7 Emerging Technologies in SEO and Their Applications

Posted by AbdulGaniy_Shehu

SEO is a dynamic industry. What worked some weeks ago might not work again right now.

As an SEO professional, you need to know the latest trends and emerging technologies, to keep up with the ever-changing demand of the industry. That way, you can stay on top of your game and become more efficient in your business.

In this post, I’ll share with you seven emerging technologies in the SEO industry and how they impact your work as an SEO expert. Finally, I’ll show you how to apply them in your business for optimal results.

If you want to scale your SEO processes in 2021 and beyond, you should watch out for these technologies, and start implementing them in your business right away.

1. Natural Language Processing (NLP)

In December 2019, Google officially rolled out the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) algorithm update worldwide. This update brought NLP to the fore, and it’s been a technology to watch out for in the SEO industry since.

With NLP, Google can understand what a word in a sentence means by looking at its context.

This means that Google no longer relies on the specific words or phrases that users are searching for to provide them with the right answers. Rather, they’re looking at the intent behind each search.

Here’s an example of how BERT (an offshoot of NLP), affects a search query according to Google.

Before NLP, if someone searches for the query “2019 brazil traveler to usa need a visa”, Google thinks that this is an informational query to confirm if a U.S citizen can travel to Brazil without a visa. Hence, it shows a Washington Post article that answers the question on top of the SERPs.

As you can see, the context behind this search is someone wanting to travel to the USA from Brazil who needs a visa. While it was difficult for Google to figure out what these kinds of queries meant in the past, with BERT, the algorithm understands the context behind each search and provides the user with the right information.

How to utilize NLP in your SEO processes

With NLP, informational content is more crucial than ever. However, optimizing for BERT isn’t something you can do as an SEO.

Rather, you should focus on creating high-quality content that answers search queries accurately. When you do, you’ll definitely rank well.

This Moz article shows you how to write amazing pieces of content for search engines and people.

2. Natural Language Generation (NLG) for short-form content

With NLG, SEOs can now produce meaningful phrases and sentences just like a natural language, but using technology.

Instead of battling with writers’ block and spending hours thinking of what to write, NLG removes that burden through automation. And if you’re a content creator, this helps you focus just on polishing the content and making it read better.

While there are a lot of use cases for NLG, at the moment, it’s better used to write short-form content such as headlines, product descriptions, meeting memos, and so on.

How to use NLG as an SEO

There are a lot of use cases for NLG technologies. With a tool such as Copy.ai, you can create landing page hero text, Facebook primary text, blog introductions, email subject lines, listicles, meta descriptions, and so on.

Here’s an example of some listicles I created for the topic “quality blog content” using this tool:

As you can see, if I wanted to write an article on this topic, I can use some of these suggestions as an outline for my post. With these, I can focus instead on researching the individual sub-topics.

Here’s another example of some website taglines that I created for Moz by entering the brand name and a brief description of “The Ultimate SEO tool you can trust” into the tool:

If you were starting a new brand as an SEO, you can use NLG tools such as this, to discover awesome taglines to use for your brand.

3. TF*IDF

TF*IDF stands for “Term Frequency times Inverse Document Frequency”. This measures how you use a term on a particular page and how it compares to a collection of pages for that specific keyword.

While TF*IDF might seem like a measurement of keyword density, it’s actually measuring how important a keyword phrase is by comparing it to that keyword’s frequency in a large set of documents.

Although it’s not yet clear if Google uses TF*IDF in its algorithm, it’s a good practice to incorporate it into your on-page SEO strategy.

Before applying TF*IDF, you need to create a piece of content targeting a particular keyword. Once that’s done, plug the content into a TF*IDF tool. Some recommended options are Text Tools, SEO PowerSuite, Ryte, and Surfer SEO.

How to use TF*IDF in your SEO processes

With technology and some information about your keyword, TF*IDF tools usually suggest some phrases you can add or remove from your pages. As an SEO, you can optimize your page based on these suggestions to meet the required TF*IDF score for that keyword.

That way, you can figure out some phrases which are closely related to the keyword you’re writing about, but not present in your content. When you add these phrases and words to your content, it makes your article topically relevant and helps your page rank better in the SERPs.

4. GPT-3 for automated content creation

In September 2020, The Guardian published a story on its website that was written by a robot. Since then, Generative Pre-trained Transformer Number 3 (GPT-3) has been a hot topic in the SEO industry.

The GPT-3 API works in an interesting way because it’s been trained with a large pool of datasets to mimic how humans write. This includes the Common Crawl dataset, Wikipedia, relevant historical books, and so on.

When you provide the GPT-3 API with a writing prompt, it tries to predict exactly what would come after that, based on the information it’s read on the Internet.

The screenshot below is an example of GPT-3-generated content that went viral on Hacker news some months ago. Most users commented on it, just like they would on a regular post, without knowing that it was written by a robot.

