Search Results

Wednesday 10, Dec 2025 | 12 PM ET State of AI Search Heading Into 2026: Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Insights Join Tiago Bianchi, Internet & AI Trends Industry Expert at Statista, and Crystal Carter, Head of AI Search & SEO Communications at Wix, for a data-first deep-dive into the state of AI search and generative engine optimization (GEO). This session is designed to give you a solid grounding in industry data and actionable GEO insights so you can make intelligent marketing decisions in 2026. What you’ll learn The latest data on AI search growth and consumer information discovery, including an analysis of how Google compares to AI search platforms. Top sources for large language model (LLM) citations and key data on how users are accessing AI platforms. How to use this data  to make strategic generative engine optimization and SEO decisions in 2026 , including exclusive data for AI search optimizations on Wix. You’ll leave this session with the knowledge you need to build a future-proof marketing strategy for the year ahead. Meet your hosts:   Tiago Bianchi,  Industry Expert of Internet and AI Trends, Statista Tiago Bianchi is an industry expert at Statista focused on internet and AI developments. Other topics of his coverage include online search, web traffic, AI, social media, and gaming. He is dedicated to transforming data into actionable insights and connections, supporting companies and professionals in understanding and navigating digital trends. LinkedI n Crystal Carter Head of AI Search & SEO Comms, Wix Crystal is an AI, SEO and digital marketing professional with over 20 years experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds, and Tomy. An avid SEO communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, OMR, BrightonSEO, Moz, DeepCrawl, Semrush, and more. LinkedIn

Tuesday, January 27, 2026 | 1PM ET Join us for a look at the latest Wix Studio SEO and GEO features to help you boost your Wix website visibility in 2026. From the new AI search solutions to accessibility and indexing features and get an exclusive sneak peek at what’s to come in this year.   From new ways to connect your website to search engines to new features for tracking ChatGPT responses, find out what tools you can use to increase your reach.  In this essential session, our expert panel will guide you through the newest tools and features on Wix and Wix Studio websites to help you improve your online presence. Expect tips from Wix’s Head of Product SEO & A11y, E inat Hobbian-Seybold, and  Head of AI Search & SEO Comms, Crystal Carter, as well as insights from Aviv Shamy, from the team behind leading Wix App Limy.ai .   Whether you're a DIY site owner or a seasoned SEO professional, you'll walk away with a roadmap for 2026 success. What You Will Learn The latest Wix & Wix Studio GEO & SEO platform releases  How Wix & Wix Studio's SEO, GEO, and accessibility tools improve website performance Learn actionable tips for AI visibility and search success on Wix websites in 2026 Meet your hosts: Einat Hoobian-Seybold Head of Product, SEO & A11y, Wix Einat began her SEO career by developing organic strategies for top global brands and later discovered her love for product development. As the Head of Product for Wix SEO & A11y, Einat builds impactful products that make SEO accessible and approachable to more than 299M users around the world. LinkedIn Crystal Carter Head of AI Search & SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and digital marketing professional with 20 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid AI Search & SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, BrightonSEO, Moz, OMR, Semrush and more. LinkedIn Aviv Shamny Cofounder and CEO, Limy Aviv Shamny is the CEO and co-founder of Limy, a platform helping organizations optimize their presence across the emerging agentic web. He's focused on building tools that help organizations adapt and succeed in a rapidly changing digital landscape.   LinkedIn

Author: Eli Schwartz Small businesses  have been at a disadvantage in search for most of the internet’s history. You could have the best product or service in the world, but you’d still be competing with the sheer marketing heft of big brands. A local shoe store could offer better quality and a nicer customer experience than Foot Locker and still end up buried ten pages deep in Google results. That’s about to change. Over the next year, we’ll witness one of the biggest shifts in search since the invention of Google itself. Thanks to AI, search results are becoming more diverse , more personalized , and more context-aware  than ever before.  For small businesses, this isn’t a threat. It’s the biggest opportunity in decades. As the author of Product-Led SEO  and a growth advisor who consults with some of the internet's largest companies to drive billions in revenue, I’ve seen how algorithmic changes have traditionally favored scale. But with AI search  rewarding depth, authenticity, and expertise, small businesses are uniquely positioned to win. Here’s how. First, SEO isn’t dead Let’s clear something up right away: SEO isn’t dead. It won’t die until humans stop searching, and that’s not happening anytime soon. What’s changing is how  people search, and how search engines interpret their intent. AI-driven search features, like Google's AI Mode or ChatGPT’s Search, are no longer just matching keywords to pages. They’re using massive context models to understand meaning, intent, and nuance.  That means they can generate different results for each individual, based on everything from their location to their search history to the specific phrasing of their question. This is the personalization revolution in search today. Search is no longer about guessing what “everyone” is typing. It’s about matching exactly what your customers are asking for , and being the most credible, useful, and trustworthy source for that intent. That’s a huge shift in power. It levels the playing field between small and large companies in a way we’ve never seen before. How small businesses can win in this new landscape As the definition of “search” expands to include SERP results, AI answers, smart devices, voice queries, and AR glasses, the principles of SEO are evolving, too. But the fundamentals haven’t changed: you still need to understand your customers, meet their needs, and provide clear, credible information. Here’s how to do that in the age of AI-driven search. Think like your user, not like a search engine Strip away the extras Build from your customer out, not from competitors in Design everything around outcomes Measure what actually matters 01. Think like your user, not like a search engine Most small business owners overthink SEO. They start by researching what user-first keywords  they should rank for instead of asking, “who am I actually trying to reach?” In the AI era, that mindset doesn’t work. You can’t game the algorithm anymore because there is  no single algorithm. There are millions of individual search journeys happening in real time, and your job is to align with the right ones. Start every content or website decision by pretending you’re the customer . What would you type—or ask—if you were searching for what you offer? What questions would you have before making a purchase? For example, a local plumber doesn’t need to rank for “how to fix a leaky faucet.” That query is for people trying to DIY the problem. The real opportunity is showing up for “emergency plumber near me” or “can I get a plumber to my apartment today?” Those are commercial-intent searches, and the ones that lead to sales. If your content speaks directly to that customer, you’re already ahead. 02. Strip away the extras Over the years, SEO has become cluttered with unnecessary advice: long blog posts no one reads, “about us” pages that say nothing, keyword lists that add no value. In 2026, the businesses that win will be the ones that simplify. That means removing every word, page, or element that doesn’t serve a clear user need. If your business is a service provider, your homepage  should immediately explain what you do, where you operate, and how to contact you. If you sell products, your pages should focus on clear descriptions, transparent pricing, and trustworthy details. Odds are you don’t need that content roadmap that addresses a bunch of things that ChatGPT, or any other AI model, is going to answer anyway. Don’t create content for a hypothetical algorithm. Create it for the human on the other side of the screen. Less is truly more here. 03. Build from your customer out, not from competitors in It’s tempting to copy your competitors’ SEO strategies. You see what they’re ranking for and think, Maybe I should make that same landing page. Don’t. That’s backwards thinking. Your competitors’ audience isn’t your audience. The only way to win in AI-powered search is to build your strategy around your actual  customers—their questions, their pain points, their language. Ask yourself: What makes my business meaningfully different? What do my best customers already love about working with me? What’s missing from my competitors’ content that I could provide better? Answer those questions, and you’ll create content that no AI model can ignore. For example, let’s say you’re making a website for a retail store. It’s tempting to just Google all the retail stores in your space and try to mimic their website structure, but I want you to stop and ask: What do I personally want on a retail store page? What are the products I want to see on the homepage? Do I need a search box or do I need categories?  This is no longer about the best practices required for SEO, but the best practices required for selling your product or services on the internet. 04. Design everything around outcomes Ranking doesn’t pay the bills…bookings do. Traffic doesn’t equal revenue…conversion does. In 2026, the smartest small businesses will design every page, form, and button around outcomes. Whether that outcome is scheduling a consultation, buying a product, or signing up for a service, your entire user journey should lead there.  For example: If you’re a small business service provider and you want people to call you, make sure your entire website is structured so that it leads to a phone number or contact form with a clear call to action .  If your analytics show that 90% of visitors land on your homepage, make it crystal clear what they should do next. Think of your site not as an SEO machine, but as a digital storefront. AI-driven search will get people to your door, but it’s still your job to invite them in. 05. Measure what actually matters Here’s a truth most SEO dashboards don’t tell you: traffic drops aren’t always bad. As AI starts answering more questions directly in search results, you may see fewer total clicks, but higher-quality visitors. If your conversions, calls, or orders are steady (or growing), that’s not a problem; that’s progress. The goal isn’t to chase vanity metrics. The goal is to reach the right  audience—the ones ready to take action. For example: If a Wix user runs a website for a pediatric practice, the recent changes in search (with people getting certain answers from AI) will likely mean that their traffic has gone down. But even if traffic is down 50%, the number of children who need to go to the doctor has not changed. Now, the question is, is your website optimized to help them book an appointment with you? A good rule of thumb: if a drop in traffic doesn’t impact your bottom line, it’s not a drop that matters. Monitor more than traffic with Wix’s AI Visibility Overview Good SEO delivers for “AI optimization” These days, everyone is talking about AEO (AI engine optimization) or GEO ( generative engine optimization ). Here’s my take: these aren’t new disciplines. They’re just the latest iteration of SEO under a different name. When mobile search exploded, some people started saying “mobile SEO.” But in reality, it was still about delivering a better user experience. This is no different. AI search rewards clarity, freshness, and credibility. It favors sites that are well-organized, easy to understand, and regularly updated. Instead of chasing the latest acronym, focus on timeless principles: Keep your content current and accurate Structure your pages with clear headings and lists Make your expertise obvious Update your site regularly with new products, testimonials, or FAQs that impact your bottom line That’s not AI optimization—it’s just good digital hygiene. The future of search might be more fair For years, SEO felt like an arms race: whoever had the most money for backlinks, content, and technical tweaks usually won. AI is changing that. For the first time, search engines can deliver individualized  results without losing quality—and that makes relevance more powerful than budget. A small yoga studio, a local jewelry maker, or a niche newsletter can now appear in more results than ever before, precisely because they match someone’s intent better than a big brand ever could. With AI, everyone has a personal shopping assistant who can offer more targeted results. That’s the beauty of what’s coming in 2026. Search is becoming more human again. It’s no longer about who shouts the loudest. It’s about who answers best. Eli Schwartz - Growth Advisor and SEO Consultant Eli Schwartz is the bestselling author of Product-Led SEO: The Why Behind Building Your Organic Growth Strategy . A growth advisor and consultant, his ability to demystify and craft organic marketing strategies has generated billions in value for some of the internet's top sites. Twitter  | Linkedin

July 25, 2023 During this SEO webinar , panelists shared tips and tactics that show how blogging can help your business beat even the toughest of SEO competitors. In the session, uSERP's Jeremy Moser and MarketMuse’s Elizabeth Irvine offered practical SEO content marketing strategies that can help your website gain more visibility and get more clicks. In this webinar, we covered: Tips for demonstrating topic authority and E-E-A-T with search engines How to pick the right blog topics for the greatest SEO gains Best practices for structuring your blog content Free template: Download our SEO blog writing Google Doc template to help your writers create targeted content that engages visitors and follows SEO best practices. Meet your hosts: Elizabeth Irvine Vice President of Marketing, MarketMuse With a whopping 16 years of experience in B2B marketing, Elizabeth currently leads content, demand generation, and customer enablement at MarketMuse. She has previously leant her significant expertise to leading companies such as Gartner, Code Ocean, and TechTarget. Twitter | LinkedIn Jeremy Moser Founder and CEO, uSERP Jeremy leads a team of over 50 people at uSERP, a firm that drives organic growth for leading tech brands. He has spearheaded SEO campaigns for clients like monday.com, ActiveCampaign, and Freshworks. He’s been named on the Forbes 30 Under 30 List for Marketing and Advertising. Twitter | LinkedIn Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and Digital Marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds and Tomy. An avid SEO Communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, brightonSEO, Moz, Lumar (DeepCrawl), Semrush and more. Twitter | LinkedIn Mordy Oberstein Head of SEO Branding, Wix In addition to leading SEO Branding at Wix, Mordy also serves as a communications advisor for Semrush. Dedicated to SEO education, Mordy is an organizer of SEOchat and a popular industry author and speaker. Tune in to hear him on Wix’s SEO podcast SERP’s Up, as well as Edge of the Web. Twitter | LinkedIn Competitive positioning in your SEO content strategy Elizabeth Irvine explained the importance of establishing authority by emphasizing the quality of your content—an absolute necessity for many businesses, particularly ones that operate in competitive niches. Topic authority: There could be thousands of results for your most relevant keywords. You’ll need to show search engines and your audience that you’re an expert on your topic if you want to rank and convert well. Scaling output: Your audience expects detailed content to guide them through every aspect of your product/service/business/industry. Working with AI for content briefs can help you scale without impacting quality. Content refreshes: When approached correctly, refreshing existing content can help you improve rankings and attract visitors from the SERP, while taking less time than it would to create from scratch. SEO tactics for competitive blog topics Jeremy Moser advocated for putting processes in place to ensure that your blog has multiple opportunities to reach relevant audiences. Content velocity vs. content specificity: An initial emphasis on content velocity can help new sites identify winning niches and build brand authority within them. But, beware of content decay and other potential pitfalls that can occur due to a long-term focus on velocity. Content prioritization: Get the most ROI for your efforts by factoring in demand, SERP competition, your own topical authority, and organic CTR for potential content. Content distribution: Optimize for mixed-content SERPs to exploit opportunities to appear more than once in the search results, then identify non-direct competitors to outreach to for more backlinks . 5 Wix SEO and digital marketing tools to make your content more competitive Wix site owners can put these insights into action using some of the SEO and marketing features built into the platform. 01. Optimize your blog posts with the Wix SEO Assistant The Wix SEO Assistant tool gives you real-time information on optimizations that you can add to your blog posts to improve the structure, keyword optimization, and accessibility. Integrated with Semrush keyword insights, the emphasis on keyword positioning and HTML formatting can help make your content more visible on SERP features on mobile and desktop. 02. Distribute content with Wix RSS, social share, and email integrations Tools like Wix RSS , social share, and email integrations can help you to distribute your content to followers on social media and your email marketing lists. In addition to alerting new and existing followers of your content as you create it, these content distribution tools can help your site be more visible to search engines during the indexation process. 03. Use the Wix Video Maker and structured data for better SERP visibility Content creation tools like the Wixel Video Maker help you create multimedia content from the image and video library of your website, themes, templates, and stock content from Vimeo. Add original videos to your blog and include custom video structured data via the the Advanced SEO panel to increase the opportunity for your video pages to show in rich results . 04. Track your backlinks in the Traffic over Time report Wix Analytics keeps track of all of the backlinks that people have clicked on. In the Traffic over Time Report , you can filter by Traffic category > Referral to see which websites have linked to your content. 