Since inception in 2015, the Search Engine Land Awards has recognized exceptional marketers on an annual basis — showcasing their oustanding work, providing well-earned exposure in coverage and interviews, and bestowing upon them the highest honor in search.

But the road between deciding to begin an application and winning the award can be a long one. Although this year’s submission process has been significantly streamlined — it’s never been faster or easier to apply to the Search Engine Land Awards — there’s still a story that has to be told. And while the way in which you tell that story is entirely up to you, we thought we’d look back on some advice from past judges about what really wows them, what they would love to see more of, and what areas are best avoided...

Keep reading for 17 tips for creating an award-worthy submission:

What impresses the judges most:

1. “What impresses me is when people have clearly aligned the tools and features they’re using to the goals they want to achieve. It sounds simple, but the entries that are goal-oriented rather than focused on tactics are always strongest.” – Ginny Marvin
2. “When entries have a new take on a situation or feature and talk about into how their strategy is different from the norm, and demonstrate why is their strategy or tactics are award-worthy.” – Brad Geddes
3. “When submissions are succinct but concrete in their campaign summaries, show examples (i.e., ad creative where relevant) and use straight-forward English rather than marketing speak.” – Greg Sterling
4. “When applicants are able to go beyond percentages of increases and show tangible results of how the campaign directly impacted the bottom line of the business. Also, it helps to put results into perspective — so instead of simply saying: ‘Before the campaign, the client was only bringing in this # of leads, clicks, etc — but the campaign raised that number to XXX’ offer an example of how the campaign impacted the business overall and not just the analytics. – Amy Gesenhues
5. “When entrants share a lot of technical data around their case studies.” – Barry Schwartz
6. “When entries prove their point with stats, graphs, and especially screenshots of GA/PPC Engine/ other paid search tech providers. Too many just say, ‘we increased business [some huge number]’ with no way to back it up.” – Brad Geddes
7. “It really impresses me when entrants show how they retooled, revitalized [a campaign] or did something extraordinary to achieve extraordinary results. Or, how they outfoxed a competitor in a clever way – anything that shows how extraordinary results came from really extraordinary work.” – Matt Van Wagner

What judges want to see more of:

1. “I love to see orchestration — when teams use tools, tactics and features in interesting ways to solve problems and execute on a strategy.” – Ginny Marvin
2. “Images from the campaign and data illustrating concrete outcomes. Calling out what was innovative or especially significant or effective about the campaign.” – Greg Sterling
3. “Stories around how the campaign was unique from other campaigns the agency and/or client had implemented in the past and the tools used to implement the campaign. Also, did you learn anything from the campaign that you’ve been able to introduce to other campaigns/clients. Were there any unexpected benefits that played out during the course of the campaign?” – Amy Gesenhues
4. “I’d love to see more data from our entrants that pinpoint successes or failures in their case studies.” – Barry Schwartz
5. “Entries that show the challenges they had to overcome that are outside of the norm (the scrappy startup against goliath, goliath showing it can innovate still against the scrappy startups stealing market share, etc), which might be market conditions, a business change, etc.” – Brad Geddes

What entrants need to stop doing:

1. “It’s great to test new betas, but having access to betas doesn’t make you a great marketer. Be sure your entry doesn’t lean on implementing the newest beta features as evidence of running a successful campaign. That’s not enough.” – Ginny Marvin
2. “Padding their discussions, using marketing jargon or bloated writing. I’d also like to see less self-congratulation.” – Greg Sterling
3. “Using language like world-class, best-in-class, etc. to define your campaign. Talk specific numbers and results. Using flowery language to build-up the campaign takes away from actual/quantifiable results. (In other words, let the numbers speak for themselves.)” – Amy Gesenhues
4. “Not differentiating on strategy or tactics. While it’s important that we see ‘best or standard practices’ are in place in an account, we are also looking for a detailed explanation of strategy that truly differentiates the work from others… For example, an account testing new ad extensions / formats or a landing page that breaks convention but delivers impressive conversion data.” – Brad Geddes
5. “Claiming increases of 200% when you really mean 100%. A 100% increase means you doubled your number. Going from $100 to $137 is not a 137% increase. It is a 37% increase. I’d like it that when you say ROAS, you show the formula you used to calculate it. A 1000% increase is almost always ignored as a metric. It is the opposite of impressive – it is suspicious. It is most likely you were doing very little before and now you are doing a little more than nothing.” – Matt Van Wagner

The final deadline for the 2021 Search Engine Land Awards is September 3, 2021 at 11:59 pm PST. Review the categories for 2021 and begin your application here. 