How to Use GPT-3 for automated content creation

• Email writing: As an SEO, you most likely recognize that writing great emails is a skill that’ll help your business grow, yet find it difficult to do so. With GPT-3, you can write emails easily. All you need to do is provide some bullet points outlining all you want to cover in the email, and it’ll automatically write it for you.
• First draft writing: Creating the first draft is the most difficult aspect of writing. With GPT-3, you can create the first draft of your content, and then edit it afterwards to meet your brand voice. This saves you a lot of time and makes you more efficient.

5. SEO A/B testing

Most SEOs focus more on user A/B testing and less on SEO A/B testing. While user testing involves randomly assigning visitors (users) of your website to different versions of your pages, and eventually deciding on the one to use based on the performance. In SEO A/B testing, the users are Googlebots and not end-users, and they’re typically shown the same version of the page.

What this means is that when you implement SEO/AB testing, you’re only showing users or Google only one version of the page, and not multiple pages.

How to implement SEO/AB testing

There are different ways to implement SEO A/B testing, depending on what you want to achieve for your business. If you’re just starting out, some things you can test include:

• Title tags
• Meta description
• H1

Take for instance, Etsy conducted a title tag SEO A/B testing for some of its pages, and within a few days, they started seeing significant traffic changes to their pages.

If you’re an intermediate/advanced SEO, you can test other things such as:

• AMP pages
• Internal anchor texts
• Schema markup
• New content
• And so on

For example, SearchPilot ran an internal link SEO A/B testing for a grocery store, and saw a 25% increase in organic traffic.

Conducting SEO A/B tests such as these will help you know exactly what works well for your brand and what doesn’t. That way, you can make more informed decisions when optimizing your pages for SEO.

For instance, if your traffic decreased to a particular page after making changes to it during the SEO A/B test, it shows that the test didn’t work out.

Typically, you should expect to start seeing results from your SEO A/B testing as soon as Google crawls your variant page. If Google crawls your test page within say 7-14 days, then you can compare it with the main page.

Some SEO A/B testing tools you can use for this purpose include: Google Tag Manager, Rankscience, Optimizely, etc.

6. Automated on-page content optimization

When creating a long-form piece of content, you typically:

• Check the top-ranking pages on the SERPs
• Go through each piece of content ranking on the SERPs
• Figure out the specific headings and subheadings the pages are covering
• Identify the missing points in the pages
• Create a better outline of our own piece.
• And so on

This usually takes a lot of time. You have to spend hours manually checking one piece of content after another and taking note of the most important points to include in your own piece.

How to use automated on-page content optimization

Instead of spending hours to create content briefs and researching the information you want to include in your content, you can use SEO tools such as Frase AI and Content Harmony.

With Frase AI, you can shorten the time you use for content research. Say you want to write about “how to lose weight fast”, you can input the main keyword into the tool.

Once done, it’ll automatically check the top-ranking pages in the SERPs, and provide you with some useful information you can use when creating your content. These include the top results for the keyword, statistics and data you can add in your content, questions your target audience are asking on Quora, Reddit, and Google’s People Also Ask.

With a tool such as Content Harmony, you can automatically create content briefs that meet search intent in less time.

All you need to get started is your keyword. Once you input it into the software, it automatically analyzes the SERPs using different data points. Afterwards, you can build your content briefs from there.

7. Non-text content factors

Non-text content factors are becoming more prominent in SEO because they help you create a nicer user experience on your website pages.

If you read a piece of content with blocks of texts all over it, you’ll most likely find it unappealing to look at. And with the upcoming enforcement of Core Web Vitals by Google in March 2021, non-text content factors will have a huge impact on SEO.

Some of these non-text content factors include:

• Images
• Infographics
• Graphs
• Charts
• Videos
• Audio clips
• Animations
• Slideshows
• Downloadable files such as PDFs

How to use non-text content factors for SEO

• Canva: With this tool, you create high-quality non-stock images for your pages.
• Venngage: If you want to create infographics that catches your readers’ attention, then you should use Venngage.
• Invideo: Invideo helps you create and edit videos online in a few minutes with different ready-made templates.
• Animaker: If you don’t have a design background and want to create animated videos, then this tool will help you greatly.

With these tools, you can make your pages and posts more appealing. Hence, your readers will spend more time on your website, and your bounce rate will eventually decrease drastically.

Conclusion

As we look forward into the future of the SEO industry, new technology developments will definitely play a significant role. While some of them are already in use, others are still in development.

If you’re an SEO who wants to remain on top of things in the industry, then you should keep an eye out for these emerging technologies and start applying them to grow your business. Have more SEO tech to add to this list? Let me know in the comments.

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How to Explain Domain Authority to a Non-SEO

Posted by Orbiteer

Do you ever have to explain the importance of Domain Authority to clients or co-workers who have little or no SEO experience? If so, this week’s WBF host — Andy Crestodina — walks through how to get your message across successfully.

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

Video Transcription

SEO is actually really hard to explain. There are so many concepts. But it's also really important to explain so that we can show value to our clients and to our employers. 

