Category: Digital Marketing

In this week’s Whiteboard Friday episode, Shawn walks you through four steps to overcome the challenge of gaining prioritization for your SEO projects, and how to connect your initiatives with a business’s timelines and goals.

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Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to this week’s version of Whiteboard Friday. I am your host this week, Shawn Huber. Currently my role is Director of SEO at Trellis Law, but previously I was a senior manager of SEO at T-Mobile and that’s why we’re here today to talk about my experiences while at T-Mobile.

That brings me to our topic of this week — How to Get Buy-in for Your SEO Projects. If you go back a few weeks, you can catch a really awesome episode of Whiteboard Friday from Kavi, that talks about the ROI of SEO. I highly recommend you watch that so that way it helps you with this next step here. All right.

In the SEO world, you know we’re full of challenges. One of them is the fact that we’re super dependent on other teams. I know at T-Mobile I was very dependent on my engineering partners, and so getting any project prioritized wasn’t always an easy feat, especially because my goals and timelines don’t align with theirs because they have other teams and leaders and departments of the org that need their services as well.

So I’m going to walk through how to gain that prioritization for your projects and how to connect our initiatives with their timelines and goals. 

1. Identify motivations and goals

So the first step you want to identify their motivations and goals. Remember different teams have different needs. So you’ve got to figure out what matters to each of those teams. Sometimes it’s as simple as just educating and letting them know that really it’s not that much work for your SEO projects, and sometimes that helps.

Sometimes you don’t have a complete picture. You might be missing some data points. So try to find any other ones that might be relevant to that specific audience you’re trying to sell this to. Then lastly, figure out how does your data align with what they care about. 

Now I was working on a project that was going to help save T-Mobile a few million dollars. But that only hit the SEO bottom line. The engineering team that I needed very heavily to push through this project, it didn’t matter to them. Even though the company was saving money, at the end of the day that didn’t align to his goals. So I had to figure out how can I help him help me. It turns out, obviously, they’re resource strapped, and so I was able to make a deal with them and say, “Hey, you give me this little bit of time and resources, SEO won’t need you anymore for this type of project.”

So that helped get that project green-lighted. 

2. Build a data-informed business case

Now once you have all that awesome information that you’ve collected, it’s time to build that data-informed business case. You put all that together and make sure you customize or tailor it for each of the different audiences that you’ll be presenting to. Yes, that means you’re going to have to build a few decks along the way, but it’s going to pay off in the end because you’re making it relevant to them to help sell why they should help you.

3. Pitch and evangelize

Now that you have all those decks and everything put together, it’s time to pitch and evangelize why your project needs to be prioritized over others. These are the elements that should be in that deck to help sell your project: a really awesome executive summary that says what they’re going to get; what you’re asking of them; why you’re asking of them; the problem we have today and what it’s going to look like tomorrow when your project is implemented; any test results, white papers, case studies, anything like that that you gather along the way to help prove why it’s important; a very nice roadmap that talks about timelines and how long you expect this project to last; and obviously very great next steps.

You want to really focus on making sure you customize it to your audience. I know I’ve said it before, but it’s super important, as I learned at my time at T-Mobile, that different departments have different needs. Keep it very concise because you know as it starts to bubble up and gets to senior leaders, they don’t have a ton of time to go through a big deck.

Make sure you have clear next steps. Those leaders love to know what to expect each step of the way. Then include as much visualizations as possible. Make sure that you put them in brand colors and things like that because leaders love when you take that extra minute to finesse it so that it looks like you care about it and it helps them to care that you care.

4. Follow through and follow up

Then lastly, follow through and follow up. Always establish and come through on your reporting, timelines, statuses, things of that nature because that’s going to help make it easier to establish the proof of value that SEO is bringing, and it fosters trust so that next time when you come knocking on the door saying, “Hey, I need your help to create this next project,” or whatever, they’re going to be like, “Hey, the SEO team always delivers. It makes me look good. I’ll green-light whatever you want.”

So in the end, our keys for ensuring program success are collaborating with all those different departments, figuring out what’s valuable to them and what’s important to them, and aligning it to your SEO goals and what’s important to you. Thank you for watching this week’s episode of Whiteboard Friday.

Have a good day.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

source https://moz.com/blog/buy-in-for-seo-whiteboard-friday

Search engine optimization is ever-changing as search engines are continuously evolving. A semantic SEO strategy can help you to carve out a competitive advantage. As search engines adapt to provide the best results to conversation queries, your web content should adapt too.

Once you understand the principles, you can apply semantic SEO writing to any niche. In this post, I’ll outline some of the successful strategies I’ve used across different types of sites along with some insights into the results they have achieved.

Let’s start by explaining a little more about semantic search and content before we examine some useful applications and tips.

How does semantic search work?

Semantic search provides the best results for user queries by understanding user intent and language. Through machine learning and artificial intelligence, search engines have gained a deep knowledge of the semantics (or meaning) of words and phrases, and how they link to each other. Google understands entities and topics, and groups them using The Knowledge Graph.

This is a much more sophisticated approach than the keyword matching that was used by search algorithms in their early days. Today, the semantic search engine is continuously refining its understanding of language so that it can serve the most relevant and helpful results to any given query. This requires an appreciation of the search intent, and the intent of the content being served up to the user.

What are the benefits of semantic search?

The benefits of semantic search are many.

For users:

• They get a better user experience using search engines because the results they receive are of higher quality.

• They can get to the information they need faster, and sometimes even answer their next question before they’ve asked it.

• They can search on different devices, in different ways, and still receive qualified results.

For search engines:

• They can handle the increase in conversational search queries from devices like smartphones and smart home devices (often through voice search).

• They are providing a really useful service, making the general public even more likely to use their search engine, in turn giving them more data to help them learn about human language.

What is semantic content?

In linguistics, semantics refers to the study of meaning. So in this context, semantic content looks to use words, phrases, and sentences to construct a piece of writing with a certain meaning.

A piece of semantic writing aims to utilize the relationships between words, phrases, concepts, and sentences to create a really valuable resource on a certain topic. It’s paying attention to the detail in your piece of content, from sentence structure to overall page structure and everything in between.

In slightly more relatable terms, it’s writing well for humans and following linguistic rules. It’s keeping things clear, concise, and easy to read. It’s using semantically related keywords to contextualize your topics and removing unnecessary words. You don’t need complex language or convoluted text. But you do need in-depth content.

In SEO, this is vital when writing content that you’d like to rank. Natural Language Processing (or NLP) is used by search engines to understand our content, and this process is assessing the words we’ve used, and the relationships between them.

A semantic approach to improving e-commerce SEO

So, with semantics being all about words, how does that apply to selling products? Is it purely for journalists, publishers, and blog sites? Not at all. Semantic SEO is important for all web pages on any website.

You shouldn’t assume semantic SEO isn’t for you if you run an e-commerce site. In fact, it can be really effective in an e-commerce environment. When you’re writing category, product, and landing page copy, you should still think about phrase-based indexing, writing for NLP, content structure, and readability.

Review category and product page content

Make sure all your content is top-notch by making it unique, helpful, detailed, and well-structured. Research the entities that relate to your products and include them on the relevant category, subcategory, and product pages.

Provide in-depth information about your products and product ranges. Consider their benefits and key selling points. This is all helpful for the user experience as well as search engines, so keep your audience in mind and make sure your copy serves a purpose.

Working with one of my e-commerce clients, I focused on NLP terms and entities to create semantic content on over 200 categories, subcategories, product, and information pages. Going beyond basic search term research, we focused on content structure, co-occurrence, entities, synonyms, and the relationship between terms to craft high-performing content.

Here’s an example of a subcategory page that was optimised in this way:

Over a twelve-month period, the brand saw the following results:

• Increased non-blog organic sessions: +495.97%

• Increased organic transactions: +365.58%

• Increased organic revenue: +415.30%

Examine keyword clusters and missing category pages

Using a keyword gap analysis, you can start to uncover the areas your e-commerce store isn’t ranking for in comparison with your closest competitors. You can then use this to lead your strategy for category and subcategory creation. You’re likely to find clusters of keywords on one topic that you don’t have a page to satisfy, so you can create one.

This might cover:

• a different way of grouping your products (e.g. by color or style rather than by material)

• a supporting guide that you’re missing

• a type of product that you don’t sell but could

Examine the common themes in your keyword gap analysis and create a plan for new website pages by grouping these into keyword clusters. Collate the products for a page if necessary, and write the copy carefully, optimizing for multiple keywords in your cluster, combining concepts and ideas to contextualize your overall topic.

I’ve seen a client’s search rankings and traffic soar when they added a key page to fulfill one of their biggest keyword gaps. Overall, the unique keywords they rank for have increased by 47.92% during 2022, and 79.4% since we started working on their new and existing content using this semantic approach:

First place rankings have also increased, by 59.43% during 2022 and staggeringly, by 627.58% since starting work with a semantic approach:

Covering multiple keyword clusters also captures more search traffic and can genuinely help customers who often shop in different ways.

Research and plan supporting content

Create content to support your website visitors’ needs, centered around common product questions and guides. Rather than housing these on your blog or in a resources section, add them to the category or product pages they support.

Semantic SEO is about relationships, and that goes beyond the terms used on a single page or a single piece of content. It covers the way in which pages and topics are clustered together. If you demonstrate that you not only sell a product, but you provide a whole host of expert advice relating to that product, you will demonstrate topical authority.

Internal links

Consider the use of semantic relationships within and between your pages. You can build a really powerful resource using a series of great pages with strong connections to each other. Use a clear internal linking strategy to get this right.

A hub and spoke approach using a key category page as the center of the hub (or the pillar page) can be especially effective. A large e-commerce client we work with made almost 2% of their revenue from assisted and last click conversions through hub content in a twelve-month period. This might not sound like a large percentage, but when the overall revenue is high, an extra 2% equates to quite a sum.

Here’s a hub and spoke strategy in action, organizing help and advice on washing machines around a central washing machine category page:

Apply schema markup or structured data

Use schema markup or structured data to help signpost your products, FAQs, and other aspects of a given page. It’s also known as semantic markup for a reason! This adds an additional level of information that helps search engines really understand your content.

For example, the below image shows product search results for UK retailers Currys and Argos displaying prices, images, and review ratings:

Adding structured data can help you generate rich snippets because you’re helping Google to organize your content and display it creatively. This can get you more real estate in the SERPs and therefore generate more qualified traffic.

Keep the quality high and helpful

When you’ve built up performance with great quality semantic content, you can still lose ground if you subsequently release a lot of unhelpful, thin, or badly written content.

In Google’s latest documentation about the helpful content update, they explicitly say:

“Any content — not just unhelpful content — on sites determined to have relatively high amounts of unhelpful content overall is less likely to perform well in Search, assuming there is other content elsewhere from the web that’s better to display. For this reason, removing unhelpful content could help the rankings of your other content.” – Source: Google

This goes to show that even if you create fantastic content, it will still suffer if there aren’t enough pages of high-quality content on your website.

When you’re managing a busy e-commerce site and adding lots of new products, it’s easy to let thin, badly written, or even duplicate content slip through the net. But if you do, it can have a knock-on effect and actually harm the progress you’ve been making.

Working with e-commerce clients, I’ve seen this happen. Overall progress has taken a dip when nothing on our top-performing pages has changed. But digging into the data, I’ve often found that a large batch of products has been added to the site with low-quality, rushed descriptions. This has likely had an influence on the overall website content quality and tipped the balance in the wrong direction. If these descriptions had been carefully written for semantic SEO, taking entities, related phrases, and good structure into account, the addition of new products could have increased results across the site rather than hindered progress on key pages.

Once you start creating higher-quality content for semantic search (and your users) it’s really important to keep it up. Consistency is key. If you can, have a plan for every new page that hits the site and make sure it’s as good as it can be within the time restrictions you have.

B2B service and creative industries

Service and creative industries often have quite lengthy, text-rich pages that are ideal for optimizing with a semantic approach.

Content is key

Many B2B service websites and creative industry sites only have a small number of key pages. Unlike e-commerce sites that have hundreds — maybe thousands — of subcategories and product pages, you might have a limited number of options when it comes to your services.

This is where your informational content can play a pivotal role in the success of your site. Through the addition of informative and FAQ content, we increased an e-commerce website’s informational search queries by 75%. But even so, they only account for 12% of their total keyword rankings.

In contrast, for a service site that I work on, informational queries make up 76% of their total keyword rankings. These information pages help to make semantic connections by providing further context around the subjects a service provider specializes in. Without these supporting pages, they wouldn’t be able to display their depth of knowledge or expertise on a topic.

Information pages also help to bring your target audience in at the top of the funnel. Perhaps they’re just starting out in an industry and looking for answers. If you are present in the search results and provide a helpful resource, your brand will be associated with their learning. When they try to think of an expert to help them with a problem later down the line, you’ll stand a good chance of being the one that springs to mind and winning their business.

Structure your content well

As service and creative sites are often quite wordy, it’s vital to use structure to your advantage. This helps out search engines and users alike.

Use clear headings and subheadings to signpost different areas and group common themes within an article or page. Bullet points and bold text can help certain aspects stand out. Proximity within the text can indicate the strength of relationships between phrases and entities.

