It’s a highly competitive market for SEO skills at the moment. But as a hiring manager, how do you ensure that you are selecting the right fit for your team, and not just the available candidates? It’s crucial for the well-being of your existing team, your prospective hires, as well as your SEO performance, to hire well.

Who you hire, when, and in what order can come down to several factors. Working in-house may mean your budget for hiring SEOs is limited, so you might need to find someone who ticks a lot of skill boxes broadly, but less deeply. With an agency, or enterprise team, you may have the luxury of investing in a broad roster of talent where each individual is highly-focused.

Skills needed for a well-rounded team

Not every SEO team is created equal. You have to ensure that you’re hiring in a way that suits your organization. To do this, consider what skill sets already exist in your business and where there are gaps.

SEO skills

First, let’s look at some commonly sought-after SEO skills. I’m loosely categorizing these into practical skills (those that are needed specifically for great SEO performance) and soft skills (those that are needed for a good team dynamic).

Practical skills

Practical skills are often the ones focused on more in the hiring process. After all, we want to ensure our new colleagues are proficient SEOs! How you cover these skills might be a mix of staff, freelancers, and agency support.

• On-page optimization

• Technical optimization

• Digital PR

• Data analysis

• Strategy development

• Project/account management

Soft skills

As important as practical skills are the “soft” ones. These are the skills that are interpersonal and can help your team be efficient and collaborative.

• Mentoring

• Written and verbal communication

• Leadership

• Training other departments

Adjacent skills

There are other skills that, whilst not strictly SEO skills, can help your team to function at a higher efficiency. These adjacent skills are often rolled-up into SEO skills, although it’s debatable as to whether every SEO should have an in-depth grasp of them, or merely know how to work alongside those that do.

• Data manipulation (R, Python)

• Coding

• Copywriting and editing

• Team management

• Budgetary control

These skills are by no means a comprehensive list, but they show you the core elements that your team will need to comprise.

How to assess your team’s skills gaps

Before looking at whether you need to hire new team members, or how to upskill the current ones, you need to look at where the skill gaps are.

If you work closely with the SEOs in your company, you’ll likely already have an idea of where their strengths are, or the areas of SEO that they naturally gravitate towards. Perhaps you have that one person on the team who is always asked the technical questions or is the go-to for help with E-A-T issues.

Determining your team’s areas of weakness doesn’t have to be a long and complicated process. Here are some quick methods of getting a good enough picture of where their competencies lie.

Self-assessment

Your team will know their own strengths and weaknesses well. A good first port of call is to ask them to rate their own confidence with the list of skills mentioned above. Ask them to rate their practical experience of them out of 10, as well as their theoretical knowledge out of 10.

By running this exercise you not only see where there may be skill gaps in your team, you’re also helping your colleagues to take stock of their own areas for development. Through this and a robust development plan, you may be able to fill those skills gaps internally without the need to hire.

External assessment

If your team is small, or their manager is not experienced in SEO, you’ll need the help of an external coach to identify skill gaps.

Bringing someone in from outside your company will remove any bias in assessing the availability of necessary skills on your team. You could consider a career coach, but given the specialism, you may benefit more from bringing in an SEO consultant with management experience.

Peer assessment

A third way to get a good understanding of where there are skill gaps is to ask your team to identify them. They will have a good idea of each other’s strengths and weaknesses and where they would like to see additional resources focused.

Identifying other useful skills and experience

Your team may have experience tangentially related to the work they are doing for you that actually helps them to be better SEOs. When you’re considering the skills gaps in your company, don’t forget to encourage your team to look at these skills that weren’t necessarily developed through work.

Experience gained outside of work

Consider their hobbies and volunteer work. You may be looking to hire externally for the next people manager role because no one on your team currently manages their colleagues. Could a candidate have developed those skills through their outside lives?

Perhaps you have a scout troop leader in your team, sports coaches, or voluntary industry mentors. These skills might not be immediately apparent from a CV or your experience of them at work, but dig a little deeper and you may find the missing skillset or experience you need for your department.

Don’t discount the valuable skills and experiences gained outside of a workplace setting, especially for candidates or team members who are more junior. It may be that they have not had the opportunity to showcase those skills in their careers so far but they excel in them outside of work.

What to do once the skill gaps have been identified

Once you have a better idea of where your team’s skill gaps lie, you have to decide whether to hire, train, or contract out those skills.

You may be able to grow your existing colleagues’ skills to bridge that gap with formal SEO training or like those from Moz Academy. This can also be a great way of keeping your team engaged, with the added bonus of professional certifications.

When considering training, be sensitive to life commitments. SEO is an industry that seemingly rewards “hustle”. However, a lot of people don’t want to carry out more work outside of their contracted hours, even if it is for themselves. Don’t expect your team to always be working to improve their knowledge and skills outside of work. Instead, if you want to build a world class SEO team, give plenty of space within work hours for your team to develop their skills.

If the skill gaps are too significant, you may need to bring that resource in. One way of doing that is through agencies or freelancers, but this isn’t always a cost-effective long-term solution.

Finally, you could hire someone new. Here’s how.

Create a job specification

Use the skills your team is lacking as a foundation for your new role specification. Create a description and list of capabilities around these core skills. For example, if you have identified a need to bring more technical expertise into your team, create a role that focuses on that.

Remember that it’s hard to hire an SEO who is a phenomenal all-rounder. Most of us have our leanings towards tech, content, digital PR, etc. That said…

Be careful of being too narrow

Don’t be overly prescriptive in your job specification, either. Consider whether you really need candidates to have over two years’ of experience with Python. Does this new person have to have the ability to code in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, or do they just need to know how these languages impact SEO? Do you need someone with copywriting skills, or can they just be great at communicating briefs?

If you create a very rigid “wishlist” of necessary competencies or experience you may miss out on applicants who have the right skill set for the role.

Benefits of overlapping skill sets

There can be benefits of doubling up on competencies within a team. For instance, if you’ve noted that you need a great on-page SEO but you’re getting applicants who also have a technical background, consider that a plus even if you already have great technical SEOs in your team. There’s always more that we SEOs can learn, and bringing in people who have similar specialisms, but different approaches, can help deepen our competency.

How to interview SEOs

There are many, many guides on how to conduct great interviews. What I want to focus on here are the nuances of interviewing SEOs.

In my experience, interviews for SEO roles tend to come in two main flavors:

• Discussion about experience and skills

• A practical task that usually results in a presentation

What combination of these, the number of stages involved, and who sits in on them differs greatly. But is this the optimum way to assess the competencies of an SEO?

The interview process

How you structure your interview should depend on a number of factors including:

• The skill set for the role

• The seniority of the role

For instance, an SEO with two years’ experience may require a different set of questions to that of a managerial candidate with 10 years’ experience.

There are a variety of interview techniques and activities you can use to better gauge the suitability of a candidate for a role and help them to understand if your company is the right one for them.

The formal interview

Most of us will have taken part in a formal meeting with a prospective employer. It can be a good way of quickly determining if you have rapport, and in theory, allow for both the candidate and interviewer to dig into skills and experience.

In reality, however, it’s quite a flawed method of assessing fit. Many people simply do not excel within the high-pressure situation of a one-on-one or panel interview. Depending on the role they are applying for, it could be the last time they are expected to perform in that set-up, so why interview them like that? Having a great set of interview questions can help, but to understand an individual’s capability, you may need to dig deeper.

That said, some SEO roles, in particular client-facing account or project management, will require meetings that are actually quite similar in nature to an interview. The formal interview process might be a good stage of assessment for these types of roles.

The informal chat

A less formal method for finding out information about a candidates’ skills and experience is through a more casual discussion. This interview style can be much more laid-back, giving as much space to the candidate to ask questions as the interviewer.

This can be a good way of assessing how a candidate might perform in team meetings, liaise with outside agencies, or communicate with suppliers. For roles that don’t necessarily require sales pitching or formal presentations, then an informal chat is a better route to discern a person’s fit for a job.

Homework task

Often a second or third stage of the interview process is the take-home task like auditing a website and presenting findings, or pitching a marketing project. The idea of the homework is to give candidates some time to think through a problem and work towards their best solution. It allows an interviewer to gain insight into how a candidate might actually go about a real-life SEO issue.

This is a tricky stage to get right, though.

In practice, the at-home element of these tasks can often take a candidate a long time to prepare. Given that they’re likely in several other interview processes at the same time as yours, they may be working well into their evenings and weekends to prepare for all of these tasks.

In addition, these tasks often require access to SEO tools. It’s possible to get free trials for some, but they’re limited in functionality and by trial length, or a candidate may not feel comfortable using their existing employer’s tool licenses to complete work for an interview. It will be better if, as part of this stage, you offer candidates data dumps to work from or give them temporary access to the tools they need to use.

There is also the risk on the candidate’s side that they may well come back with some excellent work and still not get hired. They will have sunk time, energy and expertise into an SEO situation just to have the interviewers say no. In some, unfortunately not atypical cases, the interviewing company may go on to use the candidate’s work even though they haven’t been hired.

On the side of the interviewing company, you also don’t really know how independently the candidate worked on the project. Look at SEO focused forums and subreddits and they are awash with people asking advice on how to best complete a task or present their findings for interviews.

A further complication of these stages is that they often test skills that aren’t necessarily needed for the role. In addition, the tasks usually need to be shared back in the form of a presentation and Q&A. As we’ve already discussed, if presentation skills are not crucial to your role, you may not be assessing the right competencies. After all, a candidate might have found a great solution to an SEO problem, but is this the right format for finding out how they arrived at it if presenting makes them nervous?

Live task

An interview assessment method that is common in the engineering and development world, but hasn’t really made it across to SEO, is the live task. Candidates can be given a problem to solve, or a website to audit, and asked to work on it whilst they are in the interview. This way, they can easily be provided with the tools they need, the risk of them asking for external help is mitigated, and they aren’t required to spend additional time outside of the interview to prepare for it.

It can, however, be quite a daunting prospect for the candidate. To make them more comfortable, consider giving them the site or rough outline of the sort of task they will be working on before the interview. Also make sure to give them the freedom to turn their, and your, cameras and microphones off if on a virtual interview, or for you to leave the room if it is an in-person interview. No one likes being stared at as they work!

Peer interviewing

To ensure it’s not just you getting to know the candidate, but that the candidate gets to know your company well, you could consider including a peer interviewing option.

Here, a candidate gets to sit with a selection of their potential colleagues and discuss what it’s like working at your company. It’s crucial that the meeting does not contain managers or anyone involved in the hiring, so the candidate can feel encouraged to ask the probing questions they want in order to find out if the company is the right fit for them.

Interviewing at the right level

It can be tough to ask the right questions of candidates who are at a different stage of their SEO career than you. If you’ve been in the industry for several years, it might be difficult to identify what someone of their experience should know and be able to achieve. Equally, if you’re not an SEO yourself, but involved in hiring one, you may not know enough about the discipline to really gauge the extent of your interviewee’s knowledge. It’s important to identify the depth of skills you would expect someone at the level you’re hiring for to have. One way of doing this is by looking at the types of problems you would want that person to solve. What skills would need to be present for them to do that? Then look at weighting those skills. Which are absolutely necessary for getting the job done and which would aid to a degree.

If you have little experience in SEO yourself you may need to consult with members of your SEO team, or look to an external advisor to help you.

Be clear about the role’s level

You don’t want to discount an eager, quick learner from a job that only requires a basic understanding of SEO because they didn’t interview as well as your last hire who is now a manager.

Similarly, a candidate may really impress you with their expertise and experience but is the role too basic for them and they are likely to want to advance on from it quite quickly?

Level appropriate questions

To make sure you’re giving your candidates the best chance to shine in their interviews, here are some ideas of questions for each of the main skill sets and how they can be tailored for junior, middleweight, and senior roles.

On-page optimization

Junior

How would you go about optimizing a page to maximize its exposure in the SERPs?

This type of question allows for the fact the candidate might not have direct experience of carrying out this activity themselves, but tests their theoretical knowledge and approach to problem-solving.

Middleweight

Give me an example of when you used on-page SEO to improve rankings of a page. What did you do, why did you do it and what were the results?

This sort of question allows for the candidate to show their direct experience with on-page SEO but does not require them to show responsibility for the strategy behind it. They can show their practical knowledge and also hint at the reasoning behind the activity.

Senior

Give me an example of when you developed and employed a content pruning strategy. What was the strategy, why did you develop it and what was the outcome?

This type of questions allows the interviewer to test the candidate’s strategic reasoning as well as their ability to identify the best methodology for achieving results, and how they analyzed those results.

Technical SEO

Junior

What would you look for when carrying out a technical SEO audit?

This type of question helps to identify whether the candidate has a theoretical knowledge of broad technical SEO activity.

Middleweight

Give me an example of when you’ve encountered a duplicate page issue, what caused it, and how you resolved it.

