Search Results

Author: Claire Carlile You’ve claimed your Google Business Profile, you’ve made sure your name, address, and phone number are correct, you’ve selected the best primary and secondary business categories , you’ve added some great photos, and you’ve started asking for and replying to reviews . Great stuff, well done! What’s next? Google Posts can help increase your business’s visibility in the search engine results page (SERP) and drive more customers to take business critical actions, such as booking an appointment, attending an event, signing up for a newsletter, and ordering online. In this article, you’ll learn how to best use Google Posts to move potential customers closer to conversion, including: What are Google Posts? Where do Google Posts appear? Google’s guidelines for Posts The types of Google Posts Update Posts Event Posts Offer Posts How to make posts work for your business Measurement and testing What are Google Posts? A bit like posts within social media channels (like a Facebook post or Tweet on Twitter, for example), Google Posts allow you to add an image, some copy, and a call to action to share with potential audiences. A carousel of Google Posts in the mobile search results. But, that’s where the likeness to most social media posts ends. Social media posts generally serve an audience that have already opted in to your content (i.e., they liked your Facebook page or they follow you on Twitter or Instagram, for example). Google Posts are different. Viewers of your Google Posts haven’t opted in. They are typically further up the marketing funnel and see your Posts because they’re shown in your business profile on search or on Google Maps. Posts are your opportunity to catch that potential customer's eye and nudge them towards clicking through to your website or taking another important action (such as calling your business). Where do Google Posts appear? Over the years, Google Posts have moved around the business profile on desktop search, on mobile search, in the local finder, and on Google Maps, so it’s not a surprise that many businesses fail to use them effectively to drive website traffic and customer conversions. In the local knowledge panel on mobile, you’ll find Update and Event Posts (more on these post types below) in the “Updates” tab (shown below). You’ll find Offer Posts (again, more on this post type below) in their own separate “Deals” tab. On a desktop, Posts look like this: And, sometimes on desktop Offer Posts can appear separately like this: Your posts will look like this in Google Maps: Your Posts can also get pulled in by Google when a searcher asks a question in your business profile’s Q&A section: As you can see, there are numerous places where your Posts could show up, and while Google has been known to change up these placements, the opportunity afforded by Google Posts for businesses is very real. However, before you can put them to work for your business, you’ll need to get familiar with Google’s guidelines for Posts. Google’s guidelines for Posts Be aware that Google Posts aren’t available to all business types—they’re currently not available to those selling regulated goods (including liquor, cannabis, and guns). Up until 2021, Posts weren’t available for lodging type categories, but these businesses now have access to both “What’s new” and “Event” posts. If your business has access to Google Posts, you’ll see them available in the “In search editing” interface on Google (shown below): Google provides a content policy for Posts —make sure to read through it before you start planning out your Posts in order to have the best chance of getting published (Google may reject posts, more on this below). In a nutshell you’ll need to adhere to the following: Avoid off-topic or irrelevant content (including general political commentary, social commentary, or personal rants). Avoid spam (including misspellings, poor quality images or videos, and duplicate photos, posts, videos, and logos). Make sure your content is appropriate (i.e., it doesn’t harass or bully, it isn’t disparaging, obscene, violent, or sexually suggestive). Respectful of privacy (i.e., it doesn’t include photos from no-photo zones, or personally identifiable images or videos of people where they may object to the use of their image). Avoid videos or photos in which regulated goods (for example, alcohol) is anything but purely incidental to the content. Phew! Just keep those in mind when you produce your content and, if your Post gets rejected, reference the guidelines for potential reasons why. If your Posts are being rejected and it’s not due to a violation of one of the guidelines listed above, it’s quite likely that one or more or your images are being viewed as suspect by Google’s systems. You can run a free check of your images here to see your images the way Google sees them. If Google’s systems are identifying elements of your images as “Racy” or “Adult,” it’s likely this is why your post was rejected. See the example below from a holistic massage practitioner: Google might easily misinterpret (and therefore, reject) this photo of a person getting a massage. Google’s Vision AI tool found that the image is very likely to be racy and/or adult. To avoid this, think carefully about how Google might interpret images when you plan your photo shoots or start gathering safe images to use specifically for your Google Posts. It’s possible that Google might interpret your images very differently to how you interpret them, so check with the free Vision AI tool before you spend your time and budget on photos that you might not be able to make much use of. The types of Google Posts There are three types of Google Posts that are available to most businesses. These are: Update Posts Event Posts Offer Posts Update Posts An Update Post allows you to add photos and/or a video, up to 1500 characters of text, and a call to action (CTA). This type of Post stays live and visible in your business profile for six months. The “Add a button” dropdown menu gives you the following CTA choices: It’s a good idea to include a call to action with each of your Posts to encourage potential customers to take the next step. If you’re including a link to your website, remember to add UTM tags to the URL so that you’ll be able to track traffic from Google Posts back to your website (more on this below). Update Post example This Update Post uses enticing language, suggests a personal touch (“sneak peak!”), and links to details and photos of the business’s new product (a luxury accommodation offering): The emojis catch the eye and the addition of the date adds an element of urgency. Event Posts With an Event Post, you can add the event title, the start and end date (with optional time), photos, plus the event details (up to 1500 characters). Add a link pointing to the relevant event content on your website with a CTA button to encourage searchers to take the next steps towards conversion (e.g., make a booking or buy a ticket). Event Post example The text (“BOOK NOW - limited availability”) adds a sense of urgency, and a range of images show all of the photo opportunities on offer at the event so parents and childcare providers can imagine their own children in that spot (and thus creating that memory). WARNING: Event Posts are not what populates this section in the business profile: If you are seeing events listed in your local knowledge panel, then it’s likely that Google is pulling this information from sources other than your business profile (and usually other than your own website). This information can often be inaccurate as Google will just scrape events from any old page with event schema that mentions your business name as the location. So, make sure to create an “Events” page on your own site and mark it up with event schema for the best chance of your own pages populating this section. Offer Posts An offer post requires an offer title (shorter than 58 characters) and a start/end date. You’ll also want to add relevant images, too. Once your offer has expired, it will no longer be pulled into the special offer sections that Google features all over the SERP. So, I recommend that you have at least one offer valid at any given time in order to grab those eyeballs, clicks, and hopefully conversions. You’ll also have the ability to add additional details: You have 1500 characters to further explain the offer (in the “Offer details” field). You can add a voucher code if you want to encourage in-person visits and, if you want to drive traffic through to the offer itself on your website, you can use the “Link to redeem offer” field. Offer Post example It’s official—Offer Posts are my favorite type of Google Post and I’m pretty sure that they’ll be your favorite (or your client’s favorite) type of post as well. The Offer Post below very clearly highlights the deal and the money-saving potential of this year-round offer: The emoji at the start of the offer is extra eye-catching in the “Offers” section where both valid offers are listed together: How to make posts work for your business Clearly, there are some restrictions and idiosyncrasies to be aware of. But, those are minor considerations compared to the potential advantages—there’s gold in them there hills! If you think of Google Posts as free (albeit very limited) ads for your business, you’ll likely be on the right track. If you’re experienced with writing ad copy, then you can crack straight on. If you’re new to ad copy, here are some techniques for writing Posts that will grab users’ attention and get more clicks: Address your users’ needs Point out your specific benefits Create a sense of urgency Show off deals and promotions Get personal with your copy Stand out with numbers and symbols Local SEO agency Sterling Sky analyzed over 1000 Google Posts and found that these were common attributes of top-performing Posts: Post titles in all caps didn’t perform as well as those with proper capitalization. Google Posts that contain images that are not stock photos got 5.6x more clicks (than Posts that used stock photos). Google Posts that contained emojis received twice as many clicks as those without. If you want more activity from Google Posts, include a CTA, add a sense of urgency, and post about promotions. You can keep these points in mind as you plan out your posts, but don’t forget that it’s YOU that knows your business, your industry, and your customers better than anyone else. You’ll need to use that knowledge to work out what types of Posts resonate best with your audience. Measurement and testing Google provides some metrics to help you understand how well your Posts perform. When you go into your Posts (if you’re logged in with the account that you use to manage your Google Business Profile), you’ll see view and click metrics for each individual Post: If you have access to the API (either directly or via a third-party tool), you can view this data over time, which will enable you to get a sense of how much visibility your posts are getting and how many click they are earning. You can analyze peaks and troughs in the context of seasonality, consumer demand, changes in Google’s interface, and according to the success of your post content. The views and clicks data will tell you how many people clicked on the CTA in a post—but, not what they actually did when they clicked through to your website. If you’re spending money and resources to produce Google Posts, how will you demonstrate the return on your investment? I suggest adding UTM tags to your Posts . That way, once a searcher clicks through on your site from a Google Post, you’ll be able to see exactly which Post they came from and what they did once they got to your website. Hooray! Better still, you can test which types of Posts work best: Do Posts with multiple images or single images perform better? Do Posts with videos earn a higher click through? If so, what types of videos? Are emojis still enticing searchers or are they going out of style? Make your mark with Google Posts Now that you know the value of Google Posts, the policies to be aware of, and have some inspiration from the example Posts mentioned above, you’re ready to figure out what works best for your business and your audiences. Remember to test, test, test, and continue to learn and iterate to get the most out of the opportunities offered by Google Posts. Go get ‘em cowperson! Claire Carlile - Local Search Expert at BrightLocal Claire Carlile is BrightLocal's Local Search Expert. Her work at Claire Carlile Marketing, where she helps businesses of all sizes make the most of the local search opportunity, allows her to provide real-world skills and expertise to what BrightLocal does. Twitter

Author: Mordy Oberstein A lot has changed in the world of SEO over the past few years. A lot has changed for Wix over the last few years as well. Not the least of which has been the SEO capabilities Wix offers you. We thought it was high time we had a conversation to update you on what Wix can do for SEO in light of how SEO has evolved. We sat down with renowned SEO expert Alexis Sanders to hash it all out. Our SEO philosophy Outlook is always important. To kick the conversation off, Nati Elimelech , our top technical SEO, discussed Wix’s overall philosophy when it comes to the platform’s SEO abilities. Specifically, Nati discussed our desire to protect Wix users but offer flexibility at the same time. Wix presents out-of-the-box defaults that help protect our users from making mistakes should they not be SEO experts. At the same time, Wix strives to offer advanced SEO users the ability to customize as much as possible. This directly speaks to doing technical SEO on a Wix site. There is a lot that a technically oriented SEO can do with Wix. This ranges from editing a Wix site’s robots.txt file to editing canonical tags to using our developer’s tool, Velo , to execute many of the things Wix doesn’t provide out-of-the-box. Where things stand with Wix for SEO We tackled a wide range of topics during our discussion with Alexis. Here are few highlights that deserve to be mentioned above all else. Structured data on your Wix site One of the more significant advancements we’ve made has been around Structured Data. The platform offers you a lot of markup out-of-the-box. For example, we add out-of-the-box structured data to product pages, bookings, events and more. SEO pros who want to further modify their markup can use Velo to do so. On static pages, such as your homepage, about page, etc. you have the ability to add custom structured data code right to the editor. On that note, some SEOs wanted to know if we support the use of microdata to add structured data to a Wix site. Currently, we only support using JSON-LD which is Google’s preferred format for adding markup to a page. Moving forward, we’re working to make it easier to modify the out-of-the-box markup we create. This will make it possible to add custom variables to the markup created for you without using our developer’s tool. Working with meta-data at scale It should go without saying that you can edit your Wix site’s meta-data. However, SEOs often want to work at optimizing their meta-data at scale. For this, we allow for updating elements such as your title-tags, meta-descriptions , og tags and beyond at the page-type level. Users can add variables to their meta-data elements that will be dynamically updated as the content on the page itself changes. For example, you can add a product’s price to all of your product page title-tags with a single click. If you change the price on a given page, the tag will be updated without you having to do anything. Further, via Velo, you can have custom variables added to your meta-data (and even your pages themselves) by dynamically adding content via a database. You can, of course, also add custom content to your meta-data elements at the page level as well. Wix’s image optimization There’s a lot Wix does for its users automatically to optimize images for search engines. Images added to a Wix site are automatically cropped, re-sized and compressed . We serve WebP images whenever it’s supported. Further, Wix's image optimization uses a combination of both lazy loading and low-quality image placeholders to help the page load as quickly and seamlessly as possible. The road ahead We’ve dedicated a lot of energy to ensuring the Wix platform offers you the tools and structure needed to be successful on search. This effort is not stopping any time soon. We have a vast amount of development around SEO ongoing. There are new tools and new structures constantly being added and implemented to the Wix platform. We’re excited about it and look forward to announcing these upgrades as they are released. Mordy Oberstein- Head of SEO Branding, Wix Mordy is the Head of SEO Branding at Wix. Concurrently he also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is one of the organizers of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Twitter | Linkedin

Updated: January 14, 2024 Author: Mordy Oberstein In terms of your SEO strategy, on-page optimization is where the rubber meets the road. While more profound concepts around content quality and the like might dominate the SEO conversation, ensuring your page’s title tag, headers, and other on-page elements are clearly understood by search engines is an imperative (if not a best practice). This is why we’ve developed the SEO Assistant , a built-in SEO auditing feature that will help you better optimize the fundamental on-page elements of your Wix Blog, booking, and store pages. In this guide, I’ll walk you through the various SEO recommendations within the SEO Assistant and how to engage with them so that you can improve the chances of your blog, bookings, and store pages ranking on search engines. Table of contents: The Wix SEO Assistant overview Implementing SEO improvements with the Wix SEO Assistant How to audit your page using the Wix SEO Assistant 01. Select an appropriate focus keyword 02. Create a well-optimized title tag 03. Write an effective meta description 04. Optimize headings appropriately 05. Write relevant alt text for images 06. Edit body text as needed 07. Construct a URL slug 08. Add structured data markup for rich result eligibility The Wix SEO Assistant on-page SEO audit overview Before we explore the Wix SEO Assistant in more detail, let me briefly give you an overview of how to access the tool, what it shows you, and how it works. To start your on-page SEO audit for a specific blog post, booking page, or store page, access the SEO Assistant by opening the SEO Panel .  For blog pages, the SEO Panel is located in the left-hand menu of the blog editor.  Note: At the time of publication, the SEO Assistant is only available for blog posts. Access the SEO Assistant audit via the sidebar menu. Once you do so, the “Assistant” tab within the SEO Panel will automatically display. The SEO Assistant audit panel within the Wix blog SEO settings. The Wix SEO Assistant immediately shows you a few initial optimization possibilities (as shown below). These include status indicators for: Indexation (whether the page is set to be indexed or if a noindex tag has been applied) Alt text Meta description Structured data markup (for rich results eligibility) The initial SEO audit results from the SEO Assistant, prior to selecting a focus keyword. You can access all these details at a glance by simply opening the Wix SEO Assistant in the SEO Panel . However, to take full advantage of the SEO Assistant , you will need to input a keyword. You can do so by simply entering whatever core keyword (you are optimizing the page for) into the Focus keyword section of the tool (shown below). You can even utilize our keyword research integration with Semrush to better understand which keyword is the most advantageous. The Semrush integration shown with the SEO Assistant. Once inside of the integration, you can do a bit of keyword research in order to analyze which focus keyword makes the most sense to pursue (I’ll explore more on what factors into that decision later in this post ). Keyword research results from Semrush as shown via the Wix integration. With a focus keyword entered, the SEO Assistant really opens up to offer a more comprehensive list of elements to optimize. As you can see below, the list of elements that the SEO Assistant includes now features the page’s: Title tag H1 H2 or H3 Body text URL In this example, the focus keyword is “content creator tips.” In fact, the panel now includes a top-level summary indicating the number of SEO tasks according to their importance (i.e., critical, high, medium, or low). Lastly, if your site is connected to Google Search Console, the SEO Assistant will display the page’s indexation status right in the panel. The Wix SEO Assistant shows that the page has been indexed by Google. If the page is not published yet, you’ll notice the SEO Assistant is aware of this and instructs you to first publish the page so that Google has the opportunity to index it in the first place. The Wix SEO Assistant indicating that an unpublished page has not yet had the opportunity to be indexed by Google. Implementing SEO improvements with the Wix SEO Assistant Let’s now take a look at how you can execute the tasks that the SEO Assistant highlights for you. One way to do so is within the tool itself. As an example, I can update my title tag to include the focus keyword I’ve chosen ( content creator tips ) by expanding the “title tag” dropdown menu within the tool. This reveals a field where I can enter the optimized title tag I want to apply. Title tags can be optimized directly within the SEO Assistant. Once you select Apply , the tool will update and the status of the task in question will show a green checkmark to reflect that it is completed. Note: For some tasks (like optimizing a header, for example), you will need to make the change within the post content itself. Notice that as you complete the SEO tasks outlined within the SEO Assistant that the background color of the priority indicators (shown below) changes in order to visually indicate the page is “healthier” from an SEO point of view. How to audit your on-page SEO using the Wix SEO Assistant Now that you’ve explored the functionality and SEO tasks within the SEO Assistant , let’s take a look at how you can effectively use the tool to audit a page. To do this, I’ll walk you through an example of an actual blog post supporting a podcast episode I did. The topic revolved around tips for content creators on making their work more memorable (which, as an aside, I think is quite important in a world of AI-written content ). For the record, I’ll be going through the optimization steps in order of how they appear in the tool itself— not necessarily in order of “SEO importance.” With that, here’s how to optimize a page based on the SEO Assistant ’s recommendations: Step 1: Select an appropriate focus keyword Initially, I used the Semrush keyword research integration to analyze the term content tips , as it just seemed like the natural place to start for the post in question. Upon seeing the results for this keyword, I decided to go in a different direction. Even the terms content writing tips and content marketing tips seemed too competitive for me, even though they have very attractive search volumes . You might wonder why the latter term was too competitive for me when Semrush qualified its difficulty to rank not as “hard” but only as “medium.” The answer is two-fold: Just by being familiar with the niche and seeing that the term content marketing tips actually had a search volume far higher than the keyword content writing tips , I felt that there are various degrees of “medium” difficulty to rank with—this being a case where the term is really closer to “hard” than it is to “medium.” Just looking at the SERP for the keyword content marketing tips made me balk a bit. As you can see, there are some juggernauts like Semrush themselves and Rock Content ranking for this keyword. The age-old adage of “know thyself” came into play for me here. The site my post would appear on does not have a strong identity around content marketing. It’s focused mainly on SEO. So, while the term content marketing