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Meta starts refunding advertisers for overspending glitch

Wednesday, May 17th, 2023

Meta is starting to issue refunds to advertisers impacted by a glitch last month that resulted in overspending and higher than usual CPAs.

Why we care. Meta needs to make this right for all of its advertisers of all sizes. It’s good that the refunds are starting, but it’s been over a month and this still is not resolved.

May 12. Some advertisers got their refunds starting on May 12. However, many smaller advertisers are complaining that the process has been much slower for them, Bloomberg reported:

“Some advertisers did receive refunds from Meta beginning on May 12, although the amounts have been doled out inconsistently and it’s not clear why some businesses received more money back than others. In the past, advertisers that spent a lot on Facebook or had personal connections at the company had better luck getting refunded, according to several agency representatives.”

The glitch. On April 23, Meta spent advertisers’ the daily budgets in a matter of hours. CPAs also tripled. You can read more about it in our story: A catastrophic Meta bug caused overspending, higher-than-average CPAs.

The damage. As one example, the $13,000 budget for one ecommerce advertiser was spent in three hours – with no results, Bloomberg reported. Another business said it “had its worst return on Sunday advertising spending on record, ultimately posting 85% lower sales than the previous Sunday and 76% lower than two weeks prior.”

Making things worse. “Refunds for ad glitches are typically cents on the dollar, and Meta doesn’t tell advertisers how it calculates the payout,” as Bloomberg noted.

What Meta said. In a statement, Meta said:

• “We identified and resolved a technical issue in our automated systems that caused ad delivery issues like faster campaign spending and more variable costs. We fixed this as quickly as possible and apologize for any inconvenience it may have caused.”

The post Meta starts refunding advertisers for overspending glitch appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

How to optimize for entities

Wednesday, May 17th, 2023

An entity is a uniquely identifiable object or thing characterized by its name(s), type(s), attributes, and relationships to other entities. An entity is only considered to exist when it exists in an entity catalog. I used this definition in my entity SEO article. 

The first part of this entity SEO series should be used when you need to justify a tactic associated with optimizing for an entity. 

TL;DR from Part 1:

• Entities are used as a source for expanding search queries with different terms.
• Document relevance to a query is partially understood through the lens of known entities.
• Google is a semantic search engine. Semantic understanding is connected to entities and databases like Wikidata and Wikipedia.
• Wikipedia and Wikidata are the most beginner-friendly sources of knowledge on the kind of information you should write about as you optimize for entities. Look at the hyperlinks, the table of contents, the sourcing, etc.
• Entity understanding is impacted by documents on the web. Google’s understanding changes frequently, and algorithm updates are known moments in time when this updated understanding is applied.
• Three data structures exist on the web: unstructured (blogs), semi-structured (Wikipedia), and structured data (Wikidata and JSON schema).
• Optimize around search intent when attempting to cover a topic.
• Speed of publishing, the number of articles published, and the depth of the articles you publish are the three primary levers you can pull as an SEO focused on entities.

This article will dive right into the actionable advice. We will go over page structure, site structure, important schemas to use and tools that can help you.

Getting started with entity optimization

Every page and every collection of pages has a context. Pages don’t exist in a vacuum. 

Why does it exist? 

Let’s use Nike as our example. Nike sells shoes. Their website exists to sell running shoes. 

How do you figure out the primary entity associated with selling running shoes? 

It’s tempting to just say “shoes” or “running shoes,” but that wouldn’t be the best answer. 

The best answer requires further abstraction. 

Optimizing entities is largely a task meant for our brains, so let’s go through some options.

Running

• Shoes
• Running shoes
• Exercise
• Sneakers
• Sports
• Tennis shoes
• Athletics
• Athleisure 

So what types of intent exist for Nike? 

Necessary gear for sports, exercise empowerment, shopping guides for each specific shoe type.

You can expand this further, but the goal is to provide an oversimplified example. If I had to guess, I’d say that the primary search intent is about sports. 

While Nike has evolved into a style, the core purpose of Nike and the core intent for searchers is all about sports equipment. 

If we ask the “why” question for sports, we could go a step further and say “personal development” or “lifestyle improvement” is the primary search intent. 

It’s up to the SEO to figure out the best choices because the entire optimization process is contingent upon:

• The search intent.
• The context of the website.
• The primary entity associated with that context. 

If you’d like to dig deeper into this idea, I recommend Koray Tuğberk GÜBÜR’s Topical Authority course (be warned, it’s complicated and designed for a skilled SEO audience). 

This realm of SEO has its own vocabulary, and GÜBÜR has spent countless hours extracting terms and formalizing the concepts associated with this area. 

Some important terms you’ll want to familiarize yourself with if you’re interested in entities and semantic search: 

• Topic coverage
• Responsiveness
• Query processing
• Semantic distance
• Contextual flow
• Contextual bridge

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What are the core concepts associated with entity optimization?

The core concepts associated with entity optimization focus on entity attribute values (EAV), information dilution, language usage, site organization and page organization. 

Entity attribute values and Amazon

When optimizing around entities, you’ll want to focus on the attributes that are associated with your entity. 

Remember that the context can change the attributes that are most important to use. 

We use OpenAI and a simple prompt to get a list of attributes. You can get creative with it, but use the image as your starting point.

Amazon’s plethora of information on each product is a great example of entity optimization. They have videos, images, multiple angles, buyer guides, reviews, tags, and detailed technical information on their products. 

Do you need to be worth a trillion dollars to achieve this depth of attribute information? No.

If you are selling products of any kind, more scientific and data-centric information will help achieve the attribute depth and width required for entity optimization. 

Information dilution and disambiguation

Are you writing about SEO for lawyers? How do you connect two entirely distinct entities without diluting Google’s understanding? 

Do you target lifestyle, technology, business, and health on one website? 

Have you properly covered each distinct category and made the necessary connections to assist Google’s understanding of your content? 

You’ll fail to optimize for entities if you don’t provide adequate context. 

For disambiguation, we like to use Google NLP.

This is an example from Google. Input your text and review the score. 

Oftentimes, a few word changes and a small tweak to how you order your sentences are all it takes to drastically improve. 

The lesson here is to remember that writers are providing information and it’s important to know your audience when writing. 

You can provide helpful content to humans while providing a structure for AI to digest and understand. Content for humans and for robots is a needless bifurcation that largely exists due to SEO practitioners lacking knowledge in this area.

The importance of language

Focus on the way you use language. The book “Entity-Oriented Search” provides almost 400 pages of deep insights into entities.

The author, Krisztian Balog, reveals that the subjects, objects, and predicates are all used in order to understand a website and each of its documents (pages/posts). 

You must have your core topic on every page if you are Nike. Exercise, fitness, or shoes could all be options here. The actions and attributes associated with your core topic should also be present throughout your website. 

This doesn’t mean you need to say the same thing repeatedly because the context of an attribute or an action can change (i.e., exercising by running in the rain, exercising by sprinting, exercising on an outdoor track, etc.).

Logical site structure, page structure and schema

Google’s Lizzi Sassman recently shared how they prefer to digest schemas. Google wants sites to nest their schema. 

Use the dropshipping outline as an example. Context isn’t just about the content, it’s about the way you connect the content. 