My name is Andy Crestodina. I'm the co-founder of Orbit Media Studios. We're a web design company here in Chicago. I've been doing SEO for 20 years and explaining it for about as long. This video is my best attempt to help you explain a really important concept in SEO, which is Domain Authority, to someone who doesn't know anything at all about SEO, to someone who is non-technical, to someone who is maybe not even a marketer.

Here is one framework, one set of language and words that you can use to try to explain Domain Authority to people who maybe need to understand it but don't have a background in this stuff whatsoever. 

Search ranking factors

Okay. Here we go. Someone searches. They type something into a search engine. They see search results.

Why do they see these search results instead of something else? The reason is: search ranking factors determined that these were going to be the top search results for that query or that keyword or that search phrase. 

Relevance

There are two main search ranking factors, in the end two reasons why any web page ranks or doesn't rank for any phrase. Those two main factors are, first of all, the page itself, the words, the content, the keywords, the relevance.

SEOs, we call this relevance. So that's the most important. That's one of the key search ranking factors is relevance, content and keywords and stuff on pages. I think everyone kind of gets that. But there's a second, super important search ranking factor. It's something that Google innovated and is now a really, really important thing across the web and all search.

Links

It's links. Do these pages have links to them? Are they trusted by other websites? Have other websites kind of voted for them based on their content? Have they referred back to it, cited it? Have they linked to these pages and these websites? That is called authority.

So the two main search ranking factors are relevance and authority. Therefore, the two main types of SEO are on-page SEO, creating content, and off-site SEO, PR, link building, and authority. Because links basically are trust. Web page, links to web page, that's kind of like a vote.

That's a vote of confidence. That's saying that this web page is probably credible, probably important. So links are credibility. Good way to think about it. Quantity matters. If a lot of pages link to your page, that adds credibility. That's important that there's a number of sites that link to you.

Link quality

Also important is the quality of those links. Links from sites that they themselves have many links to them are worth much more. So links from authoritative websites are more valuable than just any other link. It's the quantity and the quality of links to your website or links to your page that has a lot to do with whether or not you rank when people search for a related key phrase.

If a page doesn't rank, it's got one of two problems almost always. It's either not a great page on the topic, or it's not a page on a site that is trusted by the search engine because it hasn't built up enough authority from other sites, related sites, media sites, other sites in the industry. The name for this stuff originally in Google was called PageRank.

PageRank

Capital P, capital R, one word, PageRank. Not web page, not search results page, but named after Larry Page, the guy who kind of came up with this, one of the co-founders at Google. PageRank was the number, 1 through 10, that we all used to kind of know. It was visible in this toolbar that we used back in the day.

They stopped reporting on that. They don't update that anymore. We don't really know our PageRank anymore, so you can't really tell. So the way that we now understand whether a page is credible among other websites is by using tools that emulate PageRank by similarly crawling the internet, looking to see who's linking to who and then creating their own metrics, which are basically proxy metrics for PageRank.

Domain Authority

Moz has one. It's called Domain Authority. When spelled with the capital D and captial A, that's the Moz metric. Other search tools, other SEO tools also have their own, such as SEMrush has one called Authority Score. Ahrefs has one called Domain Rating. Alexa, another popular tool, has one called Competitive Power. They're all basically the same thing. They are showing whether or not a site or a page is trusted among other websites because of links to them. 

Now we know for a fact that some links are worth much, much more than others. We can do this by reading Google patents or by experiments or just best practices and expertise and firsthand knowledge that some links are worth much more.

But it's not just that they're worth a little more. Links from sites with lots of authority are worth exponentially more. It's not really a fair fight. Some sites have tons and tons and tons of authority. Most sites have very, very little. So it's on a curve. It's a log scale.

It's on an exponential curve the amount of authority that a site has and its ranking potential. The value of a link from another site to you is on an exponential curve. Links from some sites are worth exponentially more than links from other smaller sites, smaller blogs. These are quantifiable within these tools, tools like Moz, tools that emulate the PageRank metric.

And what they can do is look at all of the pages that rank for a phrase, look at all of the authority of all of those sites and all of those pages, and then average them to show the likely difficulty of ranking for that key phrase. The difficulty would be more or less the average authority of the other pages that rank compared to the authority of your page and then determine whether that's a page that you actually have a chance of ranking for or not.

This could be called something like keyword difficulty. I searched for "baseball coaching" using a tool. I used Moz, and I found that the difficulty for that key phrase was something like 46 out of 100. In other words, your page has to have about that much authority to have a chance of ranking for that phrase. There's a subtle difference between Page Authority and Domain Authority, but we're going to set that aside for now.

"Squash coaching," wow, different sport, less popular sport, less content, less competitive phrases ranking for that key phrase. Wow, "squash coaching" much less competitive. The difficulty for that was only 18. So that helps us understand the level of authority that we would have to have to have a chance of ranking for that key phrase. If we lack sufficient authority, it doesn't matter how awesome our page is, we're not likely to ever rank.