On the Boom Online website, we structure our content with clear formatting to make text-heavy service pages easier to read:

This is helpful for both search engines and users because relevant information can be located quickly and efficiently.

Don’t forget to use synonyms and close variants

When reviewing service sites, I often find that they stick with one way of saying something for consistency. Perhaps they do it just because that’s how they refer to a certain thing internally. But when you’re optimizing for semantic search, it’s much more beneficial to consider the variety of different ways you can refer to something and use them appropriately.

Let’s look at a digital marketing example: PPC can also be called pay-per-click, sponsored search, keyword auction, paid search, or search advertising. If you stay with just one of these options, you’re likely to be missing out on opportunities for traffic and chances to add context to the meaning of your page.

Here’s a good example of some content about “meet the team” pages. Because synonyms and close variants have been included, it ranks for similar terms like team bios, our team page, team profiles, and many more:

So, research these varied options for your page and use them in a suitable way. Don’t just add them for the sake of it, but add any that make sense. You’ll probably find your page is much more readable due to the variety of language you’ve used, and it will perform better in search too.

Keep your eye on the detail

If you’re using statistics to back up a point or referring to prices or facts, review these regularly. Update your pages to show the most recent stats and research and review pricing changes. Search engines don’t like out-of-date or incorrect information, and they can identify it because they understand the meaning and context they are displayed in.

Creating semantic content in the home & DIY sector

If you’re working in the home and DIY sector, you might be selling high-ticket items or services that require a little extra persuasion to close the sale. The average consumer might not have all the DIY knowledge they need to tackle their project, and is likely to be searching for additional information before they make a purchase.

You can address these sales barriers by creating semantic content that not only helps users but also drives search traffic and increases your chances of becoming a topical authority.

On-page FAQs

One useful application to consider is adding on-page FAQs that tackle some of the queries consumers might have before they purchase. Not only is this helpful for UX, but it’s also powerful for semantic SEO.

The answers to FAQs enrich your category pages, allowing you to add related entities and complete phrases to support phrase-based indexing.

Keep answers short and succinct, use schema markup, and link to more detailed articles where required.

Implementing this across a DIY client’s site has resulted in a 44% increase in keyword rankings with informational intent since January 2022, from 2.5k informational keywords ranking in Jan 2022 to 3.6k in October 2022.

Detailed guides

Working with a lot of home improvement and DIY clients, there’s plenty of scope in this sector for creating detailed how-to and informational guides. This type of content offers an abundance of helpful information to potential customers, and it helps you to rank too.

How-to and other informational guides can bring a wealth of relevant organic traffic, capture featured snippets, and demonstrate your expertise in a topic area. They can also help to drive your target customers through your sales funnel, getting them closer to the buying phase.

If you’re creating this type of content, take the time to make it really detailed, rich, and useful. Add unique images, video content, expert opinions, and more. Think about what it takes to really bring the topic to life, making it an interesting and helpful read. If competitors are doing the same thing, try to set your resource apart as the best by including some media or original insight that they have missed.

Don’t forget to execute a hub and spoke strategy. This can be really powerful if you position key category pages as hub centers, and create spokes to support them. I’ve talked more about this in the e-commerce section.

The technology sector

Selling a very technical product or service presents its own challenges for semantic SEO. Website copy is often written by subject matter experts to maintain accuracy, but this doesn’t always produce the best search results.

Create content that search users want

This is SEO 101, right? But it isn’t always that obvious. Sometimes technical providers can get carried away with explaining the intricacies of what their product or service can do, without thinking about how a user would search for that information.

To succeed with semantic SEO, go back to your keyword research. Re-focus on the relevant search queries, and then match their intent with suitable content. This might mean reworking some existing content to support the relevant keywords or the creation of new content.

For example, the below content fulfills a multitude of search queries about a specific technology in a simple format.

Follow the longtail

When I’ve been working in technical niches, search queries are often very specific and have low to zero search volume in many of the common tools. But longtail keywords can still be really valuable if they are relevant to your users.

Don’t be afraid to create great content to satisfy “zero volume” phrases. Group these phrases together to create a detailed resource and as always, research the related entities and phrases to strengthen your content. Group a series of these very specific articles together for even more semantic SEO power. The search traffic you receive might not be huge, but it will be extremely relevant and qualified.

This recently published article based on a series of longtail, very low-volume queries has generated 18.3K impressions and 816 clicks in the last four months:

Reduce jargon and improve readability

Technical sites can often use a lot of industry jargon and long, winding sentences. Whilst technical subjects do tend to have higher reading difficulty scores, they shouldn’t be impossible to comprehend.

Very long and complex sentences make it difficult for Google to understand the links between words, reducing its confidence in the meaning of that sentence. It’s important to be precise, concise and clear no matter what the subject.

You can test this theory out by using Google’s NLP Tool.

For this complex sentence, there are a lot of dependency “hops” between words:

Google sees the most salient entities as “products” and “front”.

But I am talking about reaching an audience using advertising. So when we simplify the language as below:

You can instantly see the dependency “hops” reduce. And the overall result is a sentence that retains meaning, while the most salient entities “audience” and “advertising” have a much higher salience score showing they are understood as more important or central to the text:

Re-focus your content for clarity and readability. It’s absolutely possible to do this for technical subjects. Don’t try to baffle your readers with science or technology. Making things clear and succinct will help search engines and users alike process your language and extract the meaning.

If specific industry terms are necessary, define them where possible. A great definition will reinforce your expertise, and could also pick up other relevant queries and featured snippets.

Working on all of the above with a technical client across their blog content has yielded a 43.42% increase in organic traffic landing on blog pages, and a 24.92% increase in goal completions so far in 2022:

General tips for semantic SEO

No matter what type of website you work on, you can apply semantic principles to make your content perform better. Here are some general tips for semantic SEO success:

Use it as a competitive advantage

Don’t assume that you can’t rank well enough for competitive terms without a strong link profile. Links are only one part of the picture. If you are an expert in a field and can create great content on the topic, it’s certainly worth considering. Plan the content carefully, provide high-quality, unique insights and give it a shot. You might be surprised by the results.

I have helped clients to outrank really well-known brands with strong backlink profiles for competitive search terms by using a semantic approach. It required plenty of time and effort to research the topic, related phrases, and entities. Equal care and attention have gone into writing the copy and optimizing it at a later date, but allowing for attention to detail has really been worthwhile.

Don’t forget your link-building strategy

If you create quality content using semantic search it can rank well. High-ranking content can attract some valuable backlinks. A client of ours picked up one from the New York Times in this manner.

Don’t forget to include your semantic content in your link-building plans. Share it with others, and use social media and email marketing to get it noticed. If you’ve done a really great job for semantic search, you’ve probably nailed your content for users too. And this is the kind of content that other publications would choose to share or link to, which will only add to its success.

Always stay relevant to your topics and relationships

The way to build things up with this approach is by gaining ground in your topic area. Broader topics will have little use, so it’s best to stick to what you know.

Carry out a content audit to see what’s working for your website. Use this to define your areas of strength and relevance. When you have a clear focus, thoroughly research your topic area, and stick to it. Make sure irrelevant content doesn’t creep in – you must stick to your strategy.

I worked with a client who used to add broader blog content for interest and color, assuming that people didn’t want to know about their product area as much because it didn’t seem exciting. But after a content audit uncovered that their successful content was all very closely related to their product area, we refined their strategy in early 2022.

Now, most of their blog content is very tightly related to their products, and each new post ranks well and brings in qualified traffic. The site as a whole is seeing the benefit, and the visibility for blog content has been steadily increasing:

Give it time

Don’t try to optimize too early. Give your pieces at least three months before reviewing performance. Some really well-written pieces can rank in weeks. Others can take months. If you start to change them before you’ve really seen what they can do, you risk harming their performance.

Lots of the content myself and my team have worked on in the first half of 2022 has seen some really positive gains after the May 2022 Google Core Update, so you might even need to wait for algorithm updates to really know what’s paying off.

Here’s an example of a specific content piece that was published in January, and saw virtually no visibility for just over three months. Things started to take hold and really ramp up after the May core update (marker B) with no significant changes made to the content.

Keep optimizing

Whilst you shouldn’t start optimizing too soon after releasing a piece of content, the landscape keeps changing. You should always keep optimizing and improving your content once you’ve given it some time to get established.

This new, key sales page was added to a client’s site in December 2020. It took hold quite quickly, so was further optimized in March 2021, and visibility increased massively from then on.

The content quality was reviewed again when things began to dip in December 2021, which brought about recovery.

Create an optimization plan so you don’t forget to come back to key pages. Review important pages again if you see a dip in traffic, or if things change after a core update.

Balance quality with quantity

Whilst you need to keep a close eye on the quality of each page you publish, it’s more effective to focus on quality over perfection. Ten articles that are well optimized with a semantic SEO approach will be more powerful than one article that contains all the entities possible. This is because the relationships between pages are important too, and as mentioned earlier, a larger proportion of higher quality, helpful content on your site is beneficial to the whole site.

Whatever your niche, you can take a semantic approach

You can use semantic SEO to get results in any niche. Whilst the things you focus on will be different for each, the general principles always apply. Take time over your writing, consider the words you use and the relationships between them. Create clear, structured writing, and make sure you review and optimize as the search landscape changes. Enjoy creating content that’s topically relevant and you’ll see the results!

source https://moz.com/blog/niche-semantic-seo

In June 2022, the Moz team released The Professional’s Guide to SEO — a resource to help level-up anyone comfortable with the basics of SEO, who have some experience practicing it professionally, and who crave the challenge and reward of moving from intermediacy toward mastery.

And now, we’re excited to announce a series of bonus chapters for different SEO niches, that will be added to the core guide over the next few months! 

First up: Enterprise SEO.

What’s in this chapter?

Managing the on- and off-page optimization tasks for a large business’s website (or websites) is only part of the battle for enterprise-level SEOs. In order for your SEO tactics to be successful, you also need to consider the bigger operational and interdepartmental workflows and priorities that will come into play. With all that in mind, this chapter will help you:

• Break silos and create a culture of SEO
• Scale your SEO efforts
• Use SEO to bolster your brand
• Develop meaningful content at the enterprise level
• Improve your link acquisition strategies

Who should read this chapter?

If you’re an in-house or agency SEO that works for or with large businesses (think Fortune 1000), or large websites with thousands of pages (like travel and listings sites) this chapter is for you!

Ready to learn?

Level-up your enterprise SEO with this bonus chapter to the Professional’s Guide to SEO! Use the tips in this chapter as a guideline when you need to scale up your efforts, and be sure to check out the rest of the guide for more expert SEO advice. 

Read the Enterprise SEO chapter!

source https://moz.com/blog/professionals-guide-to-enterprise-seo

Heart-on-my-sleeve: I’m stricken over climate change and wondering how I can help. What have I been doing about it lately? Listening to two remarkable women interview some outstanding experts on marketing and business sustainability.

Co-authors of the celebrated book Sustainable Marketing – How To Drive Profits with Purpose, Gemma Butler and Michelle Carvill have got something really special going on over on the Can Marketing Save the Planet? podcast. I’ve been glued to their broadcasts, and have been speaking with them while researching this piece. My vision of marketing as a catalyst for good is being refreshed and refined as I absorb why renowned creatives are defining sustainability as thecritical skill now for their careers and lives. This is my chance to share what I’m learning with you.

We’ll be swimming mainly at the deep end of the big business pool, but I’ll also be doing some local laps with you on what we learn so that we can apply large sustainability takeaways to nearby small business marketing, strengthening what I believe is the best of all business narratives. Let’s dive in!

We always start with a goal

Every good SEO and marketer already knows that we base initiatives on client goals. At ninety years of age, Professor Philip Kotler has earned the honorific title of “Father of Modern Marketing”. He has the lived experience necessary to explain how marketing grew up in an era in which the industry believed that people have an infinite number of desires and that business has an infinite supply of resources, but now he’s telling the world that our job is to market “deconsumption or more sensible consumption”.

Given this, Ollie Deane and Guy Jones, founders of The Goodnet, made the clearest statement of goals for marketing sustainability that I heard in any episode:

“The prize is hundreds of millions of people living their lives differently and more sustainably than how we live now.”

Now we know what success will look like.

Owning up

“We’ve got a long way to go in regaining trust in marketing. It’s time for marketing to become the conscience of a business, and it can only do that if it stands up and takes responsibility for having been part of the problem and having contributed to this overconsumption that is part of the big problem. We in marketing are responsible for helping companies sell a whole bunch of stuff that people probably don’t need…Marketing has done it through having the expertise and the skills and the art of persuasion. So, to take all those great qualities and realign them with ensuring that brands do the right thing, becoming proper brand custodians, protecting brand integrity, protecting brand reputation, and driving that through – that’s where I think marketing can make a real difference.” – Sarah Duncan, sustainability consultant and author of ‘The Ethical Business Book’

If Butler and Carvill could interview a landfill loaded with decades of undegraded hula hoops, styrofoam ice chests, and coffee pods, I’m sure it would groan agreement to this statement of accountability from creatives like Duncan. When marketing is based on transitory persuasion rather than sustainable human happiness, we write narratives that create trending desires for things that aren’t actually good for us or our planet in the long term.