05. Verify rich results eligibility with the Wix Site Inspection tool Wix’s Google Search Console reports and Site Inspection tool can help you assess how your content is performing and maximize the impact of your efforts. With the Site Inspection panel, you can verify and sort your content by rich result eligibility, enabling you to identify which pages have structured data issues at a glance. Transcript: Outranking the biggest brands with blogging Crystal Carter 00:00 We're joined today by Jeremy Moser. Jeremy, I don't know if you want to say hello and introduce yourself quickly. Jeremy Moser 00:08 Yeah. Hey everyone, how's it going? Appreciate you having me here. And I am excited to jump into some of the topics today. Is anyone in the chat from the Tennessee area? I'm in Nashville. Any fellow Tennesseeans out there? Crystal Carter 00:23 Shout out to Dolly Parton. We've also got Elizabeth Irvine here with us today, if you’d like to say hello and introduce yourself quickly? Elizabeth Irvine 00:36 Yes. Hi, everyone. I'm Elizabeth Irvine, the VP of Marketing for MarketMuse and I'm coming to you from Arlington, Virginia today. Crystal Carter 00:44 Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us. And again, I'm Crystal Carter. I'm head of SEO communications. I'm joined today by Mordy Oberstein, the head of SEO branding. We are both from the team here at Wix. And we are going to get started just now. So just to let you know. And if anyone else asks in the chat, please let them know because people join late sometimes. But yes, this webinar is being recorded, it will be shared on YouTube. And you will get a link with the recording in an email sent to your inbox after the webinar. And we also have a q&a panel right next to the chat box on the webinar page. And you can see that and you can ask questions there. We have a team of people answering questions there who know lots about blogging, and who know lots about Wix and can help give you answers there. You can also go to the Wix SEO Learning Hub to find out lots more about our webinars and find lots more information, including our Wix SEO newsletter, Searchlight newsletter, which Mordy always reminds me to remind everyone that we have. So I've nailed that today. And in terms of agenda, we've done our introductions. Very soon, we're going to hear from Elizabeth Irvine, and she's going to talk about some amazing things that she knows about blogging, and she knows a lot, you're also going to get some insights from Jeremy Moser. And then I'm going to share five quick Wix Blog resources that can help you to grow your blog and help you to get more traffic and things like that. And then we're going to have a q&a hosted by the one and only Mordy Oberstein. So we are going to jump into it if we're ready, Elizabeth. And I'm going to stop sharing my screen. Oh, it's disabled for me. Would you mind giving me the power? Just a second... Jeremy Moser 02:28 Okay, got it. Crystal Carter 02:34 Yes, wonderful. Elizabeth Irvine 02:36 Great. So, I'm going to start by talking about high quality content and low quality content. Because both impact your ability to establish topical authority and influence decisions around content optimization. So let's dig in. High quality means your content delivers value, you're offering something authentic and unique. You're telling search engines and your readers that you know what you're talking about. Go through some of these rewritten, aggregated, rephrased content. It doesn't really offer anything new. It can be considered copycat content. Thin content, of course, doesn't cover enough, its surface level. I'll use that as an example in a minute. Overly optimized content is risky, because it's trying to do too much on one page, it's overcompensating. If you're overdoing it with certain keywords and kind of repeating yourself in order to hit a word count target, then you risk over optimization, or if you're trying to show what the problems are, why you need to solve it, how to solve it, tools to help you solve it. Search engines won't know when to serve that page, because it's unclear what it's about. No information gain: If you're not offering something new and different, not offering your experience and expertise, why would search engines favor your article? For promotional use, topic misalignment really comes down to the story you're telling and journey you want your audience to go on. Does everything on the page in question help move your reader to the next step of their journey? Or would it take them on a completely different path altogether? Think about what makes you read an article or something you're trying to solve. This happened to me the other day I landed on, I waited on something that was like three ways to do X, Y, Z and added additional content that was kind of related, but not really. A bunch of promos and pop ups. And that's a frustrating experience. It's not giving me what I really needed. So then, when AI comes into the mix, it's exciting because you can save time and resources in your production. But if you're not producing high quality content every time you publish now and you figure out a way to scale your process with AI, you may see slight increases in the beginning because of volume, but you risk long term pain because of the lack of quality, which is what search engines prioritize. Creating a high quality article is a long process. You have to decide where you want to save time. And I'll briefly go through the steps and note this is pre-generated AI. Research is diving into competitor topics and keyword research, how are they covering it? What are the gaps that you could fill? What are the must haves? Planning, you drill down a little bit more into targeted topics that will better attract your audience based on authority, and long tail keywords that position your content in a more niche area where you can thrive. Briefing, putting together a detailed outline of titles, subheadings topics, questions to address, and links to include for your writer to focus around, writing, putting it all together in a story. Editing pertains to proofreading, copy editing, is it telling the story you want. Publishing and distributing to your audience and optimizing afterwards for continuous improvement and changes in the market, which we'll also get to in a minute. It's easy to look at this and think, Well, why wouldn't I want to shorten that writing bar with generative AI? Or maybe I can cut most of the research out and simplify that. But what are you sacrificing? It could be a lot depending on your existing process and implementation of AI. Say your current process is to give a writer a brief or a topic that's been on your list for a long time. They write it, you edit and then you post it. Now you want to shorten that process with AI. So you create a brief based on the topic and it looks good. Seems like it's covering everything you would expect. What you risk missing out on here is targeted, personalized research, what if that topic wasn't the right topic to pursue to begin with? What if coverage is so good and vast for that topic, you're facing a huge uphill battle to rank for it. If you then use generative AI to help with copy, providing light editing, because again, everything sounds fine. That piece isn't going to help you build authority, knowing how hard it will be for you to rank, and not just anybody to rank, it's important. And your authority is a huge factor in determining that. So if you're using AI to identify a topic to create a brief to write your content, where does your expertise fit into that story, prioritize authority and helpfulness in your content, then volume. So let's go into an example. Here, we're going to use the term "how to groom a dog". This is an example of a piece of thin content ranking for this term. But this is all the article was: There was an intro paragraph in the beginning with related links at the bottom, not much detail, low content score, meaning they left a lot of stuff out. There's also an intent mismatch. This seems more like it's trying to sell these scissors, these three in one scissors, but they're not really giving instructions on how to groom a dog. Let's look at a high quality page. So I can't put the whole page on here, obviously, but it's just this section alone has much more detail. It could be formatted a lot better. But the information is valuable. They had other sections on what not to do. And details on brushing, eye ear cleaning, it actually talks about how to groom a dog. Clearly, there's experience that went into creating this, it has a high content score, meaning it covered a lot of relevant topics. If you were looking for details, steps on grooming a dog, you're going to stay on this page and not the other one. You'll also be more likely to buy grooming tools from them or follow the recommendations because they earn your trust with how to do it. You're likely to buy from them instead of the other. Every page on your site should have a purpose. Really think about what your page is about. Do the keywords you're going after reflect that? Does the intent match? Are you trying to sell something on a page that's really meant to be informational? These on this slide. These are some of the questions that Google provided on how they define helpful content. It goes back to experience. Have you actually done this or got help from someone who can weigh in on the narrative and provide details that you may have overlooked? Because if a writer or generative AI is helping you build it out, it looks fine. It looks good. It reads well. But it's not necessarily sticking to the topic and has that experience and expertise to make it really authentic. The first page that I showed recommended the reader to actually go to a groomer in a couple of those paragraphs, which is really confusing because the article was about how to trim your dog's hair. It's easy to find out. It's easy to think about it from a personal point of view. How often have you gone to a site like I said before, looking for an answer to a question, you get frustrated and you go back to search. You haven't learned enough from that page. So when visitors reach your page, will they have learned enough? Low quality content has a compounding effect. Outdated content can also hurt you here. If you have an old article talking about ways to cook a turkey, for example, and you don't mention air fryers, that's going to hurt if people don't stay on your page because they didn't get any value. You may see traffic but that's it. It feels good. Create new content and increase your footprint. But content is not "set it and forget it". All of your content together tells a story to search engines about what you know and how well you know it. So don't automate for the sake of it, identify the safest place to automate, or bring AI in and test it first and then scale. There's a lot of really great prompt recommendations and templates, but they're meant to give you a starting point, you need to make it your own and personalize the inputs before executing, or you risk creating similar content to what's already out there. Remember to prioritize authority, and helpfulness in your content, then volume. So let's talk about how to build authority with content optimization. We will do that with the example I showed before. But content optimization is not just about the page you're working on today, or going back to old posts. Of course, you want to prune, looking for posts with dates, name, stats, that may need to be updated. But it's also good for good performing posts, good performing posts to help them continue to improve and do even better. But content optimization is more than optimizing a single page. As I said, you want to tell search engines that you're an expert on the whole topic, which is the makings of a cluster. So let's go back to that example that was underperforming and talk about how we could quickly improve it. First, this page is not talking about how to groom a dog. It's really talking about the tools you need, and honestly recommended that you go to a groomer. So this can be rewritten and a new page can be created that goes into more detail on all the gear that you need to groom a dog including scissors, nail trimmers, shampoo, all that stuff. So make sure you're really clear on what the page is about, going back to the purpose of the article. You don't want to cover too much and cause confusion for the search engines. It will confuse intents in the search engines won't know what your page is about. Read your articles if you know nothing on the topic, I actually do this quite a lot. Or write it for your parents who adopted a dog for the first time and you want to clearly explain how to do something like that. I think sometimes we get so close to our content and our topics that we kind of forget what our readers don't know and how to fill in those gaps and help create that context for them. Look at your topic model, some of that early research that you did to identify what you should write about in the first place. In this case, trimming nails, skin health, dogs, ears, and eyes were key to showing search engines what was needed to build an authoritative piece but they weren't included in this page anywhere. The site also ranks for how to groom curly coats, which also points to a somewhat surface level page. But this paragraph could be updated about why the coats are complex. What type of breeds does that pertain to? It could turn into two or three paragraphs probably removing the groomer mentioned. But that's really all that would be needed to tell search engines that there's more information here. But we want to be really careful not to tell search engines that this page is about grooming curly coats, because that's not the title. That's not what you're trying to rank for. But since we don't want to change the focus of that page, but there's enough content and expertise for a full article, that's when you can create a new page for how to groom a dog with curly coats, and also medium to long coats. And with those pages create a link to that original how to page. Without too much work, the site could pretty quickly increase its authority on dog grooming. To take it a step further, when you go back to your topic model, look at those related topics we covered. We covered the thinning shears, that bottom of funnel content. Specific breeds are there, really certain breeds that are incredibly challenging, dig more into those explain why paw pads must be particularly challenging with grooming because it was quite high up for semantic relevancy. I know that personally because we get charged extra from the groomer because my dog hates having his paws clipped. So I don't think that's fair, because it's also a crazy amount to get your dog groomed. But that's beside the point. Once those pages are created, they can all be linked together along with strategic, non competitive external links because you don't want to give more juice to sites that have crazy authority anyway, like Wikipedia. And there you have yourself a beautiful cluster. Topic authority matters. Use good data to help you make decisions, including finding gaps, we go back to the topic model in that previous page. We saw that nobody was covering dry skin in a comprehensive way. They could create additional content on that and take advantage of that gap, it would give them an additional edge. Keep the language simple and clear. One tip I got a long time ago was to read the content out loud. It's amazing what errors you'll uncover. And you'll find if you're reading it to yourself over and over trying to understand what it's saying, then it won't be clear to your audience either. And that's part of optimization. You want them to be able to absorb the information. And don't forget intent and make sure your page has a purpose. Mordy Oberstein 14:55 That was amazing. But I just want to really, really hone in for the audience on the point of experience that you brought up, if you're competing with a big brand on the SERP, and they have an entire content team, and a content team on top of the content team, working on top of the content team, one of the gaps that they'll generally have, one of the vulnerabilities, is a lack of experience. They're a content machine, whereas you're a niche site. You have experience, you're in contact with people that have experience. You could really write deep, nuanced, very specific content, you can really build up the authority, the topical authority around that topic, multiple posts covering the topic from different angles for different audiences, in different ways, all built on real first hand experience. And that's really a way as we just saw, that you can really differentiate yourself from the big brands. I know someone in the chat asked as well, how do I outrank a big brand? That's really how. Use your strength. Your strength as an SME, or as an SMB is that you aren't a content machine. And it's actually a great thing these days, it's one of the things I've been juggling with a lot lately. You see this trend where people are looking for real experience, they're hopping over to social media to TikTok or whatever to get information. Because we're craving that personal experience. I don't believe a random webpage. I believe a person. If you're a niche site, you can really create that feeling of getting information from a person when you write in a really experienced-based way. And you're really covering a topic in a really holistic way, in a really thorough way, that really aligns to that wider marketing trend of people looking for and searching for great information built on personal experience. I just really wanted to reinforce that point. Because it's something that I think is so powerful in blogging today that you really have the power to do. I'm off my soapbox now. Crystal Carter 17:00 It was a great presentation. We really appreciate it. Elizabeth, thank you so much for taking the time. We're going to move on to Jeremy's so that we can get through some more fantastic insights. Now, Jeremy, if you are ready to share your screen. That'd be great. Jeremy Moser 17:19 Yeah, absolutely. Cool. We can let me make sure I'm on the first slide here. But yeah, Elizabeth did a really good presentation, I think Mordy kind of hit the nail on the head too, with focusing on your strengths there. And it's something we'll talk about too, in this presentation is, you know, the difference between velocity and specificity and how you can use those to your advantage sort of based on the situation that you're in. So yeah, let's just dive right in. I'm Jeremy Moser, co-founder and CEO of uSERP, and also part owner and operator in Codeless. And we do stuff for a wide variety of brands from SaaS, to e-Commerce, to even service-based companies as well. I've worked with some cool brands like monday.com, FreshWorks, Robinhood, HotJar, Active Campaign, things like that. And I'm just here to share a little bit about some of the frameworks that we use, in relation to main prompts. How do we use blogging to outrank the competition? What does that actually look like in practice? How do we prioritize things? And so the presentation today is just going to cover a little bit of that, and if there's any questions, we can kind of go from there. So on the agenda, there's kind of like three main things I wanted to address today, revolving mostly around, content velocity versus specificity. So what are those two entities? When do you use them or pick them based on the scenario that you're in currently? Number two, being topic prioritization. So when you look at a mix of topics within these sorts of frameworks, how do you decide what to prioritize? And why? What does that sort of payback period look like for you? And how do you map that within a given strategy? And then number three, once you've got some of that content output going, how do you then distribute that content? And how do you do link building at scale to where you can start to outrank competition? I think it's a really key factor within just kind of that blogging sphere as a whole, right? Good content is good. And it's a great start. But we also need to figure out how do we promote that content? And how do we get good quality websites to link back to it so that we can outrank and we can last a long time on the search results without competitors coming in. So those are like the three main points that we'll hit home on today, we'll just dive right into the velocity versus specificity. So, velocity from a content standpoint is really just how many pieces are you publishing on a given you know, daily, weekly, monthly basis, whatever it is, whatever sort of timeframe you're looking at. Velocity is most often used up like, you know, you'll hear it all the time. I've just published more content, right? Like, get more content on your site, publish more, add more articles. It's all about that quantity game where it's specificity is, sort of what Mordy was hitting on a little bit there, around how do you find what niche you're in and how deep can you go within that niche and I think both have their merits But it just depends entirely on where you're at as a company in terms of, are you already substantially within SEO in the sense that you've been here for a couple of years, you've been publishing for a while, or are you a brand new site. Those all sort of impact your ability to use one of these frameworks here. So velocity, we tend to think of it from our experience here, velocity tends to be really good for new sites to test out what works and what doesn't work, we'll typically find that if you're a brand new site, and you're just getting your blog up, you're just starting to publish things. If you throw sort of spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks, it tends to be a little bit better than actually going for something that's super, super specific there, you're spending a lot of time in the early stages, let's say this is your first couple pieces, you're putting those out. You're spending, you know, maybe weeks or even a month to get that piece out the door, you're really delaying your time to see any sort of baseline analytics that you can iterate from. And that's really the key that we find for brand new sites is that sometimes if you have, let's say, three or four different ideal customer profiles that you target, and you want to create content for all of those, sometimes it's going to be really hard to tell if you're going slow, which one of those niches is going to be the most profitable for you from an SEO perspective. And the way you can get around that is just kind of sheer velocity in the early stages to see what picks up, what doesn't, what's hitting home in the eyes of Google and what's not. And then you can really use that to your advantage, to essentially harp on that specificity later on. And so essentially, as