Staying relevant in an increasingly crowded digital world requires you to focus on and drive the metrics that matter most… while staying a step (or two) ahead of your competitors. Smart marketers know that achieving this level of success requires training with trusted experts who are eager to share what it takes to win.
Join 50+ of the world’s most respected search marketing minds at SMX Advanced – online June 14-15 – to explore the latest, most sophisticated SEO and PPC topics, trends, and tactics… all without leaving your desk, and all for free.
Your free All Access pass unlocks the entire program, featuring 40 tactic-rich sessions, two empowering keynotes featuring PPC pro Brad Geddes and SEO expert Jaimie Clark, invaluable live Q&A during Overtime, morning “Coffee Talk” networking, engaging afternoon breakout discussions, and more.
The entire program is available for you to explore live or at any time that fits your schedule. No plane ticket. No expense report. No kidding.
Join the ranks of more than 150,000 search marketers who have trusted SMX to deliver actionable tactics and expert insights that drive measurable results. Secure your free SMX Advanced pass now!
Successful search marketing requires thoughtful coordination between diverse teams responsible for SEO, PPC, content, data, and beyond. One key to nurturing that coordination is a shared training experience that gets teams on the same page, speaking the same language, and working towards a shared vision of success.
Sign your team up for their choice of SMX Master Class – happening live online March 8-9 – to sharpen skills, broaden horizons, and learn actionable tactics that drive measurable results… and save up to 20% off while you’re at it!
With seven unique, expert-led courses to choose from, the learning combinations are endless. Attend the same class to unify and bond – or attend different classes to dive deep into respective disciplines and report back with armloads of insights and next steps.
Each Master Class is $249 per person – but the bigger your team, the bigger your savings:
Groups of 3-5 save 10%
Groups of 6-11 save 15%
Groups of 12 or more save 20%
No matter your setup or schedule, attending as a team is a win-win:
Still working from home? Training together (albeit virtually) with your colleagues will foster a feeling of camaraderie that’s essential to high-performing teams, especially remote ones.
Back at the office? Embark on an invaluable shared learning experience that will fuel creative brainstorms and collaborative projects for months to come.
Can’t attend live? All Master Classes will be recorded and available for on-demand replay until May 9 – giving you plenty of time to watch and rewatch for deeper learning.
Don’t miss this unique opportunity to transform your team into a veritable search marketing Swiss Army knife. Email registration@thirddoormedia to receive your exclusive group discount code and get your team signed up today.
The days of title tag tweaks, meta keywords, and SERPs of ten blue links are long gone. SEO is one of the fastest-evolving aspects of the digital realm… and gaining visibility (not to mention quality traffic) is more complex and challenging than ever before.
If you want to stay ahead of the competition and at the top of the SERPs, it’s time to level up your SEO skills: Attend your choice of SMX Master Class – online March 8-9 – to take the first step on that critical journey.
This spring, we’re offering seven exclusive Master Classes, four of which are designed specifically for SEOs. (Not focused on SEO? Check out the complete Master Class lineup, featuring deep dives on Google Ads, Google Analytics 4, and more.)
Advanced SEO training with Bruce Clay is perfect for seasoned SEO professionals craving next-level knowledge, tactics, and best practices that boost visibility, traffic, and revenue.
Advanced technical SEO training with Eric Enge dives head-first into sophisticated, technical SEO topics and tactics, including Schema, page experience, Core Web Vitals, and more.
SEO-friendly content marketing training with Michael Brenner focuses on the crucial role content plays in SEO, and how you can effectively leverage it to support a cohesive site-wide strategy.
SEO for developers training with Detlef Johnson explores how SEOs can implement technical tactics to boost visibility… and how developers can take a more SEO-friendly approach to coding.
At just $199 each, the SMX Master Classes pack a ton of value: Six focused hours of live, expert-led training that deliver actionable tactics you can implement immediately to drive measurable results – and intimate Q&A opportunities with industry legends that address your specific queries and curiosities. Plus, 100% virtual means you can tune in from anywhere – no plane ticket, hotel reservation, or travel risks required.
We’re elated to announce the winners of the 2021 Search Engine Land Award for Advancing Diversity and Inclusion in Search Marketing. This year we’ve chosen an individual and an organization as winners for exemplifying the very best in inclusion in the search community.