To take the sustainability journey, marketers can first own the blame for our share of the landfills and their underlying fossil fuel ingredients. Only then, as Duncan suggests, can we rededicate our valuable talents to promoting what is authentically good for all of us, including our common home. In other words, if we were able to talk people into pollution and overconsumption, we can talk them back out of it, too.

The 3 C’s and the 3 P’s: Where marketing’s at right now

“If marketing doesn’t change behaviors, what’s that? It’s not marketing.” – Phil Korbel, Co-Founder, The Carbon Literacy Project

“As a marketer, would you rather be a master of persuasion or a master of authenticity?” – author and Director of ServiceBrand Global, Alan Williams

No regular reader of the Moz blog needs to be told that the whole way in which we think and talk about search marketing and customers is significantly changing. It might be said that, despite its potential for connecting people, the Internet first threw up a barrier between folk and brands, with all of us acting weirdly on either side in terms of anonymity, low-quality ranking tactics, and other behaviors we’d likely never employ in the real world. I think Alan Williams best sums up an important shift that is happening now with the 3 Cs, which are:

1) Choice: Whereas customers formerly made choices primarily on the basis of what was the best deal for them, they are now increasingly prioritizing what their values are. Williams gives Fair Trade as an example in which people are willing to spend a 20% premium if they value how a product makes it onto a shelf.

2) Communication: We’re all now becoming more comfortable with the Internet making it possible for customers and brands to communicate thoughts and feelings in both directions, instantaneously.

3) Control: This element is the one with which local business owners will already be abundantly familiar due to the rise of local reviews. Whereas brands in the past used to decide how they wanted to be seen and hire PR and marketing firms to promote that vision hoping to persuade a number of people to it, now, organizations are not what they say about themselves, but what others say about them. It’s a major shift in the dimension of control.

In sum, we now have values-driven customers who are readily telling brand stories to everyone who is communicating with them online. Again, local brands will be particularly aware of the need Williams highlights for authenticity and transparency and for owning up whenever mistakes occur. His redefinition of marketing strikes me as truly fit for this moment:

“Marketing is not about persuasion any more; it’s about making sure that everything that happens within the organization is informed by its values, because if it’s not, it will not be perceived as authentic and people will not want to have the connection and relationship with it.”

Brands large and small are experiencing this change and responding to it in a variety of ways, and here we return to Butler and Carvill’s remarkable interview with Sarah Duncan who referenced the triple bottom line concept originated by “sustainability Godfather” John Elkington, author of Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism. With the rising generations deeply interested in climate action and championing least consumption, upcycling, recycling and circularity, and with incoming marketing staff walking into organizations from the global school strike marches launched by Greta Thunberg, Elkington codified this economic approach:

1) People: No business has any future without its customers.

2) Planet: No business can thrive on an uninhabitable planet.

3) Profit: Business can become profitable from helping and healing people and planet, rather than harming them.

Some companies now set out extra unoccupied chairs at board meetings to represent people and planet, and many brands are doing outstanding work in sustainability, but the 3 Ps are also where we get into the dark places of greenwashing. How bad is it? So bad that John Elkington has spoken of revoking his triple bottom line due to corporate abuse of it.

Duncan Meisal, director of Clean Creatives speaks with absolute clarity on the fossil fuel industry being responsible for ¾ of pollution, of the seven million human beings who die untimely deaths every year from this pollution, and of the industry being the worst of all greenwashers. While we SEOs are busy right now trying to understand how to respond to frameworks like E-A-T and the Helpful Content Update with truth and authenticity, Meisal calls out oil and gas companies for mass deception:

“We have invented all the technology we need to solve climate change. There is no fanciful future technology we need to begin this transition. We don’t need any new oil wells, gas, or coal, but the fossil fuel industry is spending over 99% of its capital expenditures on opening new oil wells and pipelines that we don’t need. There is not a scientific case for expanding the oil and gas industry. The fossil fuel industry is simply trying to keep its business alive, but it is doing so at a catastrophic cost to the rest of the planet…The companies causing this pollution are investing hugely in greenwashing by telling stories about ‘look at us inventing algae fuel’, or ‘we sent someone to Antarctica on biofuel.’ The majority of the ads they are creating are about clean energy investments which they aren’t actually undertaking at scale.”

Because polluters wouldn’t be nearly so good at telling these tragically misleading stories without the skills of creatives, millions of marketers with a life-stake in a livable planet are now standing at a fork in the road.

Marketer’s choice: Stay, go, but speak up wherever you are

From listening to Butler and Carvill speak to multiple guests deeply embedded in big brand marketing, I’ve realized that creatives are facing two career choices in our era:

1. Go

You can take your marketing voice away from the worst polluters. You can become one of the many creatives who are signing Can Marketing Save the Planet’s Sustainable Marketer Manifesto, which acts as a hippocratic oath-like declaration to use your skills only for good, as well as pledges like the one from Clean Creatives which vow that your agency will refuse all contracts with the fossil fuel industry.

By withdrawing your incredible talents from the use of severe polluters, you’ll be standing in the company of climate scientists like those who canceled their speaking engagements at the Science Museum of London’s climate change exhibition sponsored by Shell Oil. You can decide that your marketing agency will only accept clients who are seriously committed to people and planet, not just profit. And it’s important to know that this is a two-way street. Meisal mentions that ethical brands are refusing to hire agencies that have polluters on their client rosters, saying,

“Why would we do business with marketers who are helping other brands do harm?”

2. Stay

Every business has some carbon footprint and as an ethical marketer, you need to know what that is so you can decide if you want to stay working for a problematic brand with the goal of radically changing it from the inside. From Korbel’s interview, I learned that 40% of marketers have now realized they need to become carbon literate for the sake of self-respect and career goals. Even if you are working for least-polluting local businesses, advocate for your org to send you for essential training to resources like carbonliteracy.org.

The BBC, which was an early adopter of this strategy, literally shut its staff in a room for a carbon literacy training day, a process described by one attendee as making them feel like a terrible human being by lunchtime, but knowing by day’s end what to do about it.

Sarah Duncan advises you to be ready to make people uncomfortable if you become trained to help brands transition to sustainable models. She says you must be prepared to prod and poke, no matter how junior you are in an organization, to be continually curious with your questions, and to learn to frame issues in third-party language, like “this is what our customers say they want,” as well as making the business case in commercial language. Deloitte finds that nearly half of youngest staffers are putting pressure on their employers to act on climate change. If you succeed in bringing about serious transformation as a result of workplace advocacy, it can be a major career and life accomplishment.

If, however, an agency or brand you’re staying with doesn’t act quickly enough to become sustainable and is stubborn in the face of essential change, you’re likely looking at an organization that is about to fail. The Paris Climate Agreement is real, and its regulations are about to be felt around the world. Korbel says that future is already here, noting,

“If you’re in a supply chain to any large organization, if they’re not already, your clients are going to go, ‘What are your scope 3 emissions?’ and if you’re left going, ‘Huh?’, if you don’t understand what a science-based target is, you’re not in the game. There will be businesses that fail because they’re simply not going to get the work – their publics, their clients, their staff, their punters, will simply say, ‘No, not having it.’”

As I listen to Meisal watching Exxon, which he describes as having been “the richest company in the history of money just a decade ago”, being removed from the Dow Index in 2021 and generally crashing and burning after haunting my youth with images of oiled wildlife, it’s time to ask what is actually working now in the sustainable marketing world.

A narrative of gains, not losses

Butler and Carvill’s guests have made me realize that marketers have three tasks ahead of us:

1) Win on messaging, and rethink competition

Capitalism is so tied up with competition that it can be hard to separate the one from the other. Supermarket A seeing Supermarket B as their fierce foe may be standard, but it no longer works as a use of essential creative energy in the PPP/CCC dynamic. We need to identify our real opponents.

Oil and gas lobbyists and their social trolls are spending their energy (and money) writing a stark narrative of our future without fossil fuels so that they can stall transition while squeezing out every last penny. SEOs likely already know that the minute they post a popular tweet about solar panels, or electric vehicles, or the obvious cause of climate disasters, all kinds of unknown accounts rush to the defense of polluters. They want very badly to paint a bleak picture of a society running on the gifts of wind, water and solar, and unfortunately, destructive marketing like this not only influences governmental policy making, but also fills humans with confusion and with dread of the future. Korbel wisely points out how to see clearly through this false narrative of losses.

“It’s quite the opposite. It’s about having more. It’s about having more connection with people, less obsession with useless stuff we can’t afford, and actually looking at things of tangible value – that sense of personal connection to the people, communities and things around us that actually make us happy.”

With saving the planet becoming core to business models, smart big brands will rethink who their real competition is and band together against polluters to create a living wall of messaging about a healthy and happy green future for all of us. In this scenario, Supermarkets A and B can stop scrapping over the lowest price of potatoes and start sharing with one another how they are overhauling their supply chains to meet carbon goals, and what gains in community mental and physical health they are fostering. By working together, brands can re-envision competitive advantage as making connections to share institutional knowledge with the goal of winning out over polluters.

2) Transformational and inclusive storytelling

Kotler reminds us that marketing is research and that it originated in finding out what people want and how to give it to them, not in persuading them to want things they don’t need. Meanwhile, Goodvertising founder Thomas Kolster says that what modern customers want to know most from brands is, “Who can you help me become?” Studies find that people want to become healthier, greener, smarter, and more connected, and according to Kolster, about ⅓ of them are willing to pay a premium price for the help. Thus, the first half of task #2 is for marketers to write the honest, hope-filled narrative of transformation and transition for all who can afford it.

The second half comes down to an embracing welcome of inclusion for all of us, regardless of income. It’s an unacceptable worldview that planetary stewardship is only for the privileged and I listened with great interest to Collective Stories Director, Helen Hepworth, explain how a major UK supermarket chain has intentionally installed its least-packaging options in one of the poorest neighborhoods in West Yorkshire. It made me think of how often I hear wise and thrifty elders in Ireland calling into talk radio shows to explain all the little, daily things they are doing to help save the Earth for their descendents. As a marketer, don’t exclude any fellow human being who is eager for a message of hope and a chance to contribute to healing.

3) Inventing frameworks for reporting

SEOs now have a long history and multiple tools and methodologies surrounding measuring and reporting movement and success. I’ve learned that sustainable marketers are just at the beginning of this journey, as Sarah Duncan describes,

“We have fairly internationally-understood frameworks for financial reporting, but we don’t have the same maturity when it comes to non-financial reporting…With the triple bottom line you can throw in a few initiatives and say you’ve got a triple bottom line without it having that kind of integrity. You’ve got to have clear action plans, you’ve got to have clear initiatives that you can measure with metrics so that you can report on them with the same authority that you would for your financial performance.”

Bringing sustainability to the core of the businesses you market may actually involve you inventing your own way of tracking outcomes. Deane and Jones are urging the industry to brainstorm ways to quantify how transformative marketing is affecting behavioral changes in society. This is a great moment of opportunity for truly creative marketers!

A special word with Michelle Carvill

The sustainable mindset doesn’t just transform business, it transforms the lives of marketers, and I was truly honored that Michelle Carvill graciously offered me this summary of her own journey:

“When writing and researching our book, there were just so many lightbulb moments and life-changing realizations. Understanding the reality of how marketing has driven unprecedented levels of convenience and consumption – that more than 7 million people die of air pollution each year, that only 9% of plastic that’s been created to date ever gets recycled, that a third of all food production is wasted before it even gets to our homes, that we give little concern to precious resources such as water, learning from one of our podcast guests, Steve Haskew at Circular Computing, that every laptop made uses a whopping 190,000 liters of water from extraction to sitting on our desk.

The more we researched, the more we listened, the more we learned, the more we realized we just had to somehow, become part of the solution.

As we say often… ‘Once you see something, you simply can’t unsee it’.

At the outset, we were on a mission to write a book – by the end, we were on a mission, and still are, to champion sustainable marketing – driving education and awareness to support the approx 10.6 million marketers on the planet in using their skills, creativity and influence as a force for good.

And that’s why we started the podcast – and to date we’ve interviewed a range of people and organizations; academics, institutions, thought-leaders, founders, creatives, agencies, marketing professionals, sustainability experts, authors, economists – always posing the question; Can Marketing Save the Planet?

With every conversation, there’s learning, lessons, takeaways and importantly, hope – the realization that there are many brilliant minds focused on positive solutions. We truly are in this together – so the more we can share experience and solutions, educate and support one another the faster the positive outcomes. Urgent action is what’s required – and collective urgent action is the key to much needed planet and human civilization-saving change.”

My local lens

Can Marketing Save the Planet? tends to highlight big brands making big impacts, but my decades of working in local search have habituated me to taking marketing and SEO lessons from all directions and downsize them to fit independent local businesses and their marketers. Almost everything we’ve covered today is directly applicable to small businesses, but with a really significant modifier: I believe that in most sectors of commerce, economic localism is the very best path forward for achieving worldwide sustainability. And it turns out that podcast guest and Wherefrom founder Adam Williams agrees when asked what he hopes business will look like ten years from now:

“I hope we have an even more profound microbusiness revolution, where people can be making their own products at an even lower entry into the market than you get today, where you’re buying and selling products in quite a local sphere. Some things can scale quite nicely (but)…once a really ethical company starts scaling, and they can just scale to the ends of the Earth, we start questioning things again. I want to see more small businesses.”