The post How to craft a winning Search Engine Land Awards entry: Past judges share their advice appeared first on Search Engine Land.

In her hit session at today’s SMX Convert, Amy Bishop, Owner and Marketing Consultant and Cultivative, schooled us on multi-channel targeting tactics to turn prospects into paying customers. Her three-step strategy includes ways to better understand your audience, how to determine their varying paths to purchase, and tips to ensure that you’re targeting them at every stage along that path.

Knowing your target audience

Just like on the SEO side, it’s critical to have your personas handy for this exercise. If you don’t have a set group of personas, Bishop included a few questions to ask yourself about your potential target audience (plus some handy sheets for B2B and B2C):

She says the best way to dig into personas is to involve other client-facing teams, as well. This includes getting with customer support, sales, customer success, and more to answer these questions about your target audience.

• What is your target audience solving for?
• Where do they get their information?
• What characteristics make them a good prospect?
• What are indicators that they’re in-market?
• What influences them?

Along with asking these key questions, Bishop also recommends using the data you already have at your fingertips. “If you have a Facebook account, even if you’re not running ads, you have a wealth of information in Facebook audience insights,” she said. It’ll take some sorting through initially, but Bishop recommends identifying top purchaser demographics and zeroing in from there. After that, you can further segment by layering interests and other demographics and then identify specific interests to target. From there, you can monitor performance to flesh out and validate your personas.

Other sources of persona data that Bishop uses include the following:

• Google Ads audience insights,
• Google Analytics demographics insights, and
• Google Analytics conversion data.

Designing your campaigns to support the funnel

Catering to your prospects means supporting their journey toward that final conversion (whatever conversion is for your organization — it isn’t always a purchase!). “A common question that I get,” said Bishop “is which channels belong where [in the funnel]. I would really caution against this line of thinking because most channels have different ways that you can reach prospects. It doesn’t have to be ‘YouTube at the top, then display, and then search.’ You can make any channel work for you depending on who your prospects are and which channels they use and which targeting options are available across all channels.”

Instead, she recommends focusing on targeting options at each stage of the funnel:

In the first stage, work on targeting options that go for potential customers who don’t know all their options yet. After that, seek options that allow you to capture prospects seeking solutions and to re-engage those who have engaged in the past. Finally, at the bottom of the funnel, we want to target options to convert hot traffic to leads or sales.

Bishop maps this out in a spreadsheet asking these questions:

• What stage of the journey is the prospect in?
• What information do they need at that stage to feel comfortable moving to the next stage?
• What action or resource do we have available that is going to meet that information need that they have?
• How are we tracking it and creating an audience off of it?

In order to acquire this data to answer these questions, Bishop recommends looking into the data you DO have to complete this spreadsheet:

• First party data can tell you paths and interactions
• Client-facing resources can give you information on objections and questions
• Publicly available data can serve as market research
• Your market can give you info through customer surveys

Considerations for improving your campaign performance

If you’ve taken all the steps above and in Amy Bishop’s SMX Convert presentation and are still having some hiccups, here are some common mistakes she’s noticed in campaigns before.

Lack of data

“As marketers, we love to have control, so we end up making hyper-specific audience. But what happens is that we over-segment them and, even if [these small audiences have] brought conversions in the past, sometimes CPL and CPA can be pretty volatile,” said Bishop. With automation becoming more of a factor in PPC every day, platforms thrive on data. removing some of the segmentation (device, platform, etc.) can help create a larger audience. This can help give your bidding strategy a boost.

Not optimizing to a higher funnel conversion

“Even if you’re in the bottom of the funnel you can optimize to a higher in the funnel conversion,” she recommends. One of Bishop’s clients was struggling to get out of learning mode, so they tried optimizing to Add to Cart. They saw huge increases in ATC, a 91% increase in purchases, and a 155% increase in purchase value. These are all strategies worth testing for your campaigns if it makes sense.

Not testing better qualifying audiences and look-alikes

“Having any first-party data is good,” said Bishop. “That’ll only become more important as time goes on. Even better than that is putting some qualifications around it.” Analyze the behaviors of SQLs and work to find more of those by feeding those data values back into platforms.