tips might be a “medium” difficulty keyword, it’s really all relative . For my site, it would be a difficult term to rank for. From here I asked myself, “Who am I really targeting with this post?” and the answer was content creators. This is why my next step inside the Semrush tool was to search for the term content creator tips . Here, I saw the term content creator tips was surprisingly a low-competition keyword (which I confirmed by checking the search results to see who is actually ranking for the term). Now, you might ask, “Is this really a good keyword if the search volume is so low?” My answer is “yes” for a few reasons: The trend section clearly shows increased interest in the topic. The search volume might be 70 now, but it could be 170 in three months from now. Search volumes are just estimations and my instincts say the search volume in this market is actually higher. Not every page is meant to drive tons of traffic. You have to understand the role of the page and its relative strength (which I discussed above). To me, having realistic expectations of what this page is (again, remember it’s a podcast page, not even a full-on blog post) would mean targeting a low-competition keyword with a more modest search volume. And with that, we have our focus keyword for this page : content creator tips . Step 2: Create a well-optimized title tag With our focus keyword in hand, let’s start thinking about the title tag . In this case, simply using a title tag of “Content Creator Tips” would be inappropriate as the tips are (as I mentioned earlier) within the context of making content memorable. Also, your title tag (should Google use it on the SERP) helps to attract clicks, so it should be more compelling and descriptive than simply “Content Creator Tips.” With that, I went with the title tag: “Can Content be Memorable? Tips for Content Creators” Now, I do have a bit of a hot take here: The general recommendation is that a title tag be between 55–65 characters. This is due to a fear that Google will truncate the title link on the SERP if the title tag is just too long (mine was 52 characters, so I’m all good here, hopefully). However, to me, this is a very loose best practice guideline—not a hard, fast rule. For one thing, Google might very well rewrite the title link used on the SERP regardless as the search engine has been more inclined to do so since the summer of 2021. Secondly, regardless of what Google actually uses on the SERP, the title tag (as it is originally written) is still factored into ranking. The full scope of language used in the title tag can impact rank—not just the words Google chooses to show on the SERP. For this reason, when faced with staunchly adhering to the character limits or writing a more optimized title tag, I recommend the latter (a sentiment shared by SEO OG Darren Shaw ). For the record, please do not take this to mean that you should stuff keywords into the title tag with no end. The best thing you can do is write a natural-sounding title tag that includes your focus keyword—don’t make your title tags long for the sake of making them long. Step 3: Write an effective meta description For me, meta descriptions are a particularly interesting element. For Google, however, they are not considered when ranking a page (although Google’s Martin Splitt has mentioned that meta descriptions help the search engine get a sense of what might be important on the page). Regardless of their importance for ranking, optimizing your meta description is a best practice and can certainly influence clicks from the SERP. Here’s the meta description I went with for this example: Let’s break this down just a bit: To start, I went with something strong and actionable since (to me) a meta description is more about attracting clicks from Google rather than ranking per se. To that end, I started off with “Get your content to stand out…” Also, this is a podcast page—I want Google to understand that and I also want the user to understand that. This is why I added the word “Listen” to the second sentence. Lastly, I wanted to use my focus keyword content creator tips , but that didn’t flow well as part of a meta description. Your content, no matter if it’s a header or a meta description, should sound natural. This is why I reformatted the keyword phrase into “tips meant specifically for content creators.” Step 4: Optimize headings appropriately The SEO Assistant breaks up optimizing H1 headers and H2/H3 headers into different tasks. However, for the sake of efficiency, I’ll address both here as the logic behind the optimization is quite similar. Headers are very important. They tell both users and search engine bots what a page is fundamentally about in a very easy-to-digest manner. Getting the headers right impacts everything from usability to indexation to ranking itself. To me, a good header works to make the content clear and interesting at the same time. Of course, the balance and the manner in which you do so depends on the nature of the content. In this case, for the H1, I went with “How to make content memorable: Tips for content creators & SEOs.” The tone of the podcast pages on the site is direct and informative for a variety of reasons. I’ve found that creating them this way improves the chances of the page being indexed by Google . Again, every site is different, and due to the nature of the content on these pages, I really want my headers to be clear (more so than I typically might). I added the term “SEOs” to the H1 because the podcast as a whole is geared towards SEO (with overlap into other marketing disciplines). I thought it was important to tell my core audience that the page is applicable to them and that I do discuss the topic from an SEO point of view as well. I went in a similar direction with an H2 for a section about why content creators should consider creating memorable content: “Why Content Creators & SEOs Should Create Memorable Content (& the Tips to Make It So!)” Again, I felt this particular page would benefit from a more direct approach with less emphasis on metaphoric language or idioms, etc. Step 5: Write relevant alt text for images Alt text does serve an SEO purpose in that it helps Google better understand what is contained within an image. However, it is fundamentally meant to serve the visually impaired or anyone relying on a text reader to convert the page into an audio experience. Such readers will use the alt text to describe what an image contains within it. For this reason (which happens to align nicely with SEO best practices), alt text should simply state what an image is. In my case, I have one image, which is the banner for the podcast episode. My alt text looks something like: “[name of podcast] banner [name of guest].” As another example, take the image below from an article on the Wix SEO Learning Hub about using Google Trends for SEO . Here, our head of SEO editorial created the following alt text: “Google Trends providing different datasets for the term ‘Apple.’” Again, all you’re trying to do is write something that describes the image. This is why you’ll notice the SEO Assistant does not tell you to use the focus keyword. The idea is to describe the image succinctly and accurately—not to rank for the page’s overall focus keyword. Step 6: Edit body text as needed If you write naturally about your topic, you should also naturally end up with body content that is optimized for search . After all, approaching your content this way allows you to address the key phrases or keywords that are relevant to both the page and your potential site visitors. For example, right above where I placed the embedded audio for my podcast, I wrote: “Listen for tips to help content creators develop content that resonates with their audience in the AI era.” This wasn’t by design or on purpose. The podcast is simply about tips for content creators so that they can create memorable content. The completed task of adding the focus keyword to a page’s main body content within the SEO Assistant. Notice that I didn’t have to use the exact phrase in order to successfully complete the task of adding the focus keyword to the body text. My body content didn’t say “content creator tips.” Instead, I wrote naturally and produced “tips to help content creators.” Again, you really just want to write naturally while being aware of the specific terms you use at certain opportunities. Remember, stuffing the keyword in all sorts of places simply for “SEO’s” sake will not help increase your search visibility. Step 7: Construct a URL slug Keywords in the URL are a very, very small part of the ranking equation . This is why our tool considers the keyword in the URL slug to be a low-priority task. When creating a URL, your foremost concern should be that it is easy for a user to comprehend. In my specific case, here’s the URL slug I created: It’s very simple and straightforward. Beyond the focus keyword, I added the word “memorable” because, topically, that is what the post is about. Again, it’s best to keep it very simple and straightforward. You do not want to turn your URLs into a revolving door trying to target a keyword. That can cause all sorts of problems and can really impact your ability to bring in traffic to the page. Go with a URL and, as a general rule, don’t change it unless you absolutely have to. If you do change the URL, make sure to implement a redirect so that you don’t end up with a broken link. If you look above, the SEO Assistant advises you to this effect as well. Step 8: Add structured data markup for rich result eligibility Depending on the nature of your page, you may wish to add structured data markup that will enable you to appear on the SERP as a rich result . In the case of a blog post, your result may appear on the SERP with the publish date: In the case of Wix blog posts, Article (Blog Posting) Markup is automatically added, which makes your blog pages automatically eligible to appear as a rich result. The automated structured data Wix creates for blog posts (as well as for booking and store pages) makes these pages eligible to appear as a rich result in Google Search. The SEO Assistant gives you a running start, but it’s only the beginning The SEO Assistant within the Wix SEO Panel is a great way to ensure pages are fundamentally optimized. Even for a seasoned pro, the tool helps you stay organized and can prevent you from publishing content that hasn’t been fully optimized for search visibility. However, this is just the beginning. Google’s algorithms are complex and demand that a site demonstrate a level of true experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness . The work that goes into creating a strong site for Google Search is both profound and continuous. Moreover, that work often depends on the goals of the site, the competitive landscape, and all the nuances that come with creating well-structured web content. Whether it’s by reading articles, listening to SEO podcasts and webinars , or by subscribing to SEO newsletters , continue your journey by learning more about SEO on a consistent basis so that you can stay up-to-date with best practices and expand upon the tactics you’ve learned in this article. Mordy Oberstein - Head of SEO Branding, Wix Mordy is the Head of SEO Branding at Wix. Concurrently he also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is one of the organizers of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Maddy Osman Even if you offer the best marketing services in the world, your business won’t survive long unless you reliably turn interested parties into paying clients. I’m biased towards this aspect of agency management because I practiced my sales fundamentals at Groupon, and then at a marketing agency before I turned my freelance writing habit into an agency of my own. By the time I started my business, I learned how a successful company lands customers, received feedback to improve my sales technique, and built a field-tested sales process—all priceless knowledge. Here are the lessons and workflows I’ve learned to build a solid and repeatable sales process so that you can do for the same for your marketing agency: Build your sales process with intention: Stages of the sales cycle The building blocks of a sales process Choose a CRM (don’t overthink it) Set standard operating procedures for consistency and accountability Start small with your sales team Lessons: What I learned from building out my sales team How to create the best pitches Craft strategic assets to nurture leads Track sales metrics Hold regular sales meetings for better collaboration Build your sales process with intention: Stages of the sales cycle During my freelancing days, I took an informal approach to dealing with leads (no defined process). As a result, it was hard to accurately plan my next steps to nurture potential clients. As I gained experience, I built my sales process according to distinct stages of the sales cycle. With a standard procedure, it became easy to understand which leads are most likely to close and which need more nurturing. Let’s talk about the essential elements from which to build your sales process. The building blocks of a sales process A lot of businesses have applied the sales cycle concept to their industry/needs, and I’ve done so as well for digital marketing agencies. Below are the seven crucial steps I’ve identified for this process. Prospect:  Start by compiling a list of potential clients that match your ideal customer persona. In addition to targeting based on companies in a specific industry, consider the specific job roles you can reach out to. For example, if you specialize in SEO for cybersecurity firms , you’ll need to appeal to both business and technical personas. Prioritize those with decision-making and budget power. Crucially, develop multiple lead sources that you can rely on based on what’s working well at the moment (and what isn’t). Be careful not to rely exclusively on one lead generation  method—especially one you have no direct control over, such as referrals. It’s a trap a lot of agencies unwittingly fall into. Make first contact with a lead:  Depending on the lead’s industry and niche, determine the best contact method (email, phone calls, social media, etc). Then, reach out: Use a templated approach with some personalization for the individual lead (I’ll discuss more about templated resources and standard operating procedures in the next sections). Your outreach success rate may vary depending on the ‘warmth’ of the lead and the contact method, so keep detailed records to improve this part of the process. Use a customer relationship management (CRM) software to log every touch (i.e., customer interaction). Sales success ultimately comes down to building relationships and staying top of mind—A CRM acts as a log for all of the important details and can also help you manage an ideal follow-up timeline. In the next section, I’ll provide some tips on selecting a CRM. Listen for pain points:  If there’s interest, meet with the prospect in a more dynamic environment, like over a Zoom call. Real-time communication is advantageous because you can better convey the nuance of your work, which helps you differentiate from your competitors and enables you to give the prospect a sample of what it’s like to work with you. The goal here is to learn more about the brand you’ll be working with and listen for their pain points. Present a proposal to collaborate:  Transform the data you gathered into a proposal  that demonstrates how you’d help solve their problem effectively. To help you do this, I’ve compiled my tips for creating the best pitches in a section we’ll get to a bit later. Address objections:  There are almost always objections. Focus on understanding the root concern based on what the prospect says. It’s the only way to effectively address the roadblock. It may sound counter-intuitive, but to effectively address an objection, start by agreeing with it (e.g., “I totally hear what you’re saying…”). From there, you can pivot by describing your offering as a solution to their objection. For example, if the objection is about being too busy to consider a new vendor, you might address the objection by sharing how working with your agency can create great efficiencies.  Close the deal:  Once you’ve reached an agreement, you need to formalize it to move forward and begin work. Typically, this means a contract with specific working terms. Facilitate sales-to-client services handoff:  Keep the good vibes going with a seamless handoff process between the sales rep and the internal team that will work with the client. Ultimately, improving the results of your sales process is a numbers game. Success depends on maintaining consistency.  On average, how many activities throughout the sales process does it take you to close a sale? It’s so important to track the numbers so you can improve, forecast the future, and position accordingly. A CRM is just the tool for the job. Choose a CRM (don’t overthink it) Whether you’re a founder-led solo operation or you have a team of sales representatives and managers, your sales process will require paying careful attention to potential client details. One of the biggest hurdles to an effective sales process is failing to properly log sales touches, contacts, and relevant details. The elephant in the room : Sales tends to be a high-churn profession. Using a CRM helps you retain important information when a salesperson leaves your team. There are so many CRM solutions on the market; it’s easy to get confused, especially if building a sales process is your first experience with using a CRM.  My suggestion: Just start using something. It’s better to get started and figure out your needs as you go (rather than prolonging analysis-paralysis and letting that affect your client communications). Wix website owners already have access to a range of CRM features , including live chat, forms, a robust contact library (shown below), workflows, and automations. Manage your client relationships in the Contacts section of your Wix dashboard. HubSpot’s CRM is also a solid option that smaller marketing agencies can use for free to start. The standard sales pipeline setup  provides an excellent foundation you can build on and configure to parallel your unique sales process. As a bonus, HubSpot offers various integrations (including a Gmail extension ) that help sales team members log email exchanges. In other words, you can capture relevant details without doing double data entry between tools. Set standard operating procedures for consistency and accountability Before assembling your sales team, spend some time creating guidelines and standard operating procedures (SOPs) that establish the goals of client relationship building, encourage team cooperation, and measure what’s working.  Ideally, these procedures enable your team to work effectively without your approval on small decisions. Besides giving your initial team a kickstart, SOPs make it easier to bring new sales support staff into the fold as you scale up, with no need to reinvent the wheel or spend too long on training. Some of the most important SOPs I’ve created with my team include: Guidelines for using our CRM and sales pipeline stages How to find and qualify relevant leads based on our ideal customers How to craft compelling pitches to move prospects through the sales funnel Boilerplate responses for common objections Don’t create SOPs with the goal of perfection—it’s impossible, especially because approaches should  change as you flesh out your sales process, test it, and grow as an agency. And remember, SOPs are only useful if they’re easy to access when you need them. Ensure that you have a straightforward way to store and retrieve the rules; a company intranet works well for this. For a more modern and dynamic solution, create a custom GPT  that team members can use to ask for directions. Start small with your sales team to find the right fit If you’re a founder, shouldering all of the sales process can be effective in the early stages of your agency—especially if you have an enticing personal brand, a lucrative network , or niche expertise. Still, the lone wolf act will eventually limit your growth potential. The long-term approach to sales success is to build a team. Personally, sales is by far the hardest business function for me to delegate (even compared to the many intricacies of client delivery). I’ve created extensive SOPs for every other department and function in my agency, and that was easier.  My advice: Start small as you build your sales operation.  Lessons: What I learned from building out my sales team I used to believe that to delegate sales effectively, I needed to step back from the process entirely and hire an all-in-one sales representative. Now, I realize there are many ways to delegate parts of this process and many ways to build the ideal sales support team. Don’t start with a sales rep:  The Blogsmith’s managing director started as a writer and evolved toward helping with big-picture planning and operations. She doesn’t call herself a salesperson, but her insider knowledge of how we operate, and her experience with our body of work, make her exceptional at winning over warm leads. Stay open-minded about which team members help with sales. Save hiring a sales rep for when your processes are highly developed and your revenue is stable. Field tests reveal what works for you:  Twice, we hired a dedicated sales representative. In both situations, it didn’t work out. In the process, we learned a lot about developing our sales process and SOPs. Pick and choose your involvement:  We now have two sales admin assistants who find and qualify leads, keep our CRM and pipeline up to date, and make suggestions for lead messaging that I can build from. I’m still hands-on with sales, but I’m not responsible for all the little details throughout the process when that’s not the best use of my time. My recipe for the best pitches Attracting and signing clients is about embodying the solution to their problems. You must proactively answer the question they’re all thinking: “What’s in it for me?” Audit how you publicly communicate what your agency does. Do you align yourself with a specific niche or focus (e.g., local SEO, content marketing, UX)? Is it crystal clear how potential clients can engage with you ? What will convince the prospective client that spending their marketing budget with you will actually solve their problems? Show a prospect that you’ve gotten results for other clients like them to demonstrate that it’s not a risky move to partner with you. You’ll need to adapt my advice for your own situation. Oftentimes, though, the best pitches only receive approval through persistence, so consistent follow-up is crucial. You’re unlikely to get the sale with your first few interactions unless you’re dealing with a highly motivated lead. Typically, it’s the follow-up that gets the sale. Craft strategic assets to nurture leads You need to communicate the value of your solution in an impactful way—sales assets are a fantastic way to do this. These content pieces don’t need to be complicated, but they do need to inspire confidence and lead your potential customers through the stages of your sales process. Great sales assets make it easier to close leads. Classic examples of strategic assets include: Case studies  — Share social proof and demonstrate how effective your agency is at achieving various client objectives. Landing pages  — Showcase specific services with targeted sales messaging. Pro tip: Wix is one of the best website builders to create landing pages  to send your leads. E-books  — Establish your expertise in a niche. Resource templates  — Help prospective clients while warming them up to your brand and getting their basic contact details. At The Blogsmith, we share case studies  with prospects to convey how we solve our clients’ challenges, the specific service offerings that helped, achieved metrics, and testimonials from happy clients. Our case studies address different buyer personas and industries we work with, so prospects see that we’ve achieved milestones with businesses like theirs.  Track sales metrics: The perks of being data-driven It’s hard to understand what’s working unless you take the time to track, analyze, and reflect on the success of your efforts—this includes reviewing the metrics by which you judge success. For example, Apollo  is one tool I use to track opens, clicks, and reply rates for our cold email campaigns. If we’re not hitting expected numbers with a new approach, we can quickly pivot until we land on a better performing campaign. The Blogsmith’s Apollo dashboard for managing email templates and measuring their performance. Before we started using Apollo, we were less able to determine the impact of each element in our approach. Now, we use the data to make small improvements that significantly impact sales results. Here’s my advice for tracking sales success across channels: Research industry benchmarks for success metrics—these can look different depending on how competitive the industry is. Track success across various lead sources to understand where opportunities come from and where your time is most valuable. Use internal and industry benchmarks as a basis for A/B testing  various website and campaign elements. If performance is far off from what’s expected, A/B testing can help uncover specific improvement opportunities. Hold regular sales meetings for better collaboration Maintain a consistent meeting schedule to hold team members accountable for specific actions, brainstorm refinements to your approach, and plan out new initiatives. Meetings are a must for all agencies, even if yours is fully remote and primarily async, like The Blogsmith. We still hold two weekly synchronous sales meetings to expedite decision-making and improve the end result of our collaboration.  Over time, I learned a few tips to make meetings more productive: Create a focused, predetermined agenda that all attendees can contribute to and access before the meeting. Avoid adding tons of new agenda items when many pending items remain open. Spend time talking through new sales initiatives and  catching up with ongoing initiatives. Your ideal sales process should always be a work in progress Industry trends develop in unexpected ways and navigating the unknowns can throw an agency into chaos if there isn’t a set of best practices and fundamentals to return to. Take control by creating a sales process with a solid foundation to support you through the multiple pivots you’ll inevitably have to make. The stable habits will be your lifeline. Creating strategic assets  with thoughtful positioning is one of the most impactful sales activities in my sales process. With Wix, you can design landing pages, case studies, and other content assets. The template library and AI assistant  make it a nearly effortless process, but even so, you’ll still need to pay attention to all the elements I’ve discussed above if you want your sales process to evolve and adapt as your agency grows. Maddy Osman - Founder, the blogsmith Maddy Osman is the bestselling author of Writing for Humans and Robots: The New Rules of Content Style , and one of Semrush and BuzzSumo's Top 100 Content Marketers. She's also a digital native with a decade-long devotion to creating engaging content and the founder of The Blogsmith  content agency. Twitter  | Linkedin