After many purposeful hours of learning from Butler and Carvill’s brilliant guests, three local lessons emerged for me:

1) Help wanted: local guardians

The more we connect our loved ones’ health and safety with climate stability, the more intense public desire becomes for sustainability. Multiple interviewees referred to the middle folk in the supply chain (namely retailers) as essential gatekeepers, urging them to put in the work to source their inventory from suppliers with the lowest possible carbon footprint to make green choices readily accessible.

At a local level, this takes on truly meaningful proportions. If my neighborhood grocer, pharmacy, housewares shop, hardware store, and clothier want to protect me, my family, and my community, then it is becoming their very honorable job to transform their shops into showcases of what is available locally. These guardians of people, planet and ethical profit can help everyone in a community quit our too-costly habit of seeking remote big brand products and replace it with loyalty to whatever is nearest and best.

In a nutshell, I’d be delighted to buy bare bread from my neighborhood baker instead of a plastic-wrapped loaf made on the other side of my country or world if it will decrease my family’s chance of experiencing a climate disaster. I don’t derive any meaningful or lasting happiness from unsustainable consumption that outweighs my love of my family and community. If local shopkeepers prioritize stocking the nearest and greenest goods, I’m truly grateful to them for their good guardianship.

2) Marketing authentic community identity

This is where local business owners band together, not as competitors, but as a united body that shows up at town councils and mayors’ offices with a sustainable vision for the community. It’s how farming allotments get opened up so that local wheat can be grown for that local loaf of bread, and so that every family in town has access to fresh, organic fruits and vegetables. It’s how a city decides to ban the construction of any new gas stations and starts building EV charging hubs.

Local search marketers can offer a significant helping hand here in facilitating the surveys their clients should be conducting to identify what customers need most as well as key sources of local pride. I grew up in a region that was once famed for its local fruit production. Our fruit was the subject of annual fairs and celebrations, a source of living wage work, and a bulwark of community identity. Then, unfortunately, localism was pushed aside in favor of a new vision of the area as an alcohol-producing tourist hub. The beautiful orchards that once fed all the families in the area were bulldozed for monocropped wine grapes, and the community has become largely lost in an overpriced fantasy that has nothing to do with residents. Teachers, firefighters, and librarians can’t afford to live here anymore and our apples now come from Argentina.

The rise of sustainability presents a remarkable opportunity for independent business owners and the creatives who work with them to discover and promote unique, diverse, inclusive new community visions. It’s time to fix the brokenness of local homelessness, hunger and other forms of suffering that have been engineered by unsustainable economics.

3) Our own two hands for good

I’ve only been listening to Can Marketing Save the Planet? for a short time, and I can’t say enough good things about its outstanding quality and timeliness, but for most of my adult life, I have been attending to the messaging emanating from Indigenous authors and speakers nearest me – leaders like Bill Tripp, Corrina Gould, and Ron Goode. In tuning into the marketing world’s shift to circular economics and regenerative least-consumption, I feel I am hearing a differently-worded echo of the fully-realized and truly time-tested wisdom that sustained abundant life on this continent for millenia.

Whereas marketers are now taking the time to ask themselves, “What am I really using my creativity for?”, and business owners who opened their doors to serve others are querying, “Am I being true to my original vision of helping people?”, my Indigenous neighbors have helped me to ask, “What was I given these two useful hands for?”

There is an Indigenous philosophy I’ve been lucky enough to encounter up and down the place called Northern California that, as best as I am able to understand it, envisions human beings as being the ones with the hands capable of helping nature continuously regenerate itself. With that in mind, my most local vision for sustainability is based in honoring and assisting the great gifts that are all around us.

I understand that some few people will spend their lives on Earth intentionally creating climate change, but that most of us don’t want wars for oil, or pipelines in our drinking water, or desolation. When we turn down the high-consumption messaging and spend a minute reflecting on the happiest moments of our lives, there is a very good chance our warmest memories stem from simply being with our loved ones, perhaps sharing a home-cooked meal, perhaps taking a walk together in some beautiful place. Most of us don’t really need anything more than that for happiness. At a local level, then, this may well be the vision of stability we are setting out today to make reality for the many generations ahead.

source https://moz.com/blog/local-sustainability-from-marketing-experts

Estimating the opportunities within your various SEO efforts is an important component of your analytics, not only to help determine where to focus your energy, but also to prove the potential value of your work to others. Building on the recent post about Aira’s new keyword estimation worksheet, in today’s episode, Robin walks you through a good strategy for this all-important estimative work.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Good evening, good afternoon, and good morning wherever you happen to be in the world. My name is Robin Lord. I work for a digital marketing agency called Aira here in the UK. I’m going to be talking to you about estimating opportunities with different searches. Now, it’s really important that we’re able to estimate opportunity because it gives us a way to talk about how valuable our projects are to other people and it helps us to figure out where we should be focusing our energies.

So being able to know how much opportunity we might get in different places is pretty crucial. So we’re going to start with the most basic way of approaching that, and then we’re going to work our way up to a slightly more complex, slightly more nuanced approach. 

Number of keywords you’re targeting

But to begin with, the kinds of things that we have, when we start to estimate opportunity with different searches, are usually the number of keywords that we want to target, for example here’s one “setting up a business,” and the search volume that we have for those keywords.

So here in this case, “setting up a business” we think is searched about 6,500 times a month. So 6,500 times a month someone is searching for “setting up a business.” Now, we’re not going to assume that every single one of those is going to come straight to our website. We’re not assuming that we could get 6,500 clicks straight to our website. We get an idea that probably most people are going to click position one, but some people are going to click position two, and some people are going to click position three and position four, and so on and so on.

So even if we were in the best possible position, we can’t be everywhere. So we can’t just assume we’re going to get that 6,500 clicks through to our website. 

Click-through rate curve

The way that we start to handle that is by using something called a click-through rate curve, which, if you haven’t encountered it before, looks roughly like this. You can probably see why it’s called a click-through rate curve.

Here we’ve got the curve. We’ve got all of our positions, 1 through 10 here at the bottom, and the side is how likely we think someone is to click through to our site. So the easiest way to kind of visualize it is in a graph. But what we usually have is in a table so that we can use something like a VLOOKUP. If we are saying position one, then we know that our click-through rate for that is probably going to be about 35%.

So we use that to estimate what we could get out of this search for position one. Likewise, if we’re looking at like position eight, we might say our click-through rate for that is more like 5%. So if we’re in position eight, that’s kind of what we assume we’re going to be able to get out of it. We use that in a formula kind of like this one. So we say the search volume, so how many how many times something is being searched here at the top, multiplied by the click-through rate is how many clicks we expect to get.

So in this case, 6,500 is our search volume. Thirty-five percent for position one gets us about 2,300 clicks a month or 27,000 clicks a year. You can see here I’ve hidden up here you can kind of mark it here at this line just to visualize it for you.

That’s kind of what we’re doing here. We’re assuming position one will get us this kind of click-through rate, and that would result in about 27,000 clicks a year for this search term.

Factor in current rankings

Now, we could stop there, and some people would stop there, in terms of, okay, well, I’m going to assume I can get position one for every keyword and I’m just going to multiply it out to make sure that I’m not making wild predictions about how much traffic I might be able to get.

But that’s the way I’m going to leave it. That can give you a slightly more accurate estimate, but it’s not factoring in times when we might already be ranking a bit for a keyword. So say, for example, we are already ranking position eight for this specific search. Now we can see here, position eight is already getting some clicks.

So if we if we move up to position one, sure, we’re going to get more than we’re currently getting, but we’re not going to get 27,000 clicks more than we’re currently getting. We’re going to get a bit more than we’re currently getting. But we need to factor that in because there could be other searches, for example, that have smaller search volume, but we’re not ranking at all. So the opportunity for us is bigger, because really what we want to focus on is how much more could we get than we’re currently getting at the moment. 

The math

So how could we handle that? Well, fortunately, the math around that is actually fairly simple. It’s exactly the same sum as we’ve done here.

We just need to look at position eight, figure out what our click-through rate is for position eight, and then do that same sum to figure out how much we could get. Now in this case, 5% gives us 325 clicks a month, about 4,000 clicks a year.

So we’re getting 4,000 clicks a year at the moment. We could get 27,000 clicks a year. So we just subtract what we’re currently getting, and we say, okay, we’ve got an opportunity here of about 23,000 clicks a year. So that’s starting to get us a bit more of a nuanced idea of what our opportunity is in different places, because we’re not going to keep pouring energy into something we’re currently doing kind of well for, and we can start to focus on the areas where there’s kind of untapped growth there.

How about we push things a little bit further still? So we’ve got this understanding of of how much we could get if we got to position one. Say for this search position one is a government website, and position two is Amazon, and position three is Google. Now, Google, once it has a government website, once it decides a government website is quite relevant, doesn’t really like to replace that because they tend to be very trustworthy and they tend to have pretty good information.

Also, it doesn’t really like to replace Amazon by and large because Amazon tends to be a great result for a whole bunch of different things. Particularly it doesn’t like to replace itself. So if we’re starting to think about what we could get for this keyword and we’re assuming we could get position one is 35% click-through rate, we might look at some of these results and think, well, actually I don’t think I can get up here.

I think we should probably be looking a little bit further down. So maybe we look at something like position fifth or fourth. Say position four is a page about how to start a business. Position five is Wikipedia. Position six is someone offering to sell a service, so that you can buy a business setup.

Seven is 50% off a business setup. So again, offering to sell, but they’ve got that cheeky 50% discount that you can benefit from. So if we look at all of this, we might start to think, okay, well, I don’t think I can reach position one, probably not position two, probably not position three. Actually, I think I probably don’t want to assume I can replace Wikipedia here either in position five.

So the best position that I’m looking at here is actually position four. So I should go back to some of my click-through rate estimates. I should estimate based on position four, rather than position one, and then use that to get an idea of the total opportunity we could get for this keyword.

How to do this

Now, you could be wondering how you might do this. Actually, there’s a bunch of tools that will give you the full top 20 export for a whole list of keywords. The first time I did this, I used the STAT top 20 export, and I just exported everything and I dumped it into a Google Sheet. So I ended up with all of my keywords and all of the top 20 results row after row after row after row on my sheet.

Then I used a formula, a pretty simple formula to just find any websites that we thought we wouldn’t be able to beat. I used that to mark those rows any time we thought we wouldn’t be able to beat, and then I just deleted those rows. So I ended up with each of my keywords I only had the ranking positions that we thought we were actually able to achieve.

So in this case, four, six, seven, and eight, which we are currently. Then I just found the highest position that we could get in that list for each keyword, and I used that with my click-through rate curve to try and estimate how much traffic we might be able to get. So this all really boiled down to like IF formulas and VLOOKUPs. So it’s very accessible for anyone who wants to get involved in this kind of thing. 

Get fancy with it

Now, we could leave it there. That would give us a pretty solid understanding of where we might be able to get, and it’s far more nuanced than the picture that we might get at first blush. If you want to get a bit more fancy with it, there’s other information that you could pull in to your analysis. 

So say, for example, you’re able to pull in the titles of all of the pages that are currently ranking. Say in position four, it’s how to start a business, and position six, it’s buy a business setup, and position seven, it’s 50% off a business setup. Again, if we look at these, we could use some fairly simple formulas, even just in Google Sheets, to try to categorize these into different intents. So “how to” is fairly clearly an informational search, an informational result rather. So we’re not trying to categorize the search.

We’re trying to categorize the individual results. “Buy” is a fairly clear purchase search, and “50% off” again suggests that it’s trying to sell us something. So if we start to look at these results, we can filter them down even more if we want to. So say, for example, we’re working on a site and we know it has to be a product page. If we’re going to target this term, we have to use a product page.

Well, we could do that same filtering process, except this time we’re marking anything where the title is something like how to or top tips or instructions how to, or anything that seems like a blog post, and we remove them as well. So we say, actually, we couldn’t get this either. This is the highest we could get with this product page.

If we do that across all of our keywords, we know that we have to use product pages. We’re saying, okay, for this, we’re position six. Well, say position six actually has a pretty low click-through rate. If we’re looking at position six for this keyword, we’re already at position eight. So maybe the opportunity that we’ve got for this keyword is actually pretty small, and we decide that we want to focus on other things. 

So that’s another quick way to filter all of our different opportunities by just removing the kind of results that we wouldn’t want to compete with. Alternatively, if we don’t already have an idea that it’s got to be a product page, we could go through all of our searches and say we know that it’s going to be position four is the best place that we could get.

We can use that same category, we can use that same categorization formula to say, well, position four looks like it’s informational. So as we’re identifying our opportunities, we can quite quickly say when we go to do a content brief for this, for example, this needs to be a blog post. It shouldn’t be an update to a product page.