The keys to improving your targeting are threefold, Bishop told us at SMX Convert. Really get to know your audience beyond surface persona data. Work to understand their path to purchase. And, finally, designs your campaigns around that path to purchase.

Want to see the whole session? Sign up to watch the entire SMX Convert learning journey on-demand.

The post Three targeting tactics that power every stage of the funnel appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Search Engine Land’s daily brief features daily insights, news, tips, and essential bits of wisdom for today’s search marketer. If you would like to read this before the rest of the internet does, sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox daily.

Good morning, Marketers, all the traffic and rankings aren’t worth a thing if they don’t help you reach those business goals.

That’s the bottom line and that’s what we’re focusing on today at SMX Convert, our single-day learning journey that dives into organic and paid search conversion optimization. Barry Schwartz and I will be moderating the organic side, where the day begins with learning how to identify top-converting queries at every stage of the customer journey, then finding out how your content marketing can be leveraged to drive the funnel as well as ways to boost visibility and conversions via your navigation and CTAs. And, we’ll cap it all off with testing your strategy for continued improvement.

On the PPC side, moderated by our own Director of Search Content Carolyn Lyden and Anu Adegbola of MindSwan, you’ll start with how to create copy that converts. Then you’ll hear about targeting tactics to help you make the most out of those new ad copy skills you just picked up. And lastly, we’ll focus on improving landing page conversions using both qualitative and quantitative data.

There’s even more value to be had if you plan on attending the community meetups, site clinics and keynotes — I’m particularly looking forward to Michael Aargard’s talk on “The psychology of disappointment: How it works, why it hurts, and why it’s so bad for conversion.” You can check out everything SMX Convert has to offer over at the agenda page. We hope to see you there!

George Nguyen
Editor

Google’s tool to report indexing bugs is now available in the U.S.

That’s not an actual button in the image above — it’s what the button to access Google’s indexing bug reporting tool looks like, and you can locate the real deal at the bottom of the URL inspection help document and indexing coverage report document.

The tool, which was announced as a pilot program back in April, enables SEOs and site owners to report an indexing issue directly to Google. It is designed for those who need further support with indexing issues outside of the Google community forums and support documentation.

When it was first announced, the company said it would be “fully available to all in the U.S. within a week or less.” Nearly four months later (certainly better late than never), it’s now accessible to all signed-in Search Console users in the U.S. Don’t forget to bookmark it and use it when you need to escalate an issue.

Read more here.

Brett Bodofsky chats with Barry Schwartz about third-party PPC integrations

In the second part of his interview, Brett Bodofsky, senior paid media specialist at Elumynt, discussed some common themes among third-party PPC integrations and shared some guidance for when it comes time to pick one out.

In addition to evaluating the capabilities of the platform and the build vs. buy value, Bodofsky’s number-one piece of advice was to look for a company with a great support team: “When you’re starting with a brand new integration, you may have never used it before and you’re going to want a team to back you and help you get integrated with it,” he said, “Can you get a hold of somebody on the phone? If not, do you really want to consider them? What happens when you have a question?”

In the latter half of the conversation, Bodofsky continues to discuss third-party integrations but with respect to how they can be used to get back more control over your campaigns by layering automation onto an ECPC manual bidding strategy.

Watch the video here.

Consumer sentiment tumbles to 70.2, the lowest reading since 2011

Inflation and surging COVID cases have taken a toll on consumer sentiment, as measured by the University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment Index, which is informed by 500 monthly telephone interviews of people across the U.S. Since just last month, the metric has fallen by 11 points, bringing it to its lowest point since December 2011.

“Consumers have correctly reasoned that the economy’s performance will be diminished over the next several months, but the extraordinary surge in negative economic assessments also reflects an emotional response, mainly from dashed hopes that the pandemic would soon end,” Richard Curtin, director of the survey, said in the report.

When it rains, it pours: “Only 36% of respondents expect a decline in the jobless rate, down from 52% the prior month, despite record job openings,” Jordan Yadoo wrote for Bloomberg,
“Consumers also became decidedly downbeat about their income prospects. The gauge of expected personal finances fell to a seven-year low.”