Author: Joshua George Even if you have the most compelling product, the lowest prices, and the most responsive customer service, customers won’t be able to find your online store without proper on-page eCommerce SEO. By targeting what users are already searching for in your product and category pages, as well as within your supporting content, you can make it easy for existing customers and new audiences to find you on Google, resulting in more sales for your business. In this post, I’ll lay out my framework for how you can approach on-page SEO strategy for your eCommerce site and the tactics you must include within it. Table of contents: The nuances of on-page SEO for eCommerce websites On-page SEO best practices for online stores Research relevant keywords for your pages For existing online stores For new online stores Optimize your product and category pages for their best keywords Resolve keyword cannibalization Canonicalize URLs with parameters Optimize, consolidate, and/or redirect content Create supporting articles for your product pages Create content silos using internal links Apply Schema markup Improve website speed Take action on low-performing pages Why is on-page SEO different for eCommerce websites? Each type of website requires a different approach to its on-page SEO . This approach is tailored to the website’s purpose, which varies depending on your business model. For example, many content sites are designed to generate revenue from display ads. So, their goal is to drive as much traffic to pages where ads appear. The more traffic these sites attract, the more revenue they get—without visitors having to buy a thing. Content websites, such as blogs, typically generate revenue through display ads. eCommerce websites, on the other hand, need to sell products/services to generate revenue. The same can’t be said for eCommerce sites, which generate revenue through sales. These sites won’t make money unless visitors successfully buy products from them. So, as an eCommerce site owner, you must focus on getting your product pages to appear on top of search engine results pages ( SERPs ). This is easier said than done due to the competitiveness of ranking in organic search.  This is where an on-page SEO strategy specific to eCommerce comes in. It enables you to create and optimize other pages on your site, improving your product pages ’ keyword rankings and generating more traffic to them. On-page SEO best practices for online stores It’s one thing to get your product pages to appear at the top of SERPs (as discussed above), but it’s another to convince people to click on them and buy your product.  On-page SEO  can:  Encourages people to click on your page (regardless of your keyword ranking). Support visitors by facilitating a seamless user experience, compelling them to purchase your product. The most efficient way to achieve all this is to observe on-page SEO best practices for your online store, which I’ll discuss in detail below. 01. Research relevant keywords for your pages There are many ways to approach keyword research ; below, I’ve highlighted two that I recommend: For existing online stores: Keyword research via your website’s traffic tier If you already have an eCommerce website, you can use its “traffic tier” to identify keywords that give you the best chance of appearing on the top of Google search results. Your traffic tier refers to the maximum search volume  and keyword difficulty  (KD) your site ranks in the top three positions for on SERPs. You can use any keyword tool for this purpose. If you’re using Ahrefs, enter your website URL in the Site Explorer, then go to Organic search > Organic keywords. From here, filter to only show the keywords that your site appears in the top three positions for. Use Ahrefs Keyword Explorer to identify the search volume and keyword difficulty that your site ranks in the top three SERPs. From the example above, the highest search volume and KD the site ranks for (in Google’s top three positions) are 600 and 5, respectively. Use these figures to filter keywords that you identified in your research (or competitor analysis ), leaving only the keywords within reach for your brand. For new online stores: Keyword research via the Keyword Golden Ratio For brand new store owners, your pages likely won’t be ranking on Google yet, which leaves your traffic tier at zero. In this case, you can use the Keyword Golden Ratio (KGR) to guide your initial keyword research efforts. Developed by Doug Cunnington of Niche Site Project fame, this keyword research approach lets you find underserved keywords to target in your upcoming campaign. Search engines show fewer page results for these keywords than their search volumes. So, creating a page optimized for these search terms allows you to rank higher and faster on Google. Source: Mangools. To compute the KGR for a given keyword, use a keyword tool to find search terms with a maximum search volume of 250 (250 is the magic volume here because many of your established competitors will target higher volume terms). Then, use the allintitle  Google search operator for each keyword to find pages containing the term in their meta titles . What’s important here is the number of search results for the term. In the example above, there are only 47 results that contain “wheelchair spoke covers” in the title, according to Google. To get the KGR, divide the number of page results for the keyword by its search volume:  [Wheelchair spoke covers] is searched 150 times (according to Ahrefs) and Google shows 47 pages for it using the allintitle  search operator. Therefore, the keyword’s KGR is 0.31  (47/150), which falls under “Might Work.”  However, you want to find keywords with a KGR equal to or lower than 0.25, as these represent the easiest opportunities for you to optimize for. Do this on all the keyword ideas you can find to maximize your chances of ranking on Google and attracting potential customers. 02. Optimize your product and category pages for their best keywords Next, assign the researched keywords to your existing web pages (or pages you plan on creating). Though you should do this for all pages that you want to drive traffic to from search engines, it’s best to prioritize your product and category pages, since they likely generate the majority of revenue for your business. For existing eCommerce sites,  check your Google Search Console  (GSC) first to determine if existing pages are already generating clicks and impressions. From your GSC dashboard, go to Performance and click on the Pages tab to see pages arranged according to the most clicks (GSC’s interface varies depending on region, so for some, this data is accessible by going to Performance > Search results, then viewing the Pages tab). Click on these pages, then click on the Queries tab to see which search terms each page appears for in Google Search. Use Google Search Console to see queries your site is getting clicks and impressions from. Wix website owners that have connected their site to GSC can also view this data directly within Wix via their SEO Dashboard . Cross-reference the queries you find here with the keywords you researched earlier. This is important because you don’t want to create new pages for keywords your site already ranks for. Next, optimize each page on your eCommerce site (again, starting with product and category pages) for your target keyword by mentioning it in the URL, H1 , and title tag. The title tag and meta description  appear when your page ranks on SERPs, so you should write them in a way that compels users to click on your page (while keeping them SEO-friendly, of course). With regard to the page’s main content, you should also use/mention words and phrases relevant to your target keyword. For this, use a tool, like Surfer SEO, to help identify text to include in the content body to help make the page more contextually relevant to your keyword. Surfer SEO, for example, has a Content Editor feature that helps you find what words and phrases. Even better, it lets you enter up to 20 keywords you want to optimize the page for.  From here, the tool analyzes the top-ranking pages for the query (or queries) you entered and finds their average number of words, paragraphs, headings, and images. Think of these as benchmarks for what search engines and users might expect from top-ranking content for that query—the goal here is to match (or ideally, exceed) that quality. Pro tip: Among the different on-page elements you can optimize for, mentioning related terms/keywords can take a lot of work. One way to help you with this is by adding an FAQ section  at the bottom of the content. This enables you to tackle most users’ questions and include the words and phrases (that you may not have mentioned elsewhere on the page) in each answer. 03. Resolve keyword cannibalization Keyword cannibalization  occurs when multiple pages from your website rank for the same search query.  This essentially means you’re competing against yourself in the search results. As a result, none of the pages can reach the top of SERPs for that keyword, which decreases the potential traffic you can attract. There are a few ways to find out whether your site has keyword cannibalization issues. One common method is to refer to your rank tracking tool. Most tools will indicate cannibalization with an icon beside the keyword (as shown below), indicating that more than one page on your site ranks for it. The bug icon found in most rank tracking tools means you have a keyword cannibalization issue. You can also verify the issue by going to your Google Search Console and checking the pages getting clicks and impressions for the same exact search term. Google Search Console shows pages that show up on SERPs for the same query. If your site cannibalizes keywords, there are solutions you can implement depending on the situation. Canonicalize URLs with parameters For example, your rank tracking tool or GSC may indicate that you have multiple pages, with the same URL, that generate traffic from the same keyword—but, Google considers them unique. This is most likely due to the URL parameters you added as part of your paid ad campaign to track the number of clicks it received. A solution here is to add the rel=“canonical” tag  to the page you want search engines to index. Optimize, consolidate, and/or redirect to distinguish content and improve keyword spread  Now, let’s say the pages ranking for the same keyword have different URLs and contain unique content. The first thing you must do is identify which page you want to rank for this specific keyword. For the rest of the pages, rewrite or optimize them for a different target keyword. Choose from the keywords you researched and optimize each one (again, Surfer SEO or another keyword tool can be very helpful). This enables you to increase your keyword spread and generate more organic traffic once the pages start ranking for their search queries. Another solution is to remove the pages and redirect their URLs  to the page you want to rank. If the pages (that you want to redirect) have content that wasn’t addressed in the page you want to rank (i.e., the target of the redirect), transfer the relevant content of the page to the target page. Doing this helps you consolidate rankings across various pages from your site to a single page, thus increasing its chances of reaching the top of SERPs. Keep in mind, however, that the page you redirect to should be relevant, otherwise Google could consider it a “ soft 404 .” Additionally, you should avoid redirect chains, which could slow down your load times and eat up crawl budget. 04. Create supporting articles for your product pages The mistake most online store owners make is focusing primarily on product pages and ignoring the rest. Just because you published product pages optimized for their target keyword doesn’t mean they’ll rank immediately in search results. While these pages are responsible for bringing in profits for your eCommerce business, you shouldn’t overlook supporting content, like articles. These typically come in the form of informational blog posts that answer your audience’s questions about the topic or how-to guides for using your product. By covering topics related to the products you sell, you increase your site’s topical relevance , giving Google and other search engines a reason to rank your website! Many SEO tools can help you find topics for your supporting articles. AlsoAsked, for example, is a freemium tool that aggregates “People Also Ask” data from Google search results. The AlsoAsked output for “cat litter,” showing related questions/topics. In Ahrefs, you can see all matching terms for your seed keyword in the Clusters by Parent Topic tab (shown below). This shows all the keywords grouped according to their parent topic, which could serve as your site’s product or category page. Ahrefs lets you cluster keywords by parent topic to help you organize keyword ideas and group similar ones together. Select a parent topic to see all matching terms for that topic. Next, you could filter to only show question keywords, which could be the supporting articles for your site’s product page. You can also filter keywords based on your traffic tier, as discussed above. You can filter the keyword ideas to only show questions in Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer. From here, you can get the keyword’s KGR to help you prioritize which search terms to create informational pages for, or optimize your existing pages for those terms. 05. Create content silos using internal links After creating supporting articles for your product pages, you want to structure them in a way that search engines can better understand them. This way, they can index your site pages  faster and higher for their respective keywords. To do this, you must develop an internal linking strategy  that connects related pages together, thus forming your online store’s content silos.  A silo aims to facilitate the proper flow of link equity (i.e., PageRank ) to all indexed pages of your site. By linking all pages within a given silo to each other, you help search engines find these pages much easier (in addition to telling them what your website is about). Each silo covers a specific topic and consists of a product page and its supporting articles. For example, if you have a store that sells dog accessories, some products you might offer include collars, leashes, beds, and so on. These products would likely have a page on your site, and each page must have supporting articles, which we discussed earlier. The key here is determining how to internally link from the pages in your silo. And, while there is no right or wrong approach to building a content silo, the optimized way to do it, in my opinion, is to follow Kyle Roof’s “Top/Bottom” silo example from his IMG course (as illustrated in the screenshot below). Source: Kyle Roof. The silo consists of an article and product page, each of which have at least three supporting articles.  The article page is optimized for keywords that start with “best,” “top,” or similar  that are relevant to your product page. If your product page is about dog bowls, a good keyword for the article page might be [best dog bowls] or [best dog food bowls]. This makes linking your article and product pages much easier since they share the same topic. If you look closely at the internal linking strategy above, the supporting articles link to either the article or product page while reciprocally linking with each other. And, only the article and product pages link with each other (as shown in the image above). The silo is designed this way to funnel all link equity to the main pages of the silo, which are the ones you want to rank for in the first place. Do this on all your silos to maximize the effect of this strategy on your eCommerce SEO. 06. Apply Schema markup Structured data is vital in eCommerce SEO. Online stores contain various elements that most other websites don’t have, such as products, customer reviews, price, availability, and so on. Without structured data to identify these elements, search engines wouldn’t know how to highlight these important details on the SERP, potentially leaving your search listings less informative than those of your competitors’. However, implementing structured data (i.e., Schema markup) for these elements enables them to show rich snippets  on search results for your pages (as shown below). By showing as much information via rich snippets as possible, you can deliver important information to potential customers right from the search results, which could help with your click-through rate. To optimize your product pages with structured data, you must create the markup to include first. Go to Merkle’s Schema Markup Generator , choose the markup you want to create, and fill out the information below. Once done, copy the code in JSON-LD format, and add the new markup to your page. Wix Stores pages come with predefined structured data, enabling site owners to get a head start with their rich results. To verify that your markup is eligible for rich results, it’s a good idea to validate your structured data . You can do so by running the URL using Google’s Rich Results Test . This enables you to see if changes need to be made to the page’s markup. Note: Wix site owners have a built-in Schema markup validator that will not allow you to submit Schema markup unless your code is error-free. Access it via the Advanced SEO panel  in Wix pages to mitigate mistakes before they happen. 07. Improve website speed As an online store owner, you want to provide visitors with the best experience browsing your site and its content. That means making all your pages load efficiently and as fast as possible. Doing so ensures that potential customers stay on your site for longer, increasing the likelihood of visitors becoming your fans, customers, or both! You can start by checking your Google Search Console’s Page Experience section. Here, you can see pages that have good and poor Core Web Vitals scores , as well as those that need improvement. GSC shows the number of pages on your site that perform poorly or need improvement, according to Core Web Vitals. Select Mobile or Desktop reports to see a breakdown of why those URLs aren’t considered good. This can help you prioritize which issues to troubleshoot, as resolving certain sitewide issues can lift the performance of all your pages simultaneously. Next, check out the problematic pages in Google’s PageSpeed Insights  to see how they score on performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO. Run your page on PageSpeed Insights to see its Core Web Vitals scores. PageSpeed Insights provides you with suggestions that can help your page load faster within the “Opportunities” section (shown below). Use the information here to make the necessary changes to your eCommerce website and improve its loading efficiency and speed. PageSpeed Insights shows you issues that are bringing your scores down and how to resolve them. 08. Take action on low-performing pages To optimize and maintain performance into the future, regularly analyze your eCommerce site by determining the best and lowest-performing pages. You can do this by checking on your site’s Google Search Console and reviewing these pages based on clicks and impressions. The idea here is to emulate the successful practices from your most visited pages and implement them across all your compatible site pages. You can start by focusing on pages that decreased traffic after a Google algorithm update . In this case, you need to compare the performance of these pages before and after the update. Don’t make changes while the search engine is still updating its algorithm–you want Google to finish the update and have the full information first before making any changes to your site. From here, compare the last 28 days to the previous period and check the pages with the highest differences in clicks and impressions. Compare the pages that dropped in clicks before and after an algorithm update in your Google Search Console. The goal is to analyze why these pages decreased in clicks (assuming that you didn’t build links  to them and the potential causes are on-page SEO-related) and find ways to restore their rankings, if not further increase them. You need to address these issues through optimization, in a similar manner to how I recommended that you resolve keyword cannibalization–either rewrite and re-optimize them or delete the page, redirect the URL to a similar, relevant page on your site, and transfer some of the content in the non-performing page to the redirected one. This way, you maximize the organic visibility of all your site pages and get more visitors to see your products. Improve your eCommerce SEO workflow to stay ahead of the competition The eCommerce SEO framework I provided above should serve as a strong foundation for optimizing your online store. But, you’ll still need to hone your strategies and workflows to cater to your specific niche and audience.  For starters, conduct an SEO audit  to understand what issues you can address now. And, run A/B tests  to see which style of title tags and meta descriptions your customers respond to (among other potential A/B tests). Using the data gathered here, further optimize your online shop to rank higher on SERPs and generate even more revenue. It should be clear that on-page SEO is not a one-size-fits-all strategy. Eventually, your plan may contain some of the tips mentioned above and include others based on your experience. But the most important thing is that you continue optimizing and experimenting with your SEO campaign to keep your business ahead of the competition. Joshua George - Founder of ClickSlice   Joshua is the founder of ClickSlice , a results driven SEO agency in London. He has almost a decade of experience as an SEO consultant and has provided SEO training for the British government. Twitter  | Linkedin