a new site, it can be really hard to find specificity without velocity first. So you can end up spinning your wheels. You're going too specific if you're saying, hey, we need to polish this one guide, this other guide, those ones just might not hit as well as if you're doing a bunch in a wide variety of spaces there and seeing what works and then doubling down on there. So really, velocity we find is very, very good for new sites. But it can also be combined with specificity, which we'll kind of dive into in a little bit here. So some of the main findings, I'll just summarize super quick before we actually get into kind of like the nitty gritty and actual frameworks, and how do you apply it. But some of the main things we've noticed over time, after working with a couple of 100 brands, that big brands should often prioritize velocity in a specific measure and not land grabs or volume metrics. And so what we mean by that specific velocity is really dialing in on what are those currents? ICP? So what are your ideal customer profiles within a search framework, you know, which one of those are doing well, currently? Which ones do you already have existing topical authority and that you can kind of go deeper in. So for example, let's say you have a couple different customers from like, you know, construction firms to law firms, whatever it is that you find currently has a really strong foothold from a search perspective, those are generally speaking ones where you want to prioritize specific velocity. So how do we go deeper within that one very specific niche now and how do we publish a lot of content across the board there versus then we're looking at all these in, you know, Semrush, Ahrefs, whatever it is. And we're seeing a tonne of volume metrics here that look great, let's just go through everything, it's usually not a great strategy if you just spread your efforts too thin when you can really dial it down, when you focus on one or two niches there when you're a little bit larger of a brand. And you already know that you have good traction in those spaces. Small brands, generally speaking, should start with velocity to identify some of those winning niches to understand which ones are working, which ones aren't for them. But then they should focus on specific velocity once they reach those, those analytics there, and they can kind of see what's working and what's not. And then small brands should not focus on velocity long term. And we'll kind of dive into some of the downsides of velocity here that we've just seen over time. And so we'll just jump right into essentially a framework that we've used on RN, which we kind of deem the velocity specificity cycle, it's kind of a mouthful. But essentially stage one here, what we're looking at is typically newer sites or a new topical niche. So this can apply if you're, like I mentioned a brand new site, you're just getting your foothold in the SEO space. Or if you are sort of a larger entity that’s been around for a bit, but you're entering sort of a new topical niche. So let's say you just haven't covered this subset of content before or this topic before. This still applies to you. Even if you're a bit larger of a brand you have more experience etc. And so you know, newer sites, new to topical niches, what you want to do here is really prioritize the velocity of those topical niches in their space. And so if you're a newer site, and let's say you have three ICPs, or you offer multiple different product variations, if your product has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 bunch of different features there. There's a lot of good, unique content you can create around those features around their use cases. A lot of what you want to do there is really prioritize velocity, and so that's stage two, where we're talking about how do we publish content clusters across three to five verticals at a time. And then we sit back for a little bit, we analyze some of that data and we understand which content clusters within that publishing framework are actually performing best. And so it's a really key stage that we find that a lot of newer sites or folks that even have larger sites , and they say, cool, we have a huge site, we have a big domain rating authority, whatever it is, we can kind of capture any topic we want. We find that you're creating a little bit more work for yourself doing it that way. Whereas going a little more specific and seeing, hey, these topics, these verticals, they're performing well, let's go a little deeper here until we've got a really good foothold. And then you can kind of expand out from there. And so stage three is what we're talking about, they're just analyzing the data after a few months, right, depending on your competition or difficulty. Analyzing the data could be as quick as a couple of weeks, it could be as long as a couple months, depending on how aggressive you're being, as well as obviously competition, right? If you're going up against larger competitors, you want to take a little bit more time to analyze that data, you're not going to see movements quite as fast. So take that into account based on your sort of existing site authority, as well as competitors in our space, and how difficult realistically it's going to be. In stage four here, what we'd like to look at is essentially finding those winning niches that align with your business goals and intent. So instead of looking at things from just a purely volume standpoint of like, hey, this one says it's low keyword difficulty, it says it's high volume, it's sort of related, maybe in some senses, let's just go after it, because it sounds nice. Those are usually ones that you want to avoid, because you're probably not going to rank for it long term, it might feel like a good short term win. But again, if it's not aligning with your business goals, and intents, a lot of the content you're creating in that sense is sort of just useless, right. And so what we want to do here within that block, that specificity cycle, is again, find those winning niches based on a little bit of velocity at the start, and then go a little bit deeper with these specific niches that we're finding are doing well. And when you're looking at, you know, metrics within Ahref, Semrush, Moz, whatever sort of keyword tool you're using, a lot of those volume metrics are just plain wrong anyways. So for example, we've seen this across our own brands, as well as hundreds of sites we've worked with, in that we'll usually see, if there's a keyword that says a couple of 1000, maybe it's probably two to 3 times that amount of search volume, if it says it's somewhere in that like, you know, 10 to 50 a month, we'd assume it's probably three, four times that amount, just based on the actual experience in there. So if you're seeing things that are super low volume, even if they're registering within a keyword tool, that's generally speaking, a really good sign that actually has more volume than it says. So it's just something to take into account here that we want to avoid some of those shiny objects, when we're talking about stage two to four here of finding those content clusters across the verticals, and then finding sort of that winning niche where one is just outperforming another, this is usually what you'll find across these stages, that when you do publish across a few different verticals, you'll find maybe one or two are going to perform better than another. And it's usually due to things, you know, different competition, or maybe you just have more experience in that space, or Google perceives you to have a little more topical authority at the moment there. And those are the ways that you kind of double down. And stage five here, essentially what we're looking at is the specificity production. And so that's how we go deep, essentially in a winning niche now. And so those are ones you should have identified from sort of that multiple month period of analyzing data, you'll now have a pretty good understanding of what are those niches that actually do perform well, for us, not only from just a pure SEO standpoint of like, actually ranked well for it, we got traffic, but did it actually result in some sort of movement towards your goals, right? Whether that's directly for leads or sales, conversions, whatever sort of business model you run, making sure that those winning niches are categorized correctly in the sense that they're forwarding or getting closer to your goals. And so that's when you start to amp the production up within that specific niche. And you really dial in on that without sort of getting that shiny object syndrome across different spaces. So stage six, there is basically increased velocity only within those spaces and put a major focus on content rejuvenation cycles. So what the heck does that mean? What is constant rejuvenation? How do we framework that within sort of new content production, where we're doing a lot of this at scale? One of the key things that you'll notice over time is that too much velocity often means a lot of content decay, even for large brands. So this is something you want to be aware of that at almost all times and Elizabeth hit on this Mordy hit on this a little bit as well, where essentially if we're seeing low quality content on a given site, Google has said this time and time again, we've also just seen it in practice that low quality, outdated, inaccurate sort of content brings your entire site down. And so it's something to be really cautious of when we're looking at content velocity. And we're looking at that too much in a silo of saying, you know, we hear it all the time, right? It just publish more content, just create more content. And then you'll start to see traffic. A lot of that can be good advice in some cases, but it also sets you up for failure. If you don't have the processes in place from a content rejuvenation perspective of now that I've created all this content, how do I go back and make sure that it's updated over time, that I'm not just creating a piece and kind of setting and forgetting because we've just seen time and time again, that brands that do set and forget there. That's an opening for another company to come in, right? And it's another way that you can actually rank against larger brands doing sort of a basic level search like this, you can do this on pretty much any keyword tool you've got. But essentially just take a look and plug in a domain and see what sort of content they are ranking for and different positions, you can even then compare that over time, they'll give you a really good understanding of like, what are all these keywords that they're not even ranking well for? Which ones have declined in the past 360, 90 days or even longer? It gives you a really cool insight into what topics are these brands prioritizing or simply just not focusing as much on. Those are really your kind of ins in a competitive space. A good example for stage sort of number two: You're publishing content across three to five verticals. So I'll give you a little bit of a breakdown of how you do that, how you identify that, what's the next step there. So this is a direct example of what we did for monday.com. So we looked at essentially all the different sorts of niches that they serve, and their different ideal customer profiles, and we just mapped to those apps to start. So they cover a whole host of different customer profiles, your business might cover only one or two, and that's totally fine. We can chat about ways to adapt based on that. But if you cover multiple ideal customer profiles here, what we want to look at is essentially spreading those out and seeing what terms, what keywords, what sort of content can we create specifically for those teams, and then sort of expand upon that. And so what we realized was, okay, cool, monday.com, it's a pretty broad product around project management, they serve a bunch of different companies, styles, types, what have you. And so we looked at, they're covering marketing, CRM and sales, project management in general, creative teams, software, dev teams, nonprofits, construction, firms, finance and accounting, right? There's all these different topics that they can cover. And so we want to do here is pick a few of these at the start that are sort of the bread and butter ones that historically if you have that data over time, which ones have converted best for you, or resulted in the highest return on investment, or lifetime value, whatever sort of metrics you're measuring there, and then create content for those specific niches. So the cool thing about Monday that might not directly apply to you is that a lot of that is really scalable in the sense that you're talking about one sort of specific product here, right, a project management tool, and you can expand that based on the use cases of each individual team. So you can really scale the amount of content velocity there within a specific niche. But that whole sort of stage two to stage four applies directly here of buying those, you know, three to five verticals. Let's just say here, it's you know, marketing, CRM, sales, project management, and really focus on velocity at the start within those. Maybe we identify that, hey, marketing and creative teams, these ones are ranking really well. Let's put a little bit of the other stuff on the backburner. And let's double down on that specificity and see that we've already got some of that topical authority there. So that's kind of what it looks like in practice. Hopefully, that makes some sense. If I'm going a little quick, we'll send some of these slides to everyone after I'm sure so you can kind of dive in and see if anything else up close there. Cool. So that was a lot for the first framework there. The second section here is a little bit on how we prioritize some of those topics. And now that you've actually done some of the research, you're saying, cool, I've got some of these ICPs. I know what I'm going to target here. How do we go from the typical phrase--we're all guilty of it, right? I need to rank for X,Y, Z and it's one specific sort of money keyword or a batch of those, how do we go from that to I know, I can rank for a given keyword and X amount of time frame, resulting in a given ROI. And so we really like to get a little bit more granular on topic, prioritization, and really look at some of the metrics there and our realistic ability to rank for that over time. So what we're going to cover in this section here is topic prioritization, which goes into a few things like the payback period. So how long will it take? You've actually recouped some of the investment there from targeting the specific pages? What are your timeframes to goals ratio? What are your KPIs? And then what does success actually look like to you? So this is a framework that we use quite often across codeless. And you serve our companies, and it's a constant framework here called Planning Predictor. And what we'd like to start here is at the base of harvesting demand, and so what we're talking about, there is looking to see what already exists from the search engine perspective, there's a few ways that you can create demand via SEO. But a lot of the time, 99% of the time, you're looking to harvest existing demand of folks already searching for this. How do we show up and build a brand in this space? How do we capture some of that attention? There are several ways to create demand. But again, a lot of what we want to focus on here is how do we harvest it because creating it is really, really hard to measure over time. And if we're talking about trying to get a really good ROI, in a reasonable timeframe, a lot of it is going to be based on harvesting existing searches. And so what we want to do here is really perform both a top down and bottom up analysis to build out a lot of that initial keyword lists for things like relevancy to your business, from the direct relevancy to something that's a little more broad, from volume metrics to again, take those with a grain of salt just based on your industry and space. And then things like keyword difficulty and even cost per click. So I'll just breeze through some of the stuff on this framework as a whole. And then we're going to dive into each one in specifics. So just feel free to listen, no need to take any notes or anything on this section just yet. We'll dive in each one there. The second stage here essentially is sort of competitiveness. So how difficulty or how difficult is the corresponding SERP that you're looking within? Can you realistically compete based on average DR, Da scores that give you sort of a good proxy, but also looking at like, how long have they been ranking there? What's their content, quality, referring domains, all these sorts of things will give you an idea of like, what is your actual, you know, reasonable timeline for ranking for some of that? The third stage here is topical authority. So are you already seen as a topical expert in these spaces? Are you building it up from the bottom? Are you already ranking for similar queries? Again, that's sort of what we were touching on earlier there, you're in that specificity stage, you might have a lot of topical authority already. It gives you a little bit more room to expand and see results faster. The organic CTR stage here of the framework is can you realistically rank within let's just say the top three for that given keyword, which is going to net probably somewhere between 70%, maybe even higher of the clicks. And you're also assuming kind of baking in that organic CTR is just been decreasing over time with various SERP features, whatever it is, you really need to be ranking within 3,4,5 to really see any sort of payback from the keyword these days. So it's something to keep in mind, you're doing that initial research. And then last, but not least, is the fun parts, right? The money part. So the payback period, what's your ideal payback period, and risk tolerance plays a huge, huge factor in how you build a content strategy from the ground up. So your tolerance here can be, need to get leads in two to three months. Or it could be, hey, we've got funding here, we've got a 24 month timeline, let's hit the ground running and see what we can rank for in that timeframe, your strategies are going to look completely different. So those are really key factors that we take into account before even looking at a piece of content and deciding whether or not to publish for it. Cool. So we'll dive straight into all of these. Now, hopefully, we won't take up too much more of your time, we'll try to be concise on some of them. But essentially, the harvest demand stage is where we're plugging in a bunch of different initial keyword ideas. And looking at essentially all of the longtail variations weighing up their respective relevance volume, keyword difficulty, cost per click. These metrics here are really good at understanding, what's the intent of a piece? What sort of length do I need to put into it? What's that cost going to be? So you know, a metric like CPC, some of you know this, some of you might not, but you know, well, it's obviously an advertising metric that can really help you indicate what people are willing to spend on something. And usually, if someone's willing to spend a pretty significant amount of money for a single click, and generally speaking, means they're getting really good quality leads, and traffic to their sites. And so you will often see, if you're in a law firm niche, they're searching for a law office near X,Y, Z city, that's going to probably be maybe even upwards of $100, $200 per click. And that generally speaking means the folks that are bidding on that are seeing a pretty good return, we're seeing good quality leads come through the door. So it's something to keep in mind in your space obviously depends on the space you're in, how expensive the things you sell are. But you can weigh those up on different keywords and essentially get some really good data on structuring intent. So this is just another example of what we did for Monday of looking at basically a keyword framework that you can plug in, which is that customer segment vertical, and then a problem or a pain point that they face. It can be as literal as this one here, where it's construction, project management, literally taking their ICP and then taking their exact software that they do here. This one's a little bit more middle of the bottom of the funnel. But you can also get a little bit more broad with these and you'll come up with a lot of really good quality terms here. And so the harvesting demand is really just building a lot of different keyword lists at scale, that you can then compare side by side, and understand which ones you can go after, that you're going to see results from, in a given timeframe. So it's a really good starting point of just building a lot of lifts in a lot of different areas. So you can have a lot of that data on and from a SERP