Rejoice Ojaiku: Individual
Rejoice Ojaiku received multiple nominations for her work in founding B-Digital, “a digital marketing platform aimed at showcasing and inspiring Black talent.” Her nominators lauded Rejoice for working tirelessly to help Black marketers break into SEO, find jobs, and be a part of the B-Digital community:
“Rejoice is a brilliant SEO who has spent her time on creating BDigital… She is kind, helpful, talented and pioneering, and has shown passion and determination in bringing Black people towards the front in SEO.”
“Reji is continually working towards helping the digital marketing industry recognise that there is a wealth of Black talent out there. Her tireless work in this area makes her a deserved nominee for this award.”
“She’s the #1 supporter of promoting POC and women SEOs. She stands up for what she believes in. She’s also incredibly intelligent when it comes to keyword clusters and teaches us something new in the industry.”
Our guest judge and last year’s Search Engine Land Award for Advancing Diversity and Inclusion winner Areej AbuAli said, “Rejoice is so deserving of this award, the impact she’s had on the industry over the past year is massive. The work she’s doing with B-DigitalUK is truly inspiring and her passion and perseverance in spreading her message on equality and inclusion is admirable. Looking forward to seeing all the brilliant initiatives coming from her community. Keep doing YOU, Rejoice, and a huge congratulations!”
hasOptimization: Organization
hasOptimization is a small marketing agency based in New Hampshire. Their marketing work is complemented by their work for both inclusion and diversity across many areas of focus.
Not only are they helping small businesses but are working hard in “attempting to advance accessibility, prioritizing minority-owned businesses, their LGBTQ+ leadership, as well as consistently employing a range of effective neurodiverse staff members who may or may not have chronic conditions. hasOptimization is not a large business, but is growing over time. I have seen a consistent line of communication regarding a range of broad and diverse ideas from staff members, many of which include new ways to make the web more accepting and accessible to others from all walks of life,” said their nominator.
“I have so much respect for the work that hasOptimization are doing. They are setting the standard for what an agency should focus on when it comes to web inclusion and accessibility. With a brilliant team and a diverse clientele, their mission on making the web a better place can be seen through the services they provide and the clients they serve. Congratulations team, well deserved recognition!” added AbuAli.
Congratulations to this year’s very deserved winners!
This year’s class of winners for Search Marketer of the Year demonstrates that leadership, community, empathy, and giving back are keys to being a person of excellence in our industry.
Your Search Marketers of the Year for 2020 are:
Frederick Vallaeys, CEO at Optmyzr
Kristen Seto, SEO Manager at Trusted Media Brands, Inc.
Sean Kaenic, VP or Strategic Growth and Marketing at Quattro
Danita Smith, SEO Program Lead, North America and Senior Web Specialist at Scheider Electric
The continuation of the pandemic forced marketers to get creative and stretch beyond their day-to-day to help brands and clients reach their target audiences in new ways. Not only have these marketers exceeded expectations in every way, but they’ve focused on giving back to their companies, departments, and communities.
“Frederick Vallaeys is an iconic search marketer and industry influencer. He helped define the paid search industry starting with his groundbreaking work as Google’s first AdWords Evangelist and later morphing to a pioneer in PPC management software as Co-Founding CEO of Optmyzr. A search marketer to the core of his soul, Fred has been in the game since its inception and is now driven to help ALL paid search pros break barriers and reach/exceed their potential,” said Joe Thornton of Aimclear, who nominated Vallaeys.
That sentiment can be said for all our winners this year. Pioneering the way for their organizations, the teams they lead, and the community at large. Congrats to the winners, thank you to all who entered, and thanks to our sponsor, DeepCrawl, for its support of this year’s awards!
The competition was fierce for the 2021 Search Engine Land Awards. The pandemic caused lockdowns and shutdowns, which affected many businesses’ main income streams. Not only that but it forced many consumers almost completely online. As such agencies, in-house marketing teams, and individual marketers had to get creative, think on their toes, and often make a little go a long way.
Amanda Jordan, Director of Local Search at Locomotive
Tess Voecks, Sr. Director of Project Management at Local SEO Guide
Crystal Carter, Sr. Digital Strategist at Optix Solutions
Mordy Oberstein, Head of Communications at Semrush
Niki Mosier, Head of SEO at AgentSync
Daisy Quaker, SEO Content Marketer at Daisy Digital LLC
Chima Mmeje, Content Strategist and SEO Copywriter at Zenith Copy
Miracle Inameti-Archibong, Organic Performance Lead at Moneysupermarket Group
Henry Powderly, Vice President of Content for Third Door Media
On the PPC side:
Anu Adegbola, PPC Consultant at The Marketing Anu
Greg Finn, Partner at Cypress North
Emily Mixon, Director of Digital Acquisition at Fleetcor
Brad Geddes, Co-Founder at Adalysis.