This type of question begins to examine the candidate’s practical experience in technical SEO and can help you to identify if they have a working knowledge or merely theoretical knowledge of technical SEO.

Senior

Give me an example of a deindexation issue you encountered, how you identified it, and how you rectified it.

This type of question will give the candidate space to demonstrate their end-to-end practical experience of serious and complex technical SEO issues. It will likely allow them to show their experience of setting up alerts and automations as well as how they think through technical problems, communicate those to other teams and work to find a resolution.

Digital PR

Junior

What’s a campaign that you’ve seen recently that you admired, and what would you have done differently?

This tests the candidate’s ability to iterate on ideas without expecting them to have launched campaigns themselves yet.

Middleweight

Give me an example of a campaign that you launched that wasn’t initially successful, and what you did to improve it.

This tests a candidate’s strategic thinking, ability to adapt to the needs and wants of the media as well as giving examples of their work.

Senior

What would be your strategy for launching a campaign to generate links in a highly regulated industry like gambling? How have you overcome struggles with regulated or hard-to-represent industries in the past?

This type of question assesses a candidate’s ability to create a well-considered strategy within a set of limiting boundaries. It also assumes prior experience of more complicated campaigns.

Analytics

Junior

If the company’s core KPI is conversions, what metrics would you look at to see if SEO is helping towards that goal? What additional information might you need?

This question does not assume the candidate has had experience with onboarding a new analytics account before but tests their theoretical knowledge.

Middleweight

What is your process for ensuring data integrity in a new analytics account?

This sort of question will allow the candidate to show that they are conscious of how data can become compromised and their process for ensuring clean data. It will also show whether they understand how they can compromise data themselves.

Senior

Tell me about a time when you deployed a complex tracking solution, your steps, and the reporting you were able to produce through it.

This type of question will explore the depth of experience a candidate has in more complicated analytics and tracking solutions.

Strategy

Junior

What do you feel are the key components to a successful [SEO/digital PR] strategy?

This type of question will test the candidate’s theoretical knowledge of creating strategies and will empower them to talk about their knowledge of auditing, measuring, reporting, and iterating.

Middleweight

Give me an example of a strategy you created that yielded great results, the steps you implemented, and the outcome.

This question allows the candidate to show their own experience of creating strategies and gives them the opportunity to discuss one they are particularly proud of.

Senior

Give me an example of a strategy you created that was not successful and what you did as a result. What would you do differently next time?

Asking this sort of question explores the candidate’s ability to fail well, including how they recover and what they have learned from that experience.

Project/account management

Junior

How would you manage your time if you were asked to complete multiple tasks with the same deadline, but only had time to complete one?

This question allows the interviewer to see how a candidate would handle a situation they are likely to encounter a lot early on in their career. It assesses the candidate’s time management and communication skills.

Middleweight

Give me an example of a time when you had conflicting deadlines and how you managed the expectations of the stakeholders involved?

Through this question an interviewer can get an idea of how a candidate has approached scheduling conflicts and stakeholder management in practice when facing that pressure, rather than what they would hope they would do in theory.

Senior

Give me an example of a project that required significant scope changes and how you handled the communications, time management, and activity allocation considering the changes

This question assesses a more experienced candidate’s approach to project management when there are multiple factors that are impacted by scope change. It allows them to discuss their line management approach, resource allocation and stakeholder communications.

Removing bias in hiring

The SEO industry has typically had a problem with promoting similar faces in conferences, committees, and within jobs. To ensure that your hiring practices encourage diversity, you should look to remove as much bias from the process as possible.

Nameless CVs and resumes

One way of removing bias is to only pass on anonymized CVs or resumes to hiring managers. This way, there is less risk of any implicit bias towards specific naming conventions affecting the hiring process.

It needs to be mentioned, of course, that this is just papering over a bigger issue, and that any employees in charge of hiring should take implicit bias training.

Bias testing

There are numerous tests available that identify whether your hiring managers have any subconscious bias towards or against people based on various characteristics. One such suite of tests is provided by Project Implicit, a non-profit organization staffed by international researchers with the mission to educate the public about bias. Their tests cover a range of potential bias such as sexuality, disability, and skin color.

Diverse interview panels

Another way of limiting bias is ensuring a diverse group of people are involved in the decision-making. This means your interviewers represent a diverse cross-section of the public, not just your organization.

Consider foregoing CVs or resumes

To make sure you aren’t hiring people based on years of working, rather than the quality and breadth of the experience they have gained, you may consider doing away with the CV altogether. Instead, candidates can answer a series of questions when applying that assesses their competency for the role.

This can stop hiring managers from weighing suitability based on former job titles (of which the SEO industry has no standard), length of time at previous roles, or impressive-sounding brands. Instead, candidates will be invited to interview based on their aptitude.

Hire people with little experience but great potential

We all had to learn somewhere. At one point in our careers, a manager took a chance on someone with relatively little SEO experience and let us loose on a website. In order to help the industry grow and adapt, it’s imperative that we continue to hire in and train up entry-level SEOs. However, this isn’t something that should be done lightly, and you should always have a good support system in place.

What to watch out for when hiring

There are a few things to be mindful of when hiring SEOs in the current climate.

The reasons behind short periods of employment

There are several reasons why candidates only worked for a year (or less) at a role. Traditionally, short periods of employment have been treated with suspicion, but ours is a flexible and dynamic industry where staying for years and years in a role doesn’t always make sense. There’s also the COVID-19 pandemic to consider, as several companies went through severe hiring and working disruptions.

In addition, it’s important to encourage employees to find the best possible fit for them, which may entail some movement between jobs. Be careful not to dismiss a candidate purely because of short stints in previous positions or companies.

Values fit

As mentioned above, you’ll often want a “culture” type interview round for new hires. The idea being that it can help to determine whether a candidate would fit in well with an existing team or structure.

This isn’t always a great idea, though. If we’re looking to promote diversity in hiring and also bring new ideas and approaches into our teams, then we should hire for values fit and not culture fit.

Culture fit is expecting a candidate to fit in with the existing way of doing things. Values fit is making sure they agree with the core principles on which your business is based, but allowing for differences in approaches, personality, and behaviors.

Conclusion

It’s a tough market to hire in at the moment, because SEO skills are very in-demand. Make sure you aren’t overlooking great candidates or even existing colleagues when trying to build your perfect SEO department.

Be clear about what you need from your team and look both internally and externally for that skill set. Remember to hire for potential and not necessarily for their current experience level, and don’t rule out candidates unnecessarily or arbitrarily.

There is a lot of movement in the market at the moment allowing for amazing opportunities. Make sure you’re setting yourself and your future team up for success.

Competitive SERP analysis (including our recently launched Competitive Analysis Suite) is — by design — based on understanding the broader ecosystems of your ranking keywords. This is great if you’re an established business, but what if you’ve got a brand new site or are still developing your SEO strategy and aren’t ranking for many keywords?

Consider, for example, the fictional site, Dice-E-Shop.com (shh.. just let me have this one). We plug it into True Competitor, wait for some magic to happen, and voila!

Look at all the time you saved!

Okay, it’s not ideal, but there is a solution, and I call it “Aspirational Analysis”. The basic idea is simple — find a few aspirational but realistic keywords (ones that you can hope to compete for in the mid-term), use those SERPs to find aspirational competitors, and analyze those competitors to chart your competitive course.

1. Aspirational keywords

Let’s assume that you don’t know your competitive SEO landscape very well or that you want a fresh perspective on it. What you do know, hopefully, is the general topic and keyword space you want to compete in.

Let’s take our fictional business, Dice-E-Shop.com, and let’s pretend that it’s an online store specializing in handmade tabletop gaming dice. The key to step one is being aspirational but realistic — no vanity keywords allowed.

I’m not trying to make you feel bad. This is purely pragmatic. For example, let’s plug the keyword “dice” into our Keyword Explorer tool. You should get something like this:

That volume may look nice, but not only is the Keyword Difficulty pretty high, but look at that estimated CTR. Let’s take a quick look at the SERP itself …

The #1 organic position is occupied by a job search brand called Dice.com, which also has expanded sitelinks and other brand-specific rankings (such as their LinkedIn page). That brand is going to soak up most of the clicks on page one. This is neither a realistic nor desirable keyword.

I’m going to simplify this process to keep the workflow reasonable, but the next step is a blend of SERP analysis and intuition. We could go down many descriptive paths (“wooden dice”, “DnD dice”, “artisan dice”, etc.), but let’s try out “handmade dice”:

Don’t get hung up on the volume — our aspirational keyword(s) is all about finding a relevant, realistic competitor. It’s not about building a target keyword list. In this case, just by moving to a two-word phrase, we’re in a more reasonable Keyword Difficulty range with a much more attractive potential for organic clicks. In a more competitive market, we might need to reach deeper into the long tail of search, but “handmade dice” will do nicely for now.

2. Aspirational competitors

Let’s dig into the SERP for “handmade dice” a bit. The #1 result is for Etsy, but while they’re probably a good source of competitive intelligence for our new shop, they’re obviously not a realistic SEO competitor.

Here are the next three organic results. I’ve turned on the MozBar Chrome extension to quickly gain some additional insight:

The #2 site has a pretty low Domain Authority (13), and might not have a lot of ranking data. Honestly, though, as a marketer, I’m stuck on the #4 site because of this:

Love it or hate it, that’s certainly a unique selling proposition. What’s great about this analysis is that you can’t really pick the wrong site. This is an exploration of the competition, and you can always loop back and take another path and journey.

So, let’s go back over to True Competitor and plug in ArtisanDice.com. You’ll get back something like this (edited for size):

Due to a high keyword overlap (at 22%), Etsy scores high on our Rivalry metric, but, as previously discussed, is out of reach. Immediately after, though, we get a number of sites that look pretty viable, and we could easily visit those sites or research them in Keyword Explorer to learn more. Even the site that doesn’t look relevant at first glance (Help-action.com) turns out to be a blog for Dungeon Master resources and might have useful content ideas.

3. Aspirational analysis

I’d argue that we’ve already unearthed some pretty interesting information, but let’s take it a step further. I’m going to plug those top three aspirational competitors (after Etsy) into our new Keyword Gap tool. Here’s a sampling of the competitive keyword gap:

Note that, because we’re using an aspirational competitor (and not our own site), the “Traffic Lift” and “Your Rank” data have to be interpreted differently. This report is from the perspective of our aspirational competitor (ArtisanDice.com).

That said, we’ve got a solid start to finding opportunities in the space and keywords our soon-to-be competitors are targeting. We can easily start to piece together themes, like popular materials, which may even inform our product decisions.

The “Top Competing Content” report gives us a glimpse at some of the most effective content from our aspirational competitors, including a sampling of ranking keywords. I’ve edited this list down to show a few patterns, including pages themed around stone dice and d20s:

Now, we can explore these pages directly for inspiration. We could even put these pages back into our “Explore by Site” tool in Keyword Explorer and get keywords for the exact URL:

This niche page (targeting oversized d20s) ranks for 43 keywords in our data, including:

• oversized d20

• giant d20s

• large 20 sided dice

• jumbo 20 sided dice

• oversized d20 dice

• massive d20

• huge 20 sided dice

• giant d20 die

Even a sampling of this list is rich with synonyms and the kind of natural-language terms you should consider when building content around this niche.

4. Aspirational automation

While I’ve written this workflow around Moz tools, there are many ways to go about it, including manually using the SERPs themselves. There are two benefits to automation, though, and why I hope our Competitive Analysis suite can empower you to do better work faster.

First, even knowing very little about this space (other than being an occasional gamer and owning a few d20s in my time), the analysis in this post took less than an hour. If I were building a business in this space, I’d have been able to get at critical insights quickly.

Second, automation allows us to quickly branch and iterate. Let’s say that, after this first analysis, we decided to focus on stone dice or specifically on the DnD market — we could easily repeat this analysis to find niche competitors, keywords, and content. We could even start over with an entirely new aspirational keyword — as many times as it was useful. We could separately analyze product and content competitors, providing future direction for both our shopping pages and blog/marketing pages.

One last thing: aspirational analysis isn’t just for new sites. Sometimes, we all need to escape our own biases, and performing competitive analysis on other, diverse sites in our industry can open up new insights or areas we may be missing entirely.

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Google holds over 85% of global desktop search traffic and gets billions of searches per day. Google’s advertising revenue through Google Ads was $209.49 billion in 2021, the majority of which came from search advertising. 

Google Ads is very competitive and Google uses an auction system to decide which ads to show. When a search query is made with a keyword that has multiple bidders, Google Ads runs an auction to determine which ads are eligible to be shown for that keyword and their ad positions. Only ads that meet minimum quality requirements will be shown for a relevant search term.