competitiveness standpoint. What we want to look at here are a few different things. And so what you'll tend to see and given keyword tools are things like, you know, keyword difficulty metrica, or a score. These are basically useless these days, in my opinion. I think they can be a good starting point but when you really dig into the fundamentals, how they're ranking some of that are scoring, they're just not great indicators of what you'll actually see work. So for example, if you're looking at this one here, this keyword of contractors, planner, says the keyword difficulty of sticks. And when you look at some of the stuff in here, it's a bit misleading, right, like there's a few brands in here that are super high DR, millions of link's pointing to them. But when you actually look at how that metric is scored, it's really just looking off the domains pointing to that individual page. So it's looking at things at a page level, more than it's looking at things at the domain level. And we need to be taking into account the factors because obviously, they matter heavily in that, you know, if Forbes comes in on this topic, and they have zero links pointing to that specific page, their brand is just so large, that they're probably going to be able to garner some topical authority and rank there really quickly. So we don't want to base things off of just the amount of domain to a specific page, we want to look at things from a domain level. And so the good news is that when you actually do that, you'll start to see things a little bit more clearly. You know, maybe this one shows an app store ranking, etc. This one shows Amazon ranking Monday.com. This might not be a term that you really want to go after for the short term, as you're just probably not going to rank for it based on competition, despite the keyword tool, saying it's an eight, which for a brand new site, it might be relatively easy. So what we look at here, from a search competitiveness standpoint, is especially as it relates to how do we create content at scale? How do we do this? How do we create a piece that's actually going to rank for here and using blogging to outrank the competition, we're gonna look here at modeling things that work from brands that are at your size, or potentially even smaller. And so when you look at, you know, the first few things that are ranking here, you'll see pretty large companies, big domains, big brands, we often are told in various different circles that, hey, we shouldn't look at the number one ranking thing here, we should basically try to make that a little bit better. And then we'll hopefully at some point rank better than them. But it's just really not how it works. In practice, we find that there are often sort of, you know, smaller size brands, they're just getting things going on the SEO side that are actually penetrating a lot of these SERPs. And so that's something we want to really hone in on and understand how they are doing this, and a lot of it comes down to that specificity within a given topical area. So whereas a brand like Reich or whatever is ranking here, they can rank for a lot of these things, just based on the fact they built a brand over the past decade, they've got a bunch of different ICPs. They have content going and a whole host of spaces, that might not be you, right, and that's okay. And you can identify, there's other folks out there that are succeeding doing this. And so you want to model after them and not model after some of the big hitters you see on SERPs, because a lot of folks can rank for some content, unfortunately, just by the size of their brand and the quality, you might read it, you might say, you know, it's not the best content I've ever read, this one's a little better. And so that's one you want to model after, generally speaking, when you're looking at certain competitiveness. Is there anyone that's a little bit closer to your brand size, lower than your brand size, or smaller rather. And then using that as an indication of whether or not it's realistic to rank for these terms. And oftentimes, you will find that even if something is hyper competitive, like an international marketing strategy, whatever it is, you'll find that there are doors that are open, they're depending on your own brand, you know, how does it fit with your company, your ICPs, things like that, from a topical authority standpoint. Elizabeth hit on this a lot as well. So I'll just expand a tiny bit on that. But essentially, what we've looked at here is organizing topics around specific customer industries, and then using basically a parent child hierarchy to help reinforce some of that topical authority. So creating pretty dense clusters, again, going back to that specificity velocity framework, by identifying the specific clusters and inches and then really going deep within those. So you can see some of that to just on their sites, as well as sort of that URL structure that we tend to use here is essentially just sending positive signals around those various different topics, topic areas that we want to focus on making sure we've got a lot of good quality content that's condensed into this area. So we're building along with that topical authority. We're adding an expertise over time, etc. And we want to focus obviously on a lot of the topics where we can add some of that uniqueness to it. So that could be you know, your company does things a certain way. Let's touch on how we actually utilize that in practice within the content and add some sort of unique value there. So that's what you mean by the topical authority standpoint. Some of the practical application here is really going back to specificity, right? So if you're ranking well, for similar terms, you probably have some topical authority there. And you can go deeper and then use that velocity framework within specificity. So really take a look. If you're already an established company, or you've been doing SEO for a while, you've been blogging for a while, you can just go take a look and run a quick analysis and check and see what are sort of those generalized themes or areas that we rank well, then which ones maybe not so much. That'll give you a really clear idea of your expansion opportunity there, or even your pruning opportunity to say, you know, hey, this content has been in this niche for the past 12 months, it's not ranking for anything. You can potentially prune that, or redirect or remove it, whatever sort of decision you make there based on your current standing. And then really focusing on areas where you do have that topical authority, you're gonna see content rank far faster. So that's a really good practical application there. And, you know, I'm not sponsored by MarketMuse and it's just a coincidence that they're involved in the webinar, but we like to use them for this specific purpose, actually. So using tools like their inventory feature, where we can analyze things like a more personalized difficulty score, we prefer that over sort of just looking at them generically and other tools, because it can help predict just based on your own sort of topical authority in a given space, how much content you have, they're currently ranking versus relying on generalized numbers that tend to be really vague. Again, like we saw in the example, up here, it tends to not be a really clear indicator of if you're actually going to rank well or not, if you see an eight out of 100 keyword difficulty score, the last thing I would expect to see is Amazon ranking number one, because you're just not going to outrank Amazon for the most part. So just something to keep in mind there. Cool. Back to the organic CTR. So we're moving again, I'll jump back here as well as you can get another bit of an overview here. So we've covered the harvest demand section, SERP competitiveness, authority down to the CTR, and then the final one, payback period. And Wix team feel free to stop me if I'm going way too over on time. Crystal Carter 47:17 You kid of are, I didn't want to say anything. Jeremy Moser 47:20 No, you're good. I figured it might have been a little too in depth. So I'm happy to skip ahead to on anything if we have like another minute or two. Crystal Carter 47:28 Sure. Jeremy Moser 47:30 Cool, cool. No worries. So the payback period, essentially--you'll have the slides afterwards, you can kind of run through, there's a few kind of questions you can ask yourself based on where you're currently ranking, all those sorts of things, to kind of determine how do you make sense of like velocities, specificity, ROI, things like that, to be able to dive into some of that, the distribution side, too. There's a lot of practical applications in here, it will take too long to go through. But essentially, what we're looking at here is, we see that it's from a link building perspective, it plays just as much in the content as anything else. And that's content quality isn't just on page. So here's kind of a direct line from Google's own How Search Works documentation, basically saying, you know, one of the several factors they use to determine quality content is if other prominent websites link to you. And so what we want to see link building as is not really this like kind of mystical thing, but more as an extension to the content quality. So how do we get really good quality sites to link back to that content you've created, actually bolsters that content and makes it better quality. So that's what we want to do in this section here. I won't dive into all of it just now. But there's a few different things you can test around in here, a few different ways to go about link building at scale. And there's a couple of different frameworks in there that you can dive into at another time. But I won't drone on too long, I think I already went too far. Crystal Carter 48:49 It was a lot of information so we really appreciate you sharing everything. I'm just going to signpost everyone quickly so we can get to some of our things here. Just a second. So we want to make sure that we are getting to your questions. On the place where you registered for the webinar with all of this information we have added lots of the notes here from Jeremy and from Elizabeth. And we've also added a lot of the the signposting lots of different tools that you can use on Wix to optimize your blog for distribution, using Wix Video Maker for different content, different content, using analytics to understand some additional opportunities, and verifying your your site for rich results, which can also give you different opportunities and things like that. So we'll link to that in your email that you get. And I'm going to pass it over to Mordy so that we can get some questions before we wrap up. Mordy Oberstein 49:45 Hi there, okay. I'm gonna quickly just pull up my list. Yep. Thank you Jeremy, that was absolutely amazing. I just want to like, kind of sum up what you're talking about in one distinct sentence. So I know there;s a bunch of questions around this. If you see that you're ranking or you're getting some traction around a particular topic, so if you fix cars and you talk about brakes on your blog posts, talk about the engines on your blog post, you talk about spark plugs (I just got mine changed). And you see that the content about the engine is not working. It's not ranking, but the content of the brakes is ranking and you're starting to get some traction on that, go deeper into braking, or brakes. You really want to build on the momentum. You have a whole podcast episode of the SERPs podcast on the Wix SEO hub about momentum, and its role in SEO. So check out that episode for more on that. Okay. Well, let's go to Andy Jarvis and he has a great question. He wrote, how do you know if you should update, optimize a piece of content or write a new piece? Say if something updates from spring to summer? 2023? What factors would be driving updating the piece versus writing a new one? Jeremy Moser 50:56 Do you want me to...? Mordy Oberstein 51:04 The floor is yours, Jeremy. Jeremy Moser 51:07 Cool. Yeah. So in terms of deciding whether to update or create a new one--is that sort of the basis of the question? Yeah, I think it depends and kind of goes back to some of the stuff we were just chatting about around how much content you've already got published there versus creating new ones. And I think a lot of the difficulty we run into with content velocity as a blanket prescription for most folks, is that you do run into the fact that you just have so much decay going on. So it'll depend a little bit on the evergreen nature of a given topic that you have. And so you can do a little bit of a clear test there by just looking at what content is already ranking there when you search that term. So if you go to Google, don't even need an SEO tool for this, just plug in that keyword and see what timeframe was the content published that's currently ranking? Did anyone update recently? Or is it still showing stuff from two, three years ago, that gives you a pretty clear idea actually, in two senses. Number one being, that content, if it's outdated, a little bit, that's an opportunity for you to create a little bit better content, if you're not already ranking number one, or it's potentially your opportunity to just bolster that number one ranking by updating it anyway with newer fresh information. And if you see that a lot of the content there is updated more frequently, and you have been losing rankings, I'd for sure prioritize rejuvenation, or updating of that content, then I would net new because again, you're then playing into that net new cycle, right, you're creating a bunch of new content, that's also going to decay. At some point, you're creating yourself a really big backlog there. So I tend to be a much bigger fan of working with what you've already got. There's still opportunity in that space, and you're seeing results from it. Crystal Carter 52:46 And that's something Elizabeth touched on as well about making sure that it's not a set it and forget it sort of approach. Elizabeth Irvine 52:53 Yeah, I think it's going to be very rare to hurt yourself by updating your content, that you can only improve your content that way, especially if there's a change in the market, changing information. When it comes to updating or creating new, it goes back to thinking about, what is this page actually about? If you're adding too much information that's changing the subject of that page, that's when you should create something new, and go really deep into it. Mordy Oberstein 53:22 So Elizabeth, you spoke a lot about content clusters. And a bunch of folks were asking, could you maybe define what is a content cluster? And maybe give an example of one and how you go about creating one? Elizabeth Irvine 53:35 Yeah, it's a lot we can provide some additional content on clusters too. In the simplest terms, though, it's a group of content that fully covers a topic. And I like to think about it across the buyer's journey. That's kind of what I was talking about earlier, too, if you're talking about tools, in a how-to article, that's clashing. That's the intent mismatch, the intent of someone searching how to do something, if they're served with products, that's now answering their query. So when you're creating a content cluster, you want to think about the related topics to your core topic and create content that covers the why, the how ,the what. Jeremy talked about different verticals. So how can you expand, go into more detail, on the topics within that the related terms, what's semantically related to that initial topic and go deep into all of those. It's kind of a mix of science and art and really thinking about what's going to provide value to your audience. That's really what you're trying to do with your content and answer their questions. If you need to create 10 pieces of content to do that, to answer all of those questions, do it. If you need to do 20, then that's fine, too. It's not necessarily that you need five pieces for this cluster and you move on. It's really how you're going to show that you know this topic really well and can provide a comprehensive answer for them. Crystal Carter 55:06 And I think it's sort of being a one stop shop. So if somebody's got a question about a house plant or something, that they know how to grow it, whether to put it in dark, light or bright light, or you know, what kind of food it needs, or what kind of pot it might go in, or all of that sort of stuff. So it's got all of the different ways that people might be interested in that topic and really showing a depth of knowledge. Mordy Oberstein 55:30 Yeah, basically, if someone were to say, hey, are you an expert on plants, you will show them your blog. Yeah, here's all the things I talked about. Clearly, I am an expert on plants. One question that kind of came up and really touched on the core of what this webinar is about. Let's say for example, I'm starting to write content, and I'm ranking in position number 15. So page two of Google, and I just can't seem to get above page two, what do I do now? The first thing that I would typically look at there would be sort of a one-on-one stacking of like, is the content quality good at a baseline perspective, from a subjective level, looking at the depth that you're going into, in comparison to competitors. What sort of varying other related topics can you add to that content? If you've checked all those boxes, you've created as good, if not better, piece of quality content. A lot of the difference maker there, from what we see, tends to be the link building side, do you have enough authority in that space, are other good quality brands pointing to that piece of content or your company as a whole and saying, hey, they're the experts in this space, listen to them around this. Generally speaking, that is what we see pushes folks from let's just say, the bottom of the first page, top of the second page, into a position where you can actually compete. And then from there tends to be a little more around, how do you update that content, etc. Generally speaking, that's what we find to work. But there's multiple ways to do it, of course. So one last thing. Right now, we're really short on time, but I've seen multiple times throughout the q & a, this idea of authority. And what I mean by authority, what are we trying to do here? And I'll say this really quickly, before I hand it over to our guests, you know, that Google is sort of like a courtship, you need to show Google that you're trustworthy, that you're relevant that they can feel comfortable showing your website on on the result pages for whatever keywords that you're trying to rank for. And that's a long process of really creating content. And I think in terms of outranking bigger websites, it's really a place where you have some advantages, because you can, as I mentioned before, get really into the nitty gritty details of a topic to build up that authority in ways that maybe a bigger website can't. But again, when we're talking about authority. Elizabeth, Jeremy, what comes to mind, what's really important to building authority? And what does that actually mean for a SME or an SMB smaller kind of website? Crystal Carter 57:54 Elizabeth it would be good to hear from you, I know you talked about this a little bit in yours. Elizabeth Irvine 57:58 Yeah, it starts with expertise and experience and displaying that in your content. So I talked about dog grooming, if everything on my site is about dog grooming, and going into a talk about specific breeds, I talked about things that if I start talking about cats, and I have no other content about cats on my blog, I'm not gonna have any authority on cats, because Google's like her blog is about dogs. Why am I gonna give her rankings for something about cats, I need to build out a whole infrastructure with all the basics and go into the same details of what I did for dogs for cats. And at the basic level, that's, that's how we perceive authority. Mordy Oberstein 58:43 And with that, I think I'll hand it back over to Crystal. Just one quick plug for the SERP's Up podcast. And I think two weeks in August, I'm gonna say eighth. We're releasing episode number 50 of the podcast. So check out episode 50, it's got a heap of cuts from our previous episodes. If you're looking to get into SEO, learn more about SEO, we will cover a whole gamut of topics in just one episode. So that's the perfect one to get started with. And now I'll hand it back to Crystal. Crystal Carter 59:09 Yes, and I just wanted to say thank you to everyone for joining us here. Thank you, Elizabeth, for your fantastic insights. Thank you, Jeremy, for joining us today with your amazing insights. We're going to be sharing this video on YouTube. We're going to be sharing it on the web, the website that you joined this webinar via and thank you all so much for coming. I hope you guys have a great, great rest of the week and see you again for the next webinar. Bye. Thank you.