Author: Alan Kent You make a change on your eCommerce site. It’s just a little change—the color of a button, to make it consistent with your site’s corporate colors. Job done and off you go with the rest of your day. A week later, you wonder why your sales feel a bit lower. Oh well, there is always next week. The panic does not set in until the end of the month. What happened? Why has your online business lost its mojo? Where have all the sales gone? How do you track down the problem and fix it? The tale above is based on a true story told to me by a real merchant. Someone changed the color of a key call-to-action button and they saw a 30% drop in click-through rate to their best-selling product. However, the real story deviated in one key point—the merchant had analytics in place so they quickly spotted the impact of the change and reverted it. Why did a seemingly minor site change have such a big impact? The new button color no longer stood out from the rest of the page, so shoppers did not notice it and moved on. The moral of this story? It’s the well known adage “ you can’t improve what you don’t measure ” (often attributed to Peter Drucker). But how do you put this adage into practice on your own website? Table of contents: The importance of measuring your eCommerce website performance Selecting the right eCommerce metrics to track Popular tools for eCommerce measurement Using website data to see the impact of site changes Longitudinal testing A/B testing The importance of measuring your eCommerce website performance The first step to protect you from becoming a cautionary tale like the one above is to measure important shopper actions on your site. Do you know how many people visit different pages on your site? If the traffic changed, would you be aware? For eCommerce websites, there are common page flows that shoppers follow, such as: Homepage > category page > product listing page > conversion (checkout) Do you know how many users (as an absolute number or a percentage) go from your homepage to a category page? Or from a category page to a product page? If you made a change, would you know if that change helped or hindered shoppers? You will lose a percentage of traffic at each transition, but if you can identify a particular step in your customer journey where you are losing an unexpected number of users, then you have a chance of fixing the problem. Otherwise, resolving the issue may feel like a wild goose chase, with you investigating numerous potential causes, such as: Maybe one of your pages is confusing shoppers as to how to proceed Technical problems, like broken links or faulty JavaScript Cross-browser compatibility of new JavaScript you added to your site Many sites and SEO experts focus on driving traffic from search engines to their pages, and there are many great tools to help analyze such traffic (like Google Search Console ). Search engine traffic matters, but on eCommerce sites, what shoppers experience after they arrive matters, too. So, other tools (in addition to some standard SEO tools) may be needed to help you effectively diagnose problems. How do you pick what eCommerce metrics to measure and track? While you could try to track everything, that’s probably not the best method as collecting too many metrics via third-party scripts can negatively impact the speed of your site (more on this later), and slower sites generally don’t convert as well. So think about the right metrics to collect so that you can keep bringing in traffic and converting it without sacrificing user experience. Selecting the right eCommerce metrics to track Like most things in life, deciding what to monitor is about compromise. Collecting metrics can negatively impact the performance of your site. And, this data is only worth the compromise in user experience if you actually put it to use to further your business goals. The user experience impact of collecting analytics can be hard to predict as it is influenced by multiple factors, including: Mobile devices generally have lower performance and network bandwidth capacity than laptops or desktops. You should design for lower-end mobile devices, not the latest high-end device. First-time shoppers on your site may have more JavaScript to download. This JavaScript has to be downloaded (competing with other network requests) and parsed by the web browser (consuming CPU and memory). There is more code monitoring for operations shoppers perform on your site, which can slow down how responsive those operations are. Collected metrics data have to be sent to your analytics collection site. User interactions on a web page need to complete in a tenth of a second to feel instantaneous. At one second, interaction delays start to interrupt a shopper’s thought process. The more metrics that are collected, the more JavaScript code needs to execute, which can negatively impact the responsiveness of the website. (Good implementations try to mitigate the impact of metrics collection by backgrounding as much work as possible, but collecting more metrics will always add more overhead.) But the impact of not collecting data can be worse. If your only insight into site issues is a drop in your sales revenue, that may be too late. If you have made multiple changes, how do you decide which ones to roll back? And how are you even sure that it was something on your site that triggered the revenue drop? To that end, here are some common eCommerce site metrics that, when monitored regularly, can help you troubleshoot conversion issues and improve performance: Bounce rate — Are users leaving your web pages as soon as they arrive from a search engine? That may indicate your page needs to be improved, or it is matching the wrong searches. Impressions — What pages on your site are shoppers visiting the most? Do you know which products are gaining interest over time? Which are losing popularity? What about the overall trends of users going from category pages to product pages? Did a site-wide template change impact site traffic? Click-through rate — Are users clicking on the links you want them to, including for special offers and email signups? Are they moving through your site towards checkout, and if not, where do they stop? Order value — Is the average order value of shoppers going up or down? Do some special offers increase the order size more than others? Abandonment rate — How many users get to checkout but do not proceed? Is there a problem without your payment processor causing friction, or were there unexpected charges that shoppers did not realize earlier? There are many more metrics that may be important for you. Before you finalize your list of metrics, review your business objectives. Do you want to increase your number of sales or the average order value? Do you value new or returning customers more? Do you want to know how effective your marketing campaigns are? Once you know your business goals, make sure you are collecting the right metrics to measure your progress. Popular tools for eCommerce measurement There are multiple free and paid tools available to help you collect and visualize metrics. The tools you should consider will depend on what you need to measure. Changes in web traffic can be measured with multiple tools: Built-in analytics (for example, Wix Analytics ) generally offer a quick and easy overview of your traffic from search engines. Google Search Console (GSC) can help you troubleshoot a multitude of potential issues related to getting traffic from Google. Note : Wix users have access to GSC data within Wix Analytics . Third-party SEO tools like Semrush , which can help you select the best keywords to increase traffic from search engines Your platform’s app marketplace may also have some useful enhanced analytic tools (for example, Visitor Analytics and other similar apps are available in the Wix App Market ). Changes in shopper behavior are commonly measured using Google Analytics , but there are many alternatives available with different strengths and price tags. Examples include: Adobe Analytics — Another platform popular with larger customers Amplitude — An analytics platform with built in support for A/B testing Matomo — A popular set of open-source tools (with commercial offerings), with options for you to keep collected metrics local to your site Hotjar — Another platform with tools such as visualization showing which parts of a page visitors view Changes in web performance , like page speed, can be measured with tools such as Google’s PageSpeed Insights , which leverages real-world data from Chrome browsers and analyzes site pages (without making changes to your site). Using website data to see the impact of site changes So you are collecting metrics for your site. Congratulations! The next step is to start running experiments based on the collected metrics. Longitudinal testing Longitudinal testing is a simple approach for testing site changes that involves looking at your metrics before and after making SEO updates or other site changes. To use this approach, you need to keep track of what site changes you made and when. Make sure you collect enough data over a long enough period of time to be confident in the results, and remember that staying organized is crucial to ensure the integrity of your test (the ability to view your site history , either as a built-in CMS feature or plugin, can be very useful). A general knowledge of statistics is useful to understand how much data you need to be confident in the impact of a change. If your site does not have much traffic, you will need to collect traffic for a longer period of time to have confidence in the results. If you have access to an analytics tool, see if it includes confidence scores for reported data so you know how long you should run the test in order to trust the results. For all its strengths, longitudinal testing also presents challenges: How can you determine which (of multiple) changes impacted your metrics? Could seasonality impact the test results? The popularity of ski gear fluctuates with the weather, so comparing two weeks of data before and after a site change may be misleading if the weather changed during that time. How can you make sure the metrics you collect capture the impact of your site change and not other influences? This is where A/B testing can be helpful. A/B testing A more advanced testing approach is A/B testing . With A/B testing, you show some of your site visitors a new experience and some the old experience. Because you are measuring both experiences at the same time, you don’t encounter many of the problems of longitudinal testing. So, why doesn’t everyone use A/B testing? One reason is that A/B testing is generally harder to implement (Note: Wix site owners can conduct A/B tests by creating a test site ). And as mentioned earlier, another practical problem is it can slow down your site and slower site speed can negatively impact your conversion metrics . So, you need to be careful that running an A/B test is not hurting your site/business/customers during the test. Getting started with eCommerce metrics collection Are you finding it hard to get started on your data insights journey? Consider starting small and expanding over time. Collect some basic site metrics and try to use the metrics to measure the impact of a site change. Even if you fail, you will start to learn what metrics are useful. Next, make it a habit. Add a regular interval on your calendar (such as monthly) to review your metrics. Or when you make a site change, add a calendar reminder for a few weeks later to check your site metrics. If you want to consistently increase revenue from your eCommerce site over time, you will want to put tools in place to measure the impact of site changes. The impact of seemingly minor changes can be significant. Without collected metrics, rolling out site changes is like playing a game of chance, but one where you don’t know if you won or lost until later. So if you are not collecting metrics, make that first step. Your platform probably has some metrics built in. Why not start now? Alan Kent - Technology Leader and Advisor Alan has been involved in search for over 30 years, and eCommerce for over 10 at eBay and Magento. As part of the Google Search Relations team, Alan focused on educating merchants to get the most out of Google Search with documentation and videos. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Atiba de Souza Video content has been fundamental for engagement strategies for years—but, as we look into the future, they’ve also become a cornerstone of visibility strategies for more and more brands. Combined with strong SEO practices, videos are a powerhouse for businesses that want to build stronger connections with their audiences and get seen across digital platforms.  In this article, discover how my agency, Client Attraction Pros, combines video content and SEO strategy to capture audience engagement. From creating captivating stories to understanding the subtleties of search algorithms, this article is your guide to unlocking the true power of video for search. Table of contents: Before you get started: Steer clients away from vanity metrics SGE & video’s evolving role on the SERP How to craft an effective video SEO strategy Stage 1: Video content research Stage 2: Video production Stage 3: Video editing Stage 4: Strategic positioning Keyword research for video SEO is not the same as for blogs Measure your video SEO’s impact on website growth Before you get started: Steer clients away from vanity metrics Before you start planning, let’s deal with a common ‘issue’: clients often prioritize views and other vanity metrics. You must help them understand which metrics actually put dollars into their pockets by educating them on the long-term benefits of SEO-driven video content (beyond immediate views, likes, and shares).  Emphasize the following as key metrics of success for your client(s):  YouTube click-through rates Average percentage viewed Website traffic from YouTube These metrics help you attribute the success of your efforts and provide the client with tangible results.  Search Generative Experience & video’s evolving role on the SERP In the ever-evolving world of SEO, the introduction of Google’s Search Generative Experience (SGE)  marks a significant shift as it presents direct answers (via artificial intelligence) at the top of search engine results pages ( SERPs ). These AI overviews fundamentally alter user interaction on Google by providing instant, relevant information without requiring a click-through to a website (not unlike featured snippets, except generated by data from potentially numerous websites). As SEOs, some of us break into sweats and panic attacks because ‘Google is stealing our clicks’. When we measure the world by yesterday’s SEO standards, then YES, Google is stealing clicks from websites! But, when we open our minds to the reality that the world of SEO and user experience is changing, we can identify an even greater opportunity now to help our clients grow their brand. Google increasingly features YouTube videos in SGE. Google’s inclusion of video content in AI overviews not only enriches search results, it also directs users to YouTube videos for detailed explanations.  By pinpointing the exact timestamps within videos where answers are addressed, Google facilitates efficient content consumption directly from its platform. Our role as SEOs is always changing, and now it’s time to recognize that getting content to the top of search does not always mean getting web pages or blogs to rank well—a huge proportion of consumers want to start their purchase journey with a video on YouTube. If so much of your target audience wants to watch videos on YouTube, why are you still measuring SEO results in the old ways? Consumers want to watch and then visit a website. It used to be the other way around. How to craft an effective video SEO strategy Videos play a crucial role in modern SEO strategies, particularly on Google Search. The format offers unique benefits that written content alone cannot match, including increased user engagement and higher click-through rates.  Google has prioritized video content since 2012, often showing video features prominently in SERPs. This trend continues as Google seeks to enhance user experience by integrating diverse content formats. Ultimately, this all spells out more opportunities for businesses that embrace video SEO. Agencies can set their clients up for video SEO success via a meticulously planned approach.  These are the four critical stages that agencies must master to deliver impactful video: Video content research Video production Video editing Strategic positioning Stage 1: Video content research The foundation of any successful video SEO strategy begins with comprehensive research. Unlike traditional keyword research for written content (which is more topic-centric), video SEO research delves deep into understanding the client’s target audience, their pain points, and their customer journey (i.e., more user-centric ).  This initial phase sets the stage for crafting content that resonates deeply with viewers and aligns seamlessly with client objectives—I’ll get into more specific details a little later . Stage 2: Video production Video production has evolved significantly, especially in response to challenges like COVID-19. During the pandemic, my company took ALL of our video production virtual by innovating and figuring out how to direct videos from remote locations.  Today, virtual and hybrid video production environments are the norm, and they all require different skills and present different challenges in planning and client management. Here are a few points to consider if you plan to offer virtual or hybrid production: Assist clients in setting up virtual studios and producing high-quality content remotely. Plan to rely on more B-roll in your editing to make the video more dynamic. Double-check your scripts to ensure that they’re clear and error-free, as it may be harder to troubleshoot or make changes on the fly in remote recording environments. Use virtual recording studios. We have used Riverside for three years and love it! Stage 3: Video editing  Video editing goes beyond mere post-production; it involves creating a distinct visual style that embodies the client’s brand identity. Whether handled internally or outsourced to specialized professionals, editing plays a crucial role in maintaining consistency and enhancing viewer engagement.  Visual branding can be simple and effective (e.g., using your brand colors in the lower-thirds). To that end, create a style guide to ensure that every video reflects the client’s unique brand and resonates with their target audience. This also helps you scale and add more editors later on without sacrificing consistency. You can also include your client's logo and contact details in unobtrusive areas of the video. Stage 4: Strategic positioning You can plan the right ‘keywords’ (more on this in the next section) and master production and editing, but if you fail to position your video content well, it will flop.  Consider the following elements when optimizing your video content. Title : Integrate your target keyword within the first 60 characters (oftentimes, this is simply the question that your video seeks to answer for audiences). Craft titles that naturally include relevant keywords and span 60–70 characters. Avoid clickbait or misleading titles. Descriptions : Write keyword-rich descriptions, starting with the target keyword in the first 200 characters. Include links to resources mentioned in the video for natural promotion (e.g., affiliate links). Tags : The jury is out on the effectiveness of tags in your YouTube description. Many marketers say that tags are ineffective, but you can still search for them. Utilize exact and relevant keywords/tags concisely. Avoid misleading tags. Chapters: This is perhaps the least used and most impactful video optimization for ranking in Google. Chapters allow you to define sections of your video with appropriate keyword phrases. Google uses these chapters to take a viewer from a search result to the exact spot in the video that they need. The 'key moments' are chapters of the video. Transcript : Manually uploading your 100% correct transcript ensures that Google ‘reads’ your entire video and interprets it correctly. This can be especially important if your videos include a lot of niche or industry-specific terminology. Thumbnails : Use high-contrast images with bright colors and incorporate close-ups of faces. Maintain consistency with your brand’s fonts, colors, and iconography. Ensure readability across all devices with a 1280x720 JPEG, GIF, or PNG image. Thumbnails do not directly affect a video’s ranking, but they do affect the click-through rate, which affects the ranking. Traditionally, in SEO, most of the above would have been considered metadata and not true ranking factors. In video SEO, they are the ranking factors.  If you have been in the SEO game for more than 15 years, you remember the days when metadata mattered. Video SEO takes us back to those days. Here’s the caveat, though—if you fail to build congruence between your metadata’ and the actual video content, it will rank initially but then fall out of ranking because viewers won’t watch your video.  Keyword research for video SEO is not the same as for blogs Remember, keyword research for video is not the same as keyword research for text-based content. There are several factors at play: In written content, we consider keyword clusters  and internal linking strategies —these don’t exist for video. Videos are standalone entities that must each carry their load. This creates interesting opportunities where you can create multiple videos that rank for the same keyword. Despite videos being standalone, consumers tend to consume them in batches (that’s why binge-worthy content is a thing). When we think about video content strategy, we must think bigger than just the initial ranking and consider how we can entice the viewer to watch the next video. People don’t use keyword searches to find videos—they ask questions . Understand the types of videos you want to rank For marketing purposes, there are two main types of videos. ‘Why’ videos:  These are videos that aim to establish deeper connections with viewers by articulating a brand’s values and philosophies. These videos resonate on a personal and emotional level, fostering trust and credibility. They’re crucial in the initial stages of the buyer’s journey, where establishing rapport and conveying purpose is important. Here’s an example of a ‘why’ video on hormonal imbalance  by VYVE Wellness. ‘How’ videos:  These are videos that provide practical solutions and actionable insights. They cater to viewers seeking specific information or instructions. This allows you to position your client as a go-to source of knowledge. These videos are effective in the consideration stages of the buyer’s journey, where potential customers are evaluating solutions and looking for detailed guidance. Here’s an example of a ‘how’ video on communicating effectively with patients  by Dr. Ariana DeMers Conduct SERP analyses for superior video SEO Where do you want the video to rank, YouTube or Google Search?  