Examples of page structure (you’ll learn how you can replicate this with schema later)

• Dropshipping
  • Low barrier to entry leading to high competition
  • Difficulty in finding unique products
  • Long delivery times leading to poor customer experience

• Digital marketing agency
  • High demand for quality digital marketing services
  • Potential to scale up to $1 million or more in revenue
  • Difficulty in scaling beyond a certain point

• Brick-and-mortar business
  • Easy to advertise locally using Facebook and Instagram
  • Operational challenges and significant startup costs
  • Difficult to scale and often generate small profits

• Online coach/consultant
  • High demand for coaching and consulting services
  • Ability to work remotely and set your own schedule
  • Difficulty in scaling due to time limitations

• Software as a Service (SaaS) Business
  • Huge potential rewards if successful
  • High risk and significant upfront investment
  • Difficulty in developing a winning product

• Ecommerce and Amazon FBA
  • High demand for online products and scalable business model
  • Challenges in differentiating from competition
  • Amazon FBA’s fees and lack of control over pricing

If you’re looking for a great example of what an entity-optimized blog architecture looks like, then I highly suggest that you review Docusaurus, a CMS of sorts, which handles content structure well.

Look at any of their showcases, and you’ll see a hierarchy of information presented on the left. 

You will get a top-down view of the cluster. The articles have a table of contents, so you get a top-down organizational structure for each article. 

The only additional thing to do is optimize the article’s internal link structure.

Using Wikipedia to jumpstart your entity-focused SEO campaign

Wikipedia is a semi-structured knowledge base that Google heavily uses in its quest to understand and use entities. 

Because we know what it is and how Google uses it in its systems, we can use a Wikipedia page to grow our understanding of entities and semantic search.

Case in point: the Wikipedia page for “sneakers.” Below are key elements to note:

• The table of contents demonstrates solid topic coverage designed to approximate all we need to know about the topic (sneakers).
• The first sentence of the page is packed with brief and clear information directly related to sneakers. The sentence provides synonyms and disambiguates the subject.
• The internal links use anchor text that signals which page should rank for the term, and it demonstrates strong connections with the semantically close subjects. 

• The See also section is an example of creating content designed to cover the topic. 
• The References section is an external validator that shares where you can find more trusted sources of info. Ideally, these should be authority sites that don’t compete with you. This section is a great support for digital PR. Conducting studies that help the industry is exactly how you get referenced.

• The bottom of the Wikipedia page shows a hierarchy. While it is not picking out the exact entity or search intent for your brand, it’s helpful to see that this page provides multiple formats for the content presentation, numerous connection points to internal pages of relevance, and multiple hierarchies. If you count Wikidata, you even have a schema version of this information. 

After analyzing hundreds of Wikipedia pages, we created an entity template that can be used as a quick reference when writing.

Generally, the most common entities are associated with brands, people, sports, activities, products, geographies, events, temporal, emotions, ideas, animals, fields of study, food, and music or film. 

No one has the full list of entities, but I shared a list of 150+ types of entities in the previous article. 

It’s important to note that you should not expect to rank by just copying everything on a Wikipedia page. The example of Wikipedia is meant to provide context for understanding.

Ask yourself how your specific website context connects with your main entity. Think about the types of search intent that exist. 

AI is very helpful in giving you a headstart with this. Ask GPT-4 to “provide a list of likely search intents for someone searching Google for [running shoes],” and you’ll get a list of ideas.

This might not be perfect, but it’s a great way to identify search intent and grease the wheels for thinking through this on your own.  

Handy tool for generating 1,000-2,000 topics 

While AI is the focus of the next article in this series, this particular use case of AI is incredibly helpful for topic maps built to cover an entity.

With the ContentSprout topic generator, you enter the niche (e.g., “golf”) and get categories, sub-categories, and clusters.

The final piece provides a list of topics to write about inside the cluster.

AI helps reduce the time it takes to do a lot of SEO tasks related to entity optimization. Invest in AI tools, and it will pay off.

Now that we’ve covered the topic of targeting, it’s time to dig into identifying entities.

Identifying entities in text

Let’s use the TL;DR section above as the input text we will analyze. Open up textrazor.com/demo and paste the text into the box. 

When you run the analysis, you’ll see a helpful collection of insights about the text you provided.

If you hover over an underlined word, you get some sweet info that can be used for your schema or for your analysis of your topic.

You get a Wikipedia link, the Freebase ID (a structured knowledge graph), and a Wikidata ID (like Freebase, but better). You also get a list of scores and entity types. 

The right side of the screen provides the identified topics. 

Remember that this isn’t Google, but it’s attempting to do something similar to what Google is doing, which makes this tool useful. 

I can now see many scores connected to topics, organized by the strength of the topic understanding. 

Using schema to connect the dots for Google

Schema has become mainstream in SEO communities, but that doesn’t mean people use schema to the fullest. Most people stick with a generic schema and avoid anything custom.

While this article isn’t designed to provide a crash course on schema, it is important to share the two underutilized schemas that help connect the dots for Google.

Mentions schema

By using mentions schema, you’re declaring that your page mentions a specific thing. You can then tie in a Wikipedia page and connect that declaration. 

Why is this helpful? 

You are disambiguating information and providing important information in the easiest format for Googlebot. Don’t sleep on mentions schema. 

In the image above, you can see a ContentSprout test website on fishing. 

The main entity of the page is declared, a description is provided, mention is used, and SameAs is incorporated. 

These pieces send an abundantly clear message to Googlebot so it understands your content.

If you’d like to visualize the schema, we suggest Schema Zone. We plugged in a URL containing a custom schema, which is what it looks like.

If you’ve ever used Sitebulb or Screaming Frog, you’ll recognize that this is essentially a schema version of what those tools do with internal links. 

We all try to get our visuals to look like this, but did you know you could replicate that structure in schema? 

Schema Zone has a few other features, but our favorite is the competitor schema stealer.

Using competitors as your starting point is always easier, and this tool is designed to do exactly that.

A new company called Entity Clouds released a programmatic schema solution that has blown us away. According to its founder Cory Hubbe:

“Entity Clouds is a programmatic entity optimization tool set that leverages the science of bot crawl patterns and classification systems to give search engines precisely what they want. We use internet database classification systems and structured data as our foundation, strengthening the association between your business and relative, authoritative entities.”

It won’t give you cool visuals, but it gives similar results, and you install it with GTM or a WordPress plugin. 

Optimizing for entities

As we learned in the first article, Entity SEO: The definitive guide, entities are the future of SEO.

They help Google understand your content and its relevance to keyword searches. 

Optimizing for entities will help your content perform better in search engines.

Your website is much more likely to continue to rank through algorithm changes as Google and Bing continually improve their understanding of the web and the vast amounts of content on it.  

The post How to optimize for entities appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Google-InspectionTool – the new Google crawler for Google testing tools

Wednesday, May 17th, 2023

Google has released a new crawler, a new Googlebot, named Google-InspectionTool. This new Google crawler will be how Google identifies crawling activity for the crawler used by Google Search’s testing tools, like the rich results test and Google Search Console’s URL inspection tool.

Google-InspectionTool. Google posted details about this new crawler in its help document over here. It says, “Google-InspectionTool is the crawler used by Search testing tools such as the Rich Result Test and URL inspection in Search Console. Apart from the user agent and user agent token, it mimics Googlebot.”