Author: Kiera Carter With the rise of AI search  and decline of organic site traffic, it's refreshing to know there's one constant: content is king. Content creation, strategy, and operations were key topics at MozCon in New York, where experts agreed on a nuanced, thoughtful approach to content in 2026. (Agreement? In SEO? I know—groundbreaking.) That’s because anyone deep in the trenches knows success in this chaotic moment isn’t about recklessly abandoning fundamentals. It's about understanding your audience , applying your search skills to new platforms, and—for the love of all original content—not writing the same explainers as everyone else on the internet. As a content marketer myself, I found it both grounding and freeing. So, as we head into 2026, I curated the best content tips from MozCon New York to help inform your future-first content strategy. If you’re looking to go deeper on AI search, check out 5 ways to adapt your content strategy for LLMs  by Kevin Indig. Top content marketing tips for 2026 GEO or SEO? Stop stressing about acronyms Bridge search and social  Break free from keywords Optimize your content operations Stop measuring traffic. Start measuring trust. Think like a publisher Actually be a thought leader Focus on your heavy hitters GEO or SEO? Stop stressing about acronyms Lily Ray, VP of SEO strategy and research at Amsive, has a message for those panicking about GEO, AEO, and LLMO: it's SEO. "Good SEO is good GEO," she said in her talk, echoing a statement from Google's Danny Sullivan. "If you're doing things right from an SEO perspective, you should expect visibility in AI search as well." Ray pointed to the tactics everyone's calling revolutionary—content chunking, FAQ schema, earning brand mentions across platforms—and reminded us that SEOs have been doing this for years. "Chunking is just writing good content with optimized headlines," she said. "The way people search has absolutely changed, but the tactics to earn AI search visibility are really just evolutions of many of the existing SEO and marketing best practices that we've employed for years." Some (level-headed) adjustments you can make to evolve your content strategy, according to Ray: Build your brand presence on Wikipedia , Reddit, and YouTube, “without being too salesy and too promotional.” Answer common questions about your business very clearly on your website. Adjust your KPIs  and explore new AI search tools  to measure your AI visibility. Wix’s AI Visibility Overview  displays how your site is performing across AI platforms  Bridge search and social  We only spend 3.5% of our online time searching, as Paul Norris, organic media director at Journey Further, explained in his talk. The rest of the time, we're scrolling through social media, streaming YouTube videos, and browsing Reddit forums. "Discovery happens everywhere," Norris said. "Search is a specific behavior. It's not a channel." But SEOs used to long-term organic traffic can bristle at the quick lifespan of social content. Norris shared research from Measure Studio  finding that TikTok videos reach 75% of their total views within the first day, and YouTube Shorts hit 95% within 35 days. "Most social content is actually like fast food for algorithms," Norris said. "It spikes. It's fleeting. It's gone." That’s exactly where search optimization comes in, he said. By making social content discoverable and indexable, you can extend its shelf life, and in some cases—particularly on Instagram—make it evergreen. His advice: Don’t keyword stuff your captions. Instead, learn how people search within each platform and optimize accordingly. Repurpose your content strategically. For example, one piece could inspire an on-site article for Google, short-form videos for TikTok, and long-form content for YouTube. Work with creators. “That stuff lands better. They've got their own audience.” Break free from keywords The journey toward natural language search didn't start with ChatGPT, said Pete Meyers, principal innovation architect at Moz. “In some ways, we've been on the natural language journey for at least 15 years now.” This means we’ve already learned the building blocks: “Even though some of this is new, and we're a little worried, I think we have what we need, and we can take a little bit of a breath,” he said. That’s the good news. The problem is that most SEOs are still thinking in keywords when they should be thinking in journeys. "People might be having multi-paragraph conversations that have multiple steps," Meyers said. “How do we cope with that from a keyword research standpoint?”   It’s a question we’re all asking, because it’s clear that traditional keyword research can't keep up. Meyers said to forget trying to track one-off, infinitely-long queries. Instead, group long-tail queries into topic families and use topic clustering tools to group semantic variations together.  When Meyers demonstrated typing "iPhone or Android" into Moz's Keyword Explorer , it surfaced questions like "why is Android better than iOS?" and "why is iPhone better than Android?" alongside "why people believe iPhones are better than Android." "These are all on the same topic cluster," he said. "We can start to group them together." The key is understanding that every query represents a path from initial curiosity to final action. Map that journey, and you'll be positioned for success no matter what search looks like next. Image courtesy of Moz Optimize your content operations Josh Spilker, content marketing and SEO lead at AirOps, spoke about content engineering, or the practice of establishing a content engine primed for cross-channel distribution and efficiency.  “We were told that machines are coming for our jobs, and that every article would be AI generated,” he said. “The reality is that AI capabilities have created a new category and the people who figure it out are going to have a competitive advantage.” That advantage—and thing to “figure out”—is your process. “We've had a ceiling with incremental improvements: you tweak your brief, you tweak your outline, you tweak some of your internal linking processes. But you can't tweak your way out of a broken system,” he said. “What we're really thinking about is how content gets built, how it gets managed, how it gets scaled, and how you can do that in this new environment.” Start by whiteboarding out your entire content process. When you break down what it takes to publish one piece—outline, slug, meta description, internal links—you'll realize how many individual steps you're managing and can start to see opportunities. Make sure to put a human in charge of quality. “Content engineering is about orchestrating humans and LLMs together with a clear strategy, not just around disconnected tools.” Stop measuring traffic. Start measuring trust. Wil Reynolds, founder of Seer Interactive, said his organic traffic is at an all-time low, but his leads are at an all-time high. "It took me 13,000 visits from search to get 67 newsletter signups," he said, "and only 2,821 visits from social to get 66." If you're still celebrating traffic numbers while your conversion rates tank, you're measuring the wrong thing. Reynolds breaks marketing into three stages:  Being seen Being believed Being chosen "Google's great at helping you be seen, but it's not great at being believed or chosen," he said. So, how do you start measuring “belief,” essentially trust, in your brand and company, in order to be chosen , everyone’s ultimate goal? Reynolds suggests tracking the percentage of traffic that comes from sources other than search and AI. "If that number is really low, humans don't give a shit,” he said. “Track newsletter signups by source—if 50% are coming from social, that's people choosing to hear from you.”  Image courtesy of Moz Think like a publisher The future of PR looks less like backlink outreach and more like operating an in-house newsroom, as Misty Larkins, director of public relations and internal communications at the University of Missouri Health Care, explained in her talk about digital PR . "When you create the data, you control the story.” That’s why companies are now hiring economists, statisticians, and data journalists to lead their content teams—because journalists quote and cite original sources. If you’re that original source, you're not just another brand hoping for coverage; you’re the expert that informs the story. This doesn't mean you need to hire a full-time economist tomorrow. But it does mean investing in content that's actually newsworthy: original research, surveys, trend reports, analysis of your internal data. "Instead of creating 50 pieces of generic content that's indistinguishable from your competitors, think about creating five highly differentiated pieces that all work together," Larkins said. Actually be a thought leader Chima Mmeje, senior content marketing manager at Moz, has zero nostalgia for the days of “boring SEO-optimized content that nobody wants to read."  The old process was predictable: do keyword research, copy what's on the SERP, use a tool to check your optimization score, and publish. "It was like math. It was boring. It was lifeless. It was lame."  Real thought leadership means becoming the primary source, not an interpreter. "Nobody wants to link to a secondary interpreter.” she said. “Everybody wants to link to the source of truth."  Mmeje pointed to Mike King as an example. “When the Google leak happened, Mike King was there first, reverse-engineering the patterns and teaching people how to assess it,” she said, noting that King's analysis earned 2,200 inbound links from a piece that doesn't even rank on the SERP. The barrier is mindset more than time. Mmeje suggested publishing just two original research pieces per year, writing opinion pieces that "either alienate or inform," and capturing demand as trends break instead of six months later. Focus on your heavy hitters Not all pages are created equal. In the post-traffic era, you need to know which pages are working hard for the business, and which ones are worth leaving behind. That’s the basis of the heavy-hitters framework shared by Bianca Anderson, organic growth manager at hims & hers. Your heavy hitters are the top 10 to 20% of URLs that drive the majority of your conversions.  Your action item: Apply a weighted score to your reporting that favors conversions (70% weight) over traffic (30% weight) to identify the pages that deserve your attention. From there, you can focus on updating the pages truly worth your time.  So, as Anderson says, "when leadership asks you,’ how bad is it?’ You can say, ‘our top traffic-driving content is down, but our conversions are doing really well.’" The marketers who'll thrive in 2026 are the ones who laser focus on the pages that actually matter—to the audience and to the business. Kiera Carter, Editorial Director at Wix Studio Kiera oversees content on Wix Studio's AI Search Lab and SEO Learning Hub. She has 15 years of experience in SEO and content strategy. In a past life, she held editorial leadership positions at companies like Hearst and People Inc. Her journalism has been published by The New York Times , Wall Street Journal , and others. Linkedin

Author: Adel Raslan The final quarter of the year is packed with holidays that can lead to higher organic traffic for certain brands—and that means more opportunities to earn money through advertising on your site. But making the most of this spike takes planning. This guide breaks down what to expect during the holiday season, based on the latest data from Google, and how to prepare your content and ad strategy to meet higher demand. For a general primer on using Google AdSense with Wix, see how you can generate additional revenue streams with Wix & Google AdSense . By putting in the work now, you can improve your results not just for the holiday season, but year-round. 8 ways to optimize your website ads for the holidays Understand the holiday traffic cycle Use the ad formats that match user behavior Activate Google AdSense Auto ads  Publish relevant content Prioritize device optimization Don’t let compliance slide under pressure Build a campaign calendar, not a content list Think long-term 01. Understand the holiday traffic cycle The holidays don’t just come with more traffic. They also come with higher- value traffic. People go online with a purpose. They’re searching for gift ideas, making travel plans, comparing prices, and looking for end-of-year inspiration. This intent makes them more likely to engage with both your content and your ads. Publishers across multiple regions saw ad revenue grow as much as 18% at the end of 2024, with click-through rates rising up to 26% in some regions of the world, according to Google AdSense  data. This reflects a seasonal shift in advertiser competition, user interest, and content engagement. If you can get your audience to spend more time on your site or visit multiple pages, that increases the chances they’ll see and click on your ads. The first step is understanding when and where traffic spikes happen on your site.  Use your website analytics to look back at October through December of last year. Pinpoint your most visited pages and highest-converting content. Did your traffic rise around specific holidays? Were there particular blog posts, product roundups, or tutorials that drew more visitors? This historical data can guide your upcoming content strategy. Analyze your traffic over time with Wix Analytics Also examine your traffic by device. In 2024, mobile and tablet visits increased across many regions, though desktop browsing held strong in North America. If you saw a mobile spike during Black Friday week or Christmas, it’s worth investing extra time in optimizing for smaller screens. 02. Use the ad formats that match user behavior Not all ads perform equally, especially during peak season. Certain formats consistently outperform others during the holidays. These include: Anchor ads These ads stay visible as users scroll through your content, making them a strong choice for mobile and tablet traffic. They’re less intrusive than interstitials and often deliver higher viewability rates. Offerwall ads These are opt-in formats that offer users something in exchange for viewing an ad. If you run a site with downloadable tools, exclusive content, or video tutorials, these ads offer a way to monetize deeper engagement. In-page ads These ads are embedded directly within your content, making them versatile and effective. They work particularly well on longer blog posts or product reviews, where the reader scrolls through multiple sections. 03. Activate Google AdSense Auto ads  If you’re pairing Google AdSense with a Wix site , you may also want to activate Auto Ads, which uses machine learning to test ad placements and automatically show the most effective ads for your audience and the best placements for them. While Google AdSense shows you where to position ads on your site and optimizes them based on your specific site and readers, you maintain the control. By using the ad quality and brand safety tools, you can override the technology and decide which ads are shown and what brands you advertise. This way, you get suggested placements for the best success, but can apply your own knowledge of your audience to make sure the ads are something they’ll actually want to click on. 04. Publish relevant content Great ad performance depends on great content. During the holiday season, this means creating content that’s timely, useful, and aligned with seasonal searches. Instead of chasing holiday trends, think about the intent behind your audience’s searches. People are usually looking for ways to save time, make decisions, or solve seasonal challenges. Budget guides, quick gift ideas, travel checklists, family-friendly recipes, or tips for starting fresh in the new year all fit the bill. You want to meet them at the moment they’re searching and offer something of immediate value. The timing of your content matters, too. Publishing as early as possible in Q4 gives your content time to get indexed by search engines and start earning backlinks . It also allows time for internal promotion via newsletters or social media. If you already have older seasonal content that performed well, refresh it. Consider updating statistics, replacing outdated links, or swapping in newer product mentions. Refer to Google Search’s advice  on creating helpful, reliable and people-first content for recommendations.  Blog owners and developers can streamline this process by scheduling blog posts, adding seasonal imagery, and using announcement bars to point to new or refreshed content. Adding internal links to related content also helps keep users engaged longer, increasing the likelihood of ad views. 05. Prioritize device optimization If your site loads slowly or displays awkwardly on mobile, it’s going to cost you both traffic and revenue. During the holidays, mobile and tablet usage spikes: Google AdSense data shows that eCPMs ( revenue earned by the publisher) grew by 22% on tablets, and by 15% on mobile devices during the holiday peak season in 2024. This means your site needs to be fast, easy to navigate, and ad-friendly across all screen sizes. Use Google PageSpeed Insights  or Lighthouse  to find performance issues Compress large image files Avoid overlapping ad placements or pop-ups that interrupt browsing Next, test ad layouts across devices. A sidebar ad that works fine on desktop might push your content too far down on mobile. Likewise, rewarded ads should appear where users are likely to engage, not where they disrupt scrolling. 06. Don’t let compliance slide under pressure Before peak season arrives, review your site using the AdSense Policy Center, which you can access by signing into your AdSense account. Look out for: Overuse of ads on a single page Accidental or misleading placements Lack of clear navigation or accessibility It’s easy to think more ads equal more revenue, but that’s not always true. Ad clutter can lead to poor user experience, which increases bounce rates and decreases long-term engagement. Worse, it can damage the trust you’ve built with your audience and lead to your ad account being penalized or suspended. As a rule of thumb, if it feels like too many ads, it probably is. Keep your layout clean and your user journey clear. Your goal should be sustainable earnings and an enjoyable experience for your site visitors, not short-term gains at the expense of trust. 07. Build a campaign calendar, not a content list The most effective publishers build a campaign-style calendar to organize their holiday strategy. Instead of just a list of blog post ideas, plan a coordinated rollout with deadlines, promotional timelines, and follow-ups. A content calendar can help you stay on track and plan publishing for strategic moments. Your calendar should include: Blog post topics, outlines, and due dates Timeframes for content updates, especially on high-traffic pages Email campaign launch dates Social promotion windows, like previews, reminders, recirculation Analytics check-ins to evaluate content and ad performance Planning this way helps you make more impactful choices with your content. 08. Think long-term The strategies you use during the holidays can serve your site all year long. By identifying high-converting content, refining your ad setup, and building an editorial calendar, you’re developing systems that support growth well beyond the holidays. Use what you learn now to shape your strategy for the new year and beyond. Which ad formats worked best? Which pages saw the most time on site? Where did users bounce? The answers will help you fine-tune your approach moving forward and help you adapt content to other times of year. An end-of-year checklist can become a quarterly feature A seasonal product roundup format can be reused for spring, back-to-school, or summer A reward-based content strategy can become part of your regular content calendar plans Make the most of the season Holiday seasonality can bring a revenue boost. More importantly, it can reveal the blueprint for what makes your content and ad strategy work best. With the right tools and a plan in place, you can meet your audience’s needs while maximizing ad performance. Whether you're just starting with Google AdSense  or looking to build on past wins, start analyzing, optimizing, and publishing with intention to get the most out of the season. Adel Raslan, Product Marketing Manager at Google Adel Raslan is a product marketing manager responsible for publisher acquisition at Google AdSense. Google AdSense makes it easy to earn money from your content, whether you're an independent creator or a larger company. Linkedin

