Navigating through Departments: The Key to Making Impactful Changes in SEO

SEO is unlike any other digital channel. It does not and cannot live in a silo, while something like a paid search program can be run by a single person with minimal help.

From our experience, the biggest deficiency in SEO campaigns is not a lack of understanding of the craft, rather, it’s the roadblocks that occur during implementation and cross-team collaboration. Great ideas can be presented and discussed, but taking an idea from a whiteboard or a slide to actually living on a site where it can impact performance can be difficult.

Whether in-house or on the agency side, blockers to success often come from internal site teams or long development queues. The key to making progress comes from two primary avenues:

• Advocating for SEO through exceptional knowledge of the channel as a whole

• Deep integration with internal teams to move projects along

The departments that SEO impacts (and how to work with each)

With a channel like SEO where progress is not solely achieved by one consultant or advocate for the channel, but from the implementation of recommendations, it’s critical to understand how to navigate through a business to make progress.

We break down the departments as follows:

• Business / Marketing

• Design / Creative

• Development / Engineering

• PR / Thought Leadership

• Content

Business / Marketing

The business and marketing teams are the stakeholders whose resources will be used to execute your SEO strategies. These are the individuals at a company who you must win over to be successful. Ever had an amazing idea only to be squashed by leadership? Many of us have been in that situation at one point or another, so the key is to make the case for SEO.

Unlike other marketing channels where ROI can be predicted, it can be difficult to forecast growth for SEO. How do we provide statistical evidence that our strategies will be a driver for success? Although there’s no perfect science, we break down our methodology below:

Step 1: Start by quantifying potential traffic gains through ranking improvements by utilizing average click-through-rate at various positions.

Step 2: Utilize this data to build a forecast based on investment and potential growth using conversion rate and average order value to predict potential revenue.

Step 3: Agree on a reasonable forecast and set expectations with the client. Ensure both parties are on the same page about the opportunity in the vertical to avoid any potential pitfalls, and keep growth conservative.

Step 4: Start audit and planning exercises. Our audits serve as the roadmap for success and the forecasting exercise occurs during this phase as a compliment to the strategy.

Design / Creative / UX & UI

Once your strategy is approved and you’re ready to build out new pages, new sections of the site, or redesign pages, it’s time to consult with the design team. They’ll be the ones to help you move your recommendations from ideation into a design, but that process isn’t always as simple as it sounds.

The first issue is not a lack of resources, but the incessant battle between UX (site teams) and SEO. Ever heard any of these statements before?

• We shouldn’t expand our main navigation because our users want a more simplified approach

• This doesn’t meet our brand guidelines as we don’t want any text content on our pages

• These site changes don’t seem to ladder up to our goal of getting people to convert

• We can’t change that because our users are used to it that way

Although these are all valid statements, they do present an issue with being able to progress and grow organic traffic.

SEO and UX need a balance. Finding it can be hard, but necessary. As the advocate for the organic channel, you must always be willing to argue how and why your recommendations can help the business grow. You can do so by providing clear, concise, and effective instructions to design and site teams.

We utilize checklist templates to provide to design teams an idea of what needs to be included with examples (after marketing / business teams have approved our recommendations, of course).

We finalize these recommendations by signing off on designs prior to development, when the real site work begins.

Development / Engineering

Why are development and engineering resources the largest blocker to SEO success at the mid-market and enterprise level?

SEO is de-prioritized (YES! Even after executives are bought in). We see it again, and again, and again. As engineering and development teams have urgent things come up, it’s easy to move around other projects that are less time sensitive. On average, website migrations we've worked on are delayed one to two months at the mid-market level. For enterprises, this can be much more severe. So how do you get around your projects being moved to the back of a development queue?

It can be hard. I have personal horror stories of asking for the same on-site changes for over three years with no movement due to other internal pressure for other things to be done, or blockers from other teams.

There are two main tips we have for ensuring that SEO development projects move through the pipeline properly once they’re scheduled:

Tip #1: Create in-depth tickets to help alleviate potential development problems. Many times, projects stall out because development can be difficult. The first thing you can do is document in detail what needs to happen. What does the final state need to look like?

Many of our clients work in JIRA, and we are able to integrate directly in to create tickets, comment on them, and QA them upon completion.

Tip #2: Create an accountability tracker. Whether you’re a consultant, and in-house SEO, or an agency partner, a “next actions” or project tracker sometimes isn’t enough. We create an accountability tracker where we can discuss weekly where projects are when they fall on other teams, specifically on engineering teams that are pulled in many different directions.

Project Tracker Template

PR / Thought Leadership

Ever engaged in some sort of authority building? Well, there’s undoubtedly some overlap with PR efforts, especially with how link building looks at this point in Google’s existence. There is no gaming or tricking the algorithm anymore- linking needs to be through concentrated content development and promotion.