Azeem Ahmad, Digital Marketing Lead at Azeem Digital
Brett Bodofsky, Sr. Paid Media Specialist at Elumynt
Vani Chopra, Director of Media Acquisition at Essence
John Lee, Head of Evagelism at Microsoft
George Nguyen, Editor at Search Engine Land
Without further ado, here are your 2021 Search Engine Land Awards winners:
SEM campaign awards:
Best Overall SEM Initiative – Small Business
Brandastic
Best Overall SEM Initiative – Enterprise
Block & Tam
Best Retail Search Marketing Initiative – SEM
DAC
Best Local Search Marketing Initiative – SEM
DAC
Best B2B Search Marketing Initiative – SEM
GR0
SEO campaign awards:
Best Overall SEO Initiative — Small Business
Inflow
Best Overall SEO Initiative — Enterprise
Primal
Best Retail Seach Marketing Initiative – SEO
Searchbloom
Best Local Search Marketing Initiative – SEO
sitecentre
Best B2B Search Marketing Initiative – SEO
Directive
Team, individual, and overall awards:
Best Integration of Search Into Cross-Channel Marketing
Rocket Agency
Agency of the Year — SEM
Disruptive Advertising
Agency of the Year — SEO
Primal
In-House Team of the Year – SEM
Wiley Education Services
In-House Team of the Year — SEO
DiscoverCars.com
Boutique Agency of the Year – SEO
Flywheel Digital
Boutique Agency of the Year – SEM
Block & Tam
Freelancer of the Year
Marco Lauerwald
Select winners of the Search Engine Land Awards will be invited to an AMA during SMX Next where YOU can ask these SEO and PPC experts your search marketing questions. If you’re interested in attending, choose your ideal pass and register now for Early Bird Pricing (ends October 23).
Congrats to the winners, thank you to all who entered, and thanks to our sponsor, DeepCrawl, for its support of this year’s awards!
Assessing the effectiveness of your content strategy is an integral part of growing your organic visibility as well as furthering your skills as an SEO. Techniques like forecasting can help you estimate the value a new piece of content or site change may generate for your business, but failing to record the real-life performance associated with those changes and comparing them with your forecasts may mean that you’re overlooking takeaways that can be used to improve future initiatives.
At SMX Convert, Alexis Sanders, SEO director at Merkle, shared the tactics that she uses to analyze site strategies for continued improvement. While the techniques mostly pertain to content, they can also be applied to other aspects of a site, like user experience.
Potential roadblocks to experimenting and testing your strategy
Experimentation can help you figure out what works best for your brand and its audience, but only if you’re able to ensure the integrity of your experiments and overcome the challenges associated with them.
High level of effort. Forecasting can require a high level of effort, skill, comfort with analytics and time. You’ll also have to determine a model to work with and formulate an approach that ensures consistency. Fortunately, the effort involved may decrease over time: “You can become better at it, but it takes extra time and it takes time away from the action and so that’s one of the challenges that a lot of people have to face,” Sanders said.
Multiple moving pieces. Large sites also typically have many people working to implement different things across the site. An e-commerce site, for example, may have different teams dedicated to merchandising, inventory, updating pricing and development. “So, extrapolating a driver can be very challenging on a large site, and making sure to have that accurate record of what is actually going on is absolutely critical,” she said.
Time. In order to get an accurate depiction of how your changes are impacting your site or business, it’s crucial to record your findings over time. “How often are you going to be reporting on things? When are you ultimately going to see an effect?” Sanders asked, “One of the solutions that we’ve seen at Merkle is by recording at different times and reporting 15 days, 30 days, 60 days, 90 days after a particular event has occurred and making sure you maintain a record of that.”
Search engines’ reactions. How search engines respond to your content may also present an unexpected challenge: “You may think your content is the best content in the world,” Sanders said, “It may satisfy your users, but search engines, it is their prerogative to determine what is the actual best result … and so there’s a certain level of lack of control that we have over that variable.”