Webinar on how to optimize for AI visibility on Wix & Wix Studio Grow and manage your presence in ChatGPT from your Wix & Wix Studio websites. Join this webinar to learn how to use new techniques and features—including the AI Visibility Overview and LLMs.txt generator— to thrive in AI search. As AI reshapes the digital landscape, understanding generative engine optimization (GEO) is paramount for discoverability. This session will equip you with unprecedented insight into how your brand appears in the emerging era of large language models (LLMs). What you’ll learn: How to use the AI Visibility Overview dashboard  What Wix LLMs.txt and other tools mean for growth Where Wix’s AI agents can support you with your site optimization Meet your hosts: Einat Hoobian-Seybold Head of Product SEO & A11y, Wix Einat began her SEO career by developing organic strategies for top global brands and later discovered her love for product development. As the Head of Product  for Wix SEO, Einat builds impactful products that make SEO accessible and approachable to more than 200M users around the world. LinkedIn Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and digital marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds, and Tomy. An avid SEO communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, OMR, BrightonSEO, Moz, DeepCrawl (Lumar), Semrush, and more. LinkedIn

Driving Local SEO Growth in the AI Age  Monday, October 27, 1 PM ET AI is dramatically shaking up local search, and the way we’ve been doing things might not cut it for much longer. This talk is for anyone who wants to cut through the hype and get real about what AI search means for local SEO.  Join local SEO expert Amanda Jordan as she shares how generative engine optimization(GEO) is already changing the game, what these changes could mean for the future, and, most importantly, what you can actually do to prepare and thrive. Get practical, actionable takeaways you can apply immediately, whether you’re managing a local coffee shop or overseeing 1,000 business locations.  Leave with a clear understanding of the shifts happening now, what we might face next, and strategies to stay ahead. What you'll learn Understand the current shifts:  Discover the specific ways AI is already changing local search rankings and influencing user discovery right now. Take action:  Walk away with practical, no-fluff strategies you can apply immediately to future-proof your local SEO, regardless of the size of your business. Future-proof your approach:  Gain a clear roadmap of future shifts in the local search landscape and stay ahead of the curve. Meet your hosts: Amanda Jordan, Senior SEO Specialist, Owner.com Amanda is a local SEO expert and the Senior SEO Specialist at Owner.com. She has worked in local SEO since 2011. Her background in local legal and enterprise SEO means she’s a pro at tackling complex problems for clients. When she's not creating local SEO strategies, she's playing with her son and dogs. LinkedI n Crystal Carter Head of SEO Communications, Wix Crystal is an SEO and digital marketing professional with over 15 years of experience. Her global business clients have included Disney, McDonalds, and Tomy. An avid SEO communicator, her work has been featured at Google Search Central, OMR, BrightonSEO, Moz, DeepCrawl (Lumar), Semrush, and more. LinkedIn

Author: Simon Schnieders When you run an SEO agency, you're sort of like Taylor Swift—you always need to reinvent yourself. For years, clients chose my SEO agency , Blue Array, because we focused on search that converts . That hasn’t changed. But what has  changed is the way people search, and that means reshaping our message for today’s landscape, where large language models (LLMs) are more popular and site traffic is down. To adapt, SEO agencies need to be fluid and dig deep into learning everything and anything about LLMs, how to optimize for them, and so much more. That’s why I felt my agency needed a narrative refresh. To bring this narrative refresh to life, we had to rethink our tagline, introduce new offerings, and focus more holistically on search that converts by meeting audiences in the many new places they’re searching, and guiding them toward meaningful actions. And that’s what I’ll cover in this article. SEOs are primed to make this pivot, and they have the skills to guarantee success. This isn’t about abandoning our core values—it’s about reframing them for a changing world. If you’ve wondered how to turn your tried-and-true SEO strategy into a comprehensive plan for the modern search landscape, read on. How to position your agency for the new era of search I don’t personally prefer the idea of “search everywhere optimization” because it suggests that we need to be everywhere, on every platform, and that’s not the case. In reality, agencies don’t need to spread themselves thin chasing every shiny new channel.  Rebranding in this new landscape isn’t about chasing breadth, it’s about sharpening focus. The real opportunity lies in understanding which touchpoints truly influence your audience, and then doubling down on the places that actually drive meaningful results. Here’s how to do that in your own agency. Dial deeper into your core values Like I mentioned, at my organic search agency, Blue Array , one of our core values has always been search that converts. That hasn’t changed with the shifting search landscape.  What are your core values? Now’s a critical time to recommit to them and to determine a compelling framework that ensures that your strategy is truly in line with your north star. For us, that meant adjusting our tagline, which used to be “search engine optimization.” To establish our relevance in today’s search world, we tweaked our tagline to “search that converts” to speak more broadly about conversion, not just SEO.  Consider going niche Do you have a specialty? Lean into it. Become the search agency for eCommerce brands or B2B fintech. This will focus your attention in terms of outbounds and give you a clear market to go after. It can also aid in generating lots of relevant case studies and white papers with a clear expertise (something that can also help your probability of showing up in an LLM search). Read more creative ways agencies are managing clients in the age of LLMs . This has worked well for me in the past. When we started my agency, we were quite unique because we were just a pure-play SEO agency. This was an intentionally uncommon move. At the time, the common wisdom—driven by books like The Marketing Agency Blueprint —was to diversify and become a generalist, offering paid search, paid social, and all those ancillary services. I thought, if that's the common wisdom, and if I'm uncommon with my wisdom, I'm going to find a niche . While others were becoming generalist agencies, we went in as specialists. That was our initial niche, and it proved to be incredibly effective. I knew that SEO was one of those things that was very difficult for companies to hire for and retain talent around. So, at the time, there was a business case for a pure-play SEO agency. Timing was very important and understanding what was happening in the market was key. How to choose your niche There are macroeconomic factors that can come into play when choosing your niche. When you're first figuring out who you're going to be targeting, you need to make very deliberate strategic moves. But you must choose your niche wisely. Look for market gaps:  If there’s an emerging industry, consider if you’re well placed to service it. If you have expert knowledge in a sector with limited marketing support you may be able to get clients better results. Assess market viability:  Look at the size of the market and potential growth. If clients in your chosen niche have limited income, then there’s a limit on how much you can charge. If your niche is under significant market pressures, then clients may be more likely to churn. Expand strategically:  You don't need to stay in your niche forever. Build your business, your name, and your reputation within that area. Then, use that credibility to pivot into broader, more generalist opportunities later on. In the Wix Studio Agency Forecast report , 62% of agencies reported that exploring new market opportunities was a viable growth strategy. Stand out from the sea of sameness Good content will always be at the heart of search (and has been a core value for Blue Array since the beginning). Why? Because the only way you can cut through the noise is by investing in content that intercepts the sea of sameness, and you're not going to get that by asking an LLM to generate content (as it will only say what has already been published on the web). Consider activity that drives multiple client touch points and creates unique value like: Creating white papers, research, and reports for your target market Host your own events and webinars to position your team as thought leaders Invest in personal branding  for leaders in your team Photo from Blue Array's LondonSEO XL event As a search agency in 2025, we need to understand what kind of content our clients should produce and then where that content needs to be placed, whether that's onsite or through earned media. Revisit your offerings Use this shift in landscape to consider new services that meet today’s client needs. For example, at Blue Array, we deepened our offerings around reputation management. If you’re interested in learning more, I outlined an intriguing case study about the US real estate industry in this post . We’re also getting more into brand monitoring, where you can track real time mentions of your brand. At Blue Array, one of our offerings is a verticalized service called Ignite, which is specifically tailored to startups and scale-ups. We offer a vastly reduced day rate and a specific timescale that supports the needs of that audience. It offers great value for new businesses and allows us to speak to the next generation of CMOs. It's a strategic investment in future relationships and a brilliant way to build a pipeline of future, larger opportunities. This service came about because we identified a need within our client base and evolved our offering.  Is there an arm of your business that has shown promise but is underdeveloped, or could be repackaged into a bespoke offering? Now might be the perfect time to invest more there. Then, actually deliver results A rebrand will only take you so far without a mindset shift. Search isn’t just about rankings anymore; it’s about understanding the signals models use to define authority and changing the way you work to meet the search needs of today. Here’s how to switch up your day-to-day. Explore new platforms Once we had a new tagline, we needed a new framework to determine that everything we set out to do for our clients aligned with search that converts . My trifecta to stress-test a high-converting search strategy is: What is the source of traffic that’s converting for you and your competitors? Where do people go after they visit your site? What platforms are influencing LLMs’ recommendations? In order to optimize for conversion in this shifting landscape, you need to understand the upstream and downstream of competitors' websites in order to attribute last click conversion as well as understand where people go after they visit these sites. Maybe you know that your core demo is on TikTok and you invest in search there. What other platforms are they searching on? What other touchpoints impact their buying decisions? You also need to know who is schooling the most popular LLMs. For example: Wikipedia is a very influential source of information for modern LLMs —it’s free to use and highly structured, making it the perfect hub for both training and citations. LinkedIn is another source I see LLMs pulling from for thought leadership. These platforms, while they may not be a hub for your target audience, might become the sources for queries that your core customer searches in an LLM. Think like an LLM Let’s try an example: When you query a model about “best” something, what does “best” mean to the model? To some degree, it’s the collective consciousness of the web because that’s what it’s trained upon. But if “best” means that I have a high volume of glowing reviews, I need to know where the models are pulling from. Is it G2? Is it Yelp? Open up an LLM and drop a query for “best” running shoes, smart watch, or anything else in your category and see what sources your model cites. Once you know which sources the model trusts, you know exactly where to focus your efforts. Rethink your reporting Traditional keyword tracking is breaking down in the age of probabilistic models. With deterministic models like Google of old, reporting to stakeholders  was more straightforward. Rankings were less of a moving target once established, so you could track keywords, measure impressions, and know exactly how visible you were for a given query.  Reporting in 2025  has completely changed. Typically when we’re reporting today, we’re generating hundreds of thousands of queries to try and understand the probability that a client will be mentioned in an AI-generated search. Because with a probabilistic model, you can only have probabilities of appearing. Wix's AI Visibility Overview provides a look at your site's visibility and brand perception across LLMs The problem is that many SEO tools are still stuck in the old paradigm. They think you should still be tracking keywords or prompts, and then your visibility for those prompts. That makes no sense with probabilistic models because its output is going to change based on things like a user’s geography, previous chat history, or even running the same prompt twice. It’s a brand new world for reporting on SEO in 2025 (and many of us are figuring it out as we go), but there are some great tools to help you sort out your data storytelling approach. Evolve and deliver Rebranding your SEO services for the new world of search isn’t about chasing every shiny new platform or rewriting your entire playbook. It’s about staying rooted in what’s always mattered, while being willing to evolve how you tell that story and deliver on it.  Reinvention doesn’t happen in a single moment. It happens in the space between reflection and action, between knowing what to hold onto and what to let go of. Just like my agency’s own narrative refresh, this moment is an opportunity to get sharper about your values, bolder in your positioning, and more creative in how you meet clients where they are.  Reinvention isn’t optional in SEO—it’s survival. And if you approach it with clarity and conviction, it can also be the m ost exciting chapter yet. Simon Schnieders, Founder of Blue Array Simon Schnieders is the Founder of Blue Array, the UK’s largest specialist organic search agency. With a background in leading SEO at Zoopla, MailOnline, and Yell, he’s a recognized authority in the industry. Simon frequently speaks at major search conferences and contributes thought leadership on SEO/GEO strategy. Linkedin

Author: Yossi Fest If you’ve been in the SEO world for any amount of time, you’ve probably heard the term crawl budget. You’ve also likely come across the paradox: for some websites, it's critical to success; while for others, it’s almost irrelevant. Crawl budget is one of the many concepts where if you ask an SEO whether you should spend time optimizing for it, the most honest answer you’ll get is “it depends.” The reality  is that for the vast majority of websites, crawl budget isn't something you need to worry about. But if you’re dealing with a large site—one with deep taxonomy, tens of thousands of URLs, or frequent content updates—neglecting crawl budget optimization could be quietly holding back your page indexation, visibility, and traffic.  SEO is constantly changing, but crawl budget remains one of the core factors that decides how effectively Google discovers, revisits, and serves your site. In this guide, I’ll break down what crawl budget is, why it matters for some sites but not others, how to figure out if you have a problem, and the strategies and activities that have the biggest impact. What is crawl budget? Crawl budget refers to Google’s allotted time and willingness within a given time period that it will spend crawling your website. It’s the balance between what your site technically presents and allows to be crawled, and Google’s perceived value of your content. Two main factors drive crawl budget: Crawl capacity Crawl capacity is about how many requests Google can make without putting too much strain on your servers. If your site responds quickly, serves lightweight pages, and handles multiple requests smoothly, Google will usually crawl more aggressively. But there’s another side to this. Google doesn’t have infinite capacity for crawling. It still needs to prioritize crawling across the entire web, which means there's always a ceiling on how much attention your site can get—no matter how optimized it is. Crawl demand This is Google’s way of deciding which URLs are worth its attention and how often they should be refreshed. The biggest factors that influence crawl demand are: Perceived inventory. By default, Googlebot will try to crawl every URL it can find on your site. This is where smart optimization comes in: guiding Google toward your most valuable content and keeping it away from the junk.  Popularity. Pages that earn more backlinks , have higher engagement signals, and/or that generate more consistent traffic tend to get crawled more often. Google assumes popular URLs are more valuable and tries to keep them fresh in its index. Freshness . If you refresh your content , Google will revisit it more often to make sure it has the latest version. On the flip side, pages that rarely change naturally get crawled less frequently.  When crawl budget matters (and when it dosen’t) As pointed out earlier, the reality is that most sites don’t and will never have a crawl budget problem. Googlebot is smart, efficient, and (mostly) capable of finding your content and keeping up with its changes if your site is small, clean, and simple.  