What’s the goal?

Now, the aim for any of this isn’t to make people’s decisions for them. We’re never going to just send this sheet, for example, off to someone and not have an SEO professional look at it. But it means that instead of spending lots of time having to reverse engineer, having to think really hard about all these different things and pull information into one place, we have a starting point for people to go from.

So when we have someone who’s an expert at SEO looking at this, they’ve got all of the information in front of them to begin with. That’s actually the approach that we tend to take in general in Aira. So when we do this kind of work, we actually tend to use a Python script, and that script pulls in all of the top 20 results. It also categorizes those search results, the individual results rather than the search term itself, based on whether they seem informational or transactional.

It finds that opportunity. It finds that highest place that we can currently get and subtracts where we’re ranking at the moment. That means that we end up with a sheet where we can order things quite nicely based on highest opportunity to lowest opportunity and categorize them based on what kind of results they are.

We also pull in some other things like authority, which is one thing that you could also use to filter down your results if you’re starting to dig into this. We also use the search results to see how similar different searches are as a way of clustering them. So those are some other things that you can dig into once you get familiar with these kinds of concepts and really start to accelerate. Now, you don’t have to go that far.

You could do any step along this route and get a little closer to a nuanced understanding of what this search result can get you, and that’s going to be a really positive advancement because the more that we can bring in this nuance, the more quickly we’re able to identify these different things. All of these are decisions that you’re going to be making anyway. You’re already a smart SEO professional.

You’re already going to know all this information. It’s about speeding up your path to that answer. Anyway, thanks very much for listening to me. I really enjoyed chatting this through with you. I hope you’ve enjoyed it as well, and I’ll look forward to hearing your thoughts. Thanks a lot.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

source https://moz.com/blog/estimating-search-opportunity-whiteboard-friday

Link research is an essential pillar of an SEO strategy, but competitive link research can help you get a leg up. It’s vital for websites to not only know about their own link profile, but to also have an effective strategy in place to stay relevant against competitors.

Hopefully at this point, you know who your competitors are, and hey, that’s half the battle. If you still aren’t sure, check out our Competitive Research tool in Moz Pro. This tool can help you find out exactly who your competitors are, the keywords they rank for and what their top performing content is.

If you would like to understand our Competitive Research tool more, and learn how it can be used to your advantage, feel free to book a Moz Pro Kick Off Call with a member of Moz’s Onboarding Team below.

Book a Moz Pro Kick Off Call

So, why do we want to conduct “competitive link research”?

• Learning how others are performing can help guide your own linking strategy, and you may discover tactics that you haven’t considered before.

• There may be opportunities and gaps in your competitor’s link profile, which you can identify and slot yourself into.

• You will know what types of content perform well, and from there can make your content 10x better than your competitors!

• Your analysis will help you understand more about the audience you are trying to speak to.

• A comprehensive backlink strategy can aid you in ranking higher on the SERP.

If you’re seeking guidance on how to build an SEO competitive analysis framework, check out Moz Academy’s SEO Competitive Analysis Certification. This coursework covers everything you need to know to confidently implement an effective strategy, and you’ll earn your Moz Certification, which you can display on your LinkedIn profile!

In the following videos, the Moz team will show you workflows and other tips and tricks within the Moz Pro tool set that will help you with your competitive link research analysis.

Link Gap Analysis: Link Intersect

Link gap analysis is a popular tactic amongst SEOs. It involves comparing your own link profile to that of your competitors, and finding the gaps that exist. They could be getting backlinks from several websites that you aren’t receiving any from — this could be a golden opportunity — another way to compete with your top competitors.

In this video, Emilie will show you how to use Moz Pro’s Link Intersect tool to find out this information.

Discover Linking Domains with SERP Analysis

In the Moz Pro Keyword Research tool, there is a functionality where you can search a keyword, and the top ranking pages for that keyword will show. But, there is so much more to this function.

In this video, Varad will show you those ranking pages, as well as the domains that are linking to that particular page. Get ready to soar from there!

Use Page Optimization to Find Content Suggestions

Moz’s Page Optimization tool is primarily used to see what improvements may need to be made to a page, as well as keyword placement on a page. When you dive a bit deeper into this particular tool, you’ll find that Moz offers content suggestions to you, including URLs that are ranking for the keyword you first queried. Identifying these top ranking URLs is a great way to see what kind of content you should also be creating.

In this video, Rachel will show you what you can do with this new found information and how it can help your link research.

Find Backlinks to Competitor’s Broken Pages

Analyzing the backlinks on a competitor’s broken page is another tactic that SEOs are using, that you may not have been aware of. There are hidden opportunities within these broken pages that are just waiting to be discovered.

In this video, Arian will show you exactly how you can find those broken pages within Moz Pro’s Link Research tool.

Discovered & Lost Backlinks

Another gem within the Moz Pro Link Research tools is the ‘Discovered & Lost’ section. This section will show you all of the new backlinks that Moz has found linking to your competitor in the last 60 days, as well as backlinks that have been lost. This can be insightful information when working on your own backlink building.

In this video, Eoin shows you how you can use this functionality to up your Link Research game.

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If you’d like to continue learning about Competitive Research, check out our previous Daily SEO Fix on Competitive Keyword Research for some great insights into a competitive keyword research strategy.

Other additional resources for learning continuation:

• Moz Guide to SEO Competitor Analysis
• Moz Learn Center: Competitive Research
• Moz Free SEO Competitive Analysis Tool

source https://moz.com/blog/daily-seo-fix-competitive-link-research

Whether speaking to senior management or just trying to figure out what direction our SEO strategy should take next, as SEOs we often find ourselves asking the same question: “but what could I get from this?”

Particularly when we’re prioritizing work across different keywords, it can be hard to know:

1. What rank we can expect to achieve (rather than just assuming position 1 for everything).

2. What we could get from that ranking in terms of traffic/conversions.

3. What that means in terms of additional traffic or revenue

It can really trip us up if any of our predictions are based on wild rankings we could never achieve, or if we accidentally include traffic we’re already getting anyway!

So, what’s the solution to solve all of that, and ensure we focus on getting the biggest bang for our buck? Introducing Aira’s Keyword Opportunity Estimation Tool.

Get your copy of Aira’s Opportunity Sheet here.

What is Aira’s Keyword Opportunity Estimation Tool?

Built in Google Sheets, the focus of the tool is to:

1. Identify the highest probable ranking position for different keywords.

2. Estimate what that could achieve in terms of traffic, conversions, and revenue, etc.

3. Highlight the best opportunities so you can prioritize your efforts. This is done by subtracting current estimated traffic, conversions, and revenue from the estimations if you were to rank in the highest possible position.

The sheet takes a top-20 report from a rank tracking tool and:

• Allows you to enter a list of domains you determine you are unable to outrank.

• Removes any ranking positions for domains you’ve listed as those you are unable to outrank.

• Allows you to toggle on/off a list of commonly hard-to-beat domains so you can quickly cut down the list.

• Removes instances where you might be trying to compete with competitors on their own branded terms.

• Automatically picks out where you’re ranking currently to see how much more traffic/conversions you might be able to get on a given keyword.

Here’s an example output:

Let’s dive into an example

Imagine you’re doing SEO for a new flight site. Let’s call it BrainAir.

You know that you can probably rank for quite a few “flights” terms, unless there’s a comparison site like expedia.com already ranking. So, you add expedia.com as a domain to remove and now the sheet will find the best possible ranking you could get for each keyword except for positions where Expedia is already appearing.

In the example below, skyscanner.net and expedia.co.uk are both listed as domains to remove. In this case, position 2 is the highest potential ranking position, as this sheet only removes the specific ranking positions for the domains listed. This means you can still get a better position if that is available.

When doing keyword analysis, you may also realize there are some terms in your list like “Easyjet iceland flights”. If you don’t think you could beat Easyjet for “Easyjet iceland flights”, you can tick a box and the sheet automatically ignores any time Easyjet is ranking for a search that includes the word “Easyjet”.

Why use this tool?

This sheet can be used to see:

• How much more traffic you could get from an SEO project in general.

• How much more traffic you could get from specific keywords.

• Where you should prioritize your efforts first.

While no estimate is going to be bang on the money, many other approaches will likely wildly overestimate how much traffic you could get in total, as they usually assume a highest position of 1, which is not always attainable.

On top of that, other approaches tend to not look at current traffic estimates, so don’t factor in additional traffic, instead just focusing on total traffic. This leads to situations where you’re focusing primarily on keywords with the highest search volume, as opposed to focusing on the keywords capable of driving the highest amount of potential traffic to the site.

This can help with developing SEO strategies, such as:

• Prioritizing new page creation/re-optimization based on potential traffic opportunity. For example, if this sheet highlights an opportunity to drive a significant level of additional traffic for specific keywords, you may decide to prioritize building out new landing pages, or re-optimizing your existing content to target those keywords more effectively.

• Prioritizing technical fixes based on potential opportunity. For example, if a tool such as Little Warden highlights technical issues , then this sheet can help you see the highest potential rank for specific keywords, should those issues be fixed.

• Seeing which competitors are having the biggest impact on ranking positions for specific keywords/keyword groups. For example, if you see that the same domain consistently appears as one you need to replace in the rankings, then it will be worth investing time looking at their strategies and approaches.

How to use the sheet

Click this link to get your copy of the Opportunity Sheet.

Stage 1: Copy & Paste in your top 20 report

Import your top 20 report into the tab named [Input] Top 20 Ranking Report, pasting into cell A1. You should delete/override the existing dummy data. The top 20 ranking report can come from any rank tracking tool, for example STAT, Rank Ranger, Accuranker, Data For SEO, etc.

At this stage, the order of the columns does not matter.

Stage 2: Selecting which columns to include

Navigate to [Input] Column Selection.

Here you need to use the dropdowns to select which columns relate to:

• The keyword column

• The search volume column

• The rank column

• The URL column

The table on the right-hand side will automatically update as these different dropdowns are updated with the first six rows.

Please check if the data aligns with the correct columns (or the rest of the outputs are going to look really odd).

Stage 3: Defining which domains you’re unable to compete with

Navigate to [Input] Domain Selection.

The first step is to enter your domain. The example in this case is booking.com

Next, add the domains you feel you’re unable to compete with. These can either contain the protocol or subdomain, or not.

You can find your competing domains by using a tool such as Moz’s Free Domain SEO Analysis Tool. Alternatively you can go to [Output 4] Current Traffic/ SOV Per Domain, which displays all of the domains ordered by total estimated traffic and share of voice.

We would recommend revising this list once you have seen the results, to include any additional domains you hadn’t previously included.

On the right side of the page, you can choose to include pre-defined domains in the list. This includes standard, hard-to-beat domains such as Google and Amazon, or social media domains such as Facebook and Twitter.

Finally, you can decide whether you want to exclude domains that contain target keywords in the domain name. For example, if you don’t think you could beat Easyjet for “Easyjet flights”, tick this box and the sheet automatically ignores any time Easyjet is ranking for a search that includes the word “Easyjet”.

Stage 4: Entering CTR, conversion rates, and average order values

Navigate to [Input] CTR, Conv Rate and AOV.

This section is designed for you to enter an estimated CTR for each position, average conversion rate, and average order value (AOV).

You can access the CTR position data yourself by using Google Search Console. It would make sense to focus on non-branded keywords, as branded keywords would skew these figures.

Advanced Web Ranking also provides an average CTR for each position for different industries based on a sample of sites. This can be found by navigating to the categories tab on this page.

Note: If you leave this column blank, traffic estimates will use the Average Non Branded CTR from Advanced Web Rankings.

The Conversion rate and AOV data can be found using Google Analytics, though it’s worth noting that these figures will vary depending on the type of page. For example, a blog is likely to have a much lower conversion rate than a product page, so it’s worth bearing that in mind during your analysis.

Stage 5: Output 1 — Keyword Breakdown

Navigate to [Output 1] Keyword Breakdown.

Here you can see the top 20 report with just the four columns that were previously selected: Keyword, Search Volume, Rank, and Ranking URL.

There are a number of additional columns:

• Domain: The domain of the ranking URL.

• Can our site outrank this domain?: This column tells you whether you “Can Compete” or “Cannot Compete” with each of the domains for their ranking position, depending on whether they are included in the domain list in [Input] Domain Selection.

• Is it our domain?: This signifies whether it is the domain you have inputted in the [Input] Domain Selection tab.

• Highest Potential Ranking Position for your site?: This column shows whether the column is the highest potential ranking position for that keyword.

• Domain Name Mentioned in the Keyword?: This column tells you whether the domain name is mentioned in the keyword.

Stage 6: Output 2 — Keyword Highest Rank

Navigate to [Output 2] Keyword Highest Rank.

Here you can see a summary for each keyword showing you the highest potential rank, estimated traffic, and conversions/revenue, as well as which domain/URL you could conceivably outrank.

There is also data related to your current rankings and potential increase in traffic, conversions, and revenue should you reach the highest potential ranking position.

These figures are based on your previous inputs, so go back and check what you have entered if you feel that any of the figures are noticeably different to what you would expect.

Stage 7: Output 3 — Keyword Highest Rank

Navigate to [Output 3] Keyword Opportunities.