With so much competition, how can advertisers improve their performance on Google Ads? In this blog post, I cover the importance of Quality Score in the Google Ads auction. For more details about the Google Ads auction process and Ad Rank, read my last post on Understanding the Google Ads Auction & Why Ad Rank is important.

What is Quality Score? 

Quality Score is Google’s estimate of the quality of your ads, as compared to those of other advertisers. It helps ensure that the ads that are most relevant to the search term are shown at a higher position in the search results, so it is based on the relevance of your ad to the search term, the likelihood that your ad will receive clicks when shown, and the user experience offered by your landing page. Every keyword in your account is assigned a Quality Score from 1 (bad) to 10 (excellent) and can be viewed in the keyword table.

Quality Score should be used as a diagnostic tool to improve the quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages to increase ad performance, and is measured by the performance of three components: 

1. Expected CTR

2. Ad relevance

3. Landing page experience

Each of these components is given a rating of “Above Average”, “Average”, or “Below Average”. This rating is determined by comparing your ads with other advertisers who ran ads for the same keyword in the past 90 days. 

Why is Quality Score important? 

The Quality Score of your ads and keywords is important for the success of your Google Ads PPC (pay per click) campaigns, as they can impact: 

• Whether your ads are shown — Quality Score determines if your ads are eligible to be shown at all in the results for a search query.

• Your ad position — Quality Score is one of the main factors that is used to determine your ad position or Ad Rank on the search results. 

• Your Cost Per Click (CPC) — Your Quality Score determines the actual cost per click (CPC) you pay for your ads. Ads with a higher Quality Score pay a lower CPC, while lower quality ads are charged a higher CPC which may be closer to their max CPC. 

• Whether ad extensions are shown — Ads have to have a high Quality Score for ad extensions to be shown with the ads. Ad extensions provide additional business information and can include call extensions, location extensions, and site links. Ad extensions help to increase the clickthrough rate (CTR). 

• Your ad performance — Higher quality ads and landing pages tend to have a higher CTR, higher conversion rates, and lower bounce rates.

• How often your ads are shown — More relevant ads will have higher ad impressions on the SERP. 

How to improve Quality Score and ad performance

To improve your ad performance, and compete successfully in Google Ads auctions, you should focus on optimizing the three components of Quality Score. 

1. Review the Quality Score of your search keywords

The first step is to review the Quality Score of your search keywords in the keywords table. For each keyword, you’ll see the Quality Score along with ratings for expected CTR, landing page relevance, and ad relevance. If you get a rating of “Average” or “Below Average” on any of these components, follow the tips listed below to better optimize. If you get a “-” in the Quality Score columns, it means there aren’t enough clicks and impressions for that keyword to determine the values. 

Note that the Quality Score status columns need to be enabled in your keywords table to show the values. For tips on how to enable the Quality Score status columns, refer to my post on Understanding the Google Ads Auction & Why Ad Rank Is Important

2.Select relevant keywords

Selecting the right keywords for each search query is essential for success with Google Ads. You need to make sure to select relevant keywords that are specific to the ads and match the intent behind the search query. Use the Keyword Planner tool in Google Ads to pick specific keywords based on search volume and competition.

Don’t use generic keywords, as they’ll result in your ad being shown for unrelated searches and that will waste your ad budget. For example, if you sell natural dog food, use “natural dog food” as the keyword in your ad, not the generic keyword “dogs”. You can also use long-tail keywords to target specific search queries.

3. Create ads with specific keywords 

Creating ads with specific keywords helps to increase ad relevance and expected CTR. Use the keywords from the previous step in your ad text, especially the headlines, to show that the ad is directly relevant to the search query and fulfills search intent. You can use dynamic keyword insertion to update ads with keywords from successful ads in your ad group. 

You can also add more headlines and descriptions. Responsive search ads, now the default ad format in Google Ads, allows you to enter up to 15 headlines and four descriptions, and uses machine learning to combine them into multiple ad combinations. Create at least 10 headlines and multiple descriptions so that there are more ad combinations available to show, and make sure they’re unique. 

If your ads are targeting a local area, mention relevant locations in your ads. You can use location insertion in responsive search ads to dynamically enter a city, state or country. Locations are selected from your campaign location targeting.

When creating responsive search ads, utilize the ad strength indicator to gauge your progress, and aim for ad strength of “Good” or “ Excellent”. Ad strength measures the relevance, quality, and diversity of your ads.

4.  Organize keywords into relevant ad groups

A Google Ads PPC campaign will typically contain several ad groups. Ad groups help to organize your keywords and ads by a common theme, such as the products and services that are being promoted in the ads. 

All the keywords in an ad group should be specific to the ads in that ad group. To increase ad relevance and keep your targeting specific, don’t have more than 20 keywords in one group. If you have ads targeting different search terms, you should create different ad groups for each target.

Since Google Ads is pay-per-click bidding, you can set a CPC bid at the ad group level, which would apply to all the keywords in that ad group. You can also set CPC bids for individual keywords. The CPC bids help to determine your ad position and the amount you are willing to pay for a click on your ad. 

As seen in the examples, to advertise dog food and dog beds, I would create an ad group for dog food and a separate ad group for dog beds. Each ad group would contain only the keywords and the ads that are specific to that service.  

5. Use negative keywords

To build a targeted Google Ads PPC campaign that’s focused on your target customers, you need to exclude search terms that aren’t relevant to your campaign. Negative keywords increase ad relevance by ensuring that your ads are triggered only for the keywords you want to target and shown for relevant search queries. They also decrease unwanted clicks on your ads, which helps to reduce wasted ad spend and increases ROI.

When building a negative keyword list, you want to exclude search terms for items that you do not sell. However, it’s important to choose negative keywords carefully and make sure that they don’t overlap with keywords you are targeting, since they’ll prevent your ads from being shown for those terms. 

After your PPC campaign runs for a while, there will be search terms that you aren’t targeting that you’ll want to add as negative keywords. 

To add negative keywords to your ad group or campaign, or to build a list of negative keywords from search terms: 

1. Sign into your google ads account

2. Click “keywords” on the left dashboard

3. Click “search terms” on the left dashboard

4. Check the box next to the search term you want to add as a negative keyword

5. Click “add as negative keyword” on top

For example, if I want my ads to show only to customers searching for dog food and not for dog beds, I would add “dog beds” to my list of negative keywords so that my ads are not shown for those search queries. 

6. Improve CTR

The expected CTR is one of the factors that is used to calculate the Quality Score of your ads. To improve the clickthrough rate of your ads: 

• Use responsive search ads (responsive search ads can achieve up to 10% more clicks and conversions). 

• Your ads should highlight a unique or compelling benefit of your product or service (extended return policy, one year warranty), which include seasonal and time-sensitive offers around holidays and special events. Always make sure the offer advertised is reflected on the ad’s landing page. 

• Your ads should have strong CTAs (Buy now, Call now, Order now, Get a Quote). Ensure the CTAs and ads are consistent with the landing page as well.

If your ad meets the quality thresholds mentioned above, up to four ad extensions (links with extra business information) can be shown, so make use of these to improve CTR even more. 

7.   Improve the landing page experience 

The landing page linked to the ad must be relevant and consistent with the ad, matching any offers. It should have high quality content, related images and a strong CTA. In addition, your website should be mobile-friendly, fast-loading, and easy to navigate to provide a great user experience. 

So don’t send all ad clicks to a generic home page. For example, if your ad is selling dog food, your landing page should be specific to dog food. If you also sell dog beds, create a different landing page with ads and keywords that are specific to dog beds. 

Always be sure the landing page follows optimization best practices, using an H1 header with a clear page title and the the main keywords used in the ad. Place the primary keyword towards the beginning of the title. 

Your business contact information should be easy to find on the landing page to help build trust with your customers and let them know how they can reach you. Also include trust symbols like industry mentions and awards to further build trust.

The landing page shown for dog food above is a great example of a Google Ads landing page. I searched for “natural dog food” and clicked through from the Google Ad shown. The landing page is specific and relevant and continues the conversation from the ad. It has quality content, clear images, and a strong call to action which is visible above the fold. 

It’s filled with reasons why I should choose their dog food: “fresh, whole ingredients”, “powered by science”, “tailored to their needs”, “change you can see”, etc. If a consumer is still unsure, they add plenty of trust symbols at the end of the page to convince them. Their landing page speaks to their target customer, dog owners,  and will be effective in converting them. 

Conclusion

Google Ads is very competitive and Quality Score is an important factor in the Google Ads Auction. It is used to determine which ads are shown on the Google search results, how often the ads are shown, and what the ad ranking will be. It also determines how much you pay for a click on your ads. 

By improving the three components of Quality Score, you can improve your ad quality and performance in Google Ads. You can also decrease your CPC costs, increase your ad position, compete effectively with other advertisers, and better reach your target customers on Google.

Google processes more than 8.5 billion searches every day. That’s more than 100,000 searches per second, thousands of which could lead a user to a purchase.

It’s no wonder, then, that 60% of marketers list SEO as their number one inbound marketing priority.

But generating organic traffic comes with challenges. Google has hundreds of billions of webpages in its index, competing for the top spots on search result pages. Not to mention, when you’re writing for search engines, you technically have two audiences: bots and humans.

Let’s look at how these audiences compare and see who you should be writing for.

Writing content for SEO: who to write for

Bots and humans are the chicken and the egg of search engine optimization. You need humans to make a sale, but you can’t get the humans without the help of bots.

The question is, which one comes first on your priority list? To answer that, let’s define each of these audiences.

Writing for humans

Human readers are the ones that can eventually make a purchase and become a customer. When making purchase decisions, humans need product details and pricing, but that type of information usually isn’t enough.

If you want to create content that resonates with a human audience, your content needs empathy, storytelling, and emotional reasoning. Studies show that storytelling, in particular, releases oxytocin in the brain, a hormone associated with positive feelings such as happiness and trust.

Storytelling also helps you structure your writing in a way that’s easy for human readers to follow and understand. Ultimately, when you write for people, you want to have a clear message that connects with humans.

Writing for robots

In this case, the robots we refer to are search engine crawlers or spiders. Unlike humans, web crawlers can’t buy a product from you, no matter how great your marketing.

But bots influence your position on Google’s search engine results pages (SERPs), which impacts whether or not human readers will see your content.

Search engine spiders respond to optimizations around indexing technical SEO. In other words, you want to use your keywords and heading structure to make it easier for bots to figure out the context of your content.

How to pick your audience

An analysis done by FirstPageSage found that the top-ranking article on Google’s SERPs receives an average CTR of 39.6%. And by the time you get to the 5th position, the average CTR drops to 5.1%.

If your goal is organic traffic, you need the help of search bots to get more human eyes on your content. But you never want to sacrifice your human audience. After all, they’re the only ones who can become your customers.

So, the answer to our question of which audience to choose is: Both.

This sounds like a bit of a cop-out, but the good news is they’re not mutually exclusive.

Google has continued to update its search algorithm to better process natural language and measure performance metrics that affect the user experience. These updates have made it easier to create an SEO content marketing strategy that works for both audiences.

How to write SEO content for humans and robots

Writing SEO-optimized content that works for crawlers and people is all about balance. You need to understand which elements impact each target audience the most and include them without ruining the experience for the other group.

Here are some steps to improve your SEO content strategy and drive more organic traffic.

Word choice

Word choice matters most for your human readers, but there are some aspects that apply to search engine bots.

For bots, you want to stay concise and make your content easier for Google to read and establish context. To do so, remove fluff terms, choose strong words over adjectives, and avoid long, multisyllabic words.

Here are some examples of how you can tailor the word choice for Google bots.

• “Open the app” instead of “simply open the app”

• “We’re thrilled” instead of “we’re very excited”

• “Required” instead of “mandatory”

Choosing words for humans requires a little more nuance. First, avoid language that insults your reader’s intelligence, such as the word “clearly”.

Second, opt for specific terms instead of general ones. For instance, “50% of respondents” is clearer than “many respondents”.

Finally, use inclusive language. Words such as “humankind” and “they” encompass more people than “mankind” and “she”.

Reading level

People search Google to find answers, not to read college-level explanations. Lowering your content’s reading level gives humans a more pleasant user experience.

Reading level doesn’t impact SEO rank directly. However, it can affect page experience metrics like dwell time and bounce rate, which impact SEO.

The Flesch Reading Ease score is a tool you can use to analyze the readability of your text. For instance, you can benefit from online tools like the Hemingway Editor that use Flesch score to test your writing.

The Flesch score uses average sentence length (ASL) and average syllables per word (ASW) to get your score, ranging from 0 to 100. The higher the score, the easier your content is to understand. Your score can also be connected to a Flesch-Kincaid reading level, which compares your writing difficulty to a school grade.