Here is a screenshot of that documentation:

User agent. The user agent token for its crawl activity can either be the classic Googlebot or the new Google-InspectionTool. Google also listed the full user agent strings which differ for mobile and desktop crawls:

• Mobile
  Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/W.X.Y.Z Mobile Safari/537.36 (compatible; Google-InspectionTool/1.0)
• Desktop
  Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Google-InspectionTool/1.0)

Why we care. If you are a crawler junky and you analyze the crawling activity and bot activity in your log files, you might see Google-InspectionTool show up. That is especially if you use the Rich Result Test and URL inspection in Google Search Console.

If you see issues with these tools doing their jobs, you might be blocking the Google-InspectionTool user agent from accessing your site. So make sure to allow Google-InspectionTool to crawl your site if you have strict rules in place.

The post Google-InspectionTool – the new Google crawler for Google testing tools appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Amazon plans to add generative AI to its search experience

Tuesday, May 16th, 2023

Amazon is hiring – with the goal of making generative AI part of its product search experience.

Job details. Amazon is searching for promising talent in software engineering and search marketing to reimagine search and create a seamless experience on their ecommerce platform. According to Amazon’s listing:

• “This will be a once in a generation transformation for Search.”

Reinventing Amazon search. Amazon also wants to create “a new AI-first initiative to re-architect and reinvent the way we do search through the use of extremely large scale next-generation deep learning techniques,” according to the job description, as reported by Bloomberg.

Why we care. Amazon is the go-to product search engine. This means brands, marketers and sellers should watch developments around Amazon’s product search, as changes could significantly impact how products are found and purchased.

What Amazon is saying. Amazon’s spokesperson Keri Bertolino declined to speak with Bloomberg but wrote in an email, “We are significantly investing in generative AI across all of our businesses.”

This is true. We recently reported on how Amazon is working on AI tools to generate videos, images for advertisers.

The post Amazon plans to add generative AI to its search experience appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Microsoft now rolling out new Bing Chat features including chat history, mobile features, and more

Tuesday, May 16th, 2023

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced several new features for Bing Chat, to celebrate the launch of Bing Chat and co-pilot 100 days ago. Some of those features we have seen go live and many more are now live today.

The new features we covered earlier include image answers with knowledge cards and optimized answers.

As a reminder, Bing Chat removed the waitlist earlier this month, opening Bing Chat to those who want to use Microsoft Edge.

What is live now. Here is a list of what went live according to Microsoft with this announcement:

• Chat history: Tap on the clock icon at the top of your existing chat to see a list of recent activity. These chats will be saved for 90 days, unless specifically saved for longer storage. This is live on mobile now and will be live on desktop within the next week (note, some see this live already).
• Mobile widget: A Bing Chat widget can now be added to your iOS or Android home screen. This will allow you to quickly go to Bing Chat and/or click the microphone icon to speak your question.
• Conversations across platforms: If you start your conversation with Bing Chat on desktop, then need to head out, you can continue that conversation on your mobile device. This is rolling out on iOS and Android within the next week. To access this feature, click on the answer on desktop, then select phone icon in the options menu to view the QR Code and then scan it to open on your phone.
• Multilingual support: Bing Chat now supports more countries and languages for voice input. Bing also improved the quality for non-English chats, so now you can choose from a variety of languages and voices to tailor experience to your tastes and needs, Bing said.
• SwiftKey. SwiftKey is mobile keyboard and now it is AI-powered by Bing. You can use it to search and chat with Bing from within your favorite mobile apps, as well change the tone or reframe your messages before you hit send, Bing said. Bing is adding a bunch of new support and features to SwiftKey including tones, translation and more. You can click on the Bing icon in the ribbon above the SwiftKey keyboard. It will be available to all users across iOS and Android within the next two weeks.
• Edge updates. Bing Chat also is improving on Microsoft Edge where on Edge mobile you will be able to ask questions about the page you are visiting, or ask Bing to summarize it. Also, you will be able to use selected text options by selecting specific text on a page directly on the mobile browser.

What it looks like. Here are some videos and GIFs from Microsoft demonstrating these new features:

Mobile Widget:

Edge contextual chat on mobile:

Selected text with mobile Edge:

Why we care. We continue to see small and large improvements to generative AI tools, like Bing Chat. The Bing Chat interface is becoming more and more search-friendly, more and more user-friendly and the answers continue to get better.

You can learn more about these new features over here.

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Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

Step-by-step guide for growing your agency by Digital Marketing Depot

Tuesday, May 16th, 2023

Running a successful agency means skillfully navigating a complex environment filled with challenges and opportunities. This involves managing multiple projects efficiently, going above and beyond client expectations, and consistently achieving profitability.

Teamwork Co-Founder, CEO, and former agency owner Peter Coppinger has created the ultimate step-by-step guide for agencies of all sizes. “The Ultimate Guide to Scaling Your Agency” is packed with practical insights and actionable tips, offering a roadmap based on years of industry expertise.

Whether you’re just starting out, managing a growing team, or aiming to elevate your agency to new heights, this eBook has you covered. Explore three distinct sections tailored to your agency’s size and growth journey:

• DELIVER: 1 to 10 employees: Establish a solid foundation for success by delivering client work on-time, building your business, and cementing your agency’s reputation.
• GROW: 10 to 50 employees: Organize your agency’s operations, effectively manage complex projects, and keep a strategic eye on the big picture.
• SCALE: 50+ employees: Focus on achieving profitability, systemizing your business, and making informed decisions about the future of your agency.

From templatizing client processes to centralizing communications, streamlining billing, and maximizing profitability, this eBook equips you with insider tips and expert guidance.

Visit Digital Marketing Depot to download “The Ultimate Guide to Scaling Your Agency“

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5 ways to set the stage for a successful SEO engagement

Tuesday, May 16th, 2023

So you’ve won a new SEO client – hooray!

Before you officially get the partnership kicked off, there’s a lot of ground to cover to help you set the stage for success and make a great first impression.

As SEOs know, every website has two areas that need focused analysis before you kick off an SEO program: content and back-end setup.

This article will tackle five initiatives my team undertakes right after the contract is signed to find and address those critical fixes and ensure we’re setting up our client for success. They are:

• Audit existing content for opportunities to update.
• Assess the website to prioritize technical optimizations.
• Deliver a keyword research list – well in advance of kickoff.
• Map keywords to site pages.
• Set up a tracker that works for both sides.

Let’s dig into each initiative.

1. Audit existing content for opportunities to update

How many times have you had a client eager to launch into building new content without considering optimizing what’s already on their website? (In my experience, it’s quite common.)

You can add immediate value by encouraging new clients to assign equal resources to updating their old content on top of creating net-new material.

Of course, the optimal frequency of content updates depends on the topic. The three main considerations when assessing topic-related updates:

• Is the topic evergreen? If the answer is a resounding yes – let’s say it’s an article on tax regulations that haven’t changed since the 1990s – the information can stay relevant for a long time. You still should schedule optimizations for evergreen pages, but those won’t be as intensive or frequent.
• Does the query call for super-fresh content? The more dynamic the topic, the more regularly you have to check and update it. For example, content involving social and political events must be updated regularly to show up high in the SERPs.
• Does Google consider the topic “your money or your life” (YMYL)? Google discusses YMYL topics (think: financial or medical advice) in its Search Quality Rater guidelines and holds webpages that contain them to a higher standard. These will need extra attention to make sure they convey actual, updated value to the reader.