This output provides the top-level summary focusing on the keyword, search volume, and which domain/URL you could seek to replace. The metrics in this output are focused on potential additional traffic, conversions, and revenue.

These figures are calculated by working out estimated current traffic, conversions and revenue based on current rank, search volume, conversion rate, and average order value and subtracting this from these figures should the domain rank in the highest potential position.

Stage 8: Output 4 — Predicted Traffic/SOV Per Domain

Navigate to [Output 4] Predicted Traffic/SOV Per Domain.

This output provides an overview of the total estimated traffic per domain from the top 20 report, which allows you to see which domains are driving the highest amount of traffic across your keywords.

There is also a Share of Voice column, which pulls in the share of voice for each of these domains. The calculation is total traffic per domain/total traffic across all domains.

On the right side of the page, your own domain’s current estimated traffic will be pulled through, alongside Share of Voice.

You can then enter competitor domains into the boxes below, which will provide total estimated traffic and share of voice with a comparison to your own domain.

How does this Google Sheet work?

This tool is designed to allow you to import a top 20 rankings report for your priority keywords, select which domains you feel you aren’t able to outrank within your niche, and optionally enter in CTR figures by position, average conversion rate, and Average Order Value (AOV), if you have access to this data.

Then, in the [Output 3] Keyword Opportunities tab you’ll get a list of the best potential rankings you could get for each keyword, ordered by total additional traffic and revenue you could get from on top of what you are currently getting.

In order to make all this magic happen there is a fair amount of Google Sheets spice happening in the background, so if you’re a Google Sheets enthusiast, you may enjoy taking a look under the hood to see how we’ve pulled it together.

The main formula used is the QUERY function in order to pull specific data from one sheet to another, which automatically updates based on the user’s selection on the [Input] Column Selection tab. This logic is used in all the main outputs.

The domain selection uses REGEX in order to combine together a list of different domains which are used in the different outputs to determine whether a site can rank for a specific domain or not.

Whenever working with rows, we use ARRAYFORMULAs in order to ensure that the formulas are applied to the whole column.

In the example below, we are using the regex above in order to determine whether a domain can or cannot compete for different ranking positions.

The estimated traffic, conversions, and revenue positions take the inputs from the [Input] CTR, Conv Rate and AOV tab.In the example below, we are working out the estimated traffic by multiplying the highest potential rank (in column C), looking up the CTR for that position and then multiplying it by the Search Volume (in column B). The same logic applies to the conversions and revenue figures.

Working out the difference in potential vs. current position is done by subtracting the estimated traffic from the current estimated traffic. There is some additional logic in there to catch whether the current traffic is higher than the potential traffic (as we obviously wouldn’t want the potential rank to be lower than the current rank).

These are the fundamentals, but if you are interested further, do make a copy, unhide the hidden cells, and have a good look under the hood.

Final thoughts

Within SEO, it’s critical to focus on impact when delivering results.

When you have a list of keywords, it’s often tricky to know where you could potentially rank, what levels of traffic you can earn, and how this relates to conversions and revenue. Aira’s Keyword Opportunity Estimation Tool tries to answer these questions.

Please reach out on Twitter to let us know how you get on with it!

source https://moz.com/blog/keyword-opportunity-estimation-tool

You know GA4 is coming, and last week Dana took you through some of the top things to be aware of before making the transition to it. In this week’s episode, Ruth Burr Reedy discusses what a lot of marketers may not be thinking about enough: the people besides us who use Analytics data, and what they need to know about Google Analytics 4 in order to continue using Analytics data.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. I’m Ruth Burr Reedy. I am the CEO of UpBuild. We are a boutique digital marketing agency specializing in technical SEO, advanced web analytics, and whole-funnel digital marketing strategy. And today, I want to talk a little bit about Google Analytics 4.

GA4 is here

So as, hopefully, all of you by now know, Google Analytics 4 is here. It is the next generation of Google’s Analytics tracking software. And what I think at this point, hopefully, most marketers at least know that it’s coming. 

The most important thing to know is that on July 1st, 2023, which is less than a year from now, Google Analytics 4 will be the only Google Analytics product that will be continuing to collect data. Universal Analytics, which has been the analytics standard for several years now, will be completely sunset in less than a year.

A lot of people are talking about this. A lot of people are talking about Google Analytics 4, what it is, how to use it. I’m hopeful that the Whiteboard Friday audience already knows a lot of these things. 

But one thing I think a lot of us marketers are not thinking enough about are the people besides us who use Analytics data and what they need to know about Google Analytics 4 in order to continue using Analytics data for the things that they use it for.

Stop! Get GA4 running

So, before we get into that, let’s just stop for a minute. Do you have GA4 collecting data on your web properties, on all of them? Do you? Are you sure? If you don’t, if there’s a website that you own or are involved with in any way that does not have GA4 collecting data, just pause this video. Just pause it real quick and just get GA4 running on that site. It only takes a second. It’s actually very, very easy to implement. And all you need to do, at this point, you don’t need to configure it, you don’t need to do anything else, just get it collecting data. I’ll wait.

Who needs this data?

Okay. Ready? All right, great. Here we go. So one thing that we need to think about, as people who use marketing analytics data, is that there are other people besides us who need that data and see that data and use that data to understand what’s happening and make decisions accordingly. 

So who are these people? It might be team leadership. It might be your CEO. CEOs the worst, I know. It might be your boss. It might be your boss’ boss. Your board of directors, if you’re a publicly-traded or a venture capital-funded company or any other kind of company that has a board, chances are you are compiling at least a quarterly report for your board on how the website is doing using Analytics data.

You might also, if you are like me, an agency marketer, you have clients, you have client points of contact. Hopefully, you’ve already been in close communication with your client point of contact about Google Analytics 4. You’ve already got it set up for them. 

But chances are your client point of contact has these same people in their work life. So if you are working with a director of marketing, a marketing manager, a CMO, someone in the marketing seat, you need to make sure that that person, your client point of contact has this same information to message to the people above them and the other consumers of Analytics data within their organization who may not be as familiar with how Analytics data is collected but still know enough to be using it and at least know enough to be receiving reports containing this data. All of these people need to understand what is happening with Google Analytics 4.

Implement it now

The time to do that is now. The time to do that is not July 2023. We need to start right now. We have less than a year to get everybody on board with what GA4 is, how it’s different, and what that means for the data that they consume and use to make decisions, because it is different. It’s going to be different.

I’ve talked to people who have seen that little alert pop up in Universal Analytics, that strikes a little fear into all of our hearts, Universal Analytics is going away on July 1st, 2023. Some people seem to think of this as when your phone says, “I’m going to install an operating system update overnight.” Like cool, great. Phone, you do you. Turn it on the morning. It’s not that different. It’s fine. That is not the case with Google Analytics 4. And we need to make sure that everyone who uses Analytics data, with whom we interact, understands that so that they are not taken aback when that change happens.

We can also start making that change now gently, iteratively over time, while UA is still collecting data in order to illustrate to our data consumers what the differences are.

Have a plan for historical data

So the first thing that we need to do, when it comes to GA4 and the upcoming transition, is have a plan for historical data. One of the big things about this transition is that historical data in Universal Analytics will not be available via the GA interface after July 1st, 2023. 

So how are you going to get that data? Because chances are you’re not going to be okay with just saying, “All right, well, we installed GA4 when it first came out in the fall of 2020. So we’ve got a little more than a year or two of data, and that’s our new data universe.” There are companies who have just decided that that’s what they’re going to do, that’s their new normal. KonMari your historical data, namaste, release it into the world. Most people are not going to do that. Most people are going to want to see historical data from farther back than fall 2020, which is the earliest that you could have been collecting this data.

So what is your plan for historical data? Hopefully, you have one. There are many blog posts and videos and articles out there on ways to preserve your historical data. I’m not going to go too deep into that. But whether you’re using BigQuery and you’re going to port it into some sort of database or data warehouse, maybe you have a small enough dataset that you’re just going to export a bunch of spreadsheets and kind of store that, maybe you’re going to build some kind of custom SQL database, whatever you’re going to do with your historical data, it’s none of my business, but you should have a plan to store that data.

Now, at this point, you may already have spoken to these people about the fact that historical data is going away, because that’s something that they are probably feeling pretty amped up about. I’m feeling amped up about it. It’s a lot, and we need to have a plan. But that’s okay, that’s what we’re doing today.

Don’t equate apples to oranges

The real thing that we need to keep in mind, as we’re making a plan for historical data, is that the data in Google Analytics 4 and the data in Universal Analytics is collected differently. Even things that have the same name are going to be slightly different metrics behind the scenes. We’re going to talk more about that in a minute. But it’s important to know that comparing GA4 and Universal Analytics data is always going to be apples to oranges. They’re not the same. 

So even as you have a plan to make and store and use this historical database, however you’re going to do that, you need to keep in mind that that data and the data you use going forward are not going to be one-to-one. And that’s okay. I mean, it is what it is.

Some people, keeping that in mind, are changing what they’re doing. Is the expense and effort of data warehousing your historical UA data worth all of the time and expense it’s going to take, considering that it’s apples to oranges? I can’t make that decision for you, but it’s something to consider. It’s something to ask yourself and really think about what you’re going to do with historical data going forward and how you’re going to use it.

What’s changing? Everything!

Because what’s changing with Google Analytics 4? Everything. It’s really different. And hopefully, by now, you’ve gone in there, gotten under the hood, you’ve played with some of the reports, you’ve looked at the UI. It’s really different from Universal Analytics.

I’ve been doing SEO since 2006, and this is the biggest change in Google Analytics, especially the front end, the UI that I’ve ever seen. And also the backend is different. The method of data collection within GA4 is different, because a big part of why Google is making this push for GA4 is in an effort to be more in compliance with data privacy laws. So they’re having to change some of the ways the data is collected and reported.

They’re also looking at how to better do things like report on cross-domain traffic, cross-device traffic, traffic between websites and apps, when those are the same thing, they’re the same and they’re different. And now, in GA4, you can look at that data in a more holistic sense.

There’s a lot of exciting, cool stuff happening in GA4. But the important thing to know is that things that are called the same thing in GA4 are still fundamentally different and collected at the very least slightly differently than they are in Universal Analytics. This is going to be hugely important when we’re looking at this historical data.

A great example is sessions. The session, for many, many years, has been the core unit of Analytics data. GA4, you can tell from their reporting, is really trying to shift everyone’s reporting from sessions to users. Both sessions and users are collected slightly differently. They are counted slightly differently. So your session numbers in GA4 and Universal Analytics for the same time period are going to be slightly different.

Now, the degree to which they are different is going to depend on a lot of things. Filtering options in Universal Analytics are a lot more advanced than they are right now in GA4. So if you have a lot of custom filters set up, if you’re filtering out a giant known bot network, if you are filtering out data from specific countries, whatever you’re filtering out, chances are you cannot implement that yet in GA4. That’s going to affect it. But the session itself, how it’s counted, when a session resets. So, for example, a session is resetting at midnight, having your time zone configured, hugely important in UA, less of a thing in GA4. So depending on the time period, depending on your filtering, depending on how you’re counting sessions now, your sessions data may be a little different or a lot different.

All of this is also going to depend on the scope of your data. Tiny differences become big in bigger datasets. So if you’ve got hundreds of thousands or millions of sessions in a given time period that you’re reporting on, the chances that those numbers are going to be different in GA4 to UA, they’re probably going to be different by a bigger percentage.

And, at the same time, if you only have a very, very small number of users, because that sample size is smaller, you may also see bigger gaps. It really depends on your data. 

The important thing is your data consumers don’t need to know the ways in which data collection is different. You can tell them and they’re not going to remember, and that’s okay. They’re busy and they don’t need to know. What they do need to know is that it’s different, it’s not the same, and you have a year, at this point, to show them the degree to which it is different so that they can start to understand what the difference between the old dataset and the new dataset is, while you still have those same time periods of data collection to compare. Just to give them an idea of what’s different.

So, at this point, you probably have some of these data consumers who are in love with a report. They’ve got their one report, and they look at it every day or they look at it every week or they look at it every quarter, and you have spent the last, however long you’ve been reporting to them, refining that report. You show them the report. And then they say, “What about this piece of data?” And you put it in there, and then they never look at it again. You take it out and no one notices. Or you put it in there and it becomes the new normal. Or maybe you have been trying for a long time to get them to look at users, instead of at sessions, but they just love sessions so much as a metric. Whatever it is that your data consumers love about Universal Analytics, chances are it’s going to be at least a little bit different in GA4. And it’s highly likely, and I would go so far as to say advisable, that that report is going to have to change. So the time to show them that it’s different and ease them into that change, like dipping a toe into the Jacuzzi, is now. Not July 2023, now.

Users are another really great example of what is different between Universal and GA4. So in Universal Analytics, we’re all used to total users and new users. Those are the two breakdowns of users. In GA4, you have a metric called Active Users, which is the users that have been active on your site in the last 28 days. That is the default users metric that you’re going to see in GA4 and in the reporting. Now, you may decide, because you’ve already been reporting on total users, that you want to report on total users in the future. You can do that, but I would encourage you to look at the ways in which GA4 is presenting and encouraging you to use the data.