Link building is outreach, and therefore, some of the efforts an SEO agency or SEO team might be working on may intersect. We have three main tips to ensure your outreach efforts are successful and well received.

Tip #1: Ensure that relationship boundaries are defined between PR and SEO. We start every engagement by first asking for a “Do Not Contact” list from any existing PR agencies. You do not want to be contacting a media outlet that a PR agency or an internal team has an existing relationship with. Start by understanding the types of relationships that already exist.

Tip #2: Don’t just email everyone. Similar to establishing boundaries between PR and SEO, consider other areas of the business that have relationships with website owners. For example, affiliates are another area that you want to think more in-depth about. There are strategies you can use to acquire links that are valuable from affiliates, but you’d want to ensure you’re touching base with whoever manages those affiliate teams first. Start by setting a meeting and strategizing with them.

In addition, you want to be careful about contacting websites that may not be a fan of your company or client. Be sensitive to the information in an article. When performing a service like link reclamation, be sure that the sites you’re reaching out to weren’t saying something negative or are not a fan of a company. Although this isn’t extremely common, it does happen and can cause internal issues.

Tip #3: There is always opportunity. Don’t get discouraged. Even if you’re working on outreach where there are a lot of blockers in place, there are still sites you can contact that will add SEO value. Focus on sites that are strong and receive organic traffic, but aren’t in the same tier of what a PR agency would be focusing on (think USA Today, or Seventeen Magazine). Although these are amazing sites to be featured on, you can still get value from mommy blogs that have strong rankings and some authority. These sites can still move the needle (as long as they are high-quality and don’t have high spam scores).

Content

Content creation is crucial to SEO progress, and sometimes it is the most critical piece. This varies by business type, but generally every business can benefit in some way from having SEO-focused content on a website (content built to rank for a specific query).

Most businesses have some sort of copywriting resources in-house. These individuals are not always focused on web content, but might be focused on many other types of content to support awareness initiatives or internal processes.

When looking at the content process, there are many areas that SEO teams need to support. No matter who is actually creating content, the SEO team needs to provide strategy and direction.

Our content process is as follows:

Just like all other departments that we’ve discussed so far, content teams also need to be aligned with SEO goals and understand how to produce content that ranks.

We recommend creating content maps to help guide content teams. These roadmaps should contain everything that a copywriter needs to understand how to write for SEO.

As the SEO strategist is working towards the goal of ranking for a keyword that drives business results, the strategy for the content should be coming from someone who knows the goals of the business on a deep level.

Content Roadmap Example

These are two key areas that impact rankings that can sometimes be harder to deliver on:

1. Content comprehensiveness: Although not always true, longer content does tend to rank better for informational / research queries. While a 2,500 word post may not always be the preference for the business, sometimes it is necessary to rank. It’s important as an SEO to advocate for comprehensive content (when we believe that the result should be an in-depth response).

2. Keyword targeting in content titles: There is no such thing as “writing for search engines” anymore. The truth is that content needs to be written for users. However, we still must use keywords in the title tag and in the title of the post. These are still the strongest on-page signals we have. Many times, the title of posts are written with brand or marketing language, without considering its ability to rank competitively. For example, a content team might title a post about workplace efficiency as “7 Ways to Improve Your Efficiency Throughout the Day'' without taking into consideration a keyword focus for SEO. Whereas, an SEO might recommend a title such as, “Workplace Efficiency: Tips to Improve Workflows”. As the title holds so much weight, the SEO team needs to advocate for ensuring that the title of the post has a balance between being optimized and engaging.

Conclusion

Making meaningful progress towards growth in SEO takes an entire company. It is our job as SEOs to serve as the project manager and guide projects through the pipeline. We’re also responsible for ensuring that stakeholders on different teams know and understand our initiatives, and that everyone is working towards the same goals.

When everything is working as it should, the results will follow.

Title Tag Rewrites: 7 Months Later

Back in August, we analyzed 10,000 SERPs and found that Google was rewriting 58% of the title tags we were able to track. In September, after some serious objections from the SEO community, Google released the following statement:

Based on your feedback, we made changes to our system which means that title elements are now used around 87% of the time, rather than around 80% before.

This immediately raises two questions. First, has the situation improved? Second, why the huge mismatch between our numbers (and similar numbers by others in the community)?

Rewrites by the numbers

We collected new data on March 2, 2022 from the MozCast 10,000-keyword tracking set. Here are the basic stats, which are very similar to what we found in August 2021:

• 84,639 page-one results

• 71,265 unique URLs

• 57,832 <title> tags

• 33,733 rewrites

So, let’s compare the August 2021 rewrites to the March 2022 rewrites:

Technically, the numbers did go down, but this probably isn’t the news you had hoped to hear. If 57% of titles in our study were rewritten, then — I think we can all agree with this math — 43% did not get rewritten. So, how do we reconcile our 43% with Google’s 87%?