So it's really important to understand one of the things that Domain Authority tells us is our ranking potential. Are we sufficiently trusted to be able to target that key phrase and potentially rank for that? That's the first thing that the Domain Authority defines, measures, shows. The second thing that it shows, which I mentioned a second ago, is the value of a link from another site to us.

So if a super authoritative website links to us, high Domain Authority site, that Domain Authority in that case of that site is showing us the value of that link to us. A link from a site, a brand-new blog, a young site, a smaller brand would have a lower Domain Authority, indicating that that link would have far less value. 

Conclusion

So bottom line, Domain Authority is a proxy for a metric inside Google, which we no longer have access to. It's created by an SEO tool, in this case Moz. When spelled with a capital D, capital A, it's Moz's own metric. It shows us two things. Domain Authority is the ranking potential of pages on that domain. And secondly, Domain Authority measures the value of another site should that site link back to your site. That's it.

Hope this was helpful. Feel free to pass this along to anyone that you're trying to explain this to. Add to it. Let us know in the comments. Hope this was useful, and it was a huge pleasure and honor to be able to make a Whiteboard Friday for Moz. Again, Andy from Orbit Media. Thanks, everybody.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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Presenting: The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide

Posted by MiriamEllis

Untie the ribbons and hear the paper crackle — it’s a handcrafted gift, ready for you to unwrap!

This guide is a labor of love that Moz has worked on through the toughest year in local SEO, with hopes of a stronger 2021 for local brands. It’s free, it’s jam-packed with over eight chapters of actionable local search marketing strategies for your agency or local business, it's…

The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide!

What is The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide?

Moz is publishing this free guide to support digital marketing agencies and local business owners who want to gain an excellent understanding of topics and tactics within local search marketing.

This multi-chapter guide covers:

• Understanding Google’s local SERPs
• Assessing demand and analyzing local markets
• Analyzing on-page SEO and local business listings
• Analyzing and developing a reputation and reviews strategy
• Analyzing local business content and creating a publishing strategy
• Crafting a robust local marketing strategy
• Local search automation, analytics, and reporting

It also includes a special chapter on local SEO in the time of COVID-19 and a handy local search glossary.

Who will get value from this guide?

Any reader who has a beginning-to-intermediate acquaintance with local SEO should find next-level education in this guide to improve their skill set. Experts will find useful and practical perspectives to help them communicate with teams, stakeholders, and clients, thus improving the chances of buy-in for projects.

If you’re responsible for marketing any aspect of a local business, The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide contains workflows you can implement today to achieve local brand and agency goals.

Share this guide with:

• Single and multi-location local businesses.
• Brick-and-mortar models, service-area businesses, and hybrids.
• All relevant staff at your local brand, from in-house marketers to key customer service personnel, from bloggers, to webmasters, to social media managers.
• Incoming staff at your digital marketing agency who need training in local SEO to become a greater asset to your company.
• Any member of your team tasked with the many facets of marketing local businesses.
• Friends, family and colleagues who own a local business and could use a great playbook for a better 2021.

What makes this guide different?

This highly detailed and illustrated guide is special, in that it teaches not just the “how” of local SEO, but the “why”.

Expert explanations will help you see the big picture of local SEO as a sensible whole, rather than just random tactics in no particular order. We’re not aware of another free guide on the market that delves more deeply into the mindset of serving local communities with the objective of turning a local business into a local household name.

This robust guide will help you put the three pillars of local search — proximity, prominence, and relevance — to work for the brands you’re marketing, and build the visibility and reputation essential to success.

Moz knows local businesses are the backbone of the economy, and we want to do everything we can to support sustainable, diverse, thriving towns and cities through the presence of strong local brands. We hope you’ll take this guide as our gift to help build a better future for the local businesses you’re marketing. Unwrap it today!

Read The Essential Local SEO Strategy Guide!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

5 Tips to Invigorate Boring SEO Reports with Storytelling

Posted by chrisgiarratana

Add value to SEO reports with storytelling

Monthly SEO reports are a vital part of any SEO strategy because they provide an outlet to educate customers, show ROI, and guide the conversion for upsells.

While SEO reports are crucial in many ways, they are usually reduced to boilerplate PDF templates sent to clients each month with a generic message. If this describes your SEO reporting approach, you’re missing out on vital opportunities to retain clients and upsell with carefully crafted storytelling strategies.

SEO reporting has always been an important part of my deliverables. Whether I'm working with clients through my agency, StrategyBeam, or when I worked in a corporate team, I found that good reporting made a big difference with trust building and overall strategy. Regardless of who you're working with — national brands or local businesses — I’ve found that solid SEO reporting helps ground the client relationship. Over the past eight years, I've been able to grow StrategyBeam to a mid-six-figure agency. Customer service and results have always been our bread and butter, and SEO reports help us show how we stand out from the competition, and create long-term relationships with our clients.

Be sure to incorporate SEO reports into your regular cadence if you are struggling to keep a client, or you just want a way to engage with your clients in a deeper way. Now, more than ever we need to show clients the value we bring to the table.