For our clients, that answer should always be Google Search. Google is the #1 intent-based search engine in the world—it’s where consumers generally go first.  To truly understand the opportunity/challenge of ranking for any given keyword, conduct a SERP analysis  with an eye on SERP features—the video pack, in particular, can help you identify the right keywords for your client. SEO tools can help you check for video packs at scale. Keyword volume  is a secondary metric for video SEO (relevance being the primary consideration). However, there are times when very relevant question keywords lack good volume. In such cases, you must make an informed decision regarding the video content your clients should produce. In addition, you could also encounter relevant keywords that do not show a video pack. My company has tracked hundreds of question keywords that initially did not show a video pack and have observed that, over time, Google started ranking videos for these keywords. While there isn’t a definitive science to predicting which question keywords will eventually rank videos, our research has led to some interesting observations. Predicting whether videos make it into future keyword rankings involves making strategic bets on: Placement of tabs in Google Search  — The search for [Is HubSpot worth it] returns no SERP features and low volume (according to Dragon Metrics). However, when we search on Google, we find that the second SERP tab is the video tab. Google reorders these tabs to match the type of content it believes the user wants to consume. I’ve found that the placement of the video tab in the search results is a great indicator of the likelihood of videos getting added to the video pack in the future. Although SEO tools make it easy to check SERP features, they are not always correct. Their data may be days or weeks old and Google may have updated the SERP features. Content in the video tab  — If you know your keyword is 100% relevant and an important question for your client to answer, then investigate the current content in the video tab. In doing this, I have observed two things: If the videos listed in the video tab are NOT on YouTube (but rather links to websites with embedded video), then you have a good chance of creating a YouTube-hosted video that outranks all the websites. A word of caution before you proceed—if the sites with embedded video are all high DA sites, I would not expect your video to rank. If the content on the video page is hosted on YouTube, but the quality is poor, then there’s an opportunity for your client to create more useful content.  Measure your video SEO’s impact on website growth User behavior is changing, so our approach to driving traffic to websites must change as well. For decades, the focus has been on ranking web pages and blogs on page one. However, in this post-COVID era, where users are increasingly consuming video content, the importance of a web page’s ranking has diminished significantly. The landscape has indeed shifted. As you strive to give your clients a competitive edge, it may be time to embrace driving traffic to YouTube, which can subsequently redirect traffic to their websites. This shift also implies a change in what you measure. While measuring success in SEO  tends to be a tricky subject, video actually helps us simplify it. In order to get there, we have to emphasize the importance of aligning video metrics with client objectives and understanding the nuances of viewer engagement. Below are some of my best practices that can help you get started. Distinguish between ‘views’ and ‘ideal customer views’: Delineating between mere views and views from your ideal customers is crucial. Instead of focusing solely on maximizing view counts or channel monetization, your goal should be to drive growth in high-value sales. This mindset shift ensures that every view is aligned with the target audience’s interests and needs. Align metrics with the client’s goals: By aligning video performance metrics with client objectives, such as lead generation  or brand engagement, you can ensure that each video serves a strategic purpose. Set clear expectations and KPIs:  I started this conversation with three key KPIs that we track for our clients. Understanding and analyzing these KPIs are paramount to driving relevant traffic that converts to sales. YouTube click-through rates — YouTube CTR reflects how well your thumbnail and title resonate with viewers. When analyzing this metric, note that YouTube breaks down CTR based on where engagement occurs on the platform (search, suggested, etc). Additionally, there is no way to measure CTR from Google Search. Target a CTR of 6% or higher (may vary based on your industry). Average percentage views (APV) — APV is the most crucial stat that describes whether people want to consume your content. I have seen videos with CTR above 10% but APV below 10%. For my clients, the minimum acceptable APV is 30% (although educational content tends to have a much lower APV). One tactic I like to use is aggressively tracking APV and inserting Call To Action Branded Commercials in the videos before the APV percentage (these are the brand’s own commercials placed within their videos). Website traffic from YouTube — Every link in the description of a YouTube video should use UTM parameters. Building UTM parameters into every link gives your client complete visibility into which videos and links drive the most traffic. In SEO, attribution is generally a dirty word, but links with UTM parameters help us prove attribution. The bottom line is understanding the relationship between these three metrics (and the sub-metrics that affect them) allows you to effectively manage your clients’ video strategy. Video isn’t just about the ‘now’—it’s about future-proofing your brand By aligning video strategies with client objectives and dispelling fears around video adoption, agencies can not only drive growth for their clients, but also differentiate themselves in a competitive market. Embracing video isn’t just about staying relevant—it’s about future-proofing client engagements and paving the way for innovation in digital marketing strategies. Those who fail to embrace these strategies risk becoming obsolete in a landscape where video content increasingly dominates consumer attention and search engine results. Atiba de Souza - CEO at Client Attraction Pros Atiba de Souza is a prominent figure in the digital marketing industry, known for his expertise in video content marketing and search engine optimization. He is the founder and CEO of Client Attraction Pros , a video marketing agency based in Rockville, Maryland. Linkedin

Author: Maeva Cifuentes SEO sales were easier for my agency in 2020, when SaaS companies were lighting money on fire and I only had to speak to a content manager . Today, I sell to the CFO and to a marketer who is terrified that any bad decision will cost their job. I can’t close a deal without showing them what I think the impact of our work together will be. I can’t get an idea across the line without showing how it might tie into results. It’s better that way—I am more accountable. Ultimately, this means creating an SEO forecast for prospective clients. The somewhat tricky part is that there are many ways to do this, and (as with any forecasting) the projections will be an educated estimate. But the more information you have, the more accurately you can forecast, and the safer you can make your client feel.  In this article, I’ll show you how I forecast as an agency for my clients, both for sales conversations  and for getting buy-in for ideas for existing clients. Table of contents: Define unique success metrics for each client Build a data-driven foundation for accurate forecasting Use total addressable market to inform your forecasts Build your forecast in Google Sheets Advanced methods for SEO forecasting Balance quantitative and qualitative insights for greater accuracy Use SEO forecasting to drive sales and retention Define unique success metrics for each client It’s easy to say that every client only has one goal: more revenue. While ultimately, this is true, it’s also reductive.  Your clients’ goals will differ based on their industry, growth stage, target audience, specific market challenges, as well as their leaderships’ visions and pressures. Understanding and addressing these specific factors helps you land (or renew) the potential client . Metrics that are unique to that client will highlight your success towards their goals. To that end: Understand the client’s goals Identify the POC’s goals Address client expectations and data consistency Understand the client business’s goals Broader company goals can serve as starting points for how you want to think about the ‘story’ of forecasting. These include: Growing revenue Improving customer acquisition cost Building an audience Etc. Remember, ROI  models alone don’t make a business case. A business case is a story that connects an executive’s priority to a unique solution you provide. To that end, Nate Nasralla, co-founder of Fluint.io , says that there should be a specific, named initiative that what you’re selling is rolled into—otherwise, it will most likely get deprioritized. For example, Nasralla mentioned that Jim Franklin (former CEO of Sendgrid) shared his phrase: “Make the Mail Move.” It’s a phrase executives repeat over and over. In this case, “whether you were working on user acquisition, deliverability, or a new product feature, it all tied back to email volume. More accounts, successfully sending more emails.” If you can find out things like what the exec team says is an internal priority at the all-hands, what the top-down OKRs are, etc. you’ll better understand how to frame your forecasts with regard to their top concerns. Identify the personal goals of your contact person Your point of contact (on the client side) is bound to have their own personal goals. Most of the time this will align with company goals, but sometimes they differ and it’s your job to find out what they are. They might care deeply about the quality and even the level of humor in the content you’re creating—but, this might not affect the top-level company goals at all.  If this is the case, you can emphasize forecasting metrics tied to organic traffic growth from high-quality content.  This not only reassures them, it also aligns your forecast with what they value most, building trust and increasing buy-in. To satisfy stakeholders at every level, build a forecast and pitch that bridges both the company goals and your contact’s personal goals. Address client expectations and data consistency Clients all want slightly differing things. However, as their SEO agency, you’ll have standard leading and lagging metrics that you need to track for your own understanding of whether the project is moving in the right direction. And you want to set clear expectations with the client. There are a few things I always need to figure out at the start of a new client engagement. You’d be surprised to know that sometimes clients don’t even have the answers to these questions: What are your department and company OKRs this quarter, and how should SEO contribute to that? How accurately is your CRM pulling data from GA4  and vice versa? Will I see the same number of leads if I look in one or the other? What is your current conversion rate from organic search, and what counts as a conversion? Are there internal blockers (e.g., lack of resources, slow approval processes) that might affect how quickly we can execute the SEO strategy ? Most clients would love it if you could forecast demos, revenue, or pipeline. And while I want to say that SEO can contribute to these metrics, you’d be pulling these numbers out of thin air if the client:  a) Doesn’t have an accurate way to measure these metrics internally, and b) Doesn’t have one to two years of historical data on how SEO contributed to the metrics In the following sections, I outline methods to forecast traffic growth. After creating those forecasts, I make assumptions based on the client’s existing conversion rates and customer value to forecast revenue metrics. When it comes to SEO for sales-led orgs, most revenue-related forecasts are informed assumptions—not quite a finger in the air, but it wouldn’t pass a peer review, either. The safest type of SEO forecasting is a traffic forecast supported by a strategy showing how the traffic will be the ‘right’ kind of traffic. You’ll want to agree with the client on whether traffic refers to clicks, users/new users, or sessions, as well as the time frame (e.g., 28 days, 30 days, exactly the days within the month). Build a data-driven foundation for accurate forecasting Most forecasts are built based on benchmarking (both industry-wide as well as historical performance). While clients value that SEO agencies have broad industry data, it's also crucial to analyze trends specific to their website to improve forecast accuracy. For example, I recently made the mistake of forecasting a client’s growth based on where they were starting from (their DR, current traffic, backlinks , and investment) without considering past trends. An example of how overlooking past trends, such as a 2% MoM decline over seven months, can lead to inaccurate forecasting. It's essential to account for patterns before setting expectations for SEO growth. So while I based my forecasts on their resources and my experience from past clients, I did not account for the fact that they were on a downward trend—not an upward one. I’d have to close the leak before we can start growing again, adding several months to my actual forecast. You can see in the graph above there was another month or two of decline before we addressed it and the client started growing again. The most logical and mathematically accurate way to create forecasts is to launch a multivariate regression analysis. However, this requires coding skills and a professional data analyst, which most SEO agencies (including mine) don’t have.  From what I’ve seen, though, more complex and mathematical forecasts aren’t necessarily more accurate than simpler ones (more on that below). Now, that doesn’t mean your forecast should be back-of-napkin math, but I’ve done 100% of my forecasting with Google Search Console  or Ahrefs exports, benchmarking, and Google Sheets formulas.  I’ll get into the specifics of various methods shortly, but first, let’s look at how you should contextualize your potential client’s historical data for more accurate forecasting. Reflect seasonal trends Seasonality  is probably the easiest part of historical forecasting to account for since you don’t need other data, like how much the client was publishing or building backlinks . Identifying seasonal trends is crucial for accurate SEO forecasting. For example, in the above graph, you can see that every July to November there is an average 20% drop in traffic that then slightly recovers (although not fully—there is still a downward trend here that I’ll discuss below). The screenshot above is organic traffic for one of my client’s competitors. As we looked at other competitors, we saw the same trend across all of them: Like the client's data, the competitor's traffic follows a cynical trend of increases in July followed by drops, reinforcing the importance of recognizing these seasonal shifts in SEO forecasting. All of the competitors follow this trend. For everyone in the industry, traffic went up until July and then it dropped until November, where it started the cycle again.  Reflecting cycles like this in your forecasting shows the potential client that you have insight into their industry and can plan around seasonal peaks. Account for historical downward trends A downward trend can often be seasonal (as shown in the section above), but sometimes it’s just a sign that something has been going wrong. It’s especially important to identify this at the sales stage of your client intake process because otherwise, you’ll oversell and underdeliver. I personally try to avoid doing too deep of an unpaid SEO audit , but some agencies do a lot of unpaid work as a part of the sales process. Without making it overly complex, you can use basic Google Sheets skills* to create a growth model  based on estimated impacts: Historical baseline  — Use the last six months of declining traffic to establish the baseline. Initial dip or stagnation  — Assume that traffic may continue to decline for the first few months of your SEO work (since it takes time to reverse trends). Gradual increase  — Project traffic growth based on benchmarks and conservative growth rates (e.g., 5–10% MoM increase after the initial decline). You can also use Ahrefs or similar tools to estimate traffic growth from recovering lost keywords or acquiring backlinks . Adjust for budget  — If the client has a larger budget, you may forecast a more aggressive recovery based on greater resource allocation to content production or link-building campaigns . *I walk through how I use Google Sheets to forecast in a later section. Look at previous clients or public case studies where similar traffic drops were reversed . You can use this data to project: The average timeline for stabilization after a decline The percentage traffic increase that is typical for the client’s level of resource investment Then, in your forecast, you can set different scenarios: Scenario SEO Forecast Worst-case If no corrective actions are taken or if initial SEO efforts don’t immediately make an impact, client traffic could continue to decline or remain stagnant. Consider the possibility that more severe issues (e.g., technical errors , penalties) might be contributing to the performance decline. Moderate With consistent SEO work and investment, traffic stabilizes after six to nine months. Here, you assume that the decline was mostly due to a lack of SEO effort or falling behind competitors. Best-case If the drop in traffic is due to fixable issues, like outdated content  or easy wins with backlink building, SEO efforts could start showing positive signs within three to six months, with gradual improvements afterward. Use total addressable market (TAM) to inform your forecasts TAM is one of my favorite ways to forecast because it provides my agency with what feels like the most data-driven approach to forecasting, especially when I’m data poor (as I often am during a sales conversation). In this approach, I’ll examine the prospective client’s top and closest* competitors. *In some cases, clients will consider a company a competitor even though they are way  out of their league SEO-wise.  Mailchimp generated over 4.9 million in monlthly traffic, nearly 7 times more than Constant Contact and 290 times more than Marketo, skewing the realistic total addressable market (TAM). If I were forecasting TAM for Constant Contact, for example, I’d remove Mailchimp from the equation, since nearly one million of its monthly visitors come from branded searches, and they also rank highly for crazy high-volume and intent-vague keywords like [content marketing] (position 1, 171K search volume ) and [roi] (position one, 64K search volume). Focusing on competitors like ActiveCampaign or Klaviyo provides a more accurate basis for forecasting. After I remove the outliers, then I compare traffic per page: Domain Monthly traffic Pages Visits per page constantcontact.com 681,149 171,965 3.9 activecampaign.com 368,952 9,518 38.7 klaviyo.com 322,208 13,120 24.5 getresponse.com 243,739 8,152 29.8 omnisend.com 134,784 1,894 71 The average visits per page in this industry is 28. You can also see that Constant Contact is highly inefficient per page of content. That brings us to a true traffic per page of 115, which is highly efficient. Let’s say you have a solution to improve content efficiency. Based on the benchmarks above, you can project between 5–71 visits per page. If you add 120 pages in a year (or 10 pages a month), the lower-end assumption for new traffic would be 600 visits  (assuming 5 visits per page) and the higher-end assumption would be 8,520 visits  (assuming 71 visits per page).  If we started from 681,149 (Constant Contact’s current traffic), that’s a year-end forecast of either 681,749 monthly traffic or 689,669 monthly traffic. Or, otherwise said, a 0.08% YoY increase or a 1.2% YoY increase in Constant Contacts total website traffic.  This tells us two things. We can either: Count only traffic growth from the blog as a success metric rather than the website as a whole; or Increase the investment to make a larger impact on growth The higher end assumes you implement a plan to improve content efficiency (e.g., through better content , higher volume keywords, more internal linking  or linkbuilding). Keep in mind that this method makes SEO growth seem linear (and we know that it isn’t), but again, it can give you a ballpark estimate which I have found to be about 85% accurate.  Build your forecast in Google Sheets I like the above method because it gives you an understanding of deliverables in, outcome out. But sometimes, you’re doing a lot more than just publishing new pages. Your client could invest in reoptimizing existing pages, building backlinks, improving technical performance , and  creating new content. So, sometimes a per-page forecast won’t work well for you, but you aren’t quite yet ready to use machine learning or advanced methods for forecasting. There are a few ready-made Sheets templates you can use for this: Search Engine Land’s forecasting worksheet (by Adam Tanguay) Flying Cat SEO ROI calculator Moz’s forecasting template My SEO forecasting template (shown above) is based on benchmark data based on size of investment and current monthly traffic. There aren’t all the multiple variables in it and it doesn’t account for how well you will do the actual work, but we do SEO really well and have found this forecast to be 85% accurate, which is pretty good for an SEO forecast. Advanced methods for SEO forecasting I'm no mathematician and I prefer simpler forecasting models, but there are ways to make your SEO forecasting even more data-driven. (In sales conversations, I don’t know if these complex, time-consuming and expensive models are better, though.) These advanced methods are particularly useful when dealing with large datasets, long-term forecasting needs, or when a high degree of accuracy is critical for decision-making. I'll give a high-level overview of some options, but you’ll probably need a programmer or data analyst to really get going with these techniques. Here are some advanced methods to consider: Time series analysis  for understanding past traffic trends and making predictions based on historical patterns Machine learning regression models  to predict traffic or ranking based on various SEO factors Natural language processing (NLP)  to analyze keyword trends and predict emerging topics Time series analysis Time series analysis tracks historical SEO data like organic traffic, conversions, or keyword rankings  to forecast future performance. This method allows you to identify upward or downward trends over a specific period and forecast whether that pattern will continue. It can also help you predict the impact of specific SEO changes. For example, let’s say you’ve been steadily publishing blog posts over the last year and see a clear pattern that, after each post, there’s a temporary traffic spike followed by a gradual decline. Using time series analysis, you can predict the potential impact of publishing a series of similar blog posts over the next six months. You would analyze the historical data on how past blog posts performed and use it to estimate how much traffic you might gain by maintaining the same publishing frequency. You can learn more about this from SEO analyst Jess Peck  and Patrick Stox on the Ahrefs blog . You’ll need to learn how to use ARIMA and Python for these methods. Machine learning regression models Regression models take forecasting to a deeper level by analyzing the relationship between multiple SEO factors and predicting future outcomes based on historical data.  