Truncation, from simple to …

First off, our definition of “rewrite” is extremely broad, and it covers truncation, where Google just runs out of physical space. In August, I took a pretty simplistic view of truncation, but let’s try to give Google some benefit of the doubt. I’m going to dig into three forms of truncation, starting with the simplest:

1) Simple truncation

The simplest form of truncation is when Google cuts off a long title but preserves the original text from the beginning. For example:

No one is doing anything wrong here — the IRS’s <title> is accurate and descriptive, but Google ran out of space. They didn’t take any liberties with the text.

2) Midstream truncation

Let’s review another form of truncation, with this example from the Linksys website:

Again, Google truncated a long <title>, but here they removed the branded text from the beginning and started with the more unique, descriptive text. Is this a rewrite? Technically, yes, but it’s a direct excerpt and the “...” clearly implies truncation to searchers.

3) Excerpt truncation

Finally, we have situations where Google uses a portion of the <title> tag, but they don’t clearly indicate truncation with an ellipsis (“...”). Here’s an example from Congress.gov, a site Google is unlikely to view as spammy or in need of editorial revisions:

I don’t think Google’s trying to hide the truncation here by removing the ellipsis — the truncated title is a complete thought/phrase within the original title. In some cases, is this the excerpt the creator would have chosen? Maybe not, but I would still generally call this truncation.

All told, these three forms of truncation accounted for almost exactly one-third of the “rewrites” that we observed. These forms were distinct enough that we could separate them. From here on out, it gets a bit more complicated.

Title additions (brand & local)

In addition to truncating long titles, Google sometimes adds information they deem relevant to the end of a display title. The most common addition is “brand” information (using the term loosely) that wasn’t present in the original <title> tag. For example:

I kind of love this title, and you should definitely ride Top Thrill Dragster at Cedar Point if you’re a coaster fan, but notice here how Google has appended “Touring Ohio” to the end of the display title. This kind of add-on is very common, occurring in almost 14% of our observed rewrites.

In some cases, adding the brand text caused Google to truncate the title prior to the addition. See this example from Goodreads …

While the rewrite here is intended to be beneficial, this can cause problems with long brand names. Anecdotally, though, Google seems to be doing a better job of this in the past few months, and most brand identifiers are of reasonable length.

Finally, in a few cases, Google appended location information. For example:

It’s not clear what situations trigger this added location information, but it does show that Google is considering appending other forms of relevant information that could drive future rewrites and go beyond brand tagging.

Capital-R Rewrite examples

We can argue about whether truncation and addition are real, Capital-R Rewrites, so how about the situations where Google is clearly making substantial changes? Some of these situations — even working with a moderately-sized data set — are hard to classify, but I’ll cover some major categories.

1) Maximum verbosity

I almost said “keyword stuffing,” but that’s a judgment call and isn’t always fair in these cases. Granted, there are legitimate cases of keyword stuffing, like this example:

Prior to August 2021, Google might’ve just truncated this title, but now they’re saying “Yeah, no” and replacing the entire mess. Other cases aren’t so clear, though. Consider this one:

AMC hasn’t really done anything spammy here — this <title> tag is likely a direct reflection of their site architecture. In this case, though, Google has gone beyond truncation and rewritten the title, including replacing pipes with hyphens, removing “Movie Times” (which is arguably redundant with “Showtimes”) and pushing the site/brand up.

2) Minimum verbosity

Some people have too much to say, and some people are too quiet (I’m afraid I know which side I fall on). Here’s a case where the title didn’t quite provide enough information:

In many of these cases, like displaying just the brand name, a generic placeholder like “Home”, or – in one notable case – a code placeholder (“”), it’s likely the culprit is an overzealous CMS default setting. These are clearly Capital-R Rewrites, but I would argue that Google is generally adding value in these situations by rewriting.

3) Excessive superlatives

Sometimes, we marketers get a little carried away with colorful language (in this case, the family-friendly kind). Google still seems to be disproportionately rewriting <title> tags with certain superlatives, even when they may not seem excessive. Take this example:

This is a case where Google replaced the <title> with the contents of an <h1> — while it’s not a bad rewrite, it does feel aggressive to me. It’s hard to see how “21 Best Brunch Recipes” is wildly over the top or how “21 Easy Brunch Recipes” is a major improvement.

4) Miscellaneous nonsense

It’s hard to measure the real head-scratchers, but anecdotally, it does appear that Google’s rewrite engine has improved since August 2021, in terms of the truly bizarre edge cases. Here’s a funny one, though, from Google.com itself:

Even Google thinks that Google said “Google” too many times in this <title> tag. I suspect the rewrite engine flagged the word “Google” as redundant, but I’d definitely call this a misfire.