So, let's take a look at the things all useful SEO reports should include, and how you can use storytelling tactics to build a relationship with your customers, prove your strategies' value, and uncover upsell opportunities today!

1. Organic impressions, clicks, and CTR

While SEO has a broad reach, you need to get the right message to the right people if you want them to click through to your content and convert.

This is why a good SEO report should include high-level metrics like organic impressions and clicks. While this information doesn’t provide much insight into on-page performance, it does offer a jumping-off point for you to talk to your customer about changes in market trends and user behavior.

I like to cover high-level data at the start of each reporting call to set the table for more detailed discussions with customers. I've used this data to recommend additional work for clients and use these metrics to show YoY improvement, and justify work during specific periods.

I present data from Google Search Console and Google Analytics to help my clients understand how we can influence their site's overall performance. Here are a few points that I touch on based on current click and impressions:

• What it means: Impressions = how often content appears, clicks = how many times people click on SERPs.
• Where to find it: Google Search Console
• When to use it: Identify content and build approach. Build sprints to address problem areas. Pages that are performing between 3-12 should be optimized, and low CTR should improve meta, interlinking, and technical considerations.
• How to optimize: High impressions + low clicks = update title and meta description. Low impressions = add FAQ schema.

Even though clicks and impressions don't convey too much information about a website's performance, you can use this part of your SEO report to ease into upsell opportunities and show your SEO chops when it comes to the broader scope of SEO marketing and how everything is interconnected.

2. Keyword ranking

Since SEO is all about getting specific pages to rank for target keywords, you need to include keyword performance and rankings in your SEO report. I love using keyword information to jumpstart a conversation with my clients around user intent and bringing SEO strategy back to their business goals.

I love using this time to show that I understand SEO is more than keywords and Google. At the end of the day, if my SEO strategy is not driving qualified traffic and boosting conversions, then my clients will find another agency.

Keywords are the basis of search engines, and I like to use keyword ranking data to tie in the "bigger picture", along with specific SEO tactics and push to secure more sales.

Here are a few talking points to consider with keyword performance in my monthly SEO reports and client check-ins:

• Show snapshots of keyword tools like Moz Keyword Tool and Ahrefs to show patterns. Tie MoM changes into an SEO report template to show progress and boost each client call's energy.
• Recommend content optimizations, outreach, and other SEO tactics to drive target keywords. Tie keyword ranking to your services, results, and your client's business goals.
• Run a quick technical SEO audit and content audit to provide new opportunities for additional work. This is a great way to improve your client's site's performance while also increasing trust and monthly income.

Keyword rankings give a strong signal around user intent, market trends, and competitor strategies. You can use keyword rankings in your SEO reports to focus attention on success and move the conversation towards upselling opportunities to shift gears and align your SEO strategy with your clients' business goals.

3. Describe how people engage with your content

SEO strategies are typically described in abstract terms, so it's our job as SEO professionals to connect the dots for clients whenever possible between SEO metrics and their business goals.

You probably spend a lot of time talking about different SEO marketing angles, like the customer journey, website performance, and user intent. All of these factors influence how search engines rank content, and even more importantly, all of these factors influence conversion rates.

However, SEO is abstract and challenging for our clients to understand. That's why we need to include concrete terms, visuals, and explanations in our reports for ongoing education and trust-building measures.

For example, I manage SEO and content for a large player in the shipping industry. This industry is extremely niche, but each sale can lead to 8-figure deals for my client. I was able to illustrate to the client about how they could increase leads by expanding their existing content Hub/Spoke model and use their SEO reports to talk them through different aspects of their business like:

• Categorize content on your site and assign specific metrics and goals for your clients.
• Track content based on topics and what content moved people through the customer journey.
• Use Content Drill Down in Google Analytics to show how readers move through the website. This information is valuable to highlight opportunities to optimize content.
• Jumpstart a conversation around other SEO tactics like interlinking, blogging, and on-page optimizations.

Showing how people engage with my client’s website was a key part to increase education, and help visualize how your monthly SEO work impacts your client's website. If you can point out a bottleneck in the customer journey and offer CRO, interlinking, or on-page optimizations, then you are on your way to build client trust and slide into an upsell opportunity.

4. Google Analytics events

Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager can be used to show how your SEO and CRO strategies impact user behavior when they reach your website. You can educate your customers about on-page SEO by tracking clicks on specific CTAs throughout individual pages.

In recent months I've started working with several clients on CRO and content optimization projects. Not only are these great ways to help clients reach their goals, but they are also high-margin projects that can show immediate results.

One of the metrics I focus on when I review clients' results is how people engage with their CTAs. This means that I have to connect Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics to show that our optimizations push more website visitors to valuable pages like contact forms and sales pages.

For example, I recently ran a small test for a client to show them that with some on-page SEO tweaks we could improve CTR for various posts and pages. I identified a few pages that would show the best results, closed the project, and after a month of testing I was able to include CTA clicks on different pages that I optimized.