Here’s how the scores are divided by grade level:

• Any score above 70 is easy for 7th grade or lower to understand

• Scores between 60 and 70 are 8th to 9th-grade reading level

• Scores between 50 and 60 are 10th to 12th-grade reading level

• Scores below 50 are at college and professional reading levels

The Flesch-Kincaid reading level means someone at that reading level could easily understand your content. Try to aim for a score of 60 or higher, even if you’re writing for a college-level audience. Remember, your reader came to Google to find a clear answer, not read a dissertation.

Best practices to improve readability include adding transitions, writing shorter sentences, and using active verbs.

Content structure

Your content structure affects humans and bots. Headings and subheadings should make your post easier to read. If you include a table of contents at the top, a reader should be able to understand what your post is about and find the information they need.

Furthermore, your section titles are opportunities to capture your reader’s attention. So descriptiveness is not enough; you have to have a hook. For example, “10 Ways to Improve Your Time Management” is more personable and specific than “Time Management Tips.”

As for the search bot, structure helps it figure out the context of your article. To optimize for bots, include primary and supporting keywords in your headings. You can even use GPT-3 AI Tools to help generate outlines once you’ve done the keyword research.

Remember that AI tools are great for pointing you in the right direction when it comes to ideation, but you should ensure your finished text still makes sense to a human reader.

Visuals

Using images and other media to break up large chunks of text helps improve the user experience. Similar to structure, visual elements matter for both of your audiences.

When it comes to your human audience, you want to choose visuals that help readers understand the text they complement. So ensure you include images near relevant text and avoid generic stock photos.

Instead, try:

• GIFs

• Embedded videos

• Infographics, statistics, and graphs

• Screenshots with annotations

• Expert quote images

To optimize images for search bots, Google recommends using high-quality images and compressing the files, so they don’t lower your page speed. Furthermore, you should add descriptive metadata (such as title, caption, and file name) that includes keyword phrases when relevant.

Finally, pay attention to your alternate text (or alt text). The alt text describes images for search engine bots and screen readers for people who can’t see. Writing descriptive alt text is an essential part of accessible content writing.

While bots scan this text, you ultimately want to create a description that helps your human reader picture what’s in the image. In other words, avoid keyword stuffing and opt for a description of what’s going on in the image instead.

For example:

• Keyword-stuffed alt text: “shoes trainers sneakers fashion shoes footwear women’s shoes accessories athletic shoes”

• Descriptive alt text: “pair of women’s sneakers in white”

Grammar, spelling, and capitalization

Proper grammar and spelling help you build trust with your readers.

According to Google Search Central, grammar is not a direct factor for search engine rankings. But, if a search bot can’t crawl your website because of errors, that’ll harm your search performance. On the other hand, proper spelling can improve your page’s authority score.

Spelling is especially important when it comes to brand names. As Dale Carnegie, author of How to Win Friends and Influence People, states, “A person’s name is to that person, the sweetest, most important sound in any language.”

This might seem like a minor factor, but the brands you write about care if you spell (and capitalize) their names correctly.

Here are a few brands that people commonly misspell:

• WordPress, not Wordpress

• HubSpot, not Hubspot

• Mailchimp, not MailChimp

Some word processors might not have brand names included in their spell check, but you can use Grammarly’s style guide feature to autocorrect for brands you frequently write about across a team of writers and editors.

Content length

Although Google has confirmed that word count is not an SEO ranking factor, that doesn’t mean you should ignore it.

Google does prioritize comprehensive answers to search terms, so long-form content may perform better. In other words, content length can indicate how well your writing meets a user’s search intent compared to the competition.

SEO optimization tools like Clearscope provide word count suggestions based on the length of the top-ranking pages. That said, don’t sacrifice quality content to create longer articles. Adding meaningless content to meet a word count goal can hurt the reader experience.

Page titles

You should write your page titles for bots and people. Writing for bots means including the target keyword in your SEO title tag and meta description. Doing so gives search engines more context and improves your chances of ranking for the right keywords.

Page titles for people should include keywords, but they also need to pique the reader’s interest so you can increase your click-through rate. You can make your titles click-worthy by including emotional words, adding urgency, and making them personal.

Here are some examples.

• Emotional: “5 Proven Ways to Fall Asleep Easily”

• Urgent: “How to Stop Procrastinating Right Now”

• Personal: “Resume Template to Land Your Dream Job”

Titles are one of the main factors affecting how much traffic your page receives, so they’re an excellent place to A/B test.

Writing for search engines: optimize for robots or people?

When it comes to writing SEO-friendly content, it’s not a question of humans vs. robots but rather how to optimize for both. The actionable steps in this article are an excellent place to start if you want to create content that ranks on SERPs and resonates with potential customers. 

To read more about creating consistent brand style guidelines and copywriting for an online audience, check out my book Writing for Humans and Robots: The New Rules of Content Style, available in print and Kindle on July 18, 2022.

As is often the case with SEO, if you’re doing it well, then you are probably already topically relevant. Topical authority isn’t new, but it’s a term that I’m seeing a lot right now in the SEO sphere.

But hey — if you’ve not yet earned topical authority, now is a good time to start.

In this article, I’ll take a deep dive into topical authority: what it is, how to earn it, and, importantly, how to strategically develop topical relevance.

What is topical authority?

Topical authority is a measure of authority built up through proven expertise and trust in your field. The more high-quality, informative pieces of content there are on your site, the more likely your website is to be perceived as a trusted source of information on a particular topic.

To be topically authoritative, your site needs to serve your web user, answer all their questions, and provide high-quality content at every step of the buyer journey. Unlike domain authority (DA), topical authority is more of a quantitative measure of how authoritative a site may be. Whilst DA looks primarily at backlinks and the number of high-quality, relevant backlinks, topical authority is proven expertise built over time by covering the breadth and depth of a topic.

Why is building topical relevance important?

If you reach out to someone for a service or product and they speak confidently and passionately about their offering, answer all of your questions, and understand your needs, then you’re more likely to trust them. Why should the internet be any different?

Your buyers are drawn to your offering, your expertise, and your passion. Buyers also want to know you can help serve them and that you understand them.

In the digital world, content is how you nurture buyers. Where Google is concerned, topical relevance proves to search engines that you’re trustworthy and knowledgeable. We all know that Google wants to show its users the best possible content from the most credible sources.

You know a thing or two about your product or service, so prove it to Google through content. Cover related topics, hit keywords, and present information in a way that’s easy for your user (and Google) to understand.

Medic and topical authority

Google’s desire to present only the most useful pieces of information was made clear (if it wasn’t already) in 2018 through the medic update. Back in 2018, the medic update impacted all verticals, but predominantly, health. 

It was a positive update, encouraging everyone to improve content production. The update meant that instead of writing content in isolation and expecting it to rank well, content needed to showcase expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-A-T).

And it makes sense for this standard to be upheld across the web, especially when we consider that there are more pieces of content being published than ever before. In short: publish only the most well-written, well-informed pieces on your website if you want to stay competitive.

How does topical authority help you rank higher?

Topical authority’s impact on rank is fairly logical. Consider your own buyer journey. You want to source a good product or service that you also love. Perhaps the brand values need to align with your own.

Before making a purchase, you most likely head to Google — but even if you didn’t, you’d be looking for credibility before you make your purchase. Without Google, you would need to source referrals from friends or pop into the store and speak with an advisor. You’d ask questions and gauge if the product or service does everything you need it to. You’d likely be looking to build a rapport and to see if you trust the person or business to deliver whatever you’re thinking of paying them for. If you were torn between two vendors, you might be swayed by the more passionate person or value-driven business.

Topical authority allows you to provide this same experience online. You showcase all the reasons why someone should buy from you. If you’re saying everything your competitor is saying — plus some more — and you’ve created different types of content to appeal to your audience (videos, guides, etc.), your site is starting to look more authoritative and useful. Why would Google prioritize a competitor site when it perceives your site to have more useful information?

There’s one key thing to remember: when it comes to ranking on Google and earning favor in the algorithm, you need to use keywords in your content. As you center your strategy around creating high-quality articles, you need to be especially cautious of keyword cannibalization.

There’s also what I call topical cannibalization. To build topical authority strategically, you need to know how to build out your content architecture in a smart way. I’m going to walk you through that now, step by step.

1. Research your topic

Before you can build out your content strategy, you need to research your topic. What you’re looking for are the search terms your buyers are typing into Google to solve their problems.

Here, you can turn to keyword tools like Moz’s keyword explorer. Type in a keyword (or your topic) and see what else is suggested. You will find exactly what terms are being searched in Google so you can use them within your content to earn ranks for them.

Moz shares keyword suggestions, many of which can form part of your content strategy. Remember: covering all relevant topics helps build topical authority.

Social media sites like Quora and Reddit are also useful. Within these sites, you can see exactly what discussions your audience is having. You’ll likely encounter their pain points, queries, and buyer apprehensions that you can then solve, answer, and/or soothe within your content.

Finally, it’s my favorite: people also ask (PAA). Want to know what your audience is asking? There’s a trove of information in there!

Tools like AlsoAsked make light work of PAA, allowing you to view PAA data in a visually appealing, hierarchical structure. There’s a lot of opportunity to build topical authority in any niche. Just take a look at knitting as an example!

2. Create pillars and clusters

When researching your topic, map out every single piece of content that you want to create based on what your audience is searching or looking for.

Then, you’re going to work on assigning keywords to the pieces. This is the crucial step that prevents keyword and topical cannibalization.

3. Map keywords to pillars using SERP analysis

When mapping keywords, it’s easy to assume that every keyword needs its own page. Take the knitting example from earlier: if you dig around in the keyword suggestions, you can find “what is knitting” (590 searches/month) and “history of knitting” (480 searches/month).

A quick analysis of the SERPs shows that these two keywords can perform well in SERPs used on the same page. You don’t need to write two articles. Two articles could result in what I call topical cannibalization.

4. Write high-quality, well-researched content

When planning your content, look for opportunities to write quality, well-researched, long-form articles instead of just trying to publish as many as possible.

Instead of writing two articles, consider writing one more in-depth article like sustainablefashioncollective.com did. Their article features high up on the SERPs for ‘what is knitting’ and has a featured snippet for “history of knitting”.

It’s also on page one for “knitting uses” (20 searches).

The point is, more articles don’t necessarily equate to more ranks. When it comes to topical authority, Google wants to present well-written, in-depth, well-informed articles.

5. Share it with your audience

There’s no need to wait for your page one rank before you get eyes on your article or page. Share it with your audience, use social media, and present content to your subscribers through email. Try repurposing content and creating videos.

Quick tips for earning topical authority

The steps above briefly detail the steps you can take to help build topical authority over time. Here are some final steps to integrate into your content plan:

• Keep up with current events related to your topic.

• Identify new trends and write about them.

• Cluster your keywords and cover a topic in full based on SERP analysis.

• Don’t be afraid to share something new — just because it’s not on the SERPs doesn’t mean you can’t be the first to say it.

• Don’t be afraid to link out to trusted sources. Referencing other materials is a great way to show you’ve done your research.

• Update your content to keep it fresh. For example, if you’ve got a page about your topic in 2021, it might be time to update it and make that article relevant to 2022.

How can you tell if a website is authoritative?

There are many ways to work out if a website is authoritative. Find out how the you can use the following items to tell if a website is authoritative:

• Check the domain authority

• Look out for indented SERPs

• Check organic keywords

• Strong internal link profile

• Well-written, informed content

Check the domain authority

An SEO favorite is domain authority (DA). Although we’re focusing on topical authority here, domain authority is still a measure of an authoritative website. The DA score is a number between 1 and 100 that indicates the website’s strength in search engine results pages. There are several factors that feed into this algorithm and backlinks are one of them.

Simply put, the more backlinks a site or content piece has earned, the higher the domain authority will likely be. After all, other websites tend to link to highly authoritative websites.

Look out for indented SERPs

Indented SERPs are a strong indicator that a site is topically relevant. If you search a keyword such as: ‘landscape design tips’ (90 searches/month), you might find housebeautiful.com and their indented search results.

Indented SERPs are where similar topics that exist on one website are grouped together, giving the site more prominence in search results.

Check organic keywords

Generally, the more keywords a site ranks for on a topic, the more topically authoritative it will be.

SEO tools can give you some insights into what your competitors are ranking for. They can also share topic ideas for how you can close the gap by covering the same topics.

If you do cover the same topics, remember to add more detail, more media, or a unique perspective.

Strong internal link profile

Assuming a site is using internal linking well, a strong internal link profile should demonstrate that a site is authoritative on a subject.

Take ‘beginners guide to seo’ (480 searches/month) as an example. For this keyword, Moz is in position one.

A quick internal link analysis tells me there are 26 links within content pointing to this page. Links are coming from pages such as On-Page Ranking Factors in the ‘learn’ section of the website. This is a highly relevant topic for beginner guide SEO.