Specifically, regression models help you understand how changes in one factor (like backlinks or keyword ranking) impact another (like traffic or conversions). Here’s how it works: you input data like keyword rankings, domain authority, content length, and backlink profiles into a model. The model then analyzes how each of these factors contributed to past traffic growth.  Based on that analysis, it predicts how changes in those factors will impact traffic going forward.  For example, if you plan to acquire 100 new backlinks, the model can forecast how much traffic increase you might expect, based on the impact backlinks had on traffic in the past. This method is very useful when planning SEO strategies  or setting expectations for client results. While you’ll need to study machine learning to really learn how to do this, you can learn more about using linear regression for SEO from this Thatware article  and a tutorial on simple linear regressions on this Github .  Natural language processing for keyword forecasting NLP can analyze large datasets of search queries to predict which keywords or topics will become more popular in the future. By understanding trends in search behavior, NLP can help you forecast future keyword opportunities that may not even be on your radar yet. For instance, NLP tools like Google’s Natural Language API can comb through massive amounts of search data, looking for emerging topics that are gaining traction. Imagine identifying a new trend in your industry six months before it goes mainstream—NLP can help you get ahead of the curve. You can learn more about this in Ida Silfverskiöld’s insightful article about predicting trends with NLP . Balance quantitative and qualitative insights for greater accuracy Now once you have your forecasting graphs, whether fancy or simple, you need to put a story together for it to land with your potential clients. I like to engage with clients and try to understand what factors might affect the pace of implementation. For example, do they have the time and resources to dedicate to this? I’ve set up a forecast before where the point of contact was actually not responsible for SEO and had no time to dedicate to the project.  I wasn’t able to publish on time, the project failed and obviously did not align with the forecast. There are also other factors. If the client does other work that supports SEO, those efforts may drive branded traffic and ultimately influence your projections. These activities include: Social media campaigns PR campaigns Marketing collaborations with other brands SDR outreach Any other brand awareness motions In parallel, if the client plans to do nothing and rely only on SEO, that will make the forecast more challenging as well. Use SEO forecasting to drive sales and retention Most SEO sales conversations today require some kind of answer to the question, “What am I going to get out of this investment, and how long is it going to take?” And while many SEO agencies refuse to commit to some kind of number or forecast, it’s one of the few things that can give you a leading edge against competitor agencies.  Our clients—marketing leaders—know better than anyone that they’re constantly on the chopping block at work in today’s economy. They are more afraid to mess up than to miss out. When working with professionals who are excited about doing the right thing but terrified of doing the wrong thing, providing a forecast (even if you’re clear it’s just an estimate) is a big step in helping them feel they’re making the right decision. This also goes beyond the sales conversation. Most clients that switched to my agency from another agency tell me that it’s because they didn’t know the ‘why’ behind what their previous agencies were doing. They say it feels opportunistic, like the agency is plucking keywords out of air. When you explain what you’re trying to build and back it with what you think it’s going to bring them, the decisions feel clearer and you’re less likely to get client pushback. Plus, it makes them look good in front of their bosses—like they are also making data-driven decisions because you’ve shown them that you are. SEO forecasting is a cornerstone of long-term organic success SEO forecasting is not just about making educated guesses or providing your clients with the numbers they want to hear. It’s about building trust, ensuring accountability, and setting realistic expectations based on solid data and trends. By incorporating historical performance, understanding seasonal fluctuations, and using tools like regression models or NLP for keyword forecasting, you can provide clients with a roadmap that gives them confidence in their decision to work with your agency. Remember, SEO is a long-term game, and while forecasts might not always be precise, they help guide the strategy, allowing for adjustments along the way.  The key is to balance transparency with expertise, ensuring that your clients understand both the potential and the challenges.  In the end, a well-communicated forecast strengthens your client relationships and sets the stage for sustainable SEO growth. Maeva Cifuentes - CEO & Founder, Flying Cat Maeva is the founder and CEO of Flying Cat Marketing , an SEO and content agency driving growth with a holistic, revenue-based SEO approach for B2B SaaS companies in HR tech, martech, and salestech. Maeva is also a fractional CMO, marketing advisor, and certified confidence coach. Linkedin

Author: Manick Bhan It can be challenging to prioritize SEO, especially if you’re a small business owner (or just working on limited marketing resources). Fortunately, many common marketing tasks are becoming less time- and resource-intensive because there are now tools that can help you automate them. While SEO automation hasn’t developed to the point where it’s completely automatic (and it likely never will), you can still automate specific duties, allowing you to also focus on other aspects of your business while still giving your search visibility the attention it deserves. In this article, I’ll show you how SEO automation can save you time and money. But, keep in mind that these automations don’t do the job for you—they simply augment your capabilities. You’ll still need to apply your own business acumen and critical thinking to ensure that the automations you adopt actually increase your website traffic. With that said, let’s dive into how automation can help you streamline your SEO workflow. Table of contents: What is SEO automation? Why you should automate SEO What tools do I need to automate SEO? 5 SEO tasks you can automate right now 01. Keyword research and clustering 02. SEO prioritization 03. Topic generation and content briefs 04. Site auditing and issue tracking 05. Content optimization and updates What is SEO automation? SEO automation is the process of using software tools to increase the speed, efficiency, and impact of everyday SEO tasks. In today’s digital landscape, leveraging SEO software and automating the more time-intensive aspects of the work is increasingly important in order to keep up with competitors—especially when you’re working with fewer resources. It is likely that your top competitors in the search results are already leveraging these tools to increase their organic visibility and website traffic. If you want your small business to keep pace, getting to know these tools (and how to use them effectively) is an essential step for your marketing team. Why you should automate SEO Many SEO tasks, like content creation and link building , can be time-consuming and require the attention of multiple marketing team members. This presents a big problem for small businesses that have fewer hands-on-deck or smaller marketing budgets. And although many marketers have a general understanding of SEO, it is one of the more technical digital marketing strategies. Less familiarity with search algorithms, web development, or ranking factors can easily cause small business owners to put SEO on the backburner. But by automating their most important SEO tasks, small businesses can get around these common challenges. SEO automation can help you: Save your business money , as enterprise SEO software can alleviate the need to hire more employees or outsource time-consuming tasks to marketing agencies Save your business time and energy that would otherwise be devoted to manually optimizing each page and post on your website Keep your website up-to-date with the latest SEO trends and strategies Help your team set up the necessary workflows and processes to execute successful SEO strategies on a consistent basis Altogether, these benefits of automation free up small business owners to focus on other aspects of their business—with the confidence that they will still see the benefits of SEO, like increased keyword rankings and organic traffic. What tools do I need to automate SEO? There are many SEO tools available to help you automate your SEO workflow. Ideally, you will want to find a software platform that can help you automate most of your SEO tasks. Enterprise SEO software suites like Semrush , Conductor , or the one I created, SearchAtlas , combine multiple tools into a single platform so you can easily access and manage projects from the same dashboard. But if you don’t need to automate all of the tasks listed below, there are tools available that are tailored specifically for each task. Taking tools for a test drive is usually the best way to discover which is the right choice for your business. 5 SEO tasks you can automate right now Here are some common SEO tasks that you automate right now with the help of software tools: 01. Keyword research and clustering Keyword research helps you understand the type of search terms that your target audience actively uses in search engines. Every landing page on your website should target a different cluster of keywords. That means you should perform keyword research every time you publish a new piece of content. Traditionally, keyword research has been something of a manual process, involving compiling keywords into spreadsheets in order to cluster together relevant terms. An example of manual keyword research and clustering in spreadsheets. Keyword research also involves strategically pairing keywords together that have the most advantageous combination of metrics (e.g., search volume , cost-per-click, keyword difficulty). Choosing the right keywords to target is the foundation of successful SEO, but finding relevant keywords with search volume and realistic keyword difficulty for your content (i.e., not so competitive that only major brands rank for that term) can be a very resource-intensive task! How to automate keyword research You can speed up your keyword research with the help of software. Generally speaking, most keyword research tools work in a similar fashion: Start by entering a keyword that is related to your products/services and you’ll get a list of relevant keywords that users are typing into search engines (along with the aforementioned search volume and keyword difficulty data). For example, when I search the keyword coffee shops in denver using Ubersuggest , the tool provided me with a list of relevant keywords along with their key metrics. Keyword metrics for “coffee shops in denver” as seen in keyword tool Ubersuggest. Using software, I can easily create keyword lists for each piece of content I create. And if you need to share your keyword data or analyze it further, most keyword research tools have the option to export your lists as spreadsheets. From here, you can simply filter by the appropriate keyword difficulty, search volume, etc. to narrow down your options. How to automate keyword clustering Some SEO software platforms can automatically create keyword clusters for you. The way this works is that software algorithms will make recommendations based on your website, which could even enable you to maintain a strong presence in search engines without having to outsource this task to an agency or freelancer. For example, let’s say that your small business sells golf attire. To automatically cluster your keywords, you could use a tool like: Content Planner in SearchAtlas Keyword Clustering Tool from NeuralText Keyword Grouper by SE Ranking After typing women’s golf clothes into the tool, the software identified hundreds of potential keyword clusters that I can add to my content strategy. An example of suggested keyword clusters from the input “women’s golf clothes” generated in the SearchAtlas content planner. You can filter these clusters by search volume, traffic potential, and more. The above keyword clusters are paired together because they have a “Very Easy” ranking potential, which is important for newer websites that have not yet built up their topical authority . Here’s a closer look at a keyword cluster: The software paired keywords together based on their search volume, competitive landscape, total potential traffic, and relevance. Keyword research tools like the ones mentioned above can eliminate hours of manual work. With more keywords on hand, your team can move on to creating more content faster. 02. SEO prioritization SEO often involves a combination of strategies (like content marketing, web development, public relations, and more). So, one of the biggest challenges that small businesses face when improving their SEO performance is simply a lack of knowledge—after all, if you’re not an experienced SEO practitioner, it can be difficult to understand what you need to prioritize. But with the help of artificial intelligence , there are now software tools that can make SEO recommendations tailored to your website and create an easy-to-follow roadmap of which tasks to complete first. If you take advantage of these tools properly (factoring in your own business and its goals), that ultimately means less second-guessing and better search visibility. How to automate your SEO prioritization Tools like OTTO (by SearchAtlas) and Grow Flow (by Surfer) leverage artificial intelligence to make tailored SEO recommendations for your website. Simply provide your domain and your Google Search Console account, and these tools will provide a list of tasks for your marketing team to complete. Recommended SEO tasks from OTTO. Within these tools, you can track and manage your tasks or assign them out to team members. With new tasks generated every two to three weeks, you’ll always have a roadmap to follow to keep your SEO strategy moving forward. An example of the SEO Tasks list from Grow Flow by Surfer. Keep in mind that with automation tools, you don’t want to put all of your strategic work on autopilot. A human touch is still critical to ensure that your SEO implementation aligns with your business goals. Although the above tools are generally very accurate and great for recommending SEO tasks, there may occasionally be moments when recommendations—such as keyword suggestions or content ideas—are not a perfect fit for your business’s niche. Simply dismiss that particular task and focus on those that are in your topic areas and clearly relevant to your products or services! 03. Topic generation and content briefs Once you identify the keywords your target audience is using, you have to create high-quality content that matches the search intent of that keyword and has strong ranking potential. Creating high-quality, helpful content that provides a satisfying experience for users is arguably the most time-intensive part of SEO. And if you want that content to rank towards the top of results, it will need to meet Google’s search rater quality standards , including: People-first content (as opposed to spammy content meant to manipulate search engines) Displaying first-hand expertise or depth of knowledge Providing answers to users’ common questions Covering a topic (and relevant subtopics) in-depth Providing the user with a “satisfying” experience Creating rank-worthy content also requires you to optimize page titles , meta descriptions , and headings of landing pages, as well as ensuring page experience and load times perform well for users. When you do content creation right, you can also find ways to showcase your small business’s products, services, brand voice, and areas of expertise while providing a positive experience for your potential customer/site visitor. How to automate content ideation Automating content ideation can be incredibly time-saving for your marketing team. You can also use software to help you generate article or blog post ideas that have the potential to rank for your target keywords. The wide use of generative AI (like ChatGPT , for example) in marketing applications now means that almost any content marketing platform has some version of a blog topics generator . Simply enter one of the keywords from your cluster and these tools will generate multiple titles or topic ideas for your content. An example from Copy.ai’s Blog Ideas Generator for the keyword “womens golf clothes.” Although you should never use auto-generated content word-for-word, tools like Copy.ai can really help you avoid writer’s block. They help you keep the flow of new content ideas going so your SEO editorial calendar is always populated. Since tools like these are also available to your competitors, you’ll need to add your own unique spin and brand voice to the topic for the content to work for your business. Remember, if you’re creating content about the same topics as others (which is almost inevitable), you need to find a way to make your content superior if you want potential customers to choose you in the search results. How to automate content briefs Instead of manually putting together a content brief, you can utilize software to help you generate them faster. Content briefs include all of the information that freelance content writers or in-house writers need to create search engine-optimized content (e.g., target keywords, optimized metadata, headers/content structure, target word count, readability level, etc). For example, tools like Dashword can help you generate briefs based on an article title and a short description. Other tools allow you to easily export your content briefs to Google Docs and hand them off to content writers. A content brief from SearchAtlas exported to Google Docs. Creating content and publishing new blog posts will help your SEO by increasing the total number of keywords that your website can rank for. You’ll also be signaling to potential visitors (and search engines) that your site is “alive” by publishing new content regularly. That means more real eyes on your products/services. 04. Site auditing and issue tracking Site auditing is the process of reviewing the technical elements of your website to identify any issues that may prevent higher rankings. With regular site audits, you can ensure that Google has no problems finding and indexing your new pages, understands the hierarchy of your website, and knows how your web pages interrelate. As you add new content, pages may be moved, links can break, and so on (this is especially true if multiple people work on your website). Note: Wix automatically creates 301 redirects when you change the URL of a published page. Some technical SEO issues that websites commonly face include: Broken external links Slow page speed and load times Orphan pages Improper use of meta robots Duplicate content All of these issues can have detrimental effects on SEO, which is why regular site audits are a must. However, some marketing agencies charge a very high price for audits, which might be tougher on small business budgets. Outsourcing the auditing process to software instead can be a major money saver for your business. How to automate site auditing Using site auditing software is as simple as inputting your domain and allowing the tool to get to work. Site auditing tools like ContentKing , Screaming Frog , and SearchAtlas will crawl your website in search of SEO errors. Then, these tools will automatically notify you of the issues it discovered and on which pages those issues are occurring. The SEO Issues Report in site auditing tool ContentKing. With detailed resources and guides , you can resolve the issues yourself. But in most situations, you will hand off your site audit report to a web developer so that they can address the more technical issues. An example of the SearchAtlas site auditor explaining to the user how to fix a broken external link. Most tools can send you automated email alerts to let you know any time an issue is detected on your website. This can help you resolve technical SEO problems quickly before they have a negative impact on your SEO performance. Note: Wix site owners can use the Wix Site Inspection tool to audit their site’s technical health, mobile usability, rich result eligibility, and more, without having to pull data manually or leave the Wix dashboard. 05. Content optimization and updates Over time, your target keywords may grow more competitive. Or, new research or information on your topic may come to light. Although creating “evergreen” content is essential to increase the longevity of your content, you will inevitably need to update your pages with the most accurate information available. This is particularly true for small eCommerce businesses that may have seasonal products or periods of time when products go out-of-stock. If searchers click through to your website and see the product they’re looking for is unavailable, that doesn’t make for a great user experience (you could update the page by adding relevant links or CTAs that direct visitors to a similar, available product, for example). As a result, the content on our websites often requires updating , adjusting, or rewriting in order to keep providing value for visitors and to keep up with the competition. How to automate content optimization When it comes to keeping your content fresh and up-to-date, content optimization tools make recommendations based on the top-ranking content that is currently ranking for your target keywords. These tools highlight changes that can improve your content and any new subtopics or questions people are asking in relation to the target keyword. Tools like Clearscope , Surfer , and LinkGraph’s SEO Content Assistant show you exactly what needs updating and how to thoroughly optimize your content. Enter your web page URL and a target keyword, and they will highlight what to add to the content to improve its quality and relevance. A screenshot of Clearscope content tool showing a list of recommended terms to include on a page. The more you include the software’s recommended terms and topics in your own content, the higher your content score will be, which theoretically translates to greater ranking potential for your landing pages. SEO automation that works for your business—not the other way around There has never been a better time to start embracing SEO in your digital marketing strategy. Many of the tools and platforms mentioned above offer free trials, allowing you to test out the tools for yourself to see how easy it is to automate your daily SEO tasks. Automating SEO will bring a variety of benefits to your online visibility and growth, so think about where your small business might be able to start leveraging these tools right now. You may not be ready to set up more complex automation like website auditing, but generating keyword clusters and blog ideas is as simple as one click. To get started, all you need is one keyword that is relevant to your products or services. But remember, your competitors are likely leveraging these tools already to automate their workflows and maximize their results. Waiting too long to leverage automation, or to perform more complex, high-impact tasks like resolving technical recommendations from a site auditor, can put you even further behind. It’s easy to get intimidated by software tools that have many features and functionalities and instead stick to basic fixes. You can repair broken links on your website all day, but that won’t have the same impact as consistently publishing high-quality content that targets the keywords your audience is actively using. Many of the tools and platforms listed in this article come with a wealth of resources, tutorials, and content that details how to use these tools effectively. Plus, software engineers like myself have worked very hard to create user-friendly tools that are intuitive to both beginners and experts. You may be surprised at how quickly you become an SEO software super-user. Manick Bhan - Founder/CTO at LinkGraph Manick Bhan is the founder/CTO of LinkGraph , a full-service SEO agency. He is also the creator of the enterprise SEO software platform SearchAtlas. With 10+ years of SEO experience, he has grown LinkGraph into an award-winning agency that works with 200+ brands across sectors. Twitter | Linkedin