Use a simple matrix of potential search volume (high, medium, low) and effort required to update the content (high, medium, low) to give your client a prioritized list of opportunities to gain traction by revisiting what’s already on their site.

2. Assess the website to prioritize technical optimizations

Marketers should have a good eye for reputable visuals. Websites that look like they were built 10 years ago and don’t lead the user through any thought-out journey should draw extra-critical analysis.

These are the fundamentals to get before you pour effort into content. 

Some factors to examine after the contract is signed:

• Code that jives with spiders: If search engine spiders struggle to crawl your code, you’re already curtailing your growth. Make sure coding is clear and organized. 
• XML sitemaps: Sitemaps are table stakes for SEOs; they lay out pages, images, and videos in a way that helps search engines navigate a site’s content. 
• Server maintenance: Server diagnostic reports are great sources of insight on high-priority errors that need attention. 
• The content management system: Make sure you know the answers to major CMS questions: Can you update content easily? Are there bugs or red flags? Are plug-ins current and compatible?
• Mobile usability: Websites in every vertical – even B2B – draw a heavy dose of mobile traffic. Responsiveness for both desktop and mobile devices is a must.
• Robots.txt: This is one of our favorite features. Robots.txt signals spiders where they don’t have to crawl, which conserves resources on services and points bots indirectly to the content that matters. 
• Site speed: Slow-loading websites lead to poor user experiences and high bounce rates – and are a big factor in Google’s algorithm. What does Google Search Console say are the highest-opportunity areas of improvement?
• 301 redirects: 301s pre-empt error pages by redirecting old or null pages to newer, more relevant content. This can improve user experience.
• Full URLs: URL shortcuts can lead to crawl errors. Ensure you use the complete URL, including https://, for internal links.
• Canonical tags: These tags provide protection against getting dinged for duplicate content. They direct search engines to the URL you’d like to appear in the SERPs.
• The design: Just as marketers can sniff out old or outdated site designs, users are conditioned to keep up with web trends and might be pre-conditioned to bounce if you haven’t shown your site much design love.

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3. Deliver a keyword research list at least two weeks before kickoff

The keyword research list is the most important single document in an entire account as it sets the framework for targeting and helps align goals with the client. This living document should be updated consistently throughout the client engagement.

The sheet is simple. Add headings for:

• Keyword.
• Volume.
• Keyword Category.
• Current Rank.
• Current Ranking Page.
• Strategy.

This gives you and the client an actual baseline of performance and a tool to connect and align our campaigns. 

Deliver it to the client well in advance of the kickoff and ask for prompt feedback.

The goal should be to incorporate the feedback and build out a longer list, with ideas for how to rank, to discuss during kickoff.

4. Build a keyword-to-webpage mapping document

Content and keywords need good strategic direction to reach their potential.

While you’re developing the target keyword list, map those keywords to current pages for optimization.

This helps you stay organized on important early projects like title tags and meta description optimization. It also ensures you are aligned on the SEO goals of each page, including the queries they’re intended to address.

5. Set up a project tracker that works for both sides

Whether it’s on Asana, Trello, Monday, or a Google Sheet, it’s a good practice to establish a central reference for tracking all projects, including timelines, priorities, owners, and collaborators.

Basic functions should include:

• The ability to grant different permissions (e.g., edit, view, etc.)
• 24/7 access for all parties.
• The ability to add comments and notes for each task.
• Roll-up and zoom-in capabilities to track progress at scale and by initiative. 

Before kickoff, make sure you know the client’s preference for the platform and have a list of collaborators so you can build a skeleton to present as a starting point. 

Working toward a successful SEO engagement 

This might sound like a lot of work to commit to before the client has paid a dollar for the engagement. The reality is that it is work your team will need to do anyway.

Tackling it preemptively gives you a springboard into an effective engagement and will give the client a clear signal that you’re ready and willing to move the needle for their business.

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Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

SEO and website design: How to build search engine-friendly sites

Monday, May 15th, 2023

Your website is the center of your digital marketing world. It’s where you have the most control and where all digital marketing rivers run toward.

Generally, the largest of those traffic sources is organic search. 

Yet, all too often, SEO is not deeply embedded when a new website is being designed (or redesigned), and SEO thinking is often only addressed after a site has launched. 

This is a problem. 

When building a new website as a marketing vehicle for your business, SEO considerations should be included in the planning stages before a line of code is written. 

My team and I have helped hundreds of businesses design and build sites that take their SEO and marketing to the next level.

Unfortunately, we have also helped many businesses recover SEO traffic after a botched website redesign that failed to factor in SEO.

This article explores why – and how – SEO plays an integral part in the website design process.

It details exactly what you need to consider to build a site for search marketing and lead generation and how to focus on what your users want to help keep the Google gods on your side.

We will also dive into common pitfalls businesses looking to build a new website and maintain SEO traffic may encounter. 

1. How to develop an SEO-friendly website

The following are the key areas to consider in building a truly optimized website. 

• Fundamentals: Domains, hosting and CMS.
• Crawling: The technical bit.
• Information architecture: How to structure your SEO-friendly site.
• Mobile: Mobile-friendly sites need more than just responsive design.
• Page speed: Fast sites make for happy users.
• Usability: Confuse them and lose them.

The rest of this article will dive into each of these points in detail. 

Fundamentals

There are a few core elements that set the stage for a well-optimized website design process.

Domains

Your domain name is the entry point into your website, and there should be one single (canonical) domain. You may have others, but they should all point (redirect) to this one.

Our business is called Bowler Hat. We operate in the UK. We are a web-based business. It naturally follows that our domain is www.bowlerhat.co.uk. All subdomains 301 redirect back to the main URL www.bowlerhat.co.uk. We have a few domain variations that 301 redirect back to the main URL. This all makes sense.

Your domain should be brand led in the majority of cases, and having www.crammed-my-keywords-in-here.com is not going to help you rank today (1999 just called and wants its SEO back). 

Hosting

You can buy hosting for $1 a month – but guess what? It is not very good. 

Slow, cruddy hosting creates a poor user experience and ultimately creates a site that Google is not so keen to show in the search results. 

Buy the best hosting you can afford and ensure your site has good uptime and runs well on it. 

In most cases, hosting should follow common-sense rules:

• Be situated where your audience is
• Be fast and ideally platform-specific (e.g., WordPress hosting for WordPress)

CMS

The CMS (content management system) you choose for your business can hugely influence how successful you are. WordPress is a great platform, but there are other options. 

Try to use the path of least resistance for your CMS choice. If one of the ubiquitous CMS platforms works for your needs – go with it. Google has to understand the big players, and they are technically sound and easy to optimize. 

The final choice here depends on your utterly unique requirements, but ensure you understand why you are using a given platform and don’t just end up with the one your web agency likes to work with.

Crawling and accessibility

The first step is ensuring a search engine can crawl your site and understand what it is that you do (and where you do it).