Well-written, informed content

If you’re on a website and you’re discovering well-written, high-quality, original pieces of writing, then it shows that the site has some topical authority.

If the site is also updating this high-level content regularly, it’s probably earning topical relevance.

Do backlinks still count toward website authority?

Yes, backlinks still contribute to website authority. We can also predict that backlinks will continue to be helpful toward SERP rankings — but they’re not everything.

Backlinks needn’t be your goal when it comes to topical relevance. They will happen naturally as you earn visibility in SERPs and write high-quality, linkable content. Nevertheless, authoritative sites will continue to earn backlinks at a higher rate than non-authoritative sites. Plus, having topical authority can only help you attract links from other websites.

Koray Tugberk conducted an incredibly useful experiment where topical authority is concerned. To add credibility to his study he isolated E-A-T as the driving factor for success — he literally implemented no other SEO tactic. Take a look at his interview with Matt Diggity: 

Tuberk claims he earned 300,000 organic users, built up from zero in just five months. And he did it all using topical authority and semantic SEO only — no backlinks.

Final thoughts on topical authority

Building authority on a subject should come easy. After all, this is the topic you loved so much you built a website to share your expertise on it, right?

Reach out to your subject matter experts, ask them questions, and get to writing.

Be creative with what you put out there, repurpose your content, answer questions, and nurture your buyer.

Follow my steps above and don’t be afraid to inject some new information into the SERPs. Your buyer wants to know you and your business! The extra efforts go a long way when it comes to content.

Remember, content and topical authority in a digital world often replace face-to-face interactions. Show your buyer why you’re an expert, what you know about your subject, and all the reasons why they should trust you.

I’m writing this after John Mueller caused a minor stir on Twitter on Monday, with this post:

The concept of toxic links is something that’s made up by SEO tools — I’d just ignore it, and perhaps move on to more serious tools.

— 🐝 johnmu.xml (personal) 🐝 (@JohnMu) June 6, 2022

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

Now, at Moz we do not actually use this “toxic” language in our tools or accompanying guides, so this probably isn’t aimed at us. That said, I do think there’s an interesting discussion to be had here, and our competitor Ahrefs made an interesting conclusion about how this applies to “Spam Score” third party metrics, which of course is a term we coined:

Good thing we managed to resist this very popular feature request for quite a few years. 🙂 https://t.co/Obci3Gx4xspic.twitter.com/0Uc1E1uCzi

— Tim Soulo 🇺🇦 (@timsoulo) June 7, 2022

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

At risk of getting myself eviscerated by John Mueller and perhaps the entire SEO industry on Twitter, I want to push back slightly on this. To be clear, I don’t think he’s wrong, or acting in bad faith. However, there is sometimes a gap between how Google talks about these issues and how SEOs experience them. 

Google has suggested for a while now that, essentially, bad (“toxic”) links won’t have a negative impact on your site — at least in the overwhelming majority of cases, or perhaps even all cases. Instead, the algorithm will supposedly be smart enough to simply not apply any positive benefit from such a link.

If this is true now, it definitely wasn’t always true. Even today, though, many SEOs will say this description is not consistent with their own recent experience. This could be confirmation bias on their part. Alternatively, it could be a case where the Google algorithm has an emergent characteristic, or indirect effect, meaning it can be true that something is (or isn’t) a ranking factor, and that it also affects rankings in one direction or another. (My former colleague Will Critchlow has talked about this pattern in SEO a bunch, and I have written about the distinction between something affecting rankings and it being a ranking factor.)

Either way, whether links like these are negative or merely not beneficial, it’s surely useful to have some clues as to which links they are. That way you can at least prioritize or contextualize your efforts, or indeed your competitor’s efforts, or your potential acquisition’s efforts, accordingly.

This is the purpose of Moz’s Spam Score metric, and other metrics like it that now exist in the industry. True, it isn’t perfect — nothing can be in this space — as Google’s algorithm is a black box. It’s also, like almost all SEO metrics, very frequently misunderstood or misapplied. Spam Score works by quantifying common characteristics between sites that have been penalized by Google. As such, it’s not magic, and it’s perfectly possible for a site to have some of these characteristics and not get penalized, or even remotely deserve to be penalized.

We would, therefore, encourage you not to monitor or attempt to optimize your own site’s Spam Score, as this is likely to result in you investing in things which, although correlated, have no causal link with search performance or penalties. Similarly, this is not a useful metric for questions that don’t relate to correlations with Google penalties — for example, a site’s user experience, its reputation, its editorial rigor, or its overall ability to rank.

Nonetheless, Spam Score is a better clue than SEOs would have access to otherwise, as to which links might be less valuable than they initially appear. That is why we offer it, and will continue to do so.

“Why is that business outranking mine?”

This has to be the commonest local search FAQ, and a worthwhile answer to it will always require real analysis. 

Today, I’ll teach you to assess 50+ factors and provide you with a free, copyable spreadsheet to fill out to help you discover how the business you’re marketing can reach the level of its top local  competitor. I’ll provide an illustrated tutorial of each field in the sheet, and I’ll also cover how to use what you learn to create strategy, differentiation, and a philosophy for competition that exists within the positive framework of localism. 

How to use the local business competitive audit spreadsheet

You’ll find four columns you can fill out within the sheet: one for the business you’re marketing, one for its competitor, one for wins, and one for notes. 

Use the “wins” column like this: when both businesses are doing equally well for a specific factor, leave this column blank, but if one is doing better than the other, put their name in that column. This way, at the end of the audit, you can count up the wins of the winner and have a detailed record of which factors are likely to be giving them an advantage. Use the “notes” field to document interesting findings along the way.

Now you’re ready to begin with your copy of the spreadsheet, using the following as a key to each field:

Multi-sampled local finder rank

Your audit kicks off with these first, essential steps to orient yourself within a local market.

1. Identify a keyword phrase for which you most want to achieve high local visibility. You can follow this workflow for each of your important search phrases, but start with just one to acquaint yourself with the process. Enter that keyword phrase in the top field of the spreadsheet.

2. While located at the place of business, search on Google for that phrase and click on the local pack to be taken to the full local search results, called the “local finder”. If you are doing this audit on behalf of a client, have them perform the searches and send you the data.

3. Jot down the name and address of the business coming up in the top non-paid spot (ignore any paid ads that come up) of the local finder.

4. Scroll through the local finder until you see your business. Jot down its position.

5. Now repeat this process of searching and note-taking from different locations around your town or city. This is how you get multi-sampled data. You will likely notice that the rankings change as you change location, because Google personalizes results based on the location of your device. You may go to just one or two additional locales, or many, depending on the size of your community and your competitive goals. 

6. At the end of this process, you will have a list of competitors from which you can determine the dominant player. You can perform a competitive audit for each major local competitor, but to get started, just pick the one you saw come up in the top local finder position most often.

7. Finally, enter the rank, name, and address of the business you’re marketing and the top competitor in the first three fields of the spreadsheet.

An alternative to manual multi-sampling of local rankings is to use a local rank tracker that emulates searching from multiple locations, with the understanding that the data you get may not be quite as accurate as what you’ll get from feet on the street. Do what works for you.

Name

Now that you’ve filled out the name field of the business you’re marketing and its top competitor, evaluate how the actual words in the name could be impacting rankings. Google has historically given a ranking boost to businesses with names containing keywords. For example, if our search phrase was “Breakfast San Rafael”, then a business named “Delish Breakfast” or “Good Morning San Rafael” might have some advantage over one named “Joe’s Place”. 

However, in late 2021, Google rolled out an update commonly known as the “Vicinity Update” which appeared to significantly reduce the impact of keywords in the business name. In early 2022, they issued a second presumed update which may have softened Vicinity, meaning that keywords in the business name may still be giving a competitor an advantage to some degree.  Write the competitor’s name in the “wins” column of the spreadsheet if their business name contains keywords and yours doesn’t, or vice versa. If neither or both businesses have keywords in their business name, leave the “wins” column blank. 

Address, centroids, proximity, and maps

Now, take the address in row 5 and do some searches to fill out rows 6 and 7. 

First, look up the city you’re investigating by searching for it on Google and clicking on the map. See if both businesses fall within the red border Google throws around your city. It’s typically harder to rank within any city when a business isn’t located inside of the perimeter. 

Next, look at where Google is placing the name of the city in its knowledge panel. That is considered the “centroid” of the city. Estimate the distance each of the two businesses is from the centroid.  You can do so by looking up directions between the business address and the approximate address of the town name on the map. 

When you multi-sampled the market, you may have discovered that the dominant competitor was coming up regardless of where you moved around town. Perhaps they are located in part of town, like an auto row, that Google appears to strongly associate with an industry, or they are in the densely-populated center of town, while your business is located on the outskirts or even beyond the mapped borders of the city. 

Note down if one business is inside the border while the other isn’t, and if one is closer to the centroid than the other.

GBP categories

Now, get the free GBP Spy Chrome Extension and look at the categories both businesses have chosen. If your competitor has categories that you don’t, mark a win for them and make a note of any categories you are missing. Correct categorization is key to local search rankings, and the category you choose as your primary/first category is believed to have the strongest impact.

Co-location

You already know whether the company you’re marketing is sharing a location with other businesses in the same industry. Look up your competitor’s address and zoom in on the map to see if any other businesses within the same industry are at that location. This matters because businesses in the same category at the same address may experience Google filtering them out of the results. This behavior has been especially noted since the 2016 Possum update. It’s important to understand that if the brand you’re marketing is in a shared space with another with the same category and you are not able to see your business on the local finder map unless you zoom in, Possum may be to blame. 

Next, examine the surroundings within a few blocks of both businesses to see if any other companies with the same categories are on the map and note this down, as filtering can sometimes occur in this scenario, too. If either of the two businesses you’re investigating has no competition for a few blocks around them, note that as a win for them in row 11.

Domain Address

Next, notate the website URL of each business. As with keywords in the Google Business Profile title, having the search term in the domain name may give the business a bit of a boost. 

Google Business Profile Landing Page URL

Now, click through on the website link on the Google Business Profile for each business and record that address. Often, businesses link from their profile directly to their website homepage, but it’s also common to see some types of businesses linking to a different landing page on their site. If you’re linking to a landing page but the competitor is linking to their homepage, mark it as a win for them, because the homepage is usually the strongest page on a website.

GBP name, address, phone matches NAP info on website?

Next up, check to see whether the NAP (name, address, phone number) on the websites of you and your competitor exactly match what’s on the Google Business Profile. Small discrepancies like “street” vs. “st.” don’t matter, but a difference in the business name, its street address, or phone number can make Google feel less “trusting” about the identity of the company, possibly decreasing its visibility. 

Google Business Profile reviews

Here, we dive into the many powerful aspects of reviews to fill out rows 15-21 of our sheet.

Begin by looking at the oldest review to estimate how old the Google Business Profile is. It’s debatable whether listing age is a local ranking factor, but it’s unquestionable that an older listing has had more time to accrue reviews, photos, and other important elements.

Then, note down the overall star rating for each competitor. Star ratings are a major conversion factor because consumers look at them as a way to decide whether or not to patronize a business.

Next, record the total number of reviews each business has earned. 

Then, analyze the sentiment of the two bodies of reviews and note down whether reviews are mostly positive, neutral, or negative. While you are doing so, look at the place topics labeled “People often mention” (see screenshot, above) and write those down to see if your competitor is earning good mentions of aspects of their business which you have yet to earn.

Write down the date of the most recent review each business has received, as recency may be  a ranking factor.

Finally estimate the percentage of reviews to which each business has responded, as owner responses are key to local search marketing. 

GBP Web Results links

Examine the links to third parties that Google is surfacing in the “Web Results” section of the listings. Write down your competitor’s links in the “notes” section of your spreadsheet, and evaluate whether the websites linking to your competitor are more prestigious than those linking to you.

Date of last Google Post

Look at each profile and record the date on which each business last wrote a Google Post. Though not a direct ranking factor, posts are a good signal of how actively and comprehensively a competitor is managing their Google Business Profile. Give the business with the most recent post a “win”. 

Google Q&A count

Record the number of questions each business has received. In our screenshot, the business has received four total questions. Mark a “win” for the business with the most questions, because their audience is the most engaged with this feature. 

Business response to Q&A percentage

Estimate the percentage of questions that have received a direct response from the business owner, as shown in the above screenshot. The owner with the highest percentage of responses wins, because the alternative is ignoring customer service opportunities and leaving a customer to the vagaries of receiving public responses of uncertain quality, or no response at all. 

GBP attributes

There are multiple types of attributes which can appear in different areas of the Google Business Profile, in profile overlays, and on Google Maps. For example, our screenshot shows safety and service attributes, but other possibilities include attributes like “Black-owned”, “Wheelchair accessible” or “Late-night food”. Attributes can be the result of information a business has given directly to Google in creating their listing, or feedback Google intakes from the public. Rather than this row in your spreadsheet having a clear winner, use the notes section to record any positive attributes your top competitor has that you would also like to have. 