But once you start stacking 10’s of thousands of URLs, faceted navigation, and parameterized URLs-galore, everything changes. This is when crawl inefficiency starts bleeding into indexing speed, organic rankings, and visibility.  You don’t  need to worry if: You’ve got fewer than ~10k URLs Your site structure is clean and relatively flat Your pages rarely change  You’re not seeing  indexing delays for new content You do  need to care if: You run a very large site: If you’re a publisher, large eCommerce site, or store, crawl budget matters. When you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of pages, or even millions of pages, small inefficiencies compound fast. News articles that should be indexed instantly miss critical visibility windows. Seasonal product launches get delayed. Evergreen content refreshes lag behind competitors You’ve got faceted navigation, filters, parameters or dynamic URLs. Think eCommerce, marketplaces, travel sites. Every filter combo, sort order and view mode creates another URL. New content takes forever to index. No one expects instant indexation, but if you’re publishing fresh content and it takes weeks to show up in Google, there’s a good chance that Googlebot is not prioritizing discovery of new URLs.  From a spot-check in GSC’s Crawl Stats section, it looks messy. You see huge spikes in crawl requests, high numbers of 4XX and / or 5XX errors, and discovery dominated by everything except for HTML 200 status code pages. And you don’t recognize most of the URL paths and slug examples. If you’ve found yourself in the latter group and think you may have a problem, don’t panic. Crawl budget is an SEO issue that is easy to fix most of the time, once you know what’s going on. Between Google Search Console , log files, and smart architecture tweaks, you can take back control and make sure Googlebot spends its time where it actually matters.  How to diagnose  crawl budget issues To find out if you truly have crawl budget issues or crawl inefficiencies, there are two key tools for the job:  Google Search Console’s Crawl Stats report. This is great for spotting patterns and big picture trends. Server log file analysis. This is the real source of truth for exactly what’s being crawled.  Step 1: Start with GSC’s crawl stats report Where to find it: In Google Search Console, go to Settings > Crawl Stats. This report helps you spot crawl trends, identify inefficiencies, and understand whether Googlebot’s priorities align with yours.  At the top, you’ll see a box with line graphs displaying total crawl requests, total download size, and average response time. What to look for: Sudden spikes: Google’s possibly overcrawling duplicate or low-value pages. Drops: Google might be losing interest or throttling your crawl rate. Host status If Googlebot’s is exceeding the acceptable fail rate for any of the three metrics (robots.txt fetch, DNS resolution, and server connectivity), your crawl capacity is compromised. This means that Google will crawl your pages less.  Crawl requests breakdown By response: Make sure OK (200) dominates. Some redirects (3XX-level), as well as a small number of 4XX client errors and 5XX server errors are perfectly normal and expected—but they should never top the table.  By file type: HTML should be the top file type crawled. If CSS, JS, or JSON files dominate, your core content is competing for crawl attention.  By Googlebot type: On most sites, Googlebot Smartphone should lead. If desktop or other bot types dominate, this is a calling to double-check your mobile setup. Crawl purpose Look at discovery vs. refresh. It's normal to see lots of "refresh" crawl requests, so don't worry about that. However, you might have a crawl budget problem if you're putting out a lot of new content or have just performed a migration (involving new or changed URLs), and yet "discovery" isn't showing those updates. GSC limitations you need to know Before you treat this report as gospel, it’s important to keep the following limitations in mind: Sampled data: Individual URLs shown are just examples, not the full picture Limited history: Only covers a three month window Charts vs examples: Totals in charts are accurate, but don’t assume the examples represent all activity Use GSC to spot patterns, not diagnose root causes. For that, you need your server logs.  Step 2: Analyze log files GSC gives you trends. Logs give you facts. Your server log files show every crawl event: which URLs Google hits, when, how often, and what status codes it encounters. If you want to understand crawl budget at scale, this is where the answers live.  How to analyze your logs Regardless of whichever of the following methods you use, you will need to obtain server logs from your website. In some platforms, content management systems, and/or plugins, you’ll be able to find these pretty easy. If you can’t, simply ask your developer or webmaster to export website logs. Either Apache or NGINX are fine. If you’re using Wix, simply open your dashboard, head to Analytics > All Reports, and find the Bot visit / traffic reports under SEO Reports . There, you'll be able to analyze your log data  (including AI crawlers ) for up to the last two years.  Option A: Use a tool There are log file analysis tools out there to make this easier, such as Screaming Frog Log File Analyzer. Simply upload your log files and let the tool do the work for you by showing you your data in prebuilt views. Option B: DIY Simply upload your CSV into an LLM for analysis, or plot out the data yourself in Excel. You'll need to format your columns for consistency, filter for various bots / user agents, and verify IPs (instructions below) to make sure they are the official bots, and not spoofed ones. Once your data is formatted and organized, you can analyze patterns with line charts, pivot tables, etc. What to focus on in your analysis Firstly, always confirm Googlebot via user agent. Google’s confirmed crawlers can be found here , and their IP addresses are here . To simplify this process, just make sure the IP address contains %66.249%, as this is the predominant IP address Google uses. You can do this in a similar fashion for all other common web crawlers. Crawl frequency: Are your high-value URLs crawled often, or ignored? Wasted requests: Are search pages, infinite filters, or faceted URLs hogging crawl budget? Valuable pages missed: Are products, landing pages, or content hubs being skipped entirely? 5XX errors: Server errors kill crawl efficiency Site section analysis: Segment by URL / subfolder to see patterns of where Googlebot is spending time New content crawling: Check how fast new content gets crawled. Pro tip: Pair log data with organic traffic to measure time-to-first visit vs. time-to-index Status code stability: Spikes in 3XX, 4XX, or 5XX often point to structural or infrastructure issues Segmenting your analysis Look for issues by combining insights from GSC and logs to uncover crawl inefficiencies.  Overcrawled: Are search pages, filters,  paginated, or parameterized pages dominating crawl requests? Undercrawled: Are key site sections or money pages visited less than less-important sections? Misaligned priorities: Is Googlebot fetching images, CSS, JS, or API endpoints more than actual HTML content? This is where you find out whether Googlebot’s working for you or against you. If you see low discovery, wasted requests, skipped important sections, or persistent errors, it’s likely that you've got a crawl budget problem. How to optimize your site’s crawl budget Optimizing your crawl budget is a strategy, not a hack. And it’s not something you manipulate, it’s something you manage. Googlebot has limits. The good news is that there are a number of actions you can take to improve crawl efficiency and make sure Google focuses where it matters most.  These optimizations can be categorized at a high level into three key groups: Controlling what Google crawls: Manually controlling which URLs does and doesn't crawl. Guiding Google to the right pages: Helping Google find your most important content faster Making every crawl request count: Squeezing more out of every crawl Googlebot gives you 01. Controlling what Google crawls The first and arguably most important step is to make sure Google doesn't waste its time on URLs that it does not  need to crawl, and to make sure that Google is  to make sure Google can access all URLs it should be crawling.  Optimize your robots.txt Your robots.txt file lets you control which URLs bots can crawl. Use it to block URLs that don't need to be crawled.  Faceted  / Parameterized / Sort  URLS These pages are especially prevalent on eCommerce websites, marketplaces, and information libraries. Example: https://www.example.com/shoes Based on potential filtering on this page, it could generate dozens of URL variations that Googlebot does not need to crawl.  Example: https://www.example.com/shoes?color=blue&size=9&sort=price We’d want to block the following: Disallow: /*color= Disallow: /*size= Disallow: /*sort= Internal search results pages Depending on your SEO strategy, internal search results pages often have no unique value, and there can be an infinite number of these URLs generated (ie. a user can search endlessly). Staging, development, and demo environments Session IDs, tracking, and affiliate parameters User-specific or non-public content Auto-generated / UGC pages Duplicate pages for marketing campaigns API endpoints, JSON, and other non-HTML responses Caution: Be careful when blocking resources in robots.txt file. Blocking essential files like API endpoints needed to load content can prevent Google from rendering your pages correctly. Always test changes to ensure you’re not blocking anything required for page rendering. Speed up your site If your pages are slow to respond, Googlebot will crawl less often, crawl fewer pages, and deprioritize your site in favor of faster alternatives to spend its resources on. This isn’t speculation. Google has explicitly confirmed this in their crawl documentation : “If the site responds quickly for a while, the limit goes up, meaning more connections can be used to crawl. If the site slows down or responds with server errors, the limit goes down and Googlebot crawls less.” That’s why this action sits in this category. Site speed has a direct impact on crawl rates, and a faster site gives you more control over how much Google crawls. If you’re using Wix, the platform is built for performance. Wix serves content through a globally distributed CDN, automatically compresses and converts images to next-gen formats, lazy loads media, prefetches critical resources, and continuously optimizes JavaScript execution. Just remember to follow the best practices  to keep your site performing at its best. Crawl budget isn’t just about how many URLs Google wants to crawl, it's also about how your site can handle the requests. If your site consistently returns fast response times, Googlebot increases your crawl rate limit as it sees it’s effective / can keep up. If your site struggles, overloads your servers, or results in spikes of errors, Googlebot slows down crawling in order to avoid crashing your site. Some key tactics to improve your site speed: Reducing server response times Upgrading your hosting Using a CDN Ensuring you have an effective caching setup  Optimizing assets  Compressing and minifying CSS and JS Serving images in modern formats such as webp or avif Lazy loading all non-critical media Make sure links are crawlable Googlebot follows links to discover pages, but only if it can see them. If your links are hidden behind Javascript or lazy-loaded after interaction, Google may never find them; Google is spending none of its available budget on those pages. If Google can’t find the path, it won’t crawl the destination. Always use clean tags that render server-side to make sure they are in the HTML on initial page load.  Avoid lazy-loading navigation or critical content Bad: a ‘load more’ button that injects products via JS only when clicked Good: Paginated URLs that are visible to crawlers Offload resources to a CDN or subdomain Hosting resources like images, videos, pdfs, and JS bundles on a separate hostname or CDN preserves crawl budget for your main HTML pages. Google has explicitly confirmed  that crawl budget is managed at the host level, not across an entire domain or brand. By serving static files (images, scripts, CSS) from a separate hostname, whether that’s a CDN or your own subdomain, you effectively separate their crawl demand. This prevents unnecessary strain on the crawl allocation for your primary content. Example: Google continuously crawling heavy video files that rarely change. The result of this change is that Googlebot can skip heavy resources and spend its time on high-value pages. Before: https://www.example.com/assets/hero-video.mp4 After: https://cdn.example.com/hero-video.mp4 02. Guiding Google to the right pages Once you’ve directly limited what Googlebot is wasting it’s crawling on, and made sure all important pages can be accessed, the next set of actions should be to help Googlebot find and prioritize your best content.   Keep your XML sitemap lean and focused Think of your XML sitemap as Google’s best friend for understanding your site’s pages and overall structure. It should include only the pages you want indexed and exclude everything else. Best practices: Include only canonical, indexable, high-value pages Remove expired products, outdated offers, and low-priority URLs Make sure it is kept up-to-date Build strong internal linking structure At surface level,  internal linking might just seem like a simple way to guide users to related pages, but it plays a much larger role. It’s one of the most powerful ways Google discovers, prioritizes, and revisits your content.  Without strong internal links, pages risk becoming orphaned and ignored since Googlebot relies on links to find them. A strong internal linking structure requires deep strategy, but the below are the starting points: Link from high-authority sections. Add links from your homepage, category pages, or top performing blog posts to priority URLs / site sections Ensure that all valuable pages are within 2-3 clicks of the homepage. User breadcrumbs, related products, and content hubs  03. Make every crawl request count Even with controls and guidance in place, Googlebot’s efficiency will still not be at its peak if Googlebot keeps hitting roadblocks. These optimizations help to ensure that every request works toward your goal.  Clean up low-value content If you have pages that are filled with thin content, placeholders, low effort copy, or even blank pages (soft 404s), this is problematic for multiple reasons:  Google is spending time on these, rather than on higher-quality pages that provide actual value to users. High value pages get revisited more often. Your site’s ‘reputation’ improves. A site (predominantly) composed of strong, valuable page signals quality to Google, which can help ‘persuade’ it to spend more resources crawling it. Conversely, a site containing mostly mediocre pages that don’t have user-value do NOT signal quality to Google.  There are two courses of action here: technical and content-related: Conduct a technical audit of what can be cleaned up through de-duplication, blocking in robots.txt, fixing soft 404s, and so on. If the page really is  needed and has the potential to be more valuable to users, work on increasing the page’s content to elevate it to a level where Google would deem the page as more valuable. The most important thing is to ensure that every single page on your website has a clear purpose. Fix redirect problems Whilst there is no inherent problem with redirects, they can become expensive for Googlebot. Every hop uses another crawl request. Googlebot will follow up to five redirect hops. But just because it can, doesn't mean you should make it. Even one 301 redirect on a high-impact page can add in some friction and cause unnecessary waste. Conduct a redirect audit for all types of redirects on your site (301s, 302s, etc)  Update all internal links to point directly to the final destination instead of stacking 301 on top of 301 (eliminating redirect chains) Remove dead ends Dead ends are the silent crawl killers. When Googlebot encounters 4XX client errors and 5XX client errors, not only do they count toward your budget in various cases (see table below), but that’s a lost opportunity for Google to continue its crawl journey.   404s Be sure to audit your internal links and update or remove any that point to 404s.  If a page is gone but has backlinks, set up a 301 redirect to the closest relevant page If the page is intentionally deleted permanently, set a 410 Gone status instead. This signals to Google to drop it faster 5XX errors These are even more dangerous than 404 errors. If Googlebot repeatedly encounters 5XX server errors, whether from overloaded servers, caching issues, or dodgy APIs, it throttles crawling. In turn, this means fewer URLs discovered, and slower indexation / updates in search results.  Use server logs and/or Google’s Crawl Stats report to spot recurring 5xx patterns Work with your dev team to identify the root causes/s of these issues and to resolve them Set up monitoring to catch increases Crawl Budget VS HTTP Status Codes 1xx ( Informational) Doesn't affect crawl budget 2xx   ( Success) Consumes crawl budget 3xx ( Redirect) Consumes crawl budget 4xx ( Client Error)Except 429 Doesn't affect crawl budget 5xx ( Server Error) Consumes crawl budget Source: Search Central Live Deep Dive Asia Pacific 2025 What to do if Googlebot is crawling too much On the other side of the spectrum, there may be cases where Googlebot crawls your site too much. This aggressive crawling behavior becomes problematic when your servers cannot handle the amount of crawl requests and results in site slowdown, higher error rate, and even downtime.  The good news is that it’s pretty easy to detect and correct. You’l see spikes in crawl requests in your log files and Google crawl stats. To manage these upticks, simply serve 503 or 429 errors to Googlebot for a day or two. This signals Googlebot to back off without affecting long term crawling patterns and page indexing.  Final thoughts: manage your budget wisely Crawl budget isn’t  about forcing Google to crawl your site more; it's about making the most of the budget Google is willing to allocate to your site, and encourage it to use that allocation to the fullest. The faster, healthier, and better structured your site is, the easier it is for Googlebot to crawl more pages in less time. That said, as mentioned from the outset, this isn’t something every site owner needs to obsess over. If your site contains less than a dozen-or-so thousand pages, Google can usually handle them without a problem. But for large, complex, or frequently updated sites, wasted crawl requests mean missed opportunities. Through the approach of controlling what Google sees, guiding it to the right pages, and making every request count, you’re truly maximizing what’s available and giving Google every reason to fully tap into your site’s potential. Yossi Fest, technical SEO specialist at Wix Yossi Fest is a technical SEO specialist at Wix. He's passionate about championing technical optimizations for better search visibility. Before Wix, he worked as an SEO lead at digital marketing agencies, driving organic growth for enterprise clients. Follow him on Linkedin .