Data infrastructure limitations. “If you’re interested in whether or not users are clicking a specific button or going through a specific path, and you’re not actually recording that information, then you’re not going to be able to report on it,” she said. For those facing these limitations, it’s necessary to set up the appropriate tracking and analytics moving forward so that you can eventually compare data over time.
Backburner burn. With the various action items that SEOs have to tend to on a regular basis, clearing some time in your schedule to report and communicate issues can be difficult. Nevertheless, it’s something that should be prioritized: “If it’s work that you’re doing, if it’s things that can make you more valuable within your organization, it’s something that should be prioritized for both your career and for future SEOs,” Sanders said.
Analyzing the effectiveness of new content
To determine how your audience will perceive your content, “We’re ultimately going to have to rely on is forecasting, to start off with, because that’s going to be our hypothesis,” said Sanders. For this, she recommends relying on historical data, such as case studies and competitor insights, and findings from qualitative tests, which you can conduct on a sample of your target audience.
Case studies. Sanders recommends maintaining a record of your internal case studies and links to relevant articles about case studies for initiatives that you may want to attempt in the future. Accumulating all this information will help you get a better idea of how your proposed content may perform. “Potential KPIs that we’ll be looking at may include revenue, traffic, visibility metrics like impressions, rankings and user engagement metrics,” she added.
Competitive research. Competitors’ rankings, estimated traffic (which may be correlated to rankings) and search volume are going to be the most useful metrics for forecasting. Tools like Semrush, Ahrefs, BrightEdge, Conductor, AWR and Similarweb can provide you with insights on how your competitors are performing. “This can be really useful if you want to do a specific initiative that is sort of similar to what a competitor is doing,” Sanders said, “You can see how they’re currently performing and then guess whether or not you will outperform them in certain areas based on what you’re actually going to be doing and your level of authority within the space.”
Pre-reads. A pre-read is when you ask a small group that represents your target audience to react to a piece of content. You can interview the group members for their opinions or provide them with surveys. Interviews with screen recordings “can be particularly useful if you’re looking at a site in general, or a functionality, but you can also use it for content,” Sanders said, adding, “What you’re looking for is: Do people have strong opinions about things? Do they have a strong affinity towards a piece of content? What is the ease of reading with this piece of content? Is it accessible to people? Those can be really useful for providing initial feedback and refining what you’re actually going to do with this new piece of content.”
Biological reactions. If your content deals with tough topics, observing your sample audience’s biological reactions, such as eye movement patterns and perspiration, can also be helpful for testing your content strategy. Tools like EyeQuant can help you document how users respond to your content.
Forecasting. Clickthrough rate curve estimates can help you predict incremental traffic lift. “We [calculate] that using the search volume multiplied by the clickthrough rate of our forecasted rank subtracted by our current rank,” Sanders said.
Estimated traffic lift = Search Volume x (Forecasted Rank’s CTR – Current Rank’s CTR)
“This can be really useful if you’re trying to show potential for ranking for certain keywords or keyword sets, or if you’re looking at a large group of keywords, you can just say what would be our incremental value if we increase by one ranking on all these keywords,” she added.
Quantifying the search value of content updates
Trends data.Sometimes it makes more sense to update existing content rather than start from scratch. In this scenario, trends data can also be used to predict performance (in addition to the above-mentioned clickthrough rate curve estimates).
To utilize historic trend data to create forecasts, “We would take a certain model — like Facebook Prophet, a machine learning model, whether it’s linear regression, a SARIMA model, a long/short-term memory recursive neural network machine model — and we would use that by feeding it time-series data of what we currently have of any metric (revenue, traffic, impressions, whatever you want to feed it) and that time series would project out into the future,” Sanders said. Those projections can be combined with findings from your internal case studies to give you an idea of how your content will perform.
Split testing. In certain scenarios, such as testing UX changes, split testing can help you find out what works best to facilitate your users and increase conversions. “For SEO, generally, we don’t want to have duplicate content, so if you’re introducing more than one URL, what you’re going to want to do is ensure that the bots are getting the appropriate experience,” she said, adding, “Or just don’t change the URL at all — ultimately, preserving the URL is generally going to be the best course of action.”
If there is the potential for search engine bots to find one of your alternative experience URLs, it’s best to 302 redirect to the main URL or simply exclude the bot if the test is over a short period of time.
In terms of analysis, user engagement metrics can tell you if users are taking the actions you want them to and whether they’re doing so efficiently (compared to the control experience). Tools like Google Analytics can reveal how your new experience compares in terms of bounce rate, time on page and so on.