Author: Chima Mmeje AI is great, but it creates a problem of ‘sameness.’ Anyone can hit a button and publish 100 blog posts daily, adding to the echo chamber of poor-quality content.  To bypass the noise, folks are turning to thought leaders they trust for information, making it essential to have a personal brand as a vehicle for your thought leadership. In this article, I’ll share my quantifiable and reproducible step-by-step process for building a personal brand that positions you as a thought leader and helps you stand out. Table of contents: 8 steps to build your personal brand for thought leadership Step 1: Define your personal branding goals Step 2: Find your unique voice Step 3: Identify your core topics Step 4: Find your target audience Step 5: Choose your content vehicles Step 6: Create content that establishes authority Step 7: Repurpose your content Step 8: Distribute forever My 8-step process to build a personal brand for thought leadership This is the process that worked for me, but I encourage you to make it your own and experiment with new ideas or tweak this list in a way that works for you.  Also, the results are not immediate as it took me a year to get steady traction, so approach personal branding as a long-term effort. Define your personal branding goals Find your unique voice Identify your core topics Find your target audience Choose your content vehicles Create content that establishes authority Repurpose your content Distribute forever Step 1: Define your personal branding goals One of the biggest mistakes I see people make is thinking they can ‘wing it’ with their personal brand. If you go in without a plan, you’re far more likely to quit before reaching your brand’s full potential. At an overarching level, my goals for personal branding include: Being top-of-mind for relevant audiences before they even start their search journey Becoming the authoritative source of truth for ONE thing Monetizing my brand These are lofty goals, so I broke them down into smaller, quantifiable goals to enable me to track progress and stay accountable.  For example, here are some quantifiable goals I started with and how I applied them strategically: Quantifiable goal Execution Grow LinkedIn followers by 32% in 90 days Create a mix of helpful content (that positions me as an authority) and personal content (that shows my humanity and relatability). Do this every day without fail. Generate 10 organic leads within a month Identify a problem many content marketers struggle with and explain my process for solving this problem. Attach screenshots showing results as social proof.  Boost referral traffic by 30% via guest blogging Identify websites getting at least 100K monthly traffic in the SEO/digital marketing niche and pitch a relevant topic they haven’t covered. Step 2: Find your unique voice You’ll get lost in the crowd if you model your personal brand after someone else’s. There is no personal brand without YOU, which requires you to show people your authentic self. For example, I like to think that I am funny, casual, edgy, and entertaining. I swear a lot, I like to educate, and I am not afraid to go against the grain. My content mirrors my unique voice and attracts like-minded folks. Dedicate some time to reflect on your personal traits and tone. Consider asking ChatGPT  to read samples of your work and tell you what tone of voice it’s picked up on. I encourage you to embrace your quirks, whether you use humor to connect with your audience or share bold opinions. Step 3: Identify your core topics I’ve had multiple viral posts on LinkedIn, with one post getting over a thousand engagements.  Guess how many leads these posts generated? Zero, zilch, nada! It’s easy to lose sight of priorities and give into the temptation to create content solely for relevance or engagement. But I’ve learned that, while it may provide some validation and dopamine, engagement without meaningful results doesn’t get you where you want to go and, worse yet, can skew your sense of progress. The best way to stay on track is to identify your core topics and use the 80/20 principle for social content. For example, my core topic is content marketing . Hence, 80% of my social content is about content marketing​​  ​​and 20% features my other interests, such as the FCDC , social justice, and humor. Here’s what I want you to do: Brainstorm a list of topics you want to be known for  — What do you want people to associate you with? For example, when I think of Anu Adegbola , PPC comes to mind, and when I think of Lily Ray , Google algorithms are the first thing that pop up. Break down topics into clusters to create a cohesive brand narrative  — There’s a lot going on under my core topics that make them seem vague and intangible. It becomes easier to see my expertise when I divide my core topics into clusters. For example, under content marketing, I talk about: Topic clusters Content writing Webinar/podcast strategy Content distribution and repurposing Product-led content audits Etc. The most important thing is to drill down to the ONE thing you want people to think about when they hear your name and consistently create content around it to reinforce your authority. Step 4: Find your target audience Content that isn’t seen doesn’t exist. Knowing your audience lets you identify where they spend time and create platform-specific content (which will better help you engage the right folks). For example, my target audience includes: Hiring managers  — Directors of content, heads of content/SEO/marketing, digital marketing agencies Peers  — Content marketing managers , copywriters, email marketers, SEO and conversion specialists Verticals  — Product marketers, web designers/developers, growth marketers, and demand generation managers Founders  — Bootstrapped SaaS founders about to launch a product (or those who run a lean team), founders of digital marketing agencies that work with freelancers to execute large-scale projects If you have trouble identifying your target audience, consider the following people: Folks who would hire you if you were applying for a freelance or in-house role People with a similar job title to yours or those you would work with in the same department but with a different job title Verticals that work closely with your team to execute cross-functional projects Outsourced agencies that work with freelancers in your industry C-suite executives in your industry Once you’ve identified your target audience, you can connect with them on LinkedIn. I’ve noticed that LinkedIn offers a one-month free premium subscription every other year.  You can use a free trial of LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator  to filter potential connections by job title, industry, company headcount, and location. I usually aim for folks with at least 1,000 connections who have been active on LinkedIn in the last 30 days, as they’re more likely to see my content. The goal of sending targeted requests is to populate your network with a niche audience rather than connecting with everyone. Do not send a DM or spam your new connections with promotional offers because they don’t want to be sold to. Instead, create helpful content that encourages your connections to engage with your content and spend some time interacting with their content to nurture the relationship. Step 5: Choose your content vehicles The right platforms amplify your message for maximum impact. They also allow you to create channel-specific content that will more effectively engage the right audiences. Here are a few options to explore: LinkedIn Public speaking Webinars Podcasts Website/blog LinkedIn LinkedIn fast-tracks the timeline for building topical authority  and establishing a personal brand. That’s why I started with LinkedIn in 2019, when I first decided to invest in my personal brand.  I advise you to spend a few months observing content creators to understand content that gets high vs. low engagement and how to strike a balance.  If you need more guidance, this article  has tips to help you optimize your LinkedIn profile. Public speaking As you build a presence on LinkedIn, look for digital conferences that accept first-time speakers. It’s a good starting point because online conferences don’t generally have a live audience, and you can use the video as a sample when you apply for in-person conference speaking sessions.  When you’re ready to speak at live conferences, I recommend starting with smaller, local meetups to practice your speaking skills and then pitching to larger conferences when you’re more experienced/confident. Webinars Right now, webinars  are one of the strongest ways to build authority . Pitch a topic to your employer, a relevant agency, or a professional community to attract more advanced professionals, as they will likely include the decision-makers you want to build your brand amongst.  I run the Practical Marketer Webinar series at Moz , and most people attending our monthly webinars are decision-makers looking for practical tips to make their work easier.  The goal here is to make your session practical enough that your expertise comes through, and that the decision-makers watching the webinar will want to hire you to implement the solutions you discussed. Podcasts The SERP’s Up podcast features expert guests regularly. While there are many podcasts out there, it can be very rewarding to join one with a highly engaged audience.  For example, a podcast appearance resulted in a lead with a $20K project spend. The trick is to cover a topic everyone cares about from a unique angle so people have that ‘aha!’ moment of learning something new.  Website/blog In my experience, folks find me through social media, engage with my content, click through to my website, browse a few pages, and convert on my contact form.  If you don’t have a website, you can easily build one with Wix Studio . I also encourage you to publish thought leadership content (typically via your professional blog) to reinforce trust with your audience. Step 6: Create content that establishes authority If you’ve made it this far, congrats. You’ve laid the groundwork and it’s time for the fun part.  Content is the lifeblood of your personal brand. It’s how you get in front of your audience, build connections with the people who matter, and create ‘stickiness’ that ensures they remember your name when looking for a solution. However, understanding storytelling is key to writing engaging social content.  Here’s a clear structure that might help you: Grab attention with a hook — People read the first two lines, and you want them to stop mindless scrolling and read the rest of your content. Follow up with a strong statement explaining why the problem is important. Show value with the solution — This is where you showcase your expertise and how you solved the problem. It should be practical enough for anyone to implement. End with a call to action  — Tell the reader what you want them to do next (e.g., follow you for more tips, get in touch if they need a specialist). Types of content to prioritize include: Advanced how-to guides with practical tips to solve a relevant problem Case studies showcasing real results and detailing the path from conflict to resolution Opinion pieces on trending topics backed by data and logical argument Original frameworks you created for solving a problem Research reports based on topics with sustained interest Step 7: Repurpose your content It is exhausting to create fresh content every time. Repurposing  helps you squeeze the most juice from your content without being repetitive; it also reinforces your brand and authority. For example, here’s how I repurposed a presentation on personal branding: Created a quick-fire version for Search London Expanded on it for BrightonSEO Made it super detailed and practical for MozCon with a fresh angle Shared different variations at six more conferences Presented parts of it as a podcast and webinar Turned it into a blog post (that you’re now reading on Wix) Another example is the webinars I host at Moz. I turned the episode with Mike King into four unique blog posts targeting different keywords.  I also created bite-sized videos to promote the content on social media. The webinar recording and accompanying blog were some of our most viewed content in 2024. People engage with your content in different ways. Whether they prefer social content, blog posts, short clips, or longer videos, repurposing content ensures you meet a variety of preferences. It’s also a great way to create stickiness and reinforce your messaging until you rank in the user’s mind for that topic. Step 8: Distribute forever Content distribution  ensures maximum reach and longevity for your personal brand. An excellent distribution strategy ensures that you show up with relevant content at the right place and time. I’ve explored some options, and here’s what works for me: Emails convert at the highest rate Feature other experts to get more shares and views Use social to stay top-of-mind Emails convert at the highest rate While building a targeted email list takes time, the ROI can be massive and worth the effort. The trick is personalizing your emails so they feel like you’re speaking to one person. If you’re using email for thought leadership, focus on providing value—not selling. The best newsletters I follow have a few things in common: Strong opinions on divisive issues Vulnerability when sharing about professional or personal experiences Excellent storytelling Promotional content designed to be helpful and solve a problem I’m currently facing Feature other experts to get more shares and views If you’re writing blog posts, consider featuring subject matter experts . This is great for E-E-A-T  and encourages your collaborators to amplify your content to their audiences.  To incentivize them, create a graphic for each contributor (as shown in the example above). I noticed that our content got more shares when I sent personalized graphics to each contributor, so this is definitely something to test out for yourself. Use social to stay top-of-mind When used correctly, social media is a great channel for content distribution . Sadly, many folks make the mistake of writing one or two lines of text and assuming it’s enough to drive engagement. Instead, try this: Think of the biggest problem your content addresses and identify the pain behind the problem. Use this as your opening sentence. Highlight a statistic or quote an SME who has talked about this problem as a way to reinforce why it’s important and get people to care. Break down the impact of not addressing this problem and tap into the emotions people have when this problem arises. Introduce your content and how it solves the pain point. End with an open-ended question that encourages discussion in the comments section. Include a screenshot or graphic to help people visualize the problem and stop them from mindlessly scrolling past your content. Plug the link in the comment section (for LinkedIn and Facebook). Here’s example of what this looks like: Building your personal brand: Have fun with it— otherwise it feels like work To avoid feeling overwhelmed, start by defining your goals and commit to small, consistent actions. If you struggle with consistency, block one hour in your calendar every day to maintain discipline. Avoid the temptation to copy others, as that leads to sameness and dilutes your brand. Most importantly, have fun. If it stops being fun, you’ll dread content creation and give up before you hit your stride. Chima Mmeje - Senior Content Marketing Manager, Moz Chima Mmeje is a content marketer and strategist at Moz, where she positions the company as the authoritative source of truth in the SEO industry. She's also the founder of The Freelance Coalition for Developing Countries , a UK nonprofit providing free resources and training for marketers of color. Twitter  | Linkedin

Author: Tomás Nápoles As a local business owner, you’re probably familiar with varying levels of customer demand throughout the year. In the same way your business experiences seasonal changes, your potential customers’ online search habits also shift.  Understanding these seasonal search habits and using them to boost your business’s visibility is known as seasonal SEO, and it can make a significant difference in how your business cashes in on seasonal demand.  In this guide, I’ll share my favorite methods for identifying seasonal trends and keywords for your local business, optimizing your website for seasonal SEO, and measuring the success of your efforts.  Table of contents: What is seasonal SEO? How seasonality should influence your SEO strategy 4 ways to identify seasonal keywords Check Google Trends Monitor weather predictions Analyze seasonal search volume Research season-specific keywords How to optimize for seasonal SEO: Best practices Create a seasonal content calendar Match your content to user search intent Build seasonal landing pages Optimize your seasonal content Add seasonal visuals Plan to publish in advance Use evergreen URLs Update old content Measure and analyze seasonal SEO campaigns for iterative gains year after year Organic website traffic Conversion rates Year-over-year comparisons Google Business Profile visibility Business revenue What is seasonal SEO? Many industries experience seasonal demand surges. Landscaping services, shown above, generally peaks in Google search interest during April or May. Seasonal SEO is a strategic approach that focuses on adapting your online content and tactics to take advantage of changes in customer search behavior throughout the year. These changes often occur around holidays, events, changes in season, school schedules, or industry-specific cycles. For local businesses, seasonal SEO allows you to align your digital marketing campaigns with the times when potential customers are most likely to search for your products or services—be it Black Friday, school graduation, Pride Month, or any other occasion. This leads to potentially greater visibility in search results, increased website traffic and, most importantly, more customers. How seasonality should influence your SEO strategy Seasonal SEO is about putting your budget where it’s most likely to have an impact. For local businesses (which typically have smaller digital marketing budgets), this can make a huge difference in their return on investment . Imagine you run a pumpkin patch in Illinois. During fall, people in the area will start searching for things like [pumpkin picking near me] or [kids Halloween activities], and you want to make sure your business is front and center for these searches—how do you do that? Seasonal SEO. Ranking at the top of search results for [pumpkin picking near me] or [kids halloween activities] during October likely means that many more customers will see your brand than at any other time of the year. Even if your business isn’t obviously seasonal, seasonal keyword trends can significantly improve your local SEO  strategy. For example, a local bakery might notice a spike in searches for [pumpkin pie delivery] in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, highlighting an opportunity for a new seasonal offering they know is in demand. 4 ways to identify seasonal keywords Sold on the idea of seasonal SEO and how it can help your local business? Here are my favorite methods (and tools) to find valuable seasonal keyword trends within your industry: Google Trends Weather forecasts Seasonal search volume analysis Season-specific keyword research Check Google Trends Google Trends  is a free tool for identifying search trends based on how often a search term is entered on Google over a given period of time. This highlights the periods throughout the year when you should see a spike in searches for that topic, enabling you to plan your SEO strategy in advance and gauge customer demand during peak periods. It’s probably no surprise that searches for [pumpkin pie] peak around Thanksgiving in the United States. You can search by category to identify seasonal trends that influence your customers’ purchase decisions, or search for a broad keyword related to your industry and review related topics and queries to discover new terms. Monitor weather predictions Weather can significantly impact search trends as it often influences the products we want to buy and activities we’re looking to do. If you’re a local hardware store, this means you will likely find more demand for items like [gardening tools] in spring, [grills and outdoor furniture] in summer, [leaf blowers] in fall, and [snow shovels] in winter.  With this approach, you should also consider unexpected weather changes. For example, a local HVAC company should expect to see increased searches for [AC repair] during a heatwave, and optimizing their urgent/emergency air conditioning repair landing pages in advance should bring in a lot of new leads until things cool down. Analyze seasonal search volume Keyword research tools provide a huge amount of insight into seasonal search volume for your target search terms. For example, if you search for [AC repair] in Wincher’s Keyword Explorer , you can see that every year the search volume starts to increase as we approach summer, with a peak in June.  Wix website owners can even research keywords (including analyzing search volume, intent, keyword difficulty , and seasonal trends) from within their site dashboard by installing Wincher Keyword Research from the Wix AppMarket . There’s no shortage of keyword research tools available, including Semrush and Ahrefs as well (although their data for seasonal search volume may not be as detailed). Use these tools to identify when searches start to increase and how long the increased interest lasts after the peak. This allows you to plan when you’re going to optimize your content and how long you can expect to see an increase in business from this effort.  Research season-specific keywords If you’re unsure about what seasonal keywords to target, this method might be the best to start with because you’re using your insider knowledge as the business owner, website manager, or as an SEO agency  working closely with the client. List all of the seasons, holidays, and events relevant to your business. The example below is for a local bakery. Seasons Holidays Events Spring Summer Fall Winter Valentine’s Day Easter Thanksgiving Wedding season Local festivals Next, fire up your keyword research tool and search the terms you’ve listed (along with your location and/or your industry, as shown below). In this example, searching for [Thanksgiving in Texas] revealed keywords like [Thanksgiving events in Texas],and [Thanksgiving turkey in Texas]. As you would expect, these terms increase in searches as Thanksgiving approaches, highlighting an opportunity for businesses with relevant offerings to optimize their landing pages and content to capture this interest. This list also includes some searches specific to the city of Fredericksburg. Depending on the level of competition and the area your business covers, niching down your search terms  for neighborhoods or towns allows you to target customers in a very specific area and reduces your competition. How to optimize for seasonal SEO: Best practices Now that you’ve identified your seasonal keywords, you can start planning to integrate them into your website to target these searches. You’ll need to: Create a seasonal content calendar Match your content to user search intent Build seasonal landing pages Add seasonal visuals Plan to publish in advance Use evergreen URLs Update old content Create a seasonal content calendar Rather than reacting to upcoming seasons, events, or industry-specific peaks and rushing to publish or optimize content to target them, create a seasonal content calendar. This works best when combined with your keyword research, so you’re identifying seasonal keywords and trends and then adding them to your content calendar straight away. You can re-use this seasonal content calendar each year if you find the peaks in your business are cyclical, just make sure you take the time to review seasonal keywords each year to identify any emerging trends  and adapt your strategy to suit. Match your content to user search intent Make sure your content matches what people are looking for when they use these search terms. This is known as matching the search intent  behind the keywords, and if you don’t do so, the traffic you gain from seasonal keywords will go to waste (or you won’t even rank in search engines).  