It’s very interesting to me, this is a little bit of a sidebar, the ways in which Google Analytics, over the years, has taught us what is important to measure based on what they surface up most prominently in reports. And for my career, that has chiefly been the session. Now, increasingly, we’re looking at the user, which is great in a world in which most people’s purchase journey involves more than one device and certainly more than one session. But it does change the way we fundamentally look at and think about data. And I would encourage you, rather than trying to swim upstream on that, to think about how you are going to change your data reporting in order to mesh up well with the reporting that GA4 is going to roll out, because they’re still rolling out new features all the time. You can take a look at what they are surfacing up prominently now to get an idea of where those new features are most likely going to be rolling out, especially in the next year, but even beyond that so that you are reporting in ways that are going to get you the most new cool data soonest. But I digress.

Another thing I want to make really sure that everybody, especially these people, understand is that events mean something completely different in GA4 than it does in Universal Analytics. In Universal Analytics, events are a very specific thing. You collect a piece of data. You have four parameters that you can assign — category, action, label, value. We’ve all, at this point, used UTM parameters. We know what those are. We’re familiar with it. It’s comfortable.

In GA4, everything is an event. It’s almost going back to like super, super old-school internet days and thinking about hits on your website. At this point, everything in GA4, if you boil it down to a fundamental piece of data collection, is called an event. Could they have called it something different and made this less confusing? Yes, but they didn’t, and here we are.

So this is really important to make sure that your data consumers understand that event collection is going to be different. And that’s important because of this apples-to-oranges comparison. As you’re collecting events data in GA4, it’s going to be really, really tempting to try to recreate, as much as you can, your Universal Analytics instance, how you’re collecting data, how you’re reporting on it. Resist the urge to do that. 

When you’re configuring custom events in GA4, resist the urge, and maybe even the pressure from these people, to replicate that category, action, label, value naming convention just because that’s what you’re used to. Instead, this is a fabulous time to really be rethinking your data collection and your reporting. And we, as marketers, have a huge opportunity here that I want to make sure we don’t miss.

Now is the time for data governance

Many of us have come into whatever role we’re in now and come into an existing Google Analytics instance. Filters have already been set up. Goals have already been configured. Events have already been set up and have been tracking data for however long before we got there. What this usually means is that things are not set up entirely to our liking. Many marketers, myself included, have come into an Analytics situation and found that the data is incorrect, inaccurately reported. It’s double counting things. It’s not counting things. We have an opportunity now, with GA4, to make sure that our data collection is complete, accurate, precise, and robust. And we need to seize that opportunity.

And the same thing goes with event collection. Now is the time, for everyone watching this video, to start thinking about data governance. Now is the time for us to seize control of the data and do what we can to not only make it complete, accurate, precise, robust, but also future-proof that data collection for ourselves, for the organizations that we work for, for our clients, and for our data consumers, because we may not be the only people using that data. 

There are often other teams going into Analytics. If you work with a paid search team or a display team or you work with just a general marketing agency who maybe doesn’t do anything with Analytics but they look at the data, maybe they don’t do anything to the website but they need data about the website because it informs their campaigns, they probably have dashboards configured. They probably have events set up. They may have set up those events in ways that you don’t like. Things like, oh, here the label is capitalized. There the label isn’t capitalized. Guess what, those are two different events. That’s still going to be true in GA4, as of right now at least. Capitalization is still going to make two different parameters. So we have an opportunity right now to enact some data governance, make some rules, and take control. 

So when we think about events in GA4, yes, everything is an event. There are many things that are going to be collected automatically. You do not have to configure GA4 to collect things like page views. They’re just going to do that. I don’t think you can get them to not do that because it would break the tool. You could, but why would you?

In addition to that, there are enhanced measurement events that Google has available for you to configure. Almost all of those, they’re very easy to set up and they’re standardized.

The same is true for recommended events. So within GA4, the next level of complexity from automatic and enhanced measurement events are recommended events. And in the GA4 support documentation, there is a large and increasing list of different recommended events and the parameters that they collect that you can look at. I would say, at this point, any recommended event that applies to your site you might as well configure, because you could use that data. 

With both enhanced measurement and recommended events, because they have built-in parameters, Google is going to be using those more to drive some of the … I know they’re wanting to do a lot more with automated analysis and machine learning on datasets. All of that’s going to start from the data that is consistent across Google Analytics’ broader dataset, which is these enhanced measurement and recommended events. All of the parameters will be named the same thing, so it’s very easy for them to collect them and then apply machine learning to them.

You still, as you are setting these up, need to make sure that you’re enacting some data governance. You need to make sure the parameters are named the same way, that the same parameter is collected in the same way across recommended events so that you are, going forward, no longer having apples to oranges. That’s GA4 to UA. Everything in GA4 should be oranges. Now, get that on a T-shirt, no one will know what it means.

And then the next level up is custom events. Custom events in GA4 are really cool. You can collect data on just about anything. You can pass just about any piece of data that Google Analytics 4 can collect. You can collect as a parameter. There’s a ton of functionality, especially if you are pushing things into the data later to collect that as event parameters. We’re no longer limited to category, action, label, value. We are limited by the total number of parameters that we can collect per property, which makes sense because data storage is expensive and it’s expensive for Google. But we have a lot more customizability when it comes to custom events.

This is very cool. And we really need to apply the Spider-Man principle here. With great power comes great responsibility. Resist the urge to get in there and start tracking everything, partying like it’s, I guess, 2099 at this point. Resist that urge. Make a plan. Now is the time for data governance.

As you are thinking about the custom events that you were going to track and the parameters you are going to collect, you might start by just outlining what you know you want to track and how you want to collect those parameters. But then it’s time to make some rules, some rules for what you’re going to track, how you’re going to track it, what parameters you’re going to collect, and how those parameters are labeled. You shouldn’t just do this for whatever you’re going to configure, as you’re setting up GA4 now. Think about how you can create and future-proof rules for data collection going forward so that, over time, you get promoted, somebody else is doing your job, you win the lottery and go off to an island and are having a beautiful time. Whoever has your job after you should still have rules so that, when they are setting this stuff up, it is still oranges to oranges and you are creating a dataset that is correct, that is also useful in comparison with itself. Parameters that are useful in comparison across events and event types. This is the time to be doing that. Create those rules, make them clear. Make sure that people on other teams, anybody else who might be setting up events, even outside of the inbound search team or the marketing team, or whatever team you’re sitting on, make sure that they have that. If you have clients, make sure you’re doing a whole training session with them on what the rules are and how to use those rules to configure events in the future. Make a video. Document it. Share it out. The more you can do now to set yourself up for success in the future, the more valuable your GA4 dataset is going to be from day one and going forward.

So if you get nothing else out of this video, take some time to think about data governance and how you’re going to make sure your data is useful and consistent going forward.

Now that we have this beautiful dataset, we’re collecting data, it’s configured, we’ve got a year. At this point, I’m filming this at MozCon 2022, we’ve got a year left to talk to these people about the difference between our apples and oranges and help them fall in love with oranges. So your CEO, your board, whoever it is that loves that report, don’t just recreate that report for them with GA4 data. Take some time to talk with them, to understand what it is about that information that they use to make decisions, what it is about that report that they look at that helps them do their job. Find out how to solve that same problem for them with GA4 data rather than just trying to make GA4 look as much like UA as possible, because, over time, it’s going to be less and less the case and, over time, people are going to forget about Universal and now you just have a GA4 instance that looks like Universal Analytics for no reason.

Now is the time to not do that. Resist the pressure to do that and figure out what your GA4 install is going to look like in 2023 and 2025, maybe even 2030. Institute those rules now so that you can help your board, you can help your CEO, you can help your clients and their bosses and their bosses’ bosses gall in love with your new reports. They’re beautiful. They’re oranges-to-oranges. They’ve got new, robust, actionable data that you’re using in new, exciting, advanced ways. This is coming. It’s happening. Right now is a really important moment in terms of making sure that everybody is on board with what the changes are, in terms of making sure that everybody is on board with how we’re going to collect data in the future, and giving everyone a year to fall in love with this new report before they have no other options.

If you have questions about any of this or you just want to talk about Google Analytics 4 and geek out about data collection, please holler at me at Twitter anytime. I’m very friendly, and I love talking about this stuff.

That’s my Whiteboard Friday. Thanks, everybody. Have a wonderful Friday.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

source https://moz.com/blog/preparing-for-ga4-whiteboard-friday

Did Q1 and Q2 whip past you? They did for me, but the pace of life often seems to slow down a little in autumn, and I hope you’ll join me for a relaxed and studious look at interesting local search marketing developments from the third quarter of 2022.

1) A small harvest of review-related changes

I’m grouping four different review-related developments under this heading. First, Joy Hawkins spotted a change to Google’s guidelines on prohibited and restricted content. As I’ve covered here exhaustively in my Moz column, there are lots of things a business can do to rectify a complaint in hopes of seeing an unhappy customer update their negative review to reflect an improved experience, but outright incentivization of negative review removal has now been declared out-of-bounds by Google.

Second and rather related, Greg Gifford captured a good stat from Aaron Weiche’s LocalU presentation that I’d not heard before: over ⅓ of negative experiences referenced in reviews mention communication problems. This means that you not only need to have your local business listings up-to-snuff with ongoing management of the accuracy of your contact info, but that all of your communications technologies (texting, live chat, phone, etc.) must be responsive!

Thirdly, Barry Schwartz spotted early testing of a Find Places Through Reviews feature in July, but as of September, I have still not been able to replicate this interesting result, which is a further indication of Google’s continuous experimentation in the review space.

Finally, another tip from the inimitable Hawkins as tweeted by Brandon Schmidt: longer reviews tend to remain higher up in your Google review corpus for a longer time. The problem with this is that lengthier reviews are commonly negative, with unhappy customers taking the time to wax poetic about their complaints. Take some time to consider whether you can finesse your review requests so that your delighted customers are inspired to leave more voluble reviews.

2) HCU near you

It’s my belief that local businesses which have already made a habit of publishing content that thoughtfully serves their specific customers should come out well in the much-talked-about Helpful Content Update, which finished rolling out on September 9th. While many SEOs are trying to ascertain which changes can rightfully be attributed to the update, our friends at NearMediaCo are having interesting discussions about whether the HCU is, in fact, part of Google’s response to the rise of TikTok as a vehicle for search. As Greg Sterling notes,

“Right now the most influential internet company is arguably TikTok. Google’s HCU appears to be partly a response to the popularity of the site and its much-touted “authenticity.”

Local SEOs and their clients cannot have failed to notice how many Google searches (including local searches) return low-quality results made up of optimized filler rather than human-worthy help. While the search engines and social sites play ball over who will win the authenticity trophy, my best advice to independent local businesses is to be sure that everything on your website is a proudly-published source of information for your community.

3) Beyond content: communication

There may be times when I’m willing to wander about in the Google maze or the morass of site search hoping for an answer to a complex query, but usually, I don’t have the patience and want to be able to ask a business directly, “Do you have size 8, man-made, furry boots, with fluffy linings, but not from this brand, and only from this brand, and can you deliver them to my house, and can you do that contactlessly, and is there a surcharge for that?” Local businesses can certainly publish content to cover all of these bases, but bless the brand that makes it easy for me to have a conversation with a human being.

Brandon Schmidt did us the favor of photographing Aaron Weiche’s recent presentation on this topic. Ahead of the holidays, be sure your texting, live chat, and phone staff is ready with all the answers via highly visible numbers and links (and my boots!).

4) Toggle to hide your address

Barry Schwartz highlighted Stefan Somborac’s screenshot of a new toggle feature in search and Maps that is meant to make it easier for business owners to hide the address on their Google Business Profile. The hidden address drama is one of the longest-running plots in the soap opera that is the Guidelines for representing your business on Google. I would personally like to see this character written out of the script in favor of businesses having the say in whether they want their exact location to be visible on their listings. I’ve never understood Google’s logic for requiring SABs to obscure their locations; living in an old house as I do, I’ve had too many opportunities of needing to know which 24-hour plumber is actually nearest to me.

5) Linked FAQs in Google Messaging

This might be one of the most exciting developments of the third quarter and we again have Stefan Somborac to thank for noticing it first. You can now populate Google Messaging with up to 10 FAQs with questions of up to 40 characters and answers of up to 500 characters and your answers can include links! While I’m not personally fond of automated consumer-brand communications, I can see a good use of this for answering really common questions about hours of operation, premise accessibility, or the availability of top brands in your inventory.

6) Filter local packs by days of the week

Google has long offered searchers the ability to filter packs by hours of the day, but Shameem Adhikarath realized that, at some point, the ability to filter results by specific days of the week was added. When a customer wants to know on Monday which are the best restaurants that are open on Saturday, a little feature like this makes sense. Word to the wise: be sure your hours of operation are always up-to-date on your listings!