Author: Andy Crestodina A few weeks ago, a fellow agency founder reached out to me. He wanted to talk about a problem he was having …with a keyword. He and his team had picked the phrase and made a very detailed page on the topic. They’d written 10,000 words. But the page wasn’t ranking. I told him I’d take a look. He shared the page and it was certainly detailed. And I started doing a quick bit of SEO for him: search volume, keyword difficulty, page authority, structure, originality. It looked fine. Any normal SEO would wonder what’s not working. Then I stopped. The phrase was very general. The intent was informational. The content was wordy and bland. It was basically no different from 1,000 other pages on the topic. Any normal marketer would wonder why the page was written at all. He’s a smart guy, but in this case, not very strategic. Not very audience-focused. Even if he crushed his goal of ranking first for that phrase, what was the point? No one who saw the URL would remember it 10 minutes later. You heard it many times. It’s what thousands of marketers do every day. Research a keyword, optimize the page, track the rankings, watch the traffic. But unless you're a media site that gets paid on pageviews, traffic isn’t your goal. Your goal is leads. You need to drive demand. And if you’re focused only on keywords and search volume, you’re missing the bigger picture. In a recent webinar  with Wix Studio , I sat down with Crystal Carter, Head of AI Search and SEO Communications at Wix, to talk about conversion-first SEO. Here’s the big takeaway: Marketers need to focus not just on traffic but on conversions. Not just on keywords, but on the visitor’s deeper needs. That shift in perspective, from a keyword-first to audience-first mindset, changes everything. Make the shift and you’re no longer chasing numbers, you’re solving problems for real people. You’re focused on your future prospect. If you know your audience, if you understand their questions and concerns, their pain points and challenges, you’ll naturally create content that connects and  converts. Make it work for your potential prospect first, then capture keyword opportunities second.  A page that is focused on the visitor and not just the keyphrase… Performs well for all sources of traffic Is more likely to be shared, bookmarked, talked about, remembered Triggers action Let’s break down how audience research actually impacts the bottom, not just the top, of the funnel. We’ll dig into the dangers of keyword tunnel vision, and look at some real examples.  Then, we’ll move into actionable tactics for researching your audience, uncovering their true information needs, and then write an amazing page that speaks to them directly. A few minutes from now, you’ll see why keyword research alone is insufficient, and how adopting an audience-first approach gives you not just more traffic, but more leads.  Keyword-first vs. audience-first Let’s start with the problem. Too many content strategies begin with a spreadsheet of search terms. The SEO team says: “This term has 5,000 monthly searches. Let’s make a page for it.” That can work, but it also creates blind spots. Why? Because you end up writing for algorithms, not humans. While strategy can feel like math, the real job is understanding a person’s problem and presenting a solution they connect with.  So, rather than thinking in GA4 sessions and users, take a step back to ponder what goes on at the other side of the screen: Someone with a question searches for an answer, they land on a URL, pixels load, and their eyes see the light from their computer.  The interaction between those pixels and their brain...That's the moment in which you become memorable or you don't. You become top of mind or you don't. You caused word of mouth or you didn't. And worse, you can unintentionally isolate your real audience because you’re allowing tech company algorithms  to get in between you and your customer. Keyword-first is when you go into your SEO tool of choice, you find a phrase with volume, and then you write the article.  Audience-first is the opposite: you ask, what does my audience need?  And then you write the page, even if the search volume is low. Even if it’s zero. Sometimes the right page is the one with only ten monthly searches, especially if those ten people are your exact prospects. This is where AI comes in because you can dig into the most important, least covered topics in your category. Keyword researchers never find those. AI can help you better align with the intent of your actual customer instead of just an algorithm. The “what is X?” problem Let’s bring this point to life with an example. Imagine you sell building management systems. You need leads. So you put your SEO hat on and do some keyword research. You find a lovely little phrase “How to choose a building management system.” It has some search volume. You decide to go for it. Using a keyword-first approach you plug the phrase into an SEO tool and it generates a content brief. Great. You hammer out a draft and the tool gives you a score. It could be higher so you slap an FAQ section at the bottom. The score goes up. Job done. But when you step back and look at the page, you noticed that it has a big “what is building management system” at the top. Waaaait a minute. Does that make sense? Think about your visitor. What do they need in this moment? If you rank, they click, the page loads...is this what they needed? Based on the phrase “How to choose…” we know that they are in consideration mode. They’re trying to make a decision between options. So why did you write a page that starts with a definition?  It’s absurd. The page definitely does not help them in this key moment. You did what the tools said to do. But you made something that completely misses the mark. You used tools to write for a robot, without actually thinking about the story in the life of your visitor. This visitor is a facilities manager or a real estate developer who’s actively considering their options. They’re middle-funnel, both problem-aware and  solution-aware. They already know what it is. That’s the danger of being keyword-first. You end up padding content with definitions and filler instead of addressing the visitor’s actual needs.  If you were to approach this content conversion-first, you’d view the entry paragraph as a critical place to build trust and showcase the value of your company or brand. You’d use this prime real estate to help them choose a building management system. In the process you can show what you offer and how it stands apart from competitors.  That shift from defining terms to directly solving problems is what turns passive readers into qualified leads. How to use AI for an audience-first approach Content marketers today are mostly using AI for brainstorming and editing, according to our annual Blogger Survey . More than writing headlines, suggesting edits, or creating visuals, marketers use AI as a thought-partner for content ideas. I have to agree. I frequently work with AI as an accelerant, not an author. How can it help me understand my customer’s concerns faster? How can it put me inside the mind of a buyer sooner?  These are the kinds of questions I ask AI to help me solve. With that in mind, here are a few ways that I use AI to optimize the customer experience and generate more conversions: Ask AI to go deep Let’s say we’re targeting zookeepers. There might be a million searches for: what is a zookeeper, what does a zookeeper do,  and how do you become a zookeeper.  But do you think these are terms that actual zookeepers search for? I don’t think so. So, rather than turning to an SEO tool, I ask AI: “What do zookeepers actually care about?” The results are wildly different from what I see in SEMRush. They care about glove thickness, dart guns versus blowpipes, and the best needle gauge for zebras versus rhinos. AI just told me what my true audience (and the audience most likely to convert) is interested in. Now I can create a content strategy that meets them where they are.  And this content doesn't just attract your future prospects. This content opens an avenue to deeper dives into more niche expertise with the potential for original research.  Not sure what to ask AI as you work to better understand your audience? Here are some questions to get you started: Let AI audit your page for human-first elements One key lesson in getting the most out of AI is leaning into what it does well, and one thing it’s great at is speaking in a way that only AI understands. That’s why I ask AI to generate all of my prompts.  To start, I compile my best practices for digital content. Take a look: Strong opening hook Visuals at every scroll depth Use of evidence and examples Formatting (headers, bullets, etc.) Internal links to related content Expert quotes or contributor input Personal angle or opinion Topical completeness (no major gaps) Notice how none of those are things that AI is awesome at. But AI is awesome at scoring content against these criteria. So give those criteria to AI and ask it to write a re-usable prompt. Then use that prompt every time. Let AI audit all of your content moving forward. Drop screenshots of your landing pages into AI with that reusable prompt, and AI will grade the page based on these criteria. It will point out where you’re missing the mark and what tweaks need to be made.  Try AI-powered personas Good marketing is done from the bottom up.  You need to understand your customer first. You need to understand their needs. An AI-generated persona  can help. A persona is a synthetic member of your target audience, and you can use AI to come up with various key personas that you can then show your content to to see if it meets their needs.  It works like this:  Give AI a persona prompt (see below) Review the output and improve it for accuracy Once it’s 95% solid, copy it out of the AI and put it into a PDF Upload the PDF and a draft of your page and ask it what’s missing from their point of view Now you’re looking at a list of ways in which the page fails to meet their information needs and you can make some of those audience-focused edits.  Ultimately, you need to know what wins the sales conversation to do good marketing. Keywords just attract visitors, but to convert them you have to solve their problems. Why put cheese on a broken mouse trap? Some content needs keyword research. All content needs audience research.  Keyword research isn’t obsolete. It’s still useful for understanding demand and competition. But it’s just the starting point. To put it plainly: Keyword research tells you what people type . Audience research tells you what people need . The audience always comes first. Conversions happen when you meet your visitors where they are, using their words and answering their real questions. Serve their needs, and the traffic and conversions follow. Audience-first content isn’t just better marketing. It’s respect for your reader’s time, attention, and trust. So the next time you’re tempted to chase a shiny keyword, pause. Ask yourself: Would my audience thank me for this page? Would my sales team send it to a prospect? Would it help someone decide? If the answer is yes, write it. Even if the tool says zero searches. That’s the difference between traffic and true marketing results. Because at the end of the day, rankings don’t keep the lights on. Customers do. Andy Crestodina, co-founder and CMO of Orbit Media Andy Crestodina is the co-founder and CMO of Orbit Media , an award-winning 50-person digital agency, focused on web development and website optimization for B2B lead generation websites. Linkedin

Author: Constance Chen At Google’s I/O conference this year, Google made a series of announcements introducing new updates and features across their products, offering a comprehensive suite of new AI-powered integrations. One of the most notable announcements was Gemini Live, an AI assistant that allows you to bring Google’s Gemini into the real world so you can interact with it in a dynamic way. Through your desktop or mobile device, Gemini can access your screen or camera, allowing it to see what you see and interact with the information in real time. For example, if you point your mobile camera at a flower, Gemini Live can instantly tell you which species of flower you’re looking at. You can access Gemini Live on Android or iOS via the Gemini app, as well as on desktop through Chrome or the Google AI Studio platform. If you haven’t heard of it yet, Google AI Studio is designed to allow users to quickly build and explore Google's generative AI models. This studio is a flexible platform that gives users and developers access to Gemini Live, Imagen (text-to-image model that generates images), Veo (a text-to-video model producing videos through prompts), and Lyria RealTime (a music generating model). With Google AI Studio, marketers can easily try out a number of Google’s generative AI tools and find ways to improve their content strategy and workflow. With all of these new innovations, there are new opportunities for SEO marketers to improve and streamline their day-to-day workflows. Here are some ways I found Gemini Live and Google AI studio to be impactful in my day-to-day SEO workflow. How to Use Gemini Live and Google AI Studio for SEO Both Gemini Live and Google AI Studio offer real-time, multi-modal intelligence, and advanced features that can help marketers with many of their day-to-day SEO tasks, including  keyword research , content optimization, and performance auditing. As Google’s AI capabilities and product suite continue to grow and evolve, marketers can take advantage of these tools’ efficiency and insights to create better strategies and deliverables. In the following examples, I used Gemini Live through the mobile app, and through my desktop using Google AI Studio. Conduct keyword research Improve content with E-E-A-T and helpful content guidelines Conduct a competitive analysis Write meta data in a different language Create better alt text Use Chrome developer tools to audit a site Troubleshoot code Visualize data Transcribe videos and audio Optimize Youtube videos using video transcripts 01. Conduct keyword research With Gemini Live’s screen sharing option on both desktop and mobile, you can ask Gemini to help you collaborate and brainstorm potential keywords to target when you’re creating new content or optimizing existing content. You can also ask Gemini Live to review your copy and provide recommendations to better align with user intent and SEO best practices. By pointing your camera or sharing your screen with Gemini Live, you can get real-time feedback on what you’re working on. In addition to brainstorming keyword ideas, you can also get recommendations for where to place keywords in headings, and how to revise headings in order to include your target keywords. You can also ask Gemini Live to review your final draft, fix grammar and spelling errors, and refine your language for better clarity. Related: Learn how to optimize your site with the Wix SEO Assistant 02. Improve content with E-E-A-T and helpful content guidelines Aligning with Google's E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) and Helpful Content guidelines is now an essential part of your content strategy. By including Gemini Live in the content creation process, you can ask for practical tips on how to better your content by meeting Google’s quality content guidelines.  Upload a PDF of your content or screenshare with Gemini Live to ask for specific feedback to improve your content based on the E-E-A-T guidelines. Engage with Gemini Live in a back-and-forth manner to brainstorm ideas and discuss how to improve the article you're creating or optimizing. 03. Conduct a competitive analysis Using the screensharing feature, Gemini Live can assist you with analyzing competitor sites during your competitive audits. As you scour competitor sites, get Gemini Live’s assistance to uncover opportunities to improve your content strategy, technical health, and visibility. You can even review live search results with Gemini Live, allowing it to analyze the SERPs and get recommendations based on what it’s seeing on the screen so you can improve the position of your own content.  While conducting competitive audits, have Gemini Live evaluate your competitor’s site and point out SEO, UX, and general marketing practices that could also be applied to your website. Gemini Live can also give you ideas for which types of structured data to implement so you can improve content visibility in search results. 04. Write meta data in a different language Before LLMs and generative AI tools , writing meta descriptions and title tags in a different language for international domains was a clunky and imperfect process. Without a native speaker for support, Google Translate would only get you so far with unnatural phrasing. However, thanks to Gemini Live’s native language features, it’s easier than ever to create meta data for international websites, even if you don’t know the language. 05. Create better alt text Another clear advantage you have with Gemini Live’s screen sharing feature is its ability to produce better alt text for images. As a multimodal large language model, Gemini Live can understand both text and visual content, allowing it to generate more accurate and contextually relevant alt text for images that can improve accessibility  for screen reader users.  In this example, I had an image of a system log file that I didn’t know how to describe (as I’m not a system administrator). I asked Gemini Live to review the image and provide a brief alt text description that would capture what was seen in the image. It was able to provide a great description that could be used to improve both accessibility and clarity. Related: Check out the AI Alt Text Generator in Wix Studio's Accessibility Wizard 06. Use Chrome developer tools to audit a site Gemini Live is also incredibly useful when used alongside Chrome’s Developer Inspection Tool during a site audit. Users can use the screenshare feature to ask for help when using Chrome’s Developer Inspection tool, which provides extensive diagnostic information for website performance. A user can chat with Gemini Live to understand the purpose of each file and identify issues that are impacting page performance.  You can ask questions like, “What is this script and why is it slowing down the page?” Gemini Live can provide simplified explanations to help you pinpoint issues affecting site performance, along with suggestions for fixes. While conducting a performance audit, you can also ask Gemini Live to help you prioritize what developers should address first. 07. Troubleshoot code Another way you can use Gemini Live is by getting assistance to troubleshoot code. If you’re working on a script, or trying to understand backend code from a website, you can screenshare or submit a screenshot to Gemini Live. It can help you identify what each piece of code does, guide you through debugging, and identify possible issues.  08. Visualize data Instead of defaulting to a basic bar chart to visualize your data, ask Gemini Live to take a look at your dataset and suggest a chart to visualize the information. Share your screen or upload your dataset and ask Gemini Live to give you ideas. Then, use the Gemini app on your desktop to create the chart for you. For example, with this dataset for keywords rankings, Gemini Live suggested using a heatmap. I then used Gemini to create the heatmap, which made the data easier to understand and brought a new perspective to the data. With Gemini Live, you can turn your data into a more compelling visual story. 09. Transcribe videos and audio You can also submit videos and audio clips for transcription. This is especially helpful for editing and providing value and accessibility to users who visit your site or watch your content. Accurate and detailed transcripts can also provide additional context to search engines and LLMs that are trying to understand the content. 10. Optimize YouTube videos using video transcripts For YouTube videos, you can grab the transcript from the video and ask Gemini Live to generate a detailed, search-optimized video  description based on the transcript. With Gemini Live, you can identify key topics from the transcript, summarize main takeaways, and generate titles that include your target keyword for the video. This not only improves the video’s discoverability on YouTube and Google Search but also provides viewers with an informative description for better engagement and watch time. Constance Chen - Director of Search Marketing at Moving Traffic Media   Constance specializes in marketing strategy, building Gen AI-driven marketing systems, technical SEO, and content strategy. She studies and explores AI developments and machine learning, writing about industry advancements and providing insights on emerging innovations.