Why we care. The initial vaccine rollout, combined with various stimulus initiatives, gave consumers a reason to feel optimistic and behave accordingly (read: spend more freely). That optimism seems to have peaked in April (when consumer sentiment hit a 2021 high of 88.3) and now that vaccination rates have declined and initial worries about the Delta variant have largely become a reality, people and businesses are starting to hedge their bets. This may be a sign that consumers are tightening their spending to prepare for another economic downturn, and businesses may be doing the same with their budgets, which might also affect employment rates. However, I’d like to point out Curtin’s quote, which posits that these assessments reflect “an emotional response” and “dashed hopes” — maybe it’ll be better than we expect.

It looks like B2B influencer marketing on TikTok may become a thing

The domestic B2B digital ad market grew 32.5% in 2020 and is forecasted to grow 24.9% this year to nearly $11 billion in spending, according to a July 2021 report by eMarketer. Some of that growth may be going towards influencer marketing, and for good reason — that’s the takeaway from Erika Wheless’ article for Ad Age.

“The more we test platforms like TikTok, the more we are finding good fits,” Jenni Buchbinder, director of strategic communications at QuickBooks, is quoted as saying, “These influencers are small business owners themselves, so they can speak about our product from personal experience.”

Although QuickBooks also contracts influencers on other social media platforms, it’s found more value on YouTube and TikTok because those platforms are video-first. While the company has partnered with numerous small business micro-influencers, this isn’t a throwaway campaign — it even features baseball player Alex Rodriguez.

Naturally, there are key distinctions between B2B and B2C marketing to be aware if you’re mulling over whether TikTok is right for your brand:

• There are usually longer buying cycles in B2B, and they tend to be more logical purchases (rather than emotional).
• An influencer with a large following may not be necessary. Instead, businesses should look for an influencer that is more impactful and resonates with the intended audience.
• B2B influencers usually work full-time at major businesses, which means they may not be able to accept traditional compensation.

If you’re considering dipping your toes into B2B marketing on TikTok, it’s also good to explore hashtags to see how your (or a competing) product is being used, kind of like a live focus group. And, if you’re looking for ideas, search around for user-generated content that’s already highlighting your product and build from there.

The post Traffic and rankings don’t mean a thing unless they help you convert; Tuesday’s daily brief appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google’s SERP is a very competitive environment. For this reason, getting competitive intelligence on its players is a crucial process that helps understand how the search giant assesses various website search campaign activities.

The problem is that when you look at a competitor’s current data, you don’t see the full picture. In other words, you have no way of knowing what they did in the past to get to where they are now. That is until you reverse engineer the process. This is where historical data comes to the rescue. 

This article focuses on how to analyze competitors through the retrospective analysis of their keyword and domain data. Plus, we look into why historical data is important to analyze and why you should prioritize SEO tools that gather such information. 

Note that all of the examples herein are based on analytical, historical data provided by SE Ranking.

1. What competitor insights can you get with historical data?

Whenever you start working with a new client or need to analyze a potential client to prepare a pitch, you need to have access to as much data as possible. 

Besides closely studying their current data on traffic, backlinks, keywords, and rankings, you can uncover a vast pool of data for previous periods by digging into their historical data.

Historical data is exactly what can show you the logic behind a domain’s previous setup. As in, what the domain owners were doing before and what results this led to.

Say you’re analyzing your client’s niche. Once you put together a list of all of your client’s top and direct search competitors, you can perform a comprehensive retrospective analysis of each digital rival to see what makes them tick and find out how they got to where they are today. 

What historical data points should you pay attention to?

Start by analyzing last year’s data on each shortlisted competitor with regard to traffic, backlinks, keywords, and their rankings, and then move up in time month-by-month to identify positive or negative trends.

Please note that whenever you look at a specific data point, you need to analyze it not only in comparison with your client’s site but also see how it correlates with other data points––as they are all interconnected.

• Organic and paid traffic. When analyzing traffic, pay attention to how quickly or slowly a domain’s traffic volume increases each month leading up to real-time data.
• Backlinks and referring domains. During the analysis of the growth dynamics of backlinks and referring domains, it helps to study the Domain Trust of referring domains, their dofollow/nofollow status, as well as the anchor text.
• Keywords. In terms of keywords, pay close attention to their overall number and whether that number went up or down with each month.
• Keyword rankings. Lastly, analyze the keyword rankings dynamics. More specifically, look at how many keywords were ranking among the top 3, 10, 30, 50, 100, and beyond each month.

You can actually look at more data points than the ones outlined here, but we are going to limit the analysis to the most important ones.