While you are looking at attributes, include the “$” price attribute, and make a note of how this metric is representing your business vs. the competitor. For example, note it down if you feel that having a greater or lesser price attribute than the competitor could be impacting public perception of the business you’re marketing. 

GBP photos

Fill out rows 27 and 28 in your spreadsheet by counting the number of photos each business has, calculating the percentage of them that have been uploaded by the owner (see the identity of the uploader in the upper left of the larger dessert photo), and make a judgment of the overall quality of the photo set. For example, has your business or the competitor uploaded images more recently, and are those images of high quality? These are your basic checks.

Photos have become one of the most important and powerful elements of listings. For a more advanced audit of these assets, read Mike Blumenthal’s three-part series on visual search to learn about the “find places by photos” feature, multisearch, Google’s Cloud Vision AI, Google Lens and all the other developments that are making it clearer every year that visual media will play an increasing role in local searching and shopping.

Menu link

Next, note whether either business has taken the time to enhance their listing with a menu, be that a traditional restaurant menu or a menu of services. In the case of the former category, I also like to record the URL that the menu link is pointing to in order to understand whether a business is hosting their own menu or linking to a third-party service which they don’t directly own. 

Hours of operation and popular times

There are four tasks here. Record the hours for both businesses and note whether the competitor is open at different or more hours, which might be giving Google extra reasons to make their listing visible more often. Second, verify that the hours of operation listed on the profile match those displayed on the website. Third, assess whether the display of hours meets Google’s guidelines; for example, business models which operate by appointment only are not supposed to list their hours (see guidelines for more examples). 

Finally, look at how your popular times compare with those of the competitor, and assess whether your hours of operation and patterns of foot traffic might need to be remodeled if you want to compete in the same time slots as the top competitor. 

Use of GBP Products and other shopping features

Like photos, shopping is one of those areas of SEO audits that just keeps expanding. At a basic level, check to see if either business has taken the time to add products to their listing. 

At a more advanced level in appropriate industries, Google Business Profiles and the Google Merchant Center are becoming increasingly linked. If your competitor has taken the steps to set up a Pointy feed of inventory and is enjoying the resultant “See What’s in Store” section on their listing, this is a big win for them which you may need to replicate if you’ve not yet fully “transactionalized” your listing.

Justifications appearing on listing for query language

As I’ve covered in-depth here in my column, justifications are a big deal and you can influence them. If the query you’re investigating is triggering justifications on either your listing or your competitors, write down the exact language and source. Justifications come in many flavors, including website, review, sold here, services, menu, in-stock and posts. In the above example, in a local search for “fiestaware”, Google’s display of a website-based justification is a strong signal to us of just how highly they associate this entity with our search term. Mark a “win” for the competitor if they are earning a justification, and you are not.  

Any obvious signs of GBP spam? (Name spam, fake address, fake reviews, etc.)

This can be one of the more skillful areas of a local business competitive audit because you may need a practiced eye to spot spam. Increase your abilities via a careful study of the guidelines for representing your business on Google and the review guidelines. What you are trying to diagnose is whether a competitor is attaining their top position with any help from prohibited practices. For example, they may be stuffing keywords in their business name, using a string of employees’ homes as fictitious business locations, or some of their reviews may appear to stem from incentivized reviewers or be the product of review gating. 

In some cases, guideline violations are so obvious that they’ll be easy to recognize once you know the rules and reporting them to Google may even result in the removal of elements that have been giving a competitor an unfair advantage. Unfortunately, in many other cases, certain types of spam can be hard to see and prove, and difficult to get Google to act on. For the purpose of a basic audit, simply record if you see anything overtly suspicious on either listing and mark a “win” for either business if you believe spam may be contributing to their success. 

Percentage of Local Finder spam

While you are sleuthing for spam, take a few minutes to dive deeper. Look at all of the listings that stand between you and the top competitor in the Local Finder, and do a basic estimate of the percentage that feature obvious spam tactics. If you’ve never done this before, read my column on Simple Spam Fighting: The Easiest Local Rankings You’ll Ever Earn. While this exercise is not a direct assessment of the distance between your business and its top competitor, it is an evaluation of the muck you will have to wade through to move up in the local search rankings.

DA, PA, and links

Domain Authority (DA) is a Moz metric for predicting how likely a website is to rank in the search engine results. Page Authority (PA) evaluates the same scenario, but for a single page on a website. Top Linking Domains are based on the DA of the websites doing the linking from one site to another and how those links may contribute to rankings. 

Moz Pro customers can do an advanced audit of all these factors in their paid dashboard, but if you’re not yet a customer, use Moz’s Free Domain Analysis tool for a basic audit and to fill out the next several fields in your spreadsheet. *Note that if the GBP landing page is different than the domain and is not revealed by this tool as one of the top pages of the site, you can download the free Moz Bar or use Moz Link Explorer to find that information about any page. I’ve linked to a variety of free resources in this section of the spreadsheet for ease of discovery. Fill out fields 39-43 regarding DA, PA, and links on your sheet and evaluate whether a competitor’s better metrics may be supporting their win.

Age of domain

There are many free tools like this one that will let you quickly look up the age of your domain and that of your competitor. Google reps have repeatedly stated that domain age is not a ranking factor, but I look at it anyway, to let me know how long a competitor has had to work on their website and build its authority. While it’s absolutely correct that a brand new website can outrank an old one with a great campaign, mark a win for the older domain in this row of your sheet, regardless of ranking.

Organic rank for search phrase

Look at the organic (not local) results for your search phrase. Subtract the listings that aren’t for actual businesses (in our above example, theculturetrip.com is lifestyle site rather than a restaurant) and record the true organic rank of your site and your competitor’s. Mark a win for whichever business has the highest organic rank.

Search phrase in title tag of GBP landing page?

Is the complete or partial search phrase present in the title tag of the page being linked to from the Google Business Profile? Note it down and mark a win if one business has it but the other doesn’t. Pay attention to how this language may be supporting rank for this keyword phrase.

Search phrase in main body content of GBP landing page?

While you are on the GBP landing page, check to see if the complete or partial search phrase is mentioned on it. Mark a win for whichever business is remembering to include their keywords in their copywriting. If both are, don’t mark a win here, but do write down what you observe in the “notes” section. You might also like to notate how the search phrase is incorporated. For example, is it in the headings or subheadings of the page?

GBP landing page content quality at-a-glance (weak, medium, strong)

An advanced content audit will typically be a project of its own. For now, do a quick review of the GBP landing page for both businesses to grade the effort that has been put into publishing useful, optimized multi-media content. Some things to look for would be complete and accurate contact information, helpful text that incorporates many appropriate phrases related to the search term in natural language, excellent spelling and grammar, photos, videos, reviews and review requests, maps, directions, social media links, a strong internal linking structure, and a strong call-to-action. Make notes on your observations and grade the efforts present on the two pages as “weak”, “medium”, or “strong to find your winner.

Mobile friendliness

Run both domains through Google’s free mobile-friendliness test tool. Mobile and local are inextricably linked, and if one domain is performing properly on people’s cell phones while the other isn’t, you have a clear winner.

Secure HTTPs

In 2018, Google began marking domains that hadn’t made the move from HTTP to HTTPS as “insecure”. SEOs had been touting the benefits of secure sites for some years, but if your site is displaying that warning and your competitor’s is not, you are likely losing customers as well as ranking opportunities. 

Moz Check Presence Score

Now, evaluate the health of citations across the local search ecosystem by looking up your business and your competitor in Moz’s free Check Presence tool. In just seconds, you will be able to see whether the distribution of local business information to a variety of listing platforms is contributing to your competitor’s win. 

Yelp ranking, rating, and review count

It’s likely that Google looks at Yelp as part of its assessment of local business authority, so we’ll finish up our audit by looking there, too. Document where you and your competitor rank for your search phrase in Yelp, what your respective ratings are, and how many reviews each of you has earned. The winner is typically easy to see, in all three rows.

Now you’re ready to total up the wins!

Congratulations, you’ve just made it through the audit. Your last step is to count up the wins for each business name you entered in the “wins” column (your top competitor will typically have more of them), make your own list of the fields in which they won, and pair this with the notes you took to understand the efforts that are likely contributing to their top visibility. For example, you may have discovered that reviews, content, and mobile-friendliness are clearly underpinning the exemplary performance of your peer.

It’s from gleanings like these that you’ll create an informed strategy for the business you’re marketing, to get its metrics up to a competitive level. There are some factors, like location, that you can’t typically control, but with most of your findings, a to-do list will have surfaced from the audit process. The more experience you accrue working in local SEO, the better you’ll get at prioritizing the factors on that list, based on each client and market.

Bear in mind that the purpose of a competitive audit isn’t solely to show you how to match and surpass a peer’s metrics. Examine your notes and findings for clues on how to differentiate yourself within your market. For example, your audit may have enabled you to realize that reviews indicate a local desire for something your competitor either doesn’t provide, or doesn’t do well. You could fill that gap. Or, maybe you’ve just realized that a change in hours of operation could make the business your marketing the go-to spot on Mondays and Tuesdays when its competitor is closed. A good audit shouldn’t generate a mere carbon copy – it should point the way to creating a uniquely powerful local identity.  

Whew, if this was a basic local competitive business audit, what would an advanced one cover?

We’ve hinted at this throughout the basic audit, but typically, a more advanced audit is likely to dive more deeply into factors like:

• Analytics data

• On-page SEO

• Link building

• Technical SEO

• Image SEO and visual search

• Reputation and business intelligence

• Market and consumer research

A full advanced audit could also incorporate investigation of elements not mentioned in the basic audit, including:

• Website accessibility and inclusion

• Social media performance

• Video optimization

• Evaluation of current communications strategy, including live chat, SMS, messaging, Google messaging, email, forms and more

• Assessment of e-commerce and other digital shopping functionality

• Assessment of offline performance and opportunities including in-store metrics, traditional media, policy and more

• Other areas that are specific to the industry or market of the business you’re promoting

Final thoughts on local competition

Most local businesses you market can’t reach their full potential without achieving a competitive level of visibility in Google’s local packs. But how we think about competition and, more specifically, about the people who are our competitors, matters. 

I haven’t been able to shake the memory of a marketer I heard boasting about helping one local business put another out of business. For me, the conversation conjured up stark images of a small business owner and their staff thrown into unemployment amid the desperate insecurity of the pandemic and an already-harsh economic structure. This type of swagger may have become normalized in parts of the business sector, but it’s antithetical to localism, which seeks to offer a diversity of options and resources for everyone within a community with the goal of human well-being. 

The point of learning to perform a competitive local business audit does not have to be to analyze and destroy the livelihood of your esteemed neighbor down the road; rather, it can be a study of how they have succeeded in the SERPs so that you can create an informed strategy for finding your own strong niche on the nearby business scene. This is a healthy and caring mindset local business owners can share with their marketers and vice versa – one that can make the work you do more fulfilling because it’s contributive instead of merely extractive. Good luck in bringing a new level of attention to something great within a community, with your professional skills! 

The average SEO-focused product page converts at only 2.9 percent, which is among the reasons many companies pursue paid advertising traffic to achieve their goals and KPIs.

But creating custom, campaign-specific landing pages is resource-intensive, and not every team has the necessary tools, expertise, or personnel to build the content. So, how do you know if you need a custom page or if you can safely send paid traffic to an organic page and still achieve your KPIs? This three-step, data-driven evaluation helps answer this question.

Paid vs. SEO landing pages — why have both?

Before diving into the evaluation process, you need to understand why having paid and organic pages is crucial and some of the drawbacks when you send paid traffic to your organic pages without analyzing them beforehand.

First, search intentions often differ between paid and organic users, and each group will have different content needs. We can classify these users into two groups based on whether they use high-intent or low-intent keywords.

Per WordStream’s definition, people who use high intent keywords like “best” want to conduct a transaction or perform an action, such as inquiring about a service, which can lead to an eventual conversion. This behavior aligns with the motivations of paid users, 75% of whom engage with ads because they believe landing pages make it easier to find their desired information.

In comparison, WordStream defines low intent keywords as navigational or informational in nature instead of transactional.

For example, somebody who wants to learn about a specific topic is more likely to use a longtail keyword and less likely to commit to a purchase because they’re gathering information rather than making a decision. Organic results are better suited for longtail terms, so the user will more likely engage with the organic SERP result rather than an ad.

These behavioral differences create a challenging situation for users and content creators.

Because organic content must play by Google’s rules, paid users are forced to sift through irrelevant information, which can increase bounce and exit rates and decrease conversion rates. And sadly, you can’t simply remove the extra information from the page because organic users and search algorithms need it.