After a few months of on-page optimizations I can see a big improvement for CTR and lead generation on their site. Here is a quick screenshot of CTA clicks on the client’s site from the pages/posts I optimized:



This small test was a success and lead to ongoing monthly optimizations across their deep content library. As a result, I am able to show the impact our on-page optimizations make to their lead quality and bottomline.

This is a perfect example of how we can use reports to build rapport, show our knowledge, and test ideas with clients. Plus, it can all lead to beneficial upsells- but none of this is possible without a good looking and informative report to backup our claims.

While this is not a big part of my SEO reporting process, I try to include metrics around user behavior to explain how people engage with on-page content. This information can also help tie high-level SEO metrics to business goals, which are significant parts of the overall story I convey to my clients each month.

5. Add local SEO info

Local SEO is an essential part of an SEO strategy to drive qualified leads and sales for local business owners. You can save a lot of time by using a tool like Moz Local to keep NAP and listings consistent for your clients, and you can use excellent local SEO reporting tools to show the results of your local SEO tactics.

I have several clients that offer local SEO services. Not only do these services offer immediate value to these clients, but the local SEO services also provide me with a great way to pitch additional services like outreach, page optimizations, and blogging.

While local SEO is not a great fit for all of your clients, you can unwrap great opportunities if you offer honest solutions to address their needs and present precise data to show your efforts' value.

Be sure to include local SEO metrics in your SEO reports when it makes sense, and point out the metrics that matter to business owners like phone calls, foot traffic, and driving directions!

Use SEO analytics to tell a story and build customer trust!

Reports are not the main reason many SEOs started in this profession, but monthly SEO reports help us paint a picture of our clients' SEO efforts. You'll be able to show the value of your SEO services and keep clients longer if you know how to tell a story around each metric, and tie results back to your agency!

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Impactful SEO Audits for B2B

Posted by carlycs

A comprehensive audit of your B2B website can mean the difference between winning new clients and losing them to the competition. In this brand new episode of Whiteboard Friday, guest host Carly Schoonhoven walks you through four areas that can take your audits to the next level.

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Video Transcription

Hello and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Carly Schoonhoven, and I'm a Senior SEO Manager at Obility. We're a B2B digital marketing agency here in Portland, Oregon. Now if you work for an agency, you know that sometimes a really valuable SEO audit can be the difference between winning over a client and losing out to someone else.

So something I sometimes struggle with is how to level up your basic SEO audit into something that's really impactful for a B2B company that is in need of a long-term, strategic plan. Now when I'm talking about an SEO audit, I'm not just talking about a technical audit, something you can just pull from Screaming Frog.

It's really about getting a clear picture of a site's current SEO compliance and most importantly showing the ways, both in the short and long term, that you can work with them to help them achieve their goals. So today I'm going to walk you through my approach to SEO audits and walk you through step by step. Now before we get started pulling data, there are a couple of things I like to figure out first.

Competitors and goals

Number one is competitors. So SEO, it doesn't exist in a vacuum. If we want to improve our rankings, a competitor is likely going to have to lose rankings. So it's really important to get an idea of what competitors you're going to be looking at so you can see how you stack up in relation to them. Now, again, it's really important to make sure that your competitors are realistic.

I can't tell you how many times I've been given Google as a competitor. Now maybe they're a competitor for you, but it's really important to make sure that you're being realistic and finding competitors that are of a similar size so that the insights you're providing are actually going to be valuable and actionable. So if someone gives you Google as a competitor, think about it, maybe provide some alternatives.

Another thing I like to take a look at is goals. So if you're evaluating a company, ask them what their goals are. Maybe they just launched a new product and they really would like some specific insights as to how they can improve that content. Or maybe they're going through a site migration in a few months, and they really want some insights related to that.

So good audits are not one size fits all. So you can really level up your audit by making sure that it's tailored to the site and the company you're looking at specifically. So now that we've got our competitors, we've got our goals, let's get started by taking a look at keywords.

1. Keywords

Obviously, keywords are so important. It's where you need to start because keywords are the backbone of SEO. Now this is an audit. We're not doing a full keyword research strategy here. This shouldn't take you all day. But there are a couple of tools that you can use so that you can get some really interesting and helpful information about keywords without having to put in a whole bunch of time.

So Moz's Keyword Explorer is a really great place to start. I love to use the Compare Link Profiles tool, and this is a really good way to take a look at one site versus its competitors and see how it's doing from a really high level. It'll help you identify if there's someone who's really elite, who's ranking for 20 times more keywords than you, that's maybe not the most realistic competitor to monitor yourself against.

You can see if maybe there's a site that's really comparable. Or if there's a site that's not ranking for hardly any keywords, that's not going to be one you have to worry about. So it's a really good place to start just to get sort of an idea of the competitive landscape. Another really helpful thing to look at is the keyword overlap. So we've seen total keywords.

But what are those keywords specifically that are performing well? So my lovely drawing here of a keyword overlap chart gives you an idea. So let's say the blue is your top competitor, green is competitor two, and then the red is you. So you really want to take a look at that area where your competitors overlap but you don't have any keywords that are ranking.