Launch and learn. This approach is as simple as it sounds — just launch the proposed change and see what happens.
“A lot of times when you launch, you can basically look at any metric that you’re recording,” Sanders said, “Some of the core ones are going to be the user engagement metrics: How are users acting on your site? Are they completing actions that you want them to do, like clicking buttons, completing forms, are they staying on the site appreciably long?”
The KPIs to look at include revenue, conversions, traffic, visit sessions, organic clicks and impressions, ranking information and so on. Social media engagement can also tell you whether your audience is engaging with a piece of content.
Best practices for experimenting and testing your strategy
“The number one tip I have for you is to maintain an accurate record of events,” Sanders said, “Significant updates, good and bad, are absolutely critical to record — it is what allows us to have indifference towards the results and it’s something that also allows us to quantify risk later on.”
Likewise, it’s important to record site updates or anything else that happens on the site that may affect performance. Industry news and seasonality are also factors worth making note of, as well as search industry-related news, like core algorithm updates that may impact rankings.
As you conduct your experiments, the tips above can help you turn your findings into case studies that serve your team and your stakeholders.
As a final piece of advice, Sanders touched on the mindset necessary to conduct experiments that yield trustworthy results: “Be open to qualitative feedback and insights from your core audience members, they may tell you things that you didn’t even think about, which can be really useful for refining a new piece of content or modifying an existing one.”
“Results indifference is absolutely critical to refining your understanding,” she emphasized, “So, make sure you go into it with a lack of caring as to whether or not the content performs but more interest in learning what you can from that.”
Businesses turn to content marketing because it can be an effective method for building brand awareness and guiding customers through their sales funnel. Yet, many have been unable to capitalize on their content marketing initiatives because they haven’t covered all aspects of the customer journey, didn’t keep track of their assets and wasted resources on duplicate content, failed to create unique content or were simply unsuccessful with their outreach efforts.
In her session at SMX Convert, Eve Sangenito, director at Perficient, shared her comprehensive content strategy to engage potential customers at every point in their journey and generate backlinks for greater discoverability and higher rankings.
Understanding the customer and mapping their journey
Your content should exist to serve your brand by serving your audience — that should always be at the center of your planning and execution. “It isn’t so much about what you want to tell your audience; it’s what you understand they want to learn and what’s going to be helpful for them to learn more about your solutions and/or about your industry as a whole,” Sangenito said, adding “Just knowing where they’re coming from is one of the key elements you should be focused on.”
Mapping the journey that a customer typically goes through can also help you build your audience personas while identifying opportunities to answer common questions at each phase of the journey.
“From your business’s standpoint, you want to think about how the customer lifecycle plays into the sales funnel because you’re trying to build relationships with target audiences and target buyers,” Sangenito said.
What audiences typically search for at each stage of the funnel. “We tend to see informational queries when someone is in their awareness phase,” she said, providing the following examples of questions a consumer at the top of the funnel may be asking: “What are the options available to me? What are people saying about those options? How are other people in the market feeling about the information that’s put forth by this organization?”
In the next stage of the funnel, consumers typically seek to educate themselves via how-to articles, studies and influencers. When a potential customer gets to the consideration and evaluation phases, they’re narrowing their options, reading reviews or case studies and comparing prices.
The customer lifecycle continues after the purchase as well. Teaching your customers how to make the most out of your products or services can enrich their experience and providing accessible support via FAQs or videos, for example, will also help to maximize your chances of turning a first-time buyer into a loyal customer.
An example featuring the considerations a homebuyer might have from the start to the end of their journey.
Once you’ve mapped the journey for a particular persona, you should leverage that map to develop pillar and supporting content topics. This “content topic universe” (more on that below), will help you steer clear of irrelevant topics that may end up leaving your audience with more questions rather than guiding them further down the funnel.
Developing your content topic universe
The personas you’ve created can act as the locus of the content topic universe, enabling you to brainstorm themes that are specific to that type of customer.
“What are some of the common questions based on where they are in their life stages?,” Sangenito asked, using prospective home buyers as an example, “Are they buying a home for retirement? Are they buying a home for the first time?” Marketers can create variations of those topics for different personas and branch out to answer follow-up questions that customers are likely to ask.
Cut down on wasted resources by managing your assets. Taking and maintaining an inventory of your existing content helps you understand what assets you already have at your disposal. This can minimize resources wasted on duplicate content by, for example, helping you distinguish what assets can be updated versus what needs to be created from scratch. “Also, knowing what you have allows you to see the gaps and where your editorial calendar can go in the future,” Sangenito said.