Indexing

To understand your site, they have to be able to read the content of the page. This means that the main content of your site should be text-based.

Even as we hurtle forwards towards and have search engines with AI features, the written word is the backbone of a search engine-friendly site, so ensure your text is well-written and sensibly optimized. 

Images, videos, PDFs and content are also important and can be a source of search engine traffic. Again, these need to be well-named, organized and discoverable to be indexed.

Link structure

To index your content beyond the home page, you need internal links that the search engine can crawl.

Your primary navigation, search engine directives and tools like XML sitemaps all help the search engine crawl your site and discover new pages. 

Information architecture and structuring your site

I have always liked the filing cabinet analogy for website structure.

Your site is the filing cabinet. The major categories are the drawers. The subcategories are the folders in the drawers. The pages are documents in the folders. 

• Cabinet: Your website
• Drawer: High-level category
• Folder: Subcategory
• File: Individual document/page

This helps to provide additional contextual information about the content on any given page. 

If you have a drawer in your cabinet for services, then anything in that drawer is a service – before a single character has been analyzed. 

This is good for Google and your users, which is what Google really cares about (and is a more straightforward concept than the sometimes esoteric nuances of SEO). 

Many websites have the following structure:

• Home
  • Services
    • Service area
      • Individual service

For our company website, that is:

• Home
  • Services
    • SEO
      • SEO audits

So, there is a page in this information architecture that is simply /audits/.

• We have services. 
• We have SEO services. 
• We have SEO audit services. 

This all makes sense, and the structural organization of your website can help to provide context and relevance signals beyond the page itself. 

This is relevant to blog posts, articles, FAQ content, services, locations and just about anything else that is an entity within your business.

You want to structure the information about your business in a way that makes it understandable (to people and robots).

Some sites may take a deep approach to structuring content. Others may take a wide approach. The important takeaway is that things should be organized in a way that makes sense and simplifies navigation and discovery.

A three- to four-level approach like this ensures that most content can be easily navigated within three to four clicks and tends to work better than a deeper approach to site navigation (for users and search engines).

URLs

The URL further indicates context. A sensible naming convention helps provide yet more context for humans and search engines.

Following are two hypothetical sets of URLs that could map to the Services > SEO > SEO audit path laid out above – yet one makes sense, and the other does nothing to help.

• Example 1:
  • www.example.com
  • www.example.com/services/
  • www.example.com/services/seo/
  • www.example.com/services/seo/audits/

• Example 2:
  • www.example.com
  • www.example.com/s123/
  • www.example.com/s123/s1/
  • www.example.com/s123/s1/75/

The second set of URLs is a purposely daft example, but it serves a point – the first URL naming convention helps both search engines and users, and the second one hinders.

This further builds upon the contextual signals from your filing cabinet structure. 

Navigation

Building an SEO-friendly website navigation can also help indicate the relevant importance of a given page (in the set of pages) and provides additional context. 

Your navigation should be text-based and therefore helps send a signal about the keywords you would like a given page to rank for. 

I have always liked the signpost analogy for navigation. I walk into a supermarket and look for the signs to find what I need. Your website is no different.

A user lands on your site and has to find where they need to go in the quickest possible time. They then need a signpost to get them there. 

SEO thinking can be dangerous here, though. Mega menus with hundreds of spammy page links – this is not the way! 

The golden rule is to keep your navigation simple. Don’t make the user have to think.

The following image is a sign from my local home improvement store. Which direction takes you to the car park and which direction takes you to the deliveries entrance?

My brain follows the “customer car park” line from left to right, so I turn right. However, the customer car park is to the left.

There is nothing to clearly illustrate right or wrong, and I read right to left – a simple line down the middle separating these would improve this.

As a mental activity, browsing websites is like driving. It is a complicated task, yet, to some degree, the brain is on autopilot.

Leverage this in your website navigation, give people what they expect, make it easy, and remove any potential for confusion else they will bounce back to the SERPs and into the open arms of your competition. 

Ensure your navigation is simple to use, promotes your most important pages and does not make your users think too hard (if at all). 

Common problems

There are many potential issues with content that can’t be found or understood by the search engine that can work against you. For example:

• Orphaned content that can’t be found.
• Content only available via site search.
• Flash files, Java programs, audio files, video files.
• AJAX and flashy site effects. (Google has gotten a lot better at reading AJAX pages, but it is still possible to obscure content with pointless effects.)
• Frames: Content embedded from another site can be problematic.
• Subdomains: Content split into subdomains rather than sub-folders.

Be sure that important content is easily discoverable, understandable and sits in the overall structure of the site in a way that makes sense.

Summary

If everything is done well, a human and a search engine should have a pretty good idea of what a page is about before they even look at it. Your typical SEO then just builds on this solid foundation that is laid out by your information architecture and site structure.

Mobile-friendly design

Being SEO friendly is having a site that works how your users want it to – and, in many cases, that means mobile.

Many of your future customers use mobile as the first, and often only, device to interact with your business.

Another crucial consideration for many businesses is multi-device interactions. Even if your conversions tend to be from desktop, those initial interactions may be from mobile.

Mobile-friendly means more than just responsive design. I previously looked at 28 key factors in creating mobile SEO-friendly websites that will help you move beyond simple responsive design toward truly mobile-friendly websites. 

From an SEO perspective, it is worth noting that mobile-friendliness is a confirmed ranking factor for mobile search, and it is the mobile version of your site that the search engine will use to review and rank your site.

However, far more important, mobile is how your prospective customers search for and browse your site.

It is debatable just how important features like mobile-friendly are for SEO, yet it is completely moot.

Do what works for your users and what is good for SEO. 

Page speed

Another key consideration in the mobile era is page speed. Users may be impatient, or they may not always have a great mobile data connection.

Ensuring your pages are lean and mean is a key consideration in modern SEO-friendly website design.

A great starting point is Google’s mobile-friendly test. This tool will give you feedback on mobile-friendliness, mobile speed and desktop speed. It also wraps everything up into a handy little report detailing what exactly you can do to speed things up.

Page speed is yet another essential consideration that spans how your site is built and the quality and suitability of the hosting you use.

Usability

Web usability is a combination of other factors: device-specific design, page speed, design conventions and an intuitive approach to putting the site together with the end user in mind.

Key factors to consider include:

• Page layout: Important elements should have more prominence.
• Visual hierarchy: Make more important elements bigger!
• Home page and site navigation: Clearly signpost directions for users.
• Site search: Large sites need a sensibly positioned search option.
• Form entry: Make forms as lightweight and easy to fill as possible.
• Design: Great design makes everything easier.

This just scratches the surface. Usability really has to be customized to the individual site.

A couple of resources I suggest checking out:

• The book, “Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability,” by Steve Krug.
• My mobile optimization checklist.

The content marketing funnel

Another key consideration to building a site that ranks is how you structure the content on your site to map to the different stages a potential customer will go through. 

The goal of your website is to help your business get in front of prospective customers on search engines and then engage and convert those customers.

A good way to approach this is to structure your content to match the stages in a standard marketing funnel:

Awareness: Top of the funnel

Awareness content will typically be your blog and informational articles. We are helping your prospective customer understand the problems they face and illustrating your experience and credibility in solving them.