For example, if you’re a local HVAC company and you want to attract people searching for [AC repair], optimizing your air conditioning installation page will not convert as many customers as having a dedicated air conditioning repair page.  To properly match intent, you’ll need to conduct a search engine results page (SERP) analysis . In the search example below (for [furnace cleaning]), you can see that there are local service ads, sponsored listings, a Yelp page full of local businesses, informational content, and a local pack. Crucially, what you do not see in this example is local furnace cleaning businesses ranking directly in the top results—the ones that do appear are paid ads. This means that a local furnace cleaning business might get more visibility by optimizing their Google Business Profile (GBP)  and informational content than if they created a landing page for this service. Build seasonal landing pages Unless your business only operates during specific seasons (e.g., ski resorts, water parks, Spirit Halloween stores), you want to ride the waves of seasonal keywords while maintaining a strong presence year-round. One of the best ways to do this is to create landing pages to target seasonal keywords without impacting your year-round landing pages. As an example, a local flower shop might create a [Mother’s Day Bouquets in (Your City)] landing page while maintaining a [Bouquets in (Your City)] landing page for year-round traffic. Optimize your seasonal content As with any SEO effort, you’ll need to optimize your on-page content  to rank for the seasonal keywords you’ve chosen. This should be no problem for experienced digital marketers, but if you’re more of a novice or a business owner who isn’t a full-time marketer, you can leverage on-page optimization tools. Wix website owners can enter their keyword into the Wix SEO Assistant  for guidance on how to optimize their title tag , meta description , headings  and, if required, structured data markup  to target rich results . The Wix SEO Assistant helps you optimize on-page content for your chosen keyword. Add seasonal visuals Update your content or landing pages’ images and videos to reflect the current season. Ideally, this should happen across your main pages, like your homepage, and any seasonal landing pages you create. Going back to the local hardware store example, changing the products featured on landing pages (so they’re seasonally relevant) not only helps boost the visibility of the page, but also helps increase conversions for in-demand products.  Plan to publish in advance Aim to publish your optimized content prior to the peak in interest for your seasonal target keywords.  Search engines typically don’t pick up on your website changes immediately, so you need to allow them time to discover, crawl, and index  new pages. This process can take several weeks or even longer, depending on how many pages you publish and how well your website currently ranks for related terms. Use evergreen URLs Even if your page content changes seasonally or annually, keep your URLs consistent.  Use URLs like yourwebsite.com/holiday-specials  instead of yourwebsite.com/holiday-specials-2024  to maintain the SEO value of that URL year after year, rather than losing all your hard work every time you replace it. This is because your page is already in Google’s index and may have earned valuable backlinks  over the years, which helps to improve rankings. If you need to change existing URLs to evergreen URLs, set up  301 redirects  to pass on authority to your new URLs and retain any existing traffic they might receive.  Update old content Continuing with the logic of evergreen URLs, you should also avoid creating new landing pages each year. Instead, update old content to reflect your offerings for the current year or season.  For example, if you have Black Friday promotions every year, create a Black Friday landing page and update it every year with your current offerings (rather than creating a new page from scratch each year). Best Buy uses the same URL for its annual Black Friday sales. This prevents search engines from incorrectly showing your landing pages from previous years, which will confuse your customers and likely result in lost sales opportunities.  Measure and analyze seasonal SEO campaigns for iterative gains year after year Measuring the success of your seasonal SEO campaigns is one of the most important steps in your strategy, allowing you to refine your approach each year so you’re maximizing its impact on your business.  Depending on your website’s goals (i.e., sales, leads , traffic, etc.), these are the metrics you should review for your campaigns: Organic website traffic Conversion rates YoY comparisons GBP visibility Business revenue Organic website traffic Monitor the organic traffic figures for all your seasonal landing pages leading up to and during peak periods using tools like Google Analytics  and Google Search Console . If you researched the search volume of your seasonal keywords, you should notice your traffic figures increasing at the same rate the search volume increases during peak periods. Conversion rates Measure how many of your seasonal page visitors convert into sales or leads. After all, there’s no point in attracting traffic if it’s not the right kind of traffic (i.e., traffic that converts). Google Analytics is a reliable tool for this, providing you have set up tracking events from your website . Year-over-year comparisons Even if you haven’t implemented seasonal SEO in previous years, year-over-year comparisons allow you to review your website’s performance during seasonal peaks against the same period in previous years.  Wix website owners can use Wix Analytics for YoY comparisons. This gives you a clear picture of your progress and qualifies whether your hard work optimizing for seasonal trends has paid off in increased traffic, conversions, revenue, etc. Google Business Profile visibility For local businesses, your GBP allows you to see how many times you’ve appeared in the local pack in search results (i.e., the map results) during different time periods. You can compare interactions, such as calls made from your GBP, to gauge your seasonal SEO efforts’ impact on business KPIs. Similar to organic website traffic, if you notice an increase in visibility and interactions during peak seasonal periods, this indicates that your SEO strategy is paying off. Business revenue Ultimately, the goal is to increase your bottom line. Regardless of all the other metrics above, the best way to track your seasonal SEO efforts is to correlate them with increases in revenue for seasonal offerings. This metric can be crucial—especially if you don’t own the business you’re optimizing for. Showing revenue increases can justify greater investment in your SEO recommendations , which also means more opportunities and growth if you’re a career digital marketer. There’s always next Black Friday, back-to-school, spring cleaning, etc. As you compose and execute your seasonal strategy, keep in mind that SEO is an ongoing process and what works one year might need tweaking the next.  Similarly, if you don’t notice the peaks in revenue you were expecting, this doesn’t mean you should ditch your seasonal SEO approach. Instead, use this as a baseline to improve the next time the season rolls around and don’t be afraid to experiment with new approaches. Tomás Nápoles - SaaS Growth and Digital Marketing Consultant With over eight years of experience, Tomás Nápoles works with different brands to drive their growth by generating inbound leads via strategic content marketing and optimizing sales and partner processes to enhance engagement and revenue. Linkedin

Author: Grace Frohlich Trust paves the way for conversion. One of the best ways to earn your target audience’s trust is to be there for them, answering their questions time and time again. For SEOs and site owners, this means creating content. The most effective way to accomplish this task at scale is to map out the topics and potential questions that are relevant for your audience. User journey mapping is a technique that helps businesses visualize their customers’ journey—from the moment they start searching for a solution to the point of conversion. This technique accounts for relevant topics, questions, and even user search intent to help you create a true full-funnel content marketing campaign. In this article, I’ll cover: What is user journey mapping for search? How to build a user journey map Using your user journey map for better SEO Tracking & reporting using user journey stages What is user journey mapping for search? You may have heard of the “buyer/customer journey”—a user journey map is similar. It is a model or visual representation that illustrates the stages a customer goes through, from the moment they start searching for a solution to when they actually become customers. The main difference with user journey mapping is that the touch points exclusively relate to online search. For example, in the SaaS customer engagement industry, a user journey may look something like this: 01. The user starts their search by typing how to improve customer retention into Google. 02. They may then click on a blog post about customer engagement strategies, leading them to a software company’s website. 03. From there, they may browse the website and eventually convert by signing up for a free trial. User journey mapping is a crucial component of full-funnel content marketing , as it helps align website content with user search intent, which I’ll expand on in the next section. How search intent contributes to user journey mapping Search intent refers to the “why” that drives a user to search a given keyword , and it is not always reflected in what they type into the search bar. For example, let's say you’re a B2B SaaS company that sells CRM (customer relationship management) solutions. Along their journey, a user searching for CRM products could make their way through the following search intents (and corresponding search terms): Informational intent (e.g., CRM management tools ) — The user is researching possible CRM solutions on the market. Comparative intent (e.g., best CRM tools ) — The user is comparing different tools to see which one best suits them. Transactional/navigational intent (e.g., [company name] CRM ) — The user is ready to buy the product from your website. By mapping search intent to each stage of your user journey, you can create a strategy so that your brand appears in the right places at the right time, meeting users where they are with relevant content. This not only benefits potential customers, it also helps search engines find and rank your content more effectively. One of the reasons why search intent plays such an important role in this process is because many keywords can have the same intent . For example, the keywords CRM for small business and customer relationship for small business have the same search intent. In fact, Google has claimed that 15% of search terms have never been searched before. And, Google processes trillions of searches every year , which means hundreds of billions of searches are completely new. For SEOs, this means that it’s much more important and efficient to track search intent rather than chasing keywords. This is why understanding the real intent behind searches is essential if you want to target your audience with the right content at the right time, and ultimately, drive conversions. How to build a user journey map The process of building a user journey map starts similarly to a UX customer journey map, except that you will predominantly use Google data. Here are the steps to build a user journey map for search: Step 1: Define your user persona Your audience and their pain points can serve as a clear roadmap for your user journey map to expand upon. For many brands, this means building out personas (if you haven’t already). When defining your user personas, go beyond the demographic and behavioral characteristics associated with search (i.e., users that tend to search on mobile versus desktop) to also include user goals and motivations as they relate to search and your website or industry. Spend time to identify who your target audience is and what their search habits are. Find out what types of problems they face. User surveys, focus groups, and interviews can provide critical insights into what your potential customers want and what they’re looking to avoid. If you don’t have this type of data (as is the case with many small businesses), I have found that there are AI tools, like ChatGPT , that can help generate user motivations and pain points to build a user persona. For example, if you’re a B2B SaaS company looking to generate user motivations for CRM solutions, you could feed ChatGPT a prompt like “List the most common user motivations for searching CRM solutions.” The tool will generate something like this: You can then dig into each line item to find specific pain points. Let’s look at one of the user motivations ChatGPT gave us as an example—“Improve customer retention and loyalty.” To get more granular and identify specific ways to help your audience, you could type in the prompt: “My company is a SaaS customer relation management company. I’m researching my customers’ problems and pain points about customer retention and loyalty. What are the most common pain points for my customers around improving customer retention?” ChatpGPT will generate a list like this: Get your customer’s perspective by asking ChatGPT about their pain points. Repeat this for each line item until you have a comprehensive list. Then clean your list by combining similar items, removing duplicates, or simplifying some items. You will end up with a full list of all user motivations and pain points. Step 2: Create a user journey Next, you need to use your personas to map out the user journey into “stages” and “milestones”: Stages are top-level steps in the user journey. Milestones refer to more specific steps that fall under a specific stage. I will demonstrate this process using the example for “improving customer retention and loyalty,” using the user motivations output from ChatGPT as our stages. (Note: While I am listing out the user journey in chronological order to help us visualize it, the reality is that user search behavior is non-linear and is more like “ the messy middle. ”) Start by arranging your list of motivations and pain points chronologically. Next, copy and paste the pain points (your own list or the ones ChatGPT provided) into a spreadsheet. Pro tip: It helps to categorize each item with stages in the marketing funnel : awareness, consideration, and conversion. Then split the list into two columns where the colon is. The first column will be your milestones, while the second column is a brief explanation. Tweak the wording for milestones so that they are action phrases. Now, you have specific steps in your user journey. Repeat this process for all of your stages until you have a full user journey. Again, you can assign marketing funnel stages if that helps visually (as shown in the example below). Step 3: Build a keyword list Now that you have your user journey, it’s time to get to the “mapping” part. You’ll need to compile a comprehensive keyword list to feed into the user search journey. Your list should include currently ranking keywords and aspirational keywords (terms that you would like to rank for and that make sense for your product/service). This will help you formulate business goals and uncover gaps in the user journey. To start, export ranking keywords from Google Search Console (GSC) . You can supplement this list with a keyword research tool, like Ahrefs or Semrush. If you don’t have a third-party tool, you can use Google Keyword Planner to find keyword ideas . Next, pull competitor keywords and add them to the list. Again, you can use Ahrefs or other third-party tools to get competitor keywords. Otherwise, it may be a more manual process. You can either use tools that offer free trials (although many have usage limits) or you can even leverage ChatGPT to expand on your keyword list. This article shows you AI prompts for how to do this. Step 4: Assign milestones to keywords Once you have a full keyword list, assign each keyword to a milestone in your user journey. For example, below I have listed keywords to place into each milestone for improving customer retention. improve customer service for retention how to keep customers engaged through communication customer service tips for retention customer retention through personalization tactics increase value for customer retention value-based customer retention tactics customer communication strategies for retention personalize customer experiences for retention improve product quality for customer retention customer retention strategies for better products Categorize each keyword into the most relevant milestone. I’ve formatted as above to show a visual representation, however it’s much more efficient to format your data following the example below. This will help you filter, sort, and organize your data down the line. Pro tip: It also helps to assign milestone code numbers as a quick reference. Step 5: Categorize keywords into search intent and topics The last step is to categorize keywords by search intent and topic groups. This gives you a high-level view of topics per journey stage, and helps you spot content opportunities. This can be a time-consuming process, but using an AI tool like ChatGPT can significantly speed it up. I have detailed one method below: First, enter your list of keywords into ChatGPT’s text input field and specify what type of intent or topic you want to categorize the keywords under. For search intent, you could input the prompt: “Categorize these keywords into one of these search intents: Informational, Transactional, Comparative, Navigational” If you want to categorize keywords by topic cluster , you could enter a prompt such as "Categorize these keywords by topic related to customer retention." ChatGPT will then generate a list of topic clusters and suggested search intents based on the keywords you provided. You must review the suggestions and group the keywords accordingly. Repeat this process until all of the keywords are categorized into their relevant topics and intents. Once this is done, you’ll be able to identify common themes and topics that are important to your audience at different stages of the customer journey. This can help you create highly relevant, valuable content for your target audience, which can ultimately lead to better site performance. How to use your user journey map for better SEO Now that you have your user journey map, I will explain some key insights that you can get from it. You can monitor stages and milestones to pinpoint areas that need improvement. The example below shows average monthly ranking by user journey milestone. This helps you identify specific milestones that consistently underperform and create a plan to further optimize them. Another key benefit is better site content alignment: In the previous section, you mapped your user journey according to journey stages, search intents, and topics. Take it one step further and map specific pages on your site to each keyword and intent. Let’s say you notice certain pages have been underperforming over the past few months. Look at which user journey milestones those pages are mapped to, as well as target keywords. Check if the pages satisfy the search intent. If the intent is informational but it’s mapped to a transactional page, you will have to either map to a different page or create a new page. If your pages rank well for each of the mapped keywords and stages, it means that you’re on the right track. This insight can help you determine if your targeted content resonates with customers at each stage of the journey and help you identify pages that need retargeting or optimizing. What if you don’t have a page that ranks for keywords you want to target? That’s an opportunity to investigate more or even create new content. You can then create targeted content to fill these gaps, ensuring that your brand is relevant and valuable no matter what pain points the user might currently be trying to resolve. User journey mapping also provides an easier way to track content. By mapping specific pages on the website to stages, you can see performance by site sections or groups. In the next section, I’ll explain tracking and reporting in more detail. Tracking and reporting with user journey stages You’ll need to track and report on your website’s performance to evaluate how well your user journey map is working. But, tracking keywords to measure performance is (or will soon be) outdated. Google’s MUM update aims to reduce the number of searches needed to satisfy user intent, which means we need to change the way we track and measure traffic to our websites. Instead of focusing on individual keywords, monitor user journey stages and topic groups to better understand the performance of your content in relation to user intent. Instead of tracking keywords individually, monitor user journey stages and topic groups to better understand the performance of your content in relation to user intent. I highly recommend using a keyword tracking tool for this (I use STAT Search Analytics ). When you upload your keyword list into the platform, you can tag each keyword with the user journey stage, milestone, and code. This way, you can track performance by sections. You can filter your data by user journey stage, milestone, or topic group and drill down on the data. For example, the ranking data in the image below was filtered by one specific milestone. We can then investigate keyword performance within that milestone. If you spot certain keywords that have not been ranking well, reevaluate the search intent for these terms. Check the keywords in the SERP to see if you can switch them out for other terms that better satisfy intent. You can filter data in STAT rankings to show one user journey stage or milestone. The screenshot below is an example of a user journey in STAT. You can see keyword performance by milestone, which makes it easier to make optimizations in batches, which in turn helps you work more efficiently. STAT makes it easy to view data by user journey stage and milestone (i.e., “tag name”). As your content grows, so too will your user journey map User journey mapping is an ongoing process that requires continuous monitoring and refinement. As you update and add new content to your website, it’s important to regularly review and adjust your user journey map to ensure that it remains aligned with user intent and behavior. I recommend doing this user journey mapping exercise annually to keep your data up-to-date. The initial research and set up will take time, but the reward is an invaluable resource that you will continue to use and adapt. Plus, you will find deeper insights about your current and potential customers. So, start mapping out your user journey today and take your SEO strategy to the next level! Grace Frohlich - SEO Consultant at Brainlabs Grace is a consultant at Brainlabs SEO (formerly Distilled), and has extensive knowledge and experience in SEO fundamentals. She enjoys sharing strategic processes and insights, and has spoken at BrightonSEO and SearchLove. Linkedin