Second, mixing paid and organic traffic on the same page makes it difficult to separate and track audience-specific user behavior, content performance, and conversion rationale. Without data clarity like closed-loop analytics, you can quickly get a misleading picture of content performance and miss crucial KPIs because of your clouded judgment.

Consequently, in most cases, directing the paid traffic to a custom-built, campaign-specific landing page produces higher quality conversions. You can ignore all SEO rules, which empowers you to accommodate user intentions and elicit specific user behaviors.

With the forewarning out of the way, let’s break down how organic page performance can determine if you need custom landing pages to achieve your goals.

Step 1: Gather and analyze performance baselines from multiple data sources

The first task is to gather and analyze a lot of data — from multiple sources — that shows you exactly how well your organic page is performing. Ideally, you want to scrounge up analytics data, user behavior insights, and keyword rankings. Even if you wind up making a custom paid page, this effort still pays dividends by highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of your organic content.

Analytics data

You’ll start by collecting a smattering of classic analytics data points from your preferred analytics platform to gain insights about page performance over time.

If your content is old enough, gather the following data in three-month, six-month, and one-year intervals. The breadth of data makes it easier to spot recurring themes and create a more educated guess about what will happen if you send paid traffic to the page.

Remember to filter the metrics so you’re only getting data from organic traffic sources.

Pageviews and unique pageviews

Imagine you have a well-optimized product page that converts with organic visitors at an even three percent. However, you need the equivalent of a five percent monthly conversion rate to reach the year’s KPIs and maintain a healthy company.

You can use pageview data to calculate how much missing traffic you need to conjure, either targeting new keywords or starting a paid campaign. For example, suppose you currently get 100 pageviews every month and three conversions. In that case, you’ll roughly need an additional 67 pageviews per month to get five conversions at the three percent conversion rate.

If that traffic growth is not feasible with new or improved keyword rankings, then paid traffic is a solution to consider.

Should you decide to send paid traffic to that page, you can also calculate the difference between pageviews and unique pageviews to estimate how many returning users you can effectively target in a PPC retargeting campaign.

Time on page and bounce rate

Paid landing pages are designed to be simple, straightforward, and action-oriented. The following image is an excellent example of this concept:

Lengthy or complex paid pages generally suffer from high bounce rates and low conversions. If people are spending more than one or two minutes on the page without converting, it’s a sign the content isn’t convincing enough to convert, and it needs alterations.

On the contrary, organic pages can thrive with relevant content, internal links, and other information to capture rankings and keep people interested.

You want a high time on page because that means people care about the content you provide, which sends positive ranking signals to search engines.

If you’re seeing an average time on page three minutes or more from your organic page, it’s likely not a good fit for paid users. You can always redesign or reorganize the page to accommodate paid traffic, but you risk isolating your organic users by being pushy with conversion-focused information so early.

Previous page path and conversions

Among the most challenging aspects of organic conversions is understanding what stage of the buyer’s journey somebody is in.

Are you converting with high-funnel users? Or do your users first view a case study or blog post and then visit the product page, only to leave and return later? Knowing the answer lets you see what type of content matters most from a conversion standpoint and helps determine if your content is reaching the right people at the correct time.

If your organic conversions rely heavily on return visits or high page depth, sending paid traffic to the page likely will not improve your conversions. Paid users will lack the previous knowledge and feel overwhelmed or dissatisfied, with many bouncing from the page.

Event and goal tracking data

Event and goal tracking are two types of user behavior insights you can use to determine what content users care about the most. This process also illuminates what content users often disregard, which can then be removed from the page. Knowing this information helps you determine if time-starved paid users will be interested in your existing content.

Set up the following metrics as events or goals in your analytics tool to lay the groundwork.

Hyperlinks

Do you know how many clicks each hyperlink on your page gets? If not, how do you know users find them helpful?

Traditionally, paid pages don’t have any engagement options that take people away from a conversion point. However, most organic pages do.

So, if you’re going to use an organic page for paid traffic, you’ll need to only provide internal links that add significant value and actively engage users. Otherwise, if paid users stick around, they may get lost down the rabbit hole and then abandon the site without converting.

Videos and completion rates

If you have video content, particularly content that explains your product or service, it’s crucial to know how well that video performs and how often people complete it.

If the video has high engagement and completion rates, it’s useful to include it high up on organic and paid pages. However, if most users only watch 25 percent or less of the video, then pushing it further down the organic page and omitting it from a paid page is a smarter choice.

Forms

Forms are often a high-friction page element that can easily frustrate users, especially when visiting a page with conversion intentions. Your forms need to be flawless.

If you’re noticing that users get stuck on a form or abandon it, you need to rework the form. Paid users expect forms to be simple, only require absolutely necessary information, and take very little effort. If your organic forms can’t do that, either replace the form or build a custom paid page with a bare-bones version.

CTAs

CTA location, text, and purpose dictate a lot of your page’s conversion potential. If your organic page has multiple CTAs, you need to accurately track which one gets the most engagement. If you choose to send paid traffic to the page, then the highest-engagement CTA should be the first CTA option shown.

Additionally, every CTA should be:

• Visually distinct

• Above the fold (in most instances)

• Actionable with precise copy

• Avoiding generic statements like “learn more,” “buy now,” or “subscribe”

• Giving users an idea of what happens after interacting with the CTA

If you have too many competing CTAs, or for whatever reason, your organic page can’t meet these requirements, then you need to create a custom paid page instead.

Navigation interaction

Most paid pages include a link back to the main website but not full navigation options. Organic content doesn’t have this luxury. Knowing how many of your users interact with the navigation after landing on the organic page in question is crucial to predicting what a paid user may do.

For example, suppose your page gets 2,500 organic visitors per month and 1,963 of them leave the page via navigation options. In that case, that’s a great sign that the page is either lacking conversion intent or doesn’t have enough information to convince users to convert. Either way, it’s not the behavior you want to see from paid traffic.

Heat mapping and click-tracking data

Once you’ve gathered your analytics data and set up event tracking, the next step is to collect and analyze data from a heat mapping tool like Hotjar or Mouseflow. The goal is to discover how users interact with the existing page, notice troublesome areas, and determine if those behaviors align with paid landing page best practices.

Let’s break down the types of information you’ll want to collect and how to evaluate it.

Heat mapping and scroll depth

Do you know how much of your organic page is seen by the average user before they leave the page or convert? Heat maps will tell you.

Paid pages are purposefully short so users don’t have opportunities to get distracted or disappointed by the content. If your scroll depth is deep enough that more than 75 percent of users see the most important content on the page, then the page layout and content priority may be okay for a paid user. However, if you’re seeing 30-plus percent of users leaving after scrolling just past the hero region, then paid users will most likely follow suit and you’ll either need to design a new page or alter the existing one.

Click tracking

Click tracking is a great way to visualize and confirm the event tracking data you set up previously. The maps can also pinpoint engagement issues or opportunities you may have overlooked.

The goal of click tracking is to figure out what content users care about the most. If you can naturally surface that information at the top of the page, then your paid users will be more likely to stick around. If that’s not possible, then you can design a paid page using the most popular organic page elements as inspiration.

Mouse flow

Mouse flow lets you observe the mouse movement of your users. Sometimes users hit friction points that we can’t detect by monitoring scroll depth, clicks, or other common engagement factors. These scenarios are where mouse flow reigns supreme.

While a mouse flow report is often an erratic mess of multi-colored blobs and squiggly lines, you can use it to understand what content your users may spend more time looking at or read more carefully based on where the mouse moves.

For example, in the following image, the mouse flow shows that more users hover their cursor in the “Inner Circle Guide to Next-Generation Customer Contact” section than any other content block.

Although the CTA associated with this section isn’t showing a high click density, the mouse flow report determines that users have some level of interest in the topic. If this example was on your website, you could shuffle the content order to prioritize the popular content or run A/B tests to determine if the language or information needs to be changed or simplified for a paid user’s short attention span.

Session recording

Watching actual users interact with your organic page is by far the most valuable way to determine what does and doesn’t work about your content. Most heat mapping tools let you set up recordings based on triggered events, such as clicking into a form.

You can observe the user’s entire interaction with your page and determine if the behavior is consistent among converting customers. If the behavior is consistent, it’s feasible that paid users may act the same way. However, if the recording behavior is erratic (and it likely will be), then you’ll want to build a custom page to provide a more “hand-held” experience.

Step 2: Map user behavior data to your KPIs

Now that you’ve collected and analyzed all of your data, it’s time to start looking for patterns and mapping the desired user behavior to the actual user behavior your data shows. If the two align, you’re in a great position to send paid traffic to your organic page and hopefully reap more conversions.

However, suppose there is a discrepancy between the desired and actual behaviors. In that case, you’ll need to map user behavior with specific stages of the customer journey and sales funnel, and then build a paid page that amplifies the desired behavior based on how you see users interacting with your organic page.

Let’s break down an example.

Recently, one of Portent’s clients chose to design a PPC version of an organic product page because the page wasn’t converting at their desired rate — despite already funneling paid traffic to it.

Before the client could design the new campaign content, they needed to determine what conversion-focused information users engage with most on the organic page. Otherwise, they risk supplying users with unnecessary information and wasting ad spend.

I analyzed three months of event tracking data from Google Analytics and Hotjar to determine exactly how users interacted with the product page. To narrow the results, I only focused on page elements with a call to action or internal link to pages that may lead to a conversion, such as the client’s demo page or case study archive.

Once I established which page elements get the most attention, I then isolated the users’ behaviors by using Hotjar’s filters to watch session recordings that contain the chosen events.

I watched 20 recorded user sessions to see what information people interacted with first and which they ignored, how long they took to digest the content, friction-causing UX elements, and what additional pages or resources they viewed. I then took these learnings and built a PPC campaign page that told the client’s story in the order converting users demonstrated.

The client is still building the page, so I can’t report on how well it performed. However, in theory, they should earn higher conversion rates on the paid campaign page because I isolated the content that converting users interacted with, which eliminated any non-esstial information.

Step 3: Make your choice

Now that you understand how your users interact with your organic page and some of the restrictions and considerations that come when sending paid traffic to organic content, you can choose. Invest the time and resources into building a custom paid campaign, or modify your organic content to try and target two user groups in one fell swoop?

Creating the paid page will likely give you better and more consistent results, but there is also little harm in trying your organic page first if you think it’s good enough. Run a small test, say 20 percent of your advertising budget for this project, and see if the page performance improves. If it doesn’t, then you have a definitive answer and you’re prepared with the resources you need to build a stellar paid landing page.

Over 14 million people have cut their SEO teeth on our Beginner’s Guide to SEO, learning the ins and outs of search engine optimization from scratch. For 16 years, it’s been the go-to resource that kicked off careers and page-one rankings the world over. And now, for the first time, we’re introducing the next-step resource to take you from practicing SEO to preaching it — from pupil to pro.

Read the guide!

Who should read the Professional’s Guide to SEO?

You don’t have to know the entire SEO Glossary by heart or get a perfect score on the SEO Expert Quiz to dive into this guide. If any of the following apply to you:

• You’ve done SEO work, officially or unofficially, as a component of your day job;

• Your title involves the words “digital marketer” or something similar;

• You’ve read The Beginner’s Guide to SEO, Moz SEO Learning Center articles, taken our SEO Essentials certification course, subscribed to the Moz Blog, and are thirsty for more;

• You’re ready for the next step in your SEO career;

…then this is the next-level SEO guide for you!

This resource exists to help level-up anyone comfortable with the basics of SEO, who have some experience practicing it professionally, and who crave the challenge and reward of moving from intermediacy toward mastery.

How much of this guide do I need to read?

If you’re serious about mastering advanced SEO techniques and being able to apply them in a professional setting, we recommend reading the Professional’s Guide to SEO front-to-back. We’ve tried to make it as concise and easy to understand as possible so you can learn at your own pace.

The guide has nine chapters focused on actionable tips and insights for a successful career in SEO, including:

1. Advanced SEO Strategy:

2. All About Google: The Algorithm

3. All About Google: The SERPs

4. Keywords & Content:

5. Link Building & Link Earning Tactics

6. Technical SEO

7. Competitive SEO

8. Measuring and Tracking SEO

9. Working in SEO

If you want to take a more organized approach to learning SEO or training your entire team, check out the Moz Academy Technical SEO Certification. We’ve consolidated all the resources you need to learn and apply advanced technical SEO techniques alongside unique learning strategies, task lessons and quizzes to test your knowledge. You can also display your knowledge with your LinkedIn Moz SEO Essentials certification badge.

Getting excited yet? You should be! Search engine marketing is a fascinating field and mastering advanced techniques will take your professional skills to the next level. We’re looking forward to you coming on this journey with us!

Read the guide!

Hold on to your bucket hats, this year’s MozCon is right around the corner, and we couldn’t be more excited to be back in-person in Seattle!