• Blog posts
• Informational articles
• Webinars
• Comprehensive guides
• FAQs

Consideration: Middle of the funnel

The content at the consideration stage helps your prospect compare you against the other offerings out there. This tends to be practical content that helps the customer make a decision.

• Case studies
• Product or service information
• Product demonstration videos
• User guides

Conversion: Bottom of the funnel

Bottom-of-the-funnel content drives conversions and should gently encourage a sale or lead.

• Reviews
• Testimonials
• Free trial
• Free consultation

Remember that customers will search across this entire spectrum of content types. Therefore, ensuring all these areas are covered aids discovery via search engines and helps you win more business – win-win. 

That’s the basics covered

A lot is going on there but not without good reason, and ensure you have given each of these devil’s their due in the planning of your new site. 

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2. SEO: How to optimize your site

OK, so now you have methodically planned and developed your website, laid your SEO foundations, and you are ready to start the actual optimization. 

Optimizing that site with a well-structured website that considers all of the points covered above becomes easier. 

Keyword targeting

Nailing your keyword strategy is much easier once you have a solid structure without internal duplication.

If we look at our previous examples for site hierarchy and structure, then adding keywords is relatively straightforward (and is something we would often do in a spreadsheet pre-design).

• Services: www.example.com/services/
  • SEO: www.example.com/services/seo/
    • SEO audits: www.example.com/services/seo/audits/

• www.example.com/services/
  www.example.com/services/seo/
  www.example.com/services/seo/audits/

If I use these pages as an example, we have a natural progression from broad keywords to more refined search terms. We can even consider basic modifiers such as location if we are a local business.

Home
– digital marketing agency
– digital marketing company
+ Birmingham
+ UK

Services
– marketing services
– digital marketing services
+ Birmingham
+ UK

SEO
– SEO
– Search Engine Optimization
+ Company
+ Agency
+ Birmingham
+ UK

SEO Audits
– SEO Audits
– Technical SEO Audits
+ Agency
+ Company
+ Birmingham

The point here is that a well-structured site gives you a good way to determine your keyword strategy.

You still have to do the research and copywriting, but you can be sure you have a solid strategy to target broad and more detailed terms.

Pro tip: The work done structuring your site up to this point should make this aspect a piece of cake – if you are still struggling, consider revisiting the page structure. 

HTML title tags

The <title> tag is the primary behind-the-scenes tag that can influence your search engine results. In fact, it is the only meta tag that actually influences position directly.

The best practice for title tags is as follows:

• Place keywords at the beginning of the tag.
• Keep the length around 50 to 60 characters.
• Use keywords and key phrases in a natural manner.
• Use dividers to separate elements like category and brand.
• Focus on click-through and the end user (think call to action).
• Have a consistent approach across the site.

Remember, don’t overdo it and over-optimize page titles. We want our keywords in the title tag, but not at the expense of click-through and human readability. A search engine may rank your content, but human clicks on it, so keep that in mind.

Pro tip: Google has started to include brand names and logos in search results (again), so you can now use any space you would have used for branding for a call to action or more optimization. 

Meta description tags

Sure, meta descriptions don’t directly influence rankings. We all know that, right?

But that is completely missing the point here. Your meta description is the content of your advertisement for that page in a set of search engine results.

It is what wins you the click. And winning those clicks can help improve visibility and is absolutely vital in driving more users to your pages.

Meta descriptions must:

• Truthfully describe the page content.
• Advertise the page and improve click-through rates.
• Consider the user’s thought process and why they will click on this page.
• Include keywords where relevant and natural to do so.

The search engine will highlight search terms in your page title and meta description, which help a user scan the page. Don’t use this as an excuse to spam the meta description, though, or else Google likely will ignore it, and it won’t lead to that all-important click!

There are also situations where it can make sense not to create a meta description and let the search engine pull content from the page to form a description that more accurately maps to a user’s search. Your brief meta description can’t always cover all the options for a longer-form piece of content, so keep this in mind.

Tip: Got tons of meta descriptions to write? This is one of those SEO jobs that ChatGPT can really help with. 

Heading tags

Heading tags help structure the page and indicate hierarchy in a document: H1, H2, H3 and so on.

Text in heading tags correlates with improved rankings (albeit slightly), but what matters is the alignment between the structure of the site, behind-the-scenes optimization like page titles and meta descriptions and the content itself. 

Line everything up, and things make more sense for users, and we help search engines categorize our content while eking out every last bit of simple, on-page optimization we can.

Remember to align header tags with the visual hierarchy. Meaning the most important header on the page (typically the <h1>) should also be the biggest text element on the page.

You are making the document visually easy to understand here and further ensuring that design and content are working together for the best result.

Tip: The magic here is almost always in the process itself. Thinking of the content in relation to the hierarchy of information and mapping that to the visual hierarchy will almost certainly drive revisions and improve the content – that is the real SEO win! 

Page content

The content should generally be the most important part of the page. However, we still see archaic SEO practices like overt keyword density and search terms littered in the copy affecting readability.

This does not work. It makes you look illiterate and certainly does not help with your SEO. Don’t do this. 

We want to make sure the context of our page is clear. Our navigation, URLs, page titles, headers and so on should all help here. Yet we want to write naturally, using synonyms and natural language.

Focus on creating great content that engages the user. Be mindful of keywords, but certainly don’t overdo it.

Considerations for page content:

• Keywords in content (but don’t overdo it).
• Structure of the page.
• Position of keywords in the content – earlier can be better.
• Synonyms and alternatives.
• Co-occurrence of keywords – how else do people talk about this topic?

Tip: review individual pages in Google Search Console to see what keywords the page ranks for in lower positions. Using the impression count vs. clicks you can get some easy wins here. 

Rich snippets

Rich snippets are a powerful tool to increase click-through rates. We are naturally attracted to listings that stand out in the search engine results.

Anything you can do to improve the click-through rate drives more users and makes your search engine listings work harder.

Factor in possible ranking improvements from increased engagement, and you can have a low-input, high-output SEO tactic.

The snippets that are most relevant to your business will depend on what you do, but schema.org is a great place to start.

Image optimization

Image SEO can drive a substantial amount of traffic in the right circumstances. And again, our thoughts regarding context are important here.

Google does not (yet) use the content of images, so context within the site and the page and basic optimization are crucial here.

As an example, I am looking for a hobbit-hole playhouse for my youngest, and the search brings up image results:

I can dive right into those image results and find a multitude of options, then use the image to drive me to the site that sells the playhouse.

Optimizing your images increases the chance of improving prominence in the image search results.

Image optimization is technically straightforward:

• Provide an image name that clearly describes what the image is.
• Use descriptive alt text to help those who can’t see the images reinforce the image content.
• Add OpenGraph and Twitter Cards so the image is used in social shares.
• Use the image at the right physical size to ensure fast downloads.
• Optimize the image’s file size to improve loading times.
• Consider adding images to your XML sitemap.

Image optimization is relatively simple. Keep the images relevant. Don’t spam the filenames and alt text with keywords. Be descriptive.

Tip: Use captions, titles and alt text to provide as much contextual information as possible about your images. 

Optimal optimization 

You can always optimize something else, but if you structure and plan your site and then optimize these key areas, you will get 80% of the results from 20% of the effort. 

Tip: Optimization is never complete. So focus on what moves the dial and then move on. 