Analyzing the data

Once we collect information on these data points and know what their value was each month, we’re able to reveal a lot of actionable insights. Focus on domains that are showing steady growth to uncover opportunities, and analyze less successful ones to avoid repeating their mistakes.

The big question here that you want to get an answer to is this: Which strategy yielded the best results with minimum investments?

With the power of this data, you can look at each domain and find out if, for example, the site was able to drive more traffic by getting links from referring domains with a high Domain Trust score, or if the total amount of target keywords helped the site increase the number of organic visitors.

By gradually moving back in time, you can discover the small steps that were taken by a domain along the way and use that data to improve your clients’ future strategies. Moreover, you can understand if a search engine update caused the SERP players to move around or whether the players’ strategies are, in fact, responsible for their success or failure.

Without access to such historical data, you can waste valuable time and resources doing the guesswork and experimentation yourself. But learning from other people’s mistakes can fast-track your clients’ success.

Now that we’ve covered the value you can get from analyzing historical data on domains, let’s take a look at the benefits of using historical data when working with client websites.

2. Boosting client visibility through historical domain data

Historical data on website traffic and rankings can help figure out what advantages and drawbacks to expect from investing in organic and paid search engine optimization efforts. 

On top of that, by analyzing your clients’ previous achievements along with the work that’s been carried out on their sites and comparing it to their competitors, you will be able to make market predictions with greater accuracy.

In SE Ranking’s Competitive Research tool, you can get plenty of SEO insights on the past, going back to February 2020. Naturally, every month the tools get updated with a set of data for the previous month.  

Let’s dive into the tool to see some of the ways SEOs and marketers can take advantage of historical data on domain traffic and rankings.

Have the data to make a great first impression with clients

A big part of working with clients has to do with getting pitches ready, which ideally must convince them to do business with you. But there is one problem that makes it difficult to obtain enough data to have a clear picture of the client’s market share: you can’t access any client accounts to dig into their data. To boot, you can’t access their competitors’ accounts either, but that’s always the case.

To solve this problem, SEO experts leverage paid solutions like SE Ranking’s Competitive Research to get market and SEO data that gives them the necessary historical insights. Through such tools, experts are able to paint a good picture of the journeys client websites went through, as well as their competitors. This ultimately allows agencies to put forward a strategic plan that is a lot more insightful and actionable.

Get more data when gathering competitive intelligence

Having an understanding of how quickly client competitors advance in SERPs and climb the rankings ladder can shed light on the search environment for digital experts. Once agencies have that historical rankings and traffic data on client competition, they are free to compare how their clients and their clients’ digital rivals move forward in search and understand the pace at which client websites need to go in order to reach the set goals.

So, besides using such tools to get historical data on client websites, you are encouraged to dig into the competition as well to gain a competitive edge on the market.

Access historical insights from day one

The vast majority of SEO solutions on the market don’t give you the opportunity to import relevant performance data from other SEO solutions seamlessly. This means that once you sign up for a new SEO tool, you don’t have any way of going back in time through search engine results pages. In most cases, such tools only provide data starting from the date you add the website to the tool as a project and specify which keywords you want to target.

Since SEO experts and digital marketers can’t afford to lose such valuable historical data at the risk of drawing the wrong SEO conclusions, they tend to strongly avoid switching their software solutions.

With SE Ranking’s Competitive Research tool, you can get your hands on practically the same historical data on traffic and rankings that you have in your current tool. Sure, it’s not the ideal solution, but it does allow us to see how current results compare to past achievements, regardless of whether or not you were keeping track of a website’s search performance.

Over to you

Historical organic and paid data from Google on domains is practically priceless to SEOs and digital marketers. It’s like going on a treasure hunt guided by a map, which in this case is represented by historical data. Obviously, X doesn’t mark the spot here, but it sure does help stay on the right track towards success. 

Through the power of this data, experts working with clients can get an understanding of past progress, strategy evolution, competitor movement to ultimately put forward a very well-informed SEM and SEO strategy. The best part is that you won’t have to play catch-up if you do decide to switch to a new SEO software solution like SE Ranking—all the data is there as soon as you sign up.

Time travel has already been invented, but at the moment, it only allows us to travel through Google’s SERPs.

Boost your SEO Strategy with Historical Data

The post Retrospective competitor analysis: Reinforcing SEO strategies with historical data appeared first on Search Engine Land.