Injecting your brand and goals into the content. Brand and market insights can inform how you actually create the content and, consequently, help to shape what that content does for your business: This is where you can insert your brand’s guidelines to ensure a consistent tone across your content marketing. You can also address topical issues in your industry, differentiate your offerings or tailor your content for a specific purpose (like social sharing), for example.
Creating unique, optimized content
Validate your topic. Before you start writing or creating the content, you’ll first need to confirm that the topic is relevant and of interest to your audience. You can validate your topic while conducting keyword research by looking at the search volume associated with the keywords you’d be targeting.
Align with search intent. Understanding intent for your target keywords is also a critical step: “You can look at the SERP and you can start to understand what kinds of content are being surfaced for someone who’s searching for this topic and you can see whether or not that would fit what you’re trying to accomplish,” Sangenito said. This is also an opportunity to do some research on the competition and how they’re performing in the search results: “[If] what’s being featured [in the search results] is all coming from a single set of organizations, there might be an opportunity to diversify by having your organization produce content on that [topic],” she added.
Differentiating your content. Emulating the top-performing search result is a pitfall you’ll want to avoid. Your competitive analysis should reveal ways to go beyond what’s already out there, enabling you to differentiate your content and your brand. Getting quotes from experts, hiring writers that specialize in the topic or even formatting (an infographic might appeal to your audience more than a listicle, for example) could be meaningful ways to differentiate.
After you’ve compiled your content brief (informed by your personas, journey map, keyword research and competitive analysis), it’s time to pass it on to your content writer or creator. “Make sure that your authors have the knowledge and expertise to write about those topics because the nuances of how they write about it versus the generalist who’s just doing research on their own can really come through and affect the content,” Sangenito said.
Optimizing and editing. Once you have your draft, SEO best practices, such as internal linking, title tag optimization and structured data, can be applied so that your audience can find more information related to your content and continue to move along the customer journey. It’s also important to conduct an editorial review before publishing to ensure that your content conveys professionalism, adheres to your brand tone and serves your business and your readers the way it should.
Building links for more traffic and better rankings
Determine what’s link-worthy. When building backlinks, it’s best to focus on promoting the most relevant and highest quality content for the audience you’re trying to tap into.
Sangenito recommends that marketers ask themselves the questions that the people they’re outreaching to are probably asking: “What’s the scope and scale? How relevant is this content that you want me to link? How many people does it potentially affect or how engaged is the base of people that it will affect and how much will they want to read it? What is that impact potential?”
Content that is able to engage audiences on an emotional level can also be an important factor in whether or not you earn the backlink.
Timing can influence how many backlinks you’re able to attract, as well. “There’s relevance to linking out to both evergreen content or seasonal content, but thinking about that in terms of when you actually publish content to generate organic links, or outreach for it, is something that you should keep top-of-mind,” she added.
Link building strategies. Link building can help you expand your discoverability, drive traffic to the most valuable assets on your site and create a sense of trustworthiness for your brand if you’re able to earn backlinks from authoritative publications. There are numerous ways to approach link building — Sangenito highlighted a few strategies, as shown below.
“You can do tactical elements, like understanding if you have broken inbound links and seeing if you can outreach to the sites that are linking to you to see if they could be updating them,” Sangenito said, adding that PR coverage may be another opportunity to turn a brand mention into a link if it isn’t one already. Reviewing your competitor’s backlinks can reveal sites that may also be open to linking to your brand as well.
Resource-based link building, which involves promoting an existing piece of content that might add value for users of other sites, can also be an effective approach depending on the quality of your content and your outreach skills.
Content marketing isn’t a “one-and-done” tactic
Once the content is created and the backlinks are earned, you’ll want to keep your momentum going by periodically auditing your content inventory and updating assets when appropriate. This will help keep the content that you’ve worked so hard to create and earn backlinks for up-to-date. That way, the content will continue to serve your audience and you can keep performing outreach for that particular asset, further strengthening your brand’s reputation, which should also mean more conversions for your business.
If you’re searching for actionable tactics to drive more paid and organic conversions you can’t afford to miss SMX Convert — happening onlinetomorrow, August 17, from 11:00am – 5:30pm ET.
At just $149, your All Access packs a tremendous amount of value:
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.
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.”
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.