7) Evaluate the role local SEO should play in property hunting

Elizabeth Rule brought us this screenshot of Andy Simpson’s LocalU presentation in which he reminded local SEOs that our concerns are not the only ones that should be involved when a client moves or opens a new branch. While I’m sorry to have missed Andy’s full presentation, I can see the sense of it, just from this slide. So many of the goodies of reputation and profit will flow naturally when other factors like the location, convenience, and size of a new locale are properly considered, so definitely weigh in with local SEO recommendations during times of change, but prepare to be in a queue of many priorities.

8) Maps Photo Pins exist, but have you seen them yet?

Our honored colleagues at BrightLocal captured a version of Maps-based photo pins in September that is different than the ones reported by Barry Schwartz back in July as spotted by Vishal Sharma. These latest examples are round instead of square. I have not been able to replicate this test with similar search terms from my location in the US, and so I have no way of sussing out what the source of these images is or how to nudge Google into giving a business pin like this. For now, keep adding photos and keep checking Maps for this intriguing feature.

9) Be the winner next-door next year?

Nextdoor users voted many local and ten national businesses as their favorites this past August, and the winners have received press, badges and $500 ad credits. It’s definitely a platform worth getting listed on, and home service providers came out especially well in the contest. Nextdoor highlighted how showing up on time for appointments, providing excellent service, offering specialty goods and services, and earning recommendations from neighbors all contributed to winners’ successes. Sounds like good advice to take with you into the fourth and final quarter of 2022!

source https://moz.com/blog/q3-2022-local-search-developments

Content marketing is an essential part of any SEO strategy. Without it, how are you going to attract customers looking for answers to their questions, and who are potentially in the market for your products or services?

At Tao Digital Marketing, we’ve recently generated some great results for one of our clients operating in the business financial space, The Insolvency Experts, mainly by focusing on just one “cluster topic” that was a huge money maker for them.

When looking at six month comparison stats (August 2021-January 2022 to February-July 2022), we’ve achieved the following:

• Leads: 95 to 460 (384%)

• Clicks: 4,503 to 23,013 (411%)

• Impressions: 856,683 to 2,033,355 (137%)

• Average position: 33.4 to 23.6 (increased almost 10 spots)

This was mostly achieved by absolutely hammering one topic area: company liquidation. In this case study, we’re going to explain how we did this step by step, so that hopefully you can generate similar results for your own business!

Objectives

If you really break it down, the objective of all SEO consultancy work is essentially the same: increase the number of leads for a business. This was our ultimate goal.

It’s not just as simple as that, though. We all know you can’t get to number one on Google overnight. So, like other SEO geeks out there, we tracked our successes through additional factors such as clicks, impressions, and average position, to show our efforts were worthwhile.

In January this year (2022) our goals for the next six months were as follows:

• Leads: Just over double from 95 to 200 (110%)

• Clicks: 4,503 to 13,500 (around 200%)

• Impressions: 856,683 to 1,700,000 (around 100%)

• Average position: 33.4 to 25 (around eight spots)

Insolvency Experts’ audience is primarily directors of UK businesses that are going insolvent, closely followed by business owners looking for financial advice. The majority of Insolvency Expert’s cash flow comes from formal insolvency processes, such as liquidation, administration, and CVAs (Company Voluntary Agreements), so it was really important for us to push these areas.

Our strategy

1. Research “company liquidation” search volume and related queries

We first picked this client up in November 2020. Initially, our focus was on the basics: updating all the top level pages (such as service pages and guides) to make sure they fit the intention of the user and clearly explained the services that Insolvency Experts offer.

Researching what works well at present

One of the pages that our content team updated was their company liquidation guide. After updating, the page started to perform very well in the SERP, and ranked at position #4 for “company liquidation”. Clearly, this sort of content was working, and we wanted to hit it even more.

After pulling some research together, one of our strategists proposed the idea of a “Company Liquidation Content Hub”, as the company liquidation guide was ranking for a lot of long tail questions:

After cross referencing with the monthly search volume for these questions, she added some of these as H3s within the guide to see how they would perform. They resulted in so much more traffic that she decided they warranted their own individual guides, hence the idea for the hub. This would mean we weren’t putting all of our eggs into one basket, and that we could also internally link all of them together for users wanting to read more.

Users that are further down the marketing funnel don’t want to scroll down a huge guide to find the answer to their specific question, and we were certain that this would positively affect bounce rate. We therefore made sure that nine times out of 10, the H1 contained the question that was being answered.

In order to further target those at the bottom of the marketing funnel who want to speak to someone quickly, we placed regular “Contact Us” CTAs throughout the content so that they don’t have to scroll right to the bottom of the page to get in touch with Insolvency Experts.

Undertaking a competitor analysis

We also conducted a competitor analysis on this topic, focusing on three key players in the industry that were all ranking well for the phrase “company liquidation”. We found that the key competitors had the following:

Competitor A – 38 indexed articles on liquidation

Competitor B – 23 indexed articles on liquidation

Competitor C – 47 indexed articles on liquidation

Insolvency Experts only had six indexed articles on liquidation at the time, so it was clear we needed to be on their level – this was an obvious content gap.

Pitching the content hub to the client

We suggested this idea to the client alongside a forecasting spreadsheet created by our founder, in order to justify the resource that was needed to push the client as high as possible in the rankings for company liquidation.

This spreadsheet broke down a huge list of keywords alongside monthly search volume, average click through rate for positions 1-10 on the SERP, domain authority of competitors who are currently ranking for these keywords, and average conversion rate on the site at the moment.

This unique formula would then allow us to explain to the client that for X amount of work, we predict we can get you to position X in X timeframe, and this would result in approximately X annual revenue. After pitching this to the client alongside infographics and current performance statistics, they told us they loved our ideas and agreed to let us go ahead.

2. Plan the content after client approval

After the client gave us the go-ahead, the next step was to plan all of this work based on search volume, and therefore priority order.

It’s easy to get lost in all the data within SEO, so it was incredibly important for us to have a solid plan and timeline for these changes. Topics were going to range from How to Liquidate a Company with No Money through to Administration vs Liquidation.

How we communicate planned works to our clients

In order to orchestrate clear communication between ourselves and our clients, we create a Traffic Light Report, which is a live Google Sheets document detailing all work to be undertaken for the current and next quarter. This is split into sections for technical SEO, content, and digital PR/link building (the three pillars of SEO).

This includes justification for each change we make, as well as a link to any live changes or documents. It also details when this will be done and if the action is with us or the client. The tasks are coloured in green for live changes, yellow for action needed, orange for in progress, red for anything on hold and clear for not started.

Here’s an example of what the content section of Insolvency Expert’s traffic light report looks like for their current quarter (July-September 2022):

Scheduling the tasks

We then scheduled these topics for our various content writers to work on using our project management software, ClickUp. Within each task we placed a link to a skeleton document consisting of H1s, H2s, and H3s, as well as a title, meta description and keywords to include.

3. Write the content while implementing technical SEO

By this time it was around April 2022, and it was time for us to fully attack the content portion of our task list. Since then, we’ve written 18 pieces of content around company liquidation, and still have quite a few left to go before we consider this area of focus complete.

As part of our uploads, our technical SEO adds FAQ schema, which has helped Insolvency Experts showing up for several featured snippets (more details in results section).

Analyzing as we go along

Once we covered the big topics in the first couple of months of writing, we started to use Low Fruits to find smaller queries which are estimated at around 10 or fewer monthly searches. We’ve had a lot of success targeting lower search volume phrases, as these users seem to be more focused and lower down the sales funnel, so are more likely to be better engaged and convert better. A lot of the time they are pleased that you have answered their very niche question!

The below is a screenshot from a keyword analysis. We trawled through hundreds of keywords to pull out the ones relevant to the client.

We then used Low Fruit’s Keyword Extraction and SERP Analysis tool to give us further details on a select few key terms.

These terms are shown as having a search volume of either 10, less than 10 or 0. Of course, we know that this is still hugely important to cover, and targeting these will bring in a very niche reader who is much more likely to convert due to the nature of the long-tail queries.

Finalizing the hub

Our plan is to finalize the hub this fall, and ensure that everything is internally linked. There will also be a menu change to make the addition of the hub very clear. See screenshots below for the current hub vs. how it will be presented once all content is ready (screenshot taken from their staging site in Kinsta, our hosting platform where we make design changes so that the client can approve them before they go live).

Current ‘hub’ in the menu:

How the hub will look once all content is complete:

As part of our content process within ClickUp, we have a recurring task to check a new URL in Google Search Console two weeks after upload. This allows us to see if we have the “Google Spike of Acceptance”, which is a sharp incline of impressions/traffic indicating that the content will do well, before it falls then slowly rises again.

If we don’t see this spike, we carry out multiple checks, including: Is it an orphan page? Are there any technical errors? Is it indexed? If it is not indexed, we push the URL through Index Me Now.

If the issue is just that the piece isn’t getting picked up, we will take another look at the content to see if there is something else we can do to improve it, e.g. tweak the H1 or expand the content.

4. Build links to the relevant pages and homepage

Once we’d uploaded the content, it was time to build links to the priority pages and homepage in order to build the domain authority.

We wanted to really hone in on generating links for our company liquidation page. The page has 36 backlinks, many of which were built through link building efforts. This was largely done by working with business site publications and creating natural anchor text that would help with certain keyword rankings.

As well as building links specifically to the company liquidation page, we also built links to the main URL in order to boost overall domain authority. This was done through answering queries through platforms such as HARO and Response Source, as well as working with the client to create relevant, time-specific thought leadership pieces. Here’s an example of a HARO request we responded to, the topic being “Recession-proofing tips for small businesses”:

Although the site’s domain authority tends to fluctuate between 30-33 depending on links lost and general algorithm updates, the links to specific pages have still resulted in an increase in rankings, detailed further below.

Results compared to objectives

Although we knew that our strategy was going to work well based on our experience with our other clients, we were very pleasantly surprised by the huge positive effect our work has made, which enabled us to smash the targets we set!

Leads

Goal: Increase from 95 to 200 (110%)

Result: Increased from 95 to 460 (384%)

As a result of creating incredibly useful, lengthy content and placing regular CTAs throughout the content, we managed to almost quadruple the amount of leads coming through to the client in the space of just six months.

In the six months before our liquidation project began, our Leads Dashboard within WhatConverts shows that Insolvency Experts had five liquidation leads via phone call and 10 leads via their contact form on a liquidation-focused page.

In the six-month period since we’ve been working on the content hub, they have had 38 liquidation leads via phone call and 52 leads via contact form on a liquidation-focused page.

Result: 660% increase in phone call leads and 420% increase in contact form leads.

Previous six months:

Current:

Clicks

Goal: Increase from 4,503 to 13,500 (around 200%)

Result: Increased from 4,503 to 23,013 (411%)

By creating highly relevant content that matched the user’s search intent, we managed to almost quadruple the clicks over the space of six months, doubling our original 200% goal.

The site has received 29,400 clicks overall across the past 12 months. Below, you can see the huge spike in clicks and impressions from January onwards when we really started to focus on the liquidation content.

Impressions

Goal: Increase from 856,683 to 1,700,000 (around 100%)

Result: Increased from 856,683 to 2,033,355 (137%)

Again, by creating highly relevant blogs, Google started to understand the relevancy of our content, so the number of impressions hugely increased. Along with the 137% increase above, over the past 12 months (August 2021-August 2022) the site has received 485,000 impressions for the query ‘liquidation’ alone.

The main company liquidation guide that we updated had a total of 732K impressions over the past 12 months, too, with a huge spike from February onwards, when we updated the guide.

Average position

Goal: Increase from 33.4 to 25 (around 8 spots)

Result: Increased from 33.4 to 23.6 (increased 10 spots)

This increase is due to the relevancy of our content and the amount of keywords each piece ranked for. As mentioned, the main company liquidation guide has worked incredibly well, ranking for 181 keywords, 67 of which are page one (37%). It now has the number one spot for the term “company liquidation”. See below for an example of queries the page is showing up for.

The page also shows up for six featured snippets as a result of us implementing FAQ schema.

335 clicks and 93,663 impressions have come from the FAQ rich results alone.

In the six months before we updated the guide, it pulled in around 650 clicks and 227K impressions. In the six months following, it brought in around 1,180 clicks and 382K impressions. We’ve practically doubled clicks on one single guide.

As mentioned, this particular piece of content has 36 backlinks, and actually ranks ABOVE the official UK government company liquidation guide, which has a domain authority of 93 (about 60 higher than ours). Clearly, we’re meeting the searcher’s intent and giving them what they are looking for.

In the six month period before we started work on liquidation, Insolvency Experts had an average click through rate of 0.5%. Over a six month period of us working with them, this more than doubled to 1.2%.

Another success worth noting is that 3 out of 6 of our latest articles have an average page view duration of between 9 and 10 minutes! The other half are averaging around 5 to 6 minutes, which is still very good. Clearly, users are wanting in-depth information on this topic.

The “What happens to a director of a company in liquidation?” guide, which went live in May, is now the fifth most clicked page on the site. when filtered on GSC by the term “liquidation”.

Overall, we’re extremely pleased with the results we generated, and so are Insolvency Experts — the company liquidation department is now inundated with queries and they are rushed off their feet!

source https://moz.com/blog/increase-client-leads-with-topic-clusters