There are many ways to use social and media data to inform your marketing decisions. But the most successful brands depend on data-driven insights to shed light on their overall brand health, analyze trends, anticipate consumer behavior and monitor the competition to ultimately grow their revenue.

Join experts from Netbase Quid, who unveil how brands like Tesla, Lululemon and Nike found the secret of social and media data success by applying these insights to their business strategy and programs for maximum impact.

Register today for “5 Ways to Maximize Campaign ROI Through Social and Media Insights,“ presented by Netbase Quid.

The post 5 ways to maximize campaign ROI through social and media data appeared first on Search Engine Land.

If you’re searching for actionable tactics to drive more paid and organic conversions you can’t afford to miss SMX Convert — happening online tomorrow, August 17, from 11:00am – 5:30pm ET.

At just $149, your All Access packs a tremendous amount of value:

• Grow your knowledge step-by-step with a brand-new two-track program from the Search Engine Land experts.
• Optimize user experiences, craft compelling copy, and boost landing page performance with actionable tactics you can implement immediately.
• Prepare for upcoming privacy changes with insights from Google’s Group Product Manager for Trust and Privacy and more special guest speakers.
• Discuss common CRO challenges and creative solutions with like-minded attendees during community meetups.
• Soak up inspiration from expert-led audits of peer-submitted assets during live clinics.
• Get your specific questions answered during Overtime, live Q&A with all of the SMX Convert speakers.

Here’s another way to look at it…

• Because all sessions are available live and on-demand, you’ll get 12 hours of SEO and PPC conversion optimization tactics. That’s just $12 per hour of expert-led training!
• You’ll attend presentations from 21 of the world’s leading search and conversion optimization experts. That’s just $7 per expert. (You’d spend more buying each a cup of coffee!)
• Attend a track in its entirety to earn a personalized “Certificate of Completion”, a wonderful way to demonstrate your worth when asking for a promotion or a salary bump.
• Hearing what industry experts are up to will help validate your ongoing initiatives and confirm you and your team are on the right track. That kind of peace of mind is priceless.

What are you waiting for? Secure your $149 All Access pass now and join us tomorrow at 11:00am ET.

The post SMX Convert is tomorrow… don’t miss out! appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Google’s reporting tool for indexing bugs is now available to all signed-in Search Console users in the U.S., the company announced on Monday. The tool, which was first announced as a pilot program back in April, can be accessed at the bottom of the URL inspection help document and indexing coverage report document.

Intended use. The tool enables SEOs and site owners to report an indexing issue directly to Google. It is designed for those who need further support with indexing issues outside of the Google community forums and support documentation.

How to report indexing issues. Below is a screenshot of the form.

As the form is filled out, follow-up questions are generated so that the SEO or site owner can add more details about the issue. “We may follow-up for more information if we confirm an actual indexing bug,” Google says on the form instructions, “We will not respond to other kinds of issues.”

Why we care. Indexing issues in Google Search are fairly common. In fact, we’ve reported numerous confirmed indexing issues with Google over the years. Now that this tool is out of the pilot program, SEOs and site owners in the U.S. have a way to escalate these indexing issues, which should help them get closer to resolving them.

The post Google’s tool to report indexing bugs is now available in the U.S. appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Content has been king for a while now, but just because you wrote something doesn’t mean it’ll drive qualified traffic to your site. In fact, it doesn’t even guarantee that your content will show up in search results: 90% of content on the web gets no traffic from Google, according to 2020 data from Tim Soulo of Ahrefs.

The key to effective content is planning. I’m sure there are some people who just type out bangers from their stream of consciousness, but those writers are definitely few and far between. The rest of us rely on planning and thoughtful execution. So how do you plan SEO content that actually ranks?

Aja Frost, head of English SEO at HubSpot, went over just that at SMX Create this year. One of the highest-rated sessions at the event, her top suggestions are covered here to help you get your content higher in search engine results.

How to identify measureable metrics for your content goals

Frost recommends picturing a chart like the one below and asking, “What do I want to see on the Y-axis?”

Step 1. “Figure out what would make your boss [or] your client over the moon on the Y-axis,” she said. It’s likely not traffic, but something more like leads, appointments, purchases—which should be your ultimate goal. The traffic goals will lead us to those end targets. “This is why we start with demand goals and back those into our traffic goals by [dividing] by your historical or expected conversion rates.”

demand goals ÷ historical (expected) conversion rates = traffic goals

Note: The formula above has been adjusted to correct for a typo in the presentation slides.