This is so important, because maybe you'll identify a topic area where all of your competitors have content for, but the site you're looking at doesn't. This is a really good place to start and can help you provide some initial content suggestions and get sort of a window into your competitors' content strategies. So speaking of content, let's talk about looking at content for an SEO audit.

2. Content

So this is probably where I spend the most time personally when I do audits, because it's really valuable and there are also so many different things to look at and you can find something new pretty much every time. When you're looking at a B2B site in particular, however, one thing you want to make sure you're taking a look at is the funnel. Do they have content for all of the funnel stages, and are they funneling people from one stage to the next?

So take a look at their site like you're someone visiting it for the first time. Take a look at their awareness content and see: Are there mid-funnel CTAs? Are they making the next step they want me to take clear? Or what is that ultimate conversion that they want people to take in the purchase stage? Do they have a really clear contact form?

Is it easy to navigate to the demo, if that's a really important conversion to them? Take a look at their content and what they're doing, specifically making sure that they have content for the full funnel. This is another good opportunity to evaluate your competitors. So do the same thing on your competitors' sites. See if there's something they're doing really, really well, that the site you're looking at is not.

Take some screenshots. Share some specific things a competitor is doing that maybe you can learn from and find a way to do your own version of on your site. 

3. Technical

All right. Another area to always make sure you include is technical, because we all know that even if you have the best, amazing content on your site, if your technical SEO is a mess, it's not really going to matter if you're not able to get that content indexed.

So a good place to start is to do Moz's On-Demand Crawl so you can take a look at things like 404 errors, duplicate content, maybe they have missing metadata on all of their really valuable top pages. That's good information to have and to share. Then you also want to expand that to look at things like site speed. Maybe they have really poor site speed, and it's nothing that they've ever prioritized.

Use Google's Page Speed Insights. See if there are some specific recommendations that you can give them and that you can help them fix, because ultimately it's about trying to get them to want to work with you and showing how you could help them fix those issues. You can also take a look at things that might be impacting indexation. Take a look at their robots.txt.

Take a look at their sitemap. Just check all the boxes and make sure that there's nothing that might be impacting their search appearance. 

4. Off-site



Finally, I always like to take a look at off-site. This is another great use of Moz. I love to use Moz's Compare Link Profiles option to get an idea of how you stack up with your competitors when it comes to off-site.

Now I know that off-site is really difficult. Link building is hard, and it takes a long time to really show results. But knowing how you stack up against your competitors, when it comes to Domain Authority and it comes to total links, really helps you get an idea of how hard it's going to be and how long it's going to take to catch up with your competitors in the search engine results page.

So I always like to take a look at Domain Authority, external links, linking domains and really just finding insights as far as who's going to be the most difficult, who is the most authoritative, and where do we stand today. You can also take a look at specific backlink profiles and link overlap, very similar to the competitor overlap.

See if there's a site where all of your competitors have backlinks from and you don't. Maybe it's really relevant, an industry publication, and you can provide them that and you can help them eventually, hopefully, get a link from there too. All right. So we've taken a look at keywords, content, technical, and off-site. If you followed all the steps, you should have a really great audit with some super actionable, short-term and long-term action items to provide.

So I hope this was really helpful, and thank you for joining me.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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How to Combine SEO and CRO for the Ultimate Lead Generation Strategy

Posted by IzabelleHundrev

If there’s one thing that most marketers have in common, it’s that we want more leads.

Sure, not all leads are good. Some are even downright unqualified. But leads are what drive business, and as a result, many of us are held accountable for generating more of them.

Out of all of the lead generation strategies out there, there’s one that I find particularly effective: search engine optimization (SEO) and conversion rate optimization (CRO) working together.

While this may seem obvious, you’d be surprised how many marketing teams are really good at one or the other, but fail to find the balance between both.

Below, I’ll share why it’s critical to find alignment between SEO and CRO, and how to do it so that both of these functions work together to drive qualified leads for your business.

SEO and CRO: Why you can’t have one without the other

Being discoverable is more important than it’s ever been. If a prospective buyer can’t find your business online, there’s a good chance that you’re leading them right into the arms of your competitors.

By now, most businesses understand the importance of having a presence in organic search results. SEO is more than just a buzzword, it’s a given. And it’s critical to growing brand awareness and driving traffic to your website.

But there’s a catch.

Traffic doesn’t magically turn into paying customers and revenue. Ask yourself, when someone clicks on an organic result and lands on your website, what kind of browsing experience are they having? Is your site easy to navigate? Are your web pages optimized to guide the user towards an action?

Traffic without conversions is essentially just a vanity metric. CRO is the piece that ties it all together.

Put simply, conversion rate optimization is the process of optimizing a web page to lead a user toward a desired action. Typically, this action comes in the form of a conversion. This can be a demo request, email newsletter sign up, webinar registration — you get the gist.

The idea here is to entice the user to move further down the marketing funnel in some way.

SEO is what brings people to your website and CRO is what gets them to convert.