3. Common problems

Knowing what to optimize is essential and is the target we aim at. 

It is just as important to understand common problems that impact SEO and use this as something to run away from! 

Typically, every SEO project starts with an audit, and while we can’t cover every eventuality here, the following are some key points. 

Duplicate content

There tend to be two kinds of duplicate content: true duplicates and near-duplicates.

True duplicates are where the content exists in multiple places (different pages, sites, subdomains and so on).

Near-duplicates can be thin content or substantially similar content – think of a business with multiple locations or shoes listed on a unique page in different sizes.

Keyword cannibalization

Keyword cannibalization refers to the situation where multiple pages target the same keywords. This can impact the ability of your site to have one page that strongly targets a given term.

Where the site architecture and hierarchy have been carefully planned, you should eliminate this during the planning and design stages.

Domains, subdomains and protocols

Duplication also crops up when the site is available on multiple domains, subdomains and protocols.

Consider a business with two domains:

• Example.com
• Example.co.uk

With www and non-www versions:

• Example.com
• Example.co.uk
• www.example.com
• www.example.co.uk

And the site runs on HTTP and HTTPS:

• https://example.com
• https://example.co.uk
• https://www.example.com
• https://www.example.co.uk
• https://example.com
• https://example.co.uk
• https://www.example.com
• https://www.example.co.uk

Before too long, we can get to a situation where the site has eight potential variations. Factor in the site resolving on any subdomain and a few duff internal links and we can often add things like “ww.example.com” to the list above.

These kinds of issues are resolved with URL redirections.

Still, again, they deserve consideration by any web design agency that takes care of hosting and is serious about the SEO of their customers’ websites.

Botched canonical URLs

Another common issue we see is an incorrect implementation of canonical URLs.

Typically, the person building the site looks at canonical URLs as an SEO checklist kind of job. They are implemented by dynamically inserting the URL in the address bar into the canonical URL.

This is fundamentally flawed in that we can end up with the site running on multiple URLs, each with a canonical URL claiming that they are the authoritative version.

So the canonical implementation exacerbates rather than resolves the issue (sheesh). 

Canonical URLs are a powerful tool when wielded wisely, yet they must be used properly, or they can worsen matters.

Modern web design considers SEO best practices 

SEO is not some bandage you can plaster onto an existing site. 

Every website developer or CMS will list SEO credentials. Nobody says that they build sites to crash in the search results. SEO, today and beyond, is way more than a dry list of technical must-haves. 

Like all good marketing, it is ultimately about helping your prospective customers achieve their goals. 

SEO should be woven into every aspect of your marketing, and at the center of that should be your (optimized) website. 

There are a lot of moving parts with website design and SEO. 

• The first step is to carefully plan your site to have a sensible filing cabinet structure to house your products and/or services. 
• Then, optimize the key areas to ensure Google (and your prospects) can clearly understand what they should do next. 
• Finally, double-check for typical issues and ensure you eliminate any areas that could be holding you back.

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10 reasons to join us at SMX Advanced online this June

Monday, May 15th, 2023

The rise of generative AI and ChatGPT is unprecedented. Universal Analytics is sunsetting; GA4 is the way forward. Algorithm updates and ranking factor rollouts are endless. Turn these daunting challenges into opportunities to stay one step ahead of your competitors.

Attend SMX Advanced for free, online June 13-14, to learn elite, actionable search marketing tactics that can help you keep a competitive edge and drive measurable success.

Check out the just-launched agenda, featuring exclusive keynotes with Google’s VP of Search, Cathy Edwards, and Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President, Kya Sainsbury-Carter…

…plus 60+ tactic-rich sessions, Overtime live Q&As, Coffee Talk meetups, solution demos, and more!

Keep reading for 10 undeniable reasons why you should join us online next month:

1. You’ll unlock unbiased, trustworthy content from the experts at Search Engine Land, the industry publication of record.
2. 100% digital means you can attend from anywhere: office, home, cafe, couch, etc. No travel headaches, no time out of the office, no carbon emissions.
3. Can’t justify registration fees? No problem. SMX Advanced is 100% free to attend.
4. You’ll only learn safe, reputable, reliable training — no get-rich-quick schemes or dodgy tactics.
5. Hours or live Q&A (Overtime!) means you’ll get expert answers to your toughest questions.
6. Can’t attend live? On-demand access is included with your free pass, so you can train at your convenience.
7. Hear what the best in the biz are up to… and validate your own initiatives and instincts.
8. Forge game-changing connections during Coffee Talk meetups about Google algorithm updates, generative AI, GA4, and more.
9. Unite your departments with a shared training experience – invaluable to on-site and remote teams alike.
10. Earn a personalized certificate of attendance to demonstrate your commitment to continued training and furthering your career.

Need more convincing? Read more about attendees’ favorite reasons to attend SMX Advanced.

Ready to register? Secure your free All Access pass now!

Psst… Have you heard? The 2023 Search Engine Land Awards are open for entries! Don’t miss your opportunity to boost team morale, attract new business, and stand apart from the competition… enter now!

The post 10 reasons to join us at SMX Advanced online this June appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Courtesy of Search Engine Land: News & Info About SEO, PPC, SEM, Search Engines & Search Marketing

10 SEO challenges faced by fast-growing SaaS companies

Monday, May 15th, 2023

“We’re at around 100,000 monthly organic traffic, but we cannot sustain the SERP positions and conversions…”

“We are at 530,000 monthly organic traffic, but our growth has become stagnant and we’re unable to scale up…”

I hear plenty of similar SEO concerns from SaaS companies. After working on numerous audits, I found that most of them struggle with SEO issues that impact their customer acquisition costs and diminish revenues.

1. Branded terms have more visibility

Many SaaS websites get considerable branded traffic but minimal visibility for non-branded search. 

Even unicorns from ​​fast-growing regions, such as the U.S., UK, and India, struggle despite more branded traffic.

For instance, blockchain.com has ~911,500 monthly organic visits per Semrush:

But looking at branded vs. non-branded traffic tells a different story.

The same pattern can also be seen with Monzo.com.

Out of ~656,500 organic search traffic monthly, 94.4% is branded, and only 5.6% is non-branded.

Driving branded traffic is great if you’re already popular through funding and performance marketing which result in valuations.

By ignoring non-branded terms your searchers use, you’re losing customers to competitors. Missing such opportunities can be prevented when both non-branded and branded traffic is prioritized.

Sadly, most SaaS companies only realize the importance of organic growth when it’s too late.

2. Flawed SEO content strategy

Before investing in SEO, most SaaS product marketing teams will start creating content based on the customer journey stages.

Yet, they mostly focus on creating Consideration and Decision content while overlooking Awareness and Interest stages altogether.

This type of content often revolves around branded terms that help with performance marketing and email outreach – but not SEO.

Product marketing teams have metrics to chase, and this content approach supports that.

They want to get MQLs (marketing qualified leads) and SQLs (sales qualified Leads) faster to achieve their MRR (monthly recurring revenue) and ARR (annual recurring revenue) targets.

But when you invest in SEO, the purpose is not just getting more MQLs and SQLs, even though your clients or bosses want them. 

Though top management wants leads from the organic channel, they need to know their KPIs differ based on the strategy used.