On July 11th, 12th, and 13th, join Ranger Roger at camp MozCon for insights and tactical presentations from industry leaders, plus the opportunity to connect and network with fellow attendees!

And since we know budgets are tighter than ever, we’re extending our early bird pricing through June 30! Tickets are just $1,099 for Moz subscribers. Can’t make the in-person event? Grab yourself a Livestream pass for $449. Both options include access to the professionally produced video bundle (a $300 value!), providing incredible marketing thought leadership at an unheard-of price:

Save my spot at MozCon!

We’ve been hinting at the lineup of talks with our Initial Agenda drop in April and our Community Speaker reveal and today, we’re ready to share the full and complete Final Agenda. With the schedule set and our speakers putting the final polish on their presentations, here’s a look at the three action-packed days we have planned.

Sunday, July 10th

12:00pm–4:00pm – Optional early registration & badge pick up

Arriving in Seattle early and want to get a jump on picking up your badge? Drop by registration to check in and pick up your badge. 

Monday, July 11th

7:30am – Breakfast & registration

9:00am – Welcome to MozCon 2022!

Cheryl Draper

Our own MozCon Event Manager will be kicking things off early on the first day of MozCon with a warm welcome, laying out all the pertinent details of the conference, introducing our Emcees and getting us in the right mindset for three days of learning.

9:15am – SERP Strategies

Andy Crestodina

Every key-phrase is a competition. But the best competitor for that competition depends on what you see in the SERP. Getting your page to rank organically is only one of the many possible strategies. In this talk, Andy will explain big picture strategies in the context of ever-more crowded search results pages.

9:50am – Search What You See: Visual Search Tactics, Tools, and Optimizations

Crystal Carter

Visual search has been at the forefront of Google’s search and product innovations in the last year. Join this talk for “search what you see” optimizations via Google Lens and more.

10:25am – Morning break

10:50am – Unlocking the Hidden Potential of Product Listing Pages

Areej AbuAli

E-commerce website product listing pages contain hidden potential. This talk is all about unlocking the magic of your listing pages by making the most out of filters and internal linking. Instead of being fixated on those landing page head terms, let’s turn our attention to the indexability of long-tail pages with high conversion. Whether you work in e-commerce or not, we’ll also cover how to embed yourself within tech teams and analyze impactful changes.

11:25am – Community Speaker – Get Your Local SEO Recipe Right with Content & Schema

Emily Brady

Local SEO can be so much more than off-site listings, so let’s talk about it! By using content and schema on local landing pages, businesses can create unique value that satisfies customers and search engines.

11:45am – SEO Gap Analysis: Leverage Your Competitor’s Performance

Lidia Infante

Ranking is as easy or as hard as doing better than your competitors. For that, you have to benchmark the sites on your search landscape, meet them where they are, and gain an edge. In this talk, Lidia will share how she built SEO strategies off the back of a gap analysis, along with her templates and success stories.

12:20pm – Birds of a Feather lunch discussion tables

1:50pm – The Future of Link Building: What Got Us Here, Won’t Get Us There

Paddy Moogan

Ten years ago, Paddy stood on stage at MozCon and shared 35 ways to build links in 35 minutes. This year, he is going to talk about lessons he has learned during the last 10 years, some reflections on what he got right and wrong, along with what the future holds for link building.

2:25pm – Community Speaker – How to Capitalize on the Link Potential of a Research Report

Debbie Chu

There are many types of link magnets, but there’s one that’ll never go out of style: data-backed research reports. When done well, you’re creating a piece of content that helps your E-A-T, drives backlinks, and is genuinely interesting content for your target audience. This talk will cover the different steps needed not just to create a research report, but to create one that can get links.

2:55pm – Breaking into new areas with Topic Maps

Miracle Inameti-Archibong

In this talk we’ll go beyond keyword research to explore how to build topic maps, and internal linking maps (that align with Google’s understanding) to help you conquer new SERPS and win more budget from stakeholders along the way.

3:30pm – Afternoon break

3:55pm – Moneyball is the Future of SEO

Will Critchlow

Advanced statistical analysis has changed the face of professional sports, and similar insights are changing the way we do SEO. In this talk, Will is going to share the approaches he’s seeing from the most forward-looking SEO teams, as well as the lessons learned from their analysis of what’s working and what’s not.

4:25pm – Titans of Tech: A Campfireside Interview

Vivek Shah & Special Guest

5:25pm – Day 1 Presentations conclude

7:00pm – Monday Night Welcome Party

Join us at Optimism Brewing in Capitol Hill. Meet with fellow attendees and speakers over light refreshments and snacks, music, and catching sun on the patio. We look forward to bringing our community together to kick off MozCon 2022 on this special night. See you there!

Tuesday, July 12th

7:30am – Breakfast & registration

9:00am – Day 2 Opening Remarks

9:10am – More Than Pageviews: Evaluating Content Success & Correcting Content Failure

Dana DiTomaso

Throw that tired pageview- and-bounce-rate-heavy report right out the (virtual) window — we can do better than that! Dana will peel back the layers on measuring content success. You’ll learn which metrics will actually tell you if your content is doing what it’s supposed to be doing, and how to link these metrics to your SEO strategies and tactics.

9:45am – Trash in, garbage out: A guide to non-catastrophic keyword research

Tom Capper

Keyword research is one of the first and most basic tasks that SEOs learn. And yet, it’s strewn with pitfalls and ubiquitous errors, even for experienced practitioners. In this talk, Tom will talk you through the various ways the wrong data can lead you astray, and how to leverage the right techniques for the right tasks

10:20am – Morning break

10:45am – SEO In the Enterprise: Tips and Tricks for Growing Organic Traffic at Scale

Jakie Chu

In this talk, Jackie will show us how to identify, prioritize and get buy-in on large-scale SEO campaigns to drive traffic and revenue.

11:20am – The Future of Local Landing Pages

Amanda Jordan

Visual search has been at the forefront of Google’s search and product innovations in the last year. Join this talk for “search what you see” optimizations via Google Lens and more.

11:55am – Birds of a Feather lunch discussion tables

1:30pm – Community Speaker – How Marketing Data Intelligence Skyrocketed Our B2B Conversions

Tina Fleming

If you want to geek out on data, you’ve come to the right session. And we’re not talking about Google Analytics or your plain old CRM data. We’re talking about de-anonymizing your website traffic, providing one-on-one personalized user experiences, shortening your lead forms without missing out on valuable information, and doing everything you can to get to that SQL. In this presentation, Tina will demystify the basics of marketing data intelligence, reveal actionable strategies for your day-to-day conversion marketing, and share real examples of how her agency has skyrocketed B2B conversions with the addition of marketing intelligence.

1:50pm – Achieve Accessibility Goals with Machine Learning

Noah Learner

3.8 million U.S. adults aged 21-64 have a visual impairment, but 98% of the world’s top 1 million websites don’t offer full accessibility (despite legislation to encourage this). This leads to 1 in 3 baskets being abandoned, leaving an estimated 13 trillion up for grabs. One of the top issues is image alt text. This text is essential for making images accessible – however it isn’t always a priority when it comes to SEO strategy, due to the challenges of implementing it on a wider scale. This session walks you through easy, scalable alt text generation – an intuitive and easy to understand tutorial, with most of the heavy lifting already done for you.

2:25pm – Community Speaker – How True Leaders Transform a Marketing Department into a Dream Team

Paxton Gray

There are hidden, structural factors holding stellar marketers (and their teams) back‚ and it’s not their fault. Discover what these factors are, how to root them out, and how to help your existing team members reach their potential.

2:45pm – Afternoon break

3:10pm – Myths, Misconceptions, & Mistakes (Lessons Learned from a Decade in Digital PR)

Hannah Smith

For more than 11 years, Hannah’s been tasked with coming up with content ideas that people will share and journalists will write about. In this session, she’ll be sharing some of the most important lessons she’s learned along the way.

3:45pm – E-Commerce SEO Horror Stories: How to tackle the most common issues at scale and avoid an SEO nightmare

Aleyda Solis

Between a dynamic inventory, complex categorization and filtering options, lack of unique product descriptions, and well-established global and local competitors, e-commerce sites are known to be amongst the most challenging types of sites when it comes to doing SEO, and often result in some pretty frightening horror story scenarios. But, it doesn’t have to be that terrifying. In this session, Aleyda will take us through the most common issues, and show how to effectively address them at scale, before they become real nightmares.

4:30pm – Day 2 Presentations conclude

Wednesday, July 13th

7:30am – Breakfast & registration

9:00am – Day 3 Opening Remarks

9:10am – Why Real Expertise is the Most Important Ranctor Factor of Them All

Lily Ray

In this presentation, Lily will use real data to demonstrate how the rise of E-A-T has led to Google prioritizing expertise and authority above all else.

9:45am – To Be Announced

Amanda Natividad

10:20am – Morning break

10:45am – Rabbit Holes: How Google Pushes Us Down The Funnel

Dr. Peter Meyers

As an SEO, you’ve probably fallen down the rabbit hole of “organic” results that lead to more Google SERPs. If you map that rabbit hole, you’ll see a systematic effort to push searchers down the funnel to commercial results. Why is Google doing this, what does it mean for SEO, and what can we learn about our own customers’ journeys?

11:20am – Community Speaker – Beyond the Button: Tests that Actually Move the Needle

Karen Hopper

In a world that has a million different options for every creative element… where do you start? How do you know this or that element is where you’ll see an impact big enough to make a difference for your bottom line? This is the number one question CRO strategists get asked, and the answer every time is: it depends! This session will walk through how to understand your testing opportunities, generate test ideas, and measure your results with scientific accuracy.

11:40am – Understanding Key Performance Factors: Using Data to Make Smart Decisions for Organic Search

Joe Hall

What KPIs are actually key? In this talk, Joe shows how organizations can use their own data to ascertain what’s relevant for actionable insights, in the hopes of helping you to develop smart SEO strategies.

12:15pm – Birds of a Feather lunch discussion tables

1:50pm – Leadership and Community in Search MarketingL Strong Teams, Better Results

Amalia Fowler

As search marketers, we spend a lot of time optimizing our campaigns, but don’t have the same time to put into nurturing our teams. This is especially true when faced with things like a global pandemic, the great resignation, increased competition and the whims of Google. It’s easy to forget that taking purposeful action in our working relationships can help lead us to better results. In this practical and actionable talk, we’ll bust the myth that you have to be a manager to have influence, discuss the importance of leadership and community, identify three key characteristics strong teams have in common, get tips on fostering those characteristics regardless of your role, and discuss how taking the time to do this serves all of us, clients included.

2:15pm – Community Speaker – Things I Learned from Sales Teams that Every SEO Should Know

Petra Kis-Herczegh

Whether you’re trying to build a business case or get buy-in for your SEO project, some of the core challenges will come down to the same thing: How well can you sell it? As SEOs, we often forget that, even though we spend our day-to-day analyzing data and optimizing content and websites for bots, at the end of the day, we are working with human beings — and some of those people have decision-making power over what we can and can’t achieve in our roles. This is where learning a good set of sales skills becomes crucial. In this talk, Petra will explore some of the key skills and methods sales teams use, and how you can apply these to your SEO work.

2:35pm – The Untapped Power of Content Syndication

Amanda Milligan

Many marketers have long wondered whether syndicated content has SEO value. To help provide an answer, Amanda walks through case studies that illustrate the significant impact syndicated content strategies can have on your site’s authority, rankings, and traffic.

3:10pm – Afternoon break

3:40pm – Community Speaker – Advanced On-Page Optimization

Chris Long

Take your on-page optimizations to the next-level using advanced tactics for one of the most common SEO tasks. This presentation goes beyond simply adding keywords. Chris will show you how to utilize tools such as IBM’s Natural Language Understanding to find semantic entities of competitor pages, how Google’s EAT guidelines apply to content, and what actionable steps you can take to improve content, perform on-page content experiments, and measure the impact of those tests.

4:00pm – Keyword Research for Thanks Instead of Ranks

Wil Reynolds

Seer Interactive has used keyword research methods to uncover ways to help clients understand their customers better. From diversity and inclusion, to hopes and fears, customers are leaving clues in their long tail searches. Wil demonstrates why you should spend the time to find them.

4:45pm – Day 3 Thank you & Farewell

7:00pm–10:00pm — Wednesday Night Bash

Bowling: check! Karaoke: check! Photo booth: check! Join us for one last hurrah as we take over the Garage. You won’t want to miss this closing night bash — we’ll have plenty of games, food, and fun as we mix and mingle, say “see ya soon” to friends new and old, and reminisce over our favorite lessons from the past three days.

See you there?

Chatting with speakers, connecting with peers and potential partners in Birds of a Feather lunch tables, absorbing all the knowledge for another fruitful year of marketing… we can’t wait to share it with you! Get your ticket now and we’ll see you in July!