At this point you may be like, that’s great but I have no idea what my expected conversion rates are. Here’s how to figure it out: “Take your demand actuals from the last 12 to 24 months… and then compare them to your traffic actuals from the same time period,” Frost said. “Sum up the demand metric of your choice divided by your organic traffic, and there you go. You’ve got your CVR.”

If you don’t have this data, you’ll likely have to get creative and figure out a comparable conversion rate. For example, if you’re creating a new product or service, you can use comparable CVRs from other assets you’ve been working on (say a blog or an online community, etc.).

Step 2. Next, figure out the demand you want to drive in the next 12 months and divide those by your historical or expected CVR. That gives you traffic goals.

Once you have these goals, you should also calculate where you’d land if you did absolutely nothing. “Unless you have zero content right now, your traffic is going to grow regardless of what you do,” advised Frost. “So by figuring out where you’d land if you did nothing, and the gap between that and what you need to grow, you can figure out how much additional traffic and conversions you need to generate.”

Step 3. After that, you need to determine how much monthly search volume you have to target to make up the difference between your projections and how your content would grow if you did nothing. Frost recommends a CTR curve analysis and creating estimates by SERP positions 1-3, 4-6, 7-9 and 10th position on the first page of search results. “You can multiply your weighted CVR by the traffic you need to generate to find your MSV [monthly search volume] estimates by positions,” said Frost.

How to perform keyword research based on personas

First, create or refine your personas. “When I talk to advanced SEOs, this is often a step they skip,” said Frost. But she implores SEOs of all skills levels not to forego this step. “The more deeply you understand your personas and the more detailed your insights, the more comprehensive and accurate your list of seed keywords will be.” All of your target keywords in the research process stem from these personas.

Some of the basic persona questions you need to answer include what their industry is, how big their department within their company is and what tools they need to do their jobs. So, if you find out that your target persona is in the hospitality industry with a team of two people and a company of 24 and that they typically use tools for hotel reservations and accounting, you’ll know that “hotel management software” is a seed keyword.

From there, develop your list of seed keywords and expand it out to related short-tail keywords and down to long-tail keywords. Along with the standard tools (Ahrefs, Moz, Semrush), Frost also recommends a few other keyword research tools that SEOs may not know about. Using different tools also means that you’ll get insights that other SEOs researching this space may not have. Her recommended tools include Keyword Keg, Bing’s keyword research tool and seedkeyword, which lets you ask your target audience how they’d search for a particular topic.

After that, clean the list up based on what you know about each persona and determine what’s relevant and what may not be worth your time. “Filter, categorize, and group your keywords together so you can efficiently create content,” recommended Frost.

Once you’ve got your list of seed keywords, upload them into the tool of your choice and download search suggestions.

Next, Frost categorizes queries by intent: informational, transactional, and navigational. “Informational queries contain modifiers like ‘who, what, where, when, why,’ transactional queries contain questions related to price, cost, and promotion, and navigational queries are specific to the brand or product you’re doing research for,” advised Frost.

Build an editorial (or content) calendar

Find the editorial calendar tool that works best for you and that you’ll actually use — whether it’s Trello, Asana, Monday, or just plain Google Sheets. From there, Frost recommends adding the following to your content calendaring tool of choice:

• The basics: Like target keyword, URL recommendations, headers and more.
• Internal linking opportunities: Products, offers or signup pages.
• Level of effort: The average of keyword difficulty of target keyword(s) multiplied by competitor content quality score.
• Expected traffic: Multiply search volume by the CTR of your expected position.
• Competitive advantage: Something that will differentiate your content (original data, a strong point of view, etc.).

You can also group keywords by theme (as opposed to persona) and sum up how much search volume you’re targeting for each theme. Finally, you get to writing your next-level content based on these goals and data points.

Learn more from SMX Create on demand

This is just a taste of what’s available on-demand from the super popular SMX Create event. Check out Aja Frost’s full presentation and the rest of the SEO content creation journey including…

• Creating compelling content for SEO with Alli Berry from The Motley Fool,
• Optimizing your content for increased findability with Niki Mosier from AgentSync and
• Alternative content strategies to increase organic traffic and tracking success in 2021 with Maria Amelie White from Floristpro and John Shehata of Conde Nast.

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