Growth advisor Gaetano DiNardi offers tips on breaking down traffic sources and their purposes:

Break it down like this:  

1. Demand Capture – Paid Search / Affiliates  

2. Demand Capture – Pricing Page / Demo Request  

3. Education / Exploratory – Main Website Pages  

4. Education / Exploratory – Blog & Resources

A SaaS website’s main purpose is to generate visibility on the search engines for the queries the customers search. This can only happen by targeting the right queries.

If your ideal customer is not searching for [Your product name + feature benefits], you won’t get any visibility through the search engines.

Your content strategy for SEO needs to target the queries and topics that at least fall under the Interest stage if you’re not interested in driving Awareness stage people to the website.

3. Unsustained content value

Recently, I spoke to two start-ups that already have an extensive content library or resource. Yet, it has become a bottleneck for scaling organic growth.

How? They have written a lot of blogs, but only a few perform well organically. 

What might have been the issue? 

When writing and publishing a lot of content without appropriate review and analysis, the content value is not sustained across all the content.

I’ve seen SaaS marketing or SEO teams excited about targeting to publish 40 to 60 articles a month. At such a scale, content quality control might suffer. 

That’s why I recommend a thorough content review process that looks at the following:

• Requirements: Was the content delivered according to the brief?
• Contextual intent: Does the content have the right context? Does it serve the user intent?
• Brand messaging and promotional review: Are the brand and its products/services positioned with the right messaging throughout the piece?

Now, with ChatGPT becoming stronger, you would anyways need to have an editor in place.

Putting much content out to scale up is fine, but the results will never sustain if it offers less value than your competitors.

4. Focusing on creativity over SEO

Another significant challenge with SaaS SEO is that the product marketing team needs creative punchlines to attract the crowd.

For example, look at the super fantastic headline written by Dyte.io.

Well, it’s a video streaming SDK provider. Their developer or CTO audiences can understand SDK, but because punchlines are catchy and attractive, they use them as headings. 

Let’s take another example of an amazing headline from Adapt.io.

They’re the sales acceleration platform that provides intelligent buyer analytics for proper targeting.

Nothing wrong there, but it’s missing out on helping users and search engines understand what exactly they do through the headline.

Google’s SEO Starter Guide maintains that you should use heading tags to emphasize important text.

Google’s documentation on Headings and Titles also suggests writing document titles based on the document’s primary purpose.

Let’s take the example of the largest SaaS platform from whom many of our clients inspire, Salesforce:

They have mentioned what they are as their headline.

Let’s take another example of a popular HR payroll platform, Keka:

Not just the readers but search engines can understand what this platform is all about.

You need to learn how to help search engines understand what you are and what you do so that they can put you in front of your customers for the correct queries at the right time.

So creative punchlines are great for performance marketing, but balancing them with the correct queries can take you to heights, even in SEO.

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5. Decaying content

Extensive content libraries often suffer from content decay, a continuous but slow decline in the content’s impressions, clicks and traffic.

So when you keep publishing new content, you need to remember the ones published in the past. When they’re no longer valuable to the audience, search engines may take the content off the SERPs for many queries.

Publishing content is only 20% of the task. The rest is optimizing it to own featured snippets.

6. No content optimization plan in place

Once the content is written and published, the team needs to remember to monitor whether they perform.

And this is not just the case with SaaS companies but many companies across various segments that rely on heavy content pipelines for SEO.

They only create blogs to drive value to the commercial-intent pages. If those blogs are bringing that value, it’s good. Otherwise, the focus should be on creating new content.

But when you don’t optimize the content periodically:

• You can’t maximize the content ROI because all content that you publish doesn’t drive traffic or conversions.
• You miss the opportunities of having different touchpoints to bring the target audience to the website.
• If you add filters to your target audience or change your brand positioning and don’t update them on all the content, you struggle with consistent brand messaging, which can confuse your target audience.

7. Keyword cannibalization

Keyword cannibalization is also a big issue among SaaS websites.

For example, these topics can create keyword cannibalization for a VoIP softphone app:

• What is a Softphone? Why Do You Need It? 
• Softphone: Definition, Benefits, Challenges, and More
• The Importance of a Softphone
• 6 Advantages of a Softphone

When you write the first topic, you’re exclusively covering the definition of a softphone and its benefits in detail.

And now you know that is what the second and all the other topics mean.

In this case, you feel the first blog has the below target queries:

• What is a softphone?
• Reasons you need a softphone

And the second one has:

• Softphone definition
• Softphone benefits
• Softphone advantages
• Softphone challenges

The intent of someone reading the first two contents is the same. And hence, the target queries are also the same. They are just semantically connected.

The topics may seem distinct, but the audience, context, and queries remain the same. In reality, only the titles differ.

To address this, you can either merge both articles and delete the one that is underperforming or has little value.

8. Underutilizing internal linking

Internal linking on the SaaS websites happens in two ways:

Putting too many ‘Read more’ sections between paragraphs

Even if you add them contextually after a few paragraphs, it brings interruption while reading. Adding them within the sentences using the correct anchor text is better to deliver a better user experience.

The “Read More” section should be used when sharing an extended version of the discussed topic.

Failing to link the high-end anchor text mentioned in the content 

All content gets published just while looking at the query for which the content was written. 

For example, if the content is about “How do HR management systems work,” the links would be given to all the blogs and landing pages around HR but not to the Payroll page, even if that was used in the content somewhere.

Below is the internal linking sheet for one of our clients:

This is also a content optimization mistake that can diminish your content’s value.

As Google’s Starter Guide suggests, the anchor text should help users and search engines understand what the page is about. 

Cyrus Shephard’s latest study on Google’s Selective Link Priority suggests wisely choosing your text and image anchor.

Building an internal linking structure before aggressively creating content can maximize SEO ROI.

9. Blindly copying competitors for backlinks

Most clients I’ve spoken to want all their competitors’ backlinks – even if their own site already has ~600,000 monthly organic visitors.

“My competitor has captured the backlink from Amazon. We need it!” 

Well, not really. Just because your competitor earned that backlink doesn’t mean it’s relevant.

They might have gone after irrelevant backlinks. Should you also do it?

It’s should not be about blindly copying someone else’s strategy. Carefully analyze your competitors’ backlinks and identify which are the most relevant.

This helps you avoid putting efforts in the wrong direction and wasting resources that could’ve been well-spent elsewhere.

10. Not enough or zero content distribution

Because growth needs to happen fast for SaaS businesses, SEO needs to pick up the pace. The downside is that content distribution becomes an afterthought.

Your work doesn’t end with publishing content. You should have a distribution strategy in place.

SEO cannot play alone in the game of marketing and business.

You need to think of “remarketing SEO” that focuses on what you can contribute to search, be it people, platforms, or SERP presence.

SaaS content can be repurposed, redistributed, or syndicated to ensure your efforts drive the expected results. In short, the content ROI is maximized.

SaaS SEO must be a careful and strategic investment

For SaaS companies, focusing on performance marketing and outbound lead generation strategies is expected. 

But when done right, SEO has the capability to reduce your customer acquisition costs and maximize marketing ROI dramatically.

The post 10 SEO challenges faced by fast-growing SaaS companies appeared first on Search Engine Land.

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