It sounds like a match made in marketing heaven, but achieving alignment is often easier said than done.

Start with a strong SEO foundation

I could write thousands of words on what it takes to build a strong SEO foundation for your website, but that’s not what this article is about. With that being said, a discussion about the relationship between SEO and CRO wouldn’t be complete without a mention of it.

Earlier, I said you can’t have SEO without CRO. But this goes both ways.

While it’s true that conversions are a meaningful standalone metric, you can’t have conversions without web visitors. Plus, experimentation and testing is a big part of what makes CRO so effective. It can be difficult to run tests if your website doesn’t get a healthy amount of traffic. More on this later.

A successful SEO strategy fuels the inbound marketing engine to bring new prospective buyers to your site on a regular basis. With SEO, your entire marketing team could be on PTO for a week and your website will still be generating traffic on its own.

If you’re still working to build a powerful SEO strategy, there are countless SEO resources that are available to you.

Be intentional about your content

Content and SEO go hand-in-hand.

When a buyer goes to a search engine, they want to find content that brings them an answer to their question.

As marketers, we want to create that content and match it to a buyer’s specific search query. We do this through extensive keyword research and on-page optimization to ensure that every piece of content that’s published has a likelihood to rank on page one.

Although this approach to content creation is effective at generating organic traffic, sometimes we forget to think about how a piece can drive impact beyond just ranking number one for a keyword.

CRO doesn’t just apply to landing pages or core solutions pages. There are elements of CRO that apply to your long-from content as well.

When strategizing topic ideas and doing keyword research, assign a goal to every piece of content that you publish. Ask yourself, “what action do I want the reader to take when they land on this page?”

Build this goal into your content calendar and incorporate it as a call-to-action (CTA) on each page that you publish.

As always, be mindful of the reader and their position in the funnel. Someone that lands on “The Beginner’s Guide to Marketing Automation” probably isn’t ready for a live demo just yet.

Instead, guide that reader toward a less intimidating action, such as signing up for your email newsletter. A good CTA shouldn’t feel spammy or overly promotional, it should provide additional value to the reader overall.

Following this process forces you to think beyond just traffic — you’re focusing on conversions before you even hit the “publish” button.

Test, optimize, and repeat

User experience (UX) is at the heart of both SEO and CRO.

If your website is slow, glitchy, and hard to navigate, it’s going to negatively affect both traffic and conversions. The goal is to continuously refine your website to ensure that anyone who lands on it has a frictionless browsing experience — thereby increasing their likelihood to convert.

This is why split testing is so important.

Split testing, sometimes referred to as A/B testing, is the process of testing multiple variants of a web page to determine which one converts at a higher rate. This is a core practice among marketers who specialize in CRO. You can test different types of lead forms, CTA buttons, copy variants, and even page layouts.

Here’s an example of a split test between a single and multi-step lead form:

Some SEOs may be hesitant to run split tests because they worry it will negatively affect organic rankings. The truth is that Google not only encourages testing, but it even has its own tool that helps marketers to run split tests.

As long as you’re abiding by Google’s webmaster guidelines, you should see no major negative impact on organic traffic due to testing.

It’s also worth noting that you can’t reach statistical significance in your split tests without a big enough sample size. In other words, you need traffic to have accurate test results.

There’s no hard and fast rule for what counts as “enough traffic” but the general consensus is that your web visitors should be in the thousands, at least. I recommend using this sample size calculator tool to get a better idea of a number that’s unique to your website.

This is yet another example of how closely intertwined SEO and CRO truly are. Earlier we discussed how important it is to start with a solid foundation in SEO, now you know how it fits into the bigger picture.

The common thread here?

CRO and SEO have a symbiotic relationship. What’s good for one is good for the other. And both are working toward the same common goal of generating revenue.

Identify marketing funnel gaps

When looking at the big picture of your inbound marketing efforts, SEO and CRO can help you identify and fix any gaps in your funnel.

Let’s say you have a product page that ranks #1 for its primary keyword and generates lots of traffic. But, when you dig into the conversion data, you notice that only a small percentage of users that land on that page actually convert.

This is a red flag that something is off with the page.

It could be the messaging, the offer, or the lead form. Just because it works for Google doesn’t mean it’s working for your audience. And their opinion is the only one that matters.

This goes the other way around too.

Say you have a product page that’s converting at a high rate, but you notice that it’s one of the lowest-trafficked pages on your site. This should alert you to revisit the content on that page and identify opportunities to re-optimize it. If you don’t, there are likely hundreds of potential conversions that you’re missing out on.

Final thoughts

SEO and CRO is kind of like the digital marketing version of the chicken and the egg. You can’t be really good at one without the other.

Realistically, it doesn’t matter what came first. What does matter is achieving alignment between these two key marketing tactics. By doing so, your website has the potential to become a major driver of leads and revenue for your business.

If there’s one thing you take away from this article, it’s to integrate your SEO and CRO efforts and view them as one cohesive part of your lead generation strategy.

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