A more nuanced pie chart

I made myself a to-do of creating a “pie chart with nuance,” and I now realize that’s impossible. So, here’s a pie chart that’s slightly less misleading. Many rewrites are hard to categorize and count, but let’s take a look at the data if we carve out the truncation scenarios (all three) and the additions:

Separating truncations and additions, we’re left with about 30% of <title> tags being rewritten in our data set. Keep in mind that many of these rewrites are minor and some probably involve forms of truncation and/or addition that were difficult to detect programmatically.

Flipping this around, we have 70% of titles not being rewritten. How do we reconcile that with Google’s 87%? It could just be a function of the data set, but let’s carefully re-read that quote from the beginning of the post:

Based on your feedback, we made changes to our system which means that title elements are now used around 87% of the time, rather than around 80% before.

Note the highlighted text — Google is specifically saying that they used the <title> element/tag 87% of the time. They may have subtracted from, added to, or slightly modified that original data (they don’t really say). So, the 13% of cases here is likely only when Google is pulling the display title in search from some other area of the page (body content, headers, etc.).

As to the bigger question of how much Google toned down rewrites after the initial outcry, it’s difficult to measure precisely, but I’d say “Not very much.” It does appear that some edge cases — including mishandling of parentheses and brackets — did improve, and I think Google turned down the volume a bit overall, but changes to titles remain fairly common and the reasons for these changes are similar to August 2021.

How Social Media Trends Can Influence Your SEO

Whether it’s participating in the latest challenge, using a trending TikTok sound, or putting your own spin on a viral recipe, we all know social media trends provide a great opportunity to spread brand awareness and grow your brand’s social media following. But they can also be utilized to boost search engine results, driving traffic and sales to your website.

If taking advantage of social media trends in one way or another isn’t a part of your brand’s digital marketing strategy just yet, read on. This article will show why it’s important to jump on board and provide you with a list of actionable steps to ace the game.

Examples of search results influenced by social media trends

If we compile a list of social media trends from the last couple of years and search for their related terms on Google Trends, we can spot a recurring pattern — search results for related terms increasing at the time of their social media trends going viral. Let’s take a look at a few examples.

Little Moons

@melika_zaidi Omg look how many flavours! #littlemoons#LetsGetBackOnTrack#mochi#littlemoonsmochi#foodie#foodreview♬ Butter - 방탄소년단 (BTS)

Little Moons mochi ice cream has been around for over a decade, but it wasn’t until January 2021 that their popularity truly exploded. All thanks to an organic, mid-lockdown viral trend prompted by a couple of TikTok creators.

It snowballed into thousands of Little Moons-themed TikTok videos of people searching for and trying their products, which ended up generating over 500 million views. Little Moons became the most sought-after ice cream in the UK, with their sales skyrocketing by 2,000%. At the height of the virality, product, brand, related unbranded, as well as retail searches on Google have increased drastically too, as seen below.

The significant drop in searches after the initial spike indicates that the trend has eventually died out, which is a consequence of social media content – viral or not – having a short shelf life. Brands can keep the momentum going by tapping into influencer marketing themselves, starting new trends and reaching new audiences.

Emily Mariko’s salmon rice

@emilymariko

Best lunch of the week!

♬ original sound - Emily Mariko

Another great example is Emily Mariko, a food and lifestyle content creator, whose leftover salmon rice “recipe” blew up on TikTok back in October of 2021. She went from 70,000 to 7 million followers within a few weeks, while everyone else’s follow-up salmon rice videos gathered over 800 million views so far. The Google Trends report shows us people were searching for Emily Mariko’s salmon rice on Google as well, which gave plenty of other creators, brands, and media outlets an opportunity to capitalize on it, since she didn’t utilize those searches herself.

With her newly amassed follower base, Emily Mariko continues to create viral trends and influence search results, as can be seen with a recent surge in “Emily Mariko toaster oven” searches below. This really goes to show that the power of influencer/REALfluencer marketing shouldn’t be underestimated.

Tax the rich

While the following case isn’t the most common way to go about it, there’s no denying that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez posting her “tax the rich” Met Gala dress on Instagram is a very clever example of how a post on social media can not only sell, but help spread awareness about a cause. On September 14, 2021, when the post went live, searches for “tax the rich” jumped to new heights. Of course the media frenzy surrounding the event gave them an extra boost.

How brands can take advantage of existing social media trends to drive traffic to their website

Recreate trending content

One way to interject your brand into culturally relevant moments is to recreate a trending piece of content on your brand’s social media account. By putting your own spin on it, you can get your product or message out there in a very authentic way.

A great place to find trends is through TikTok’s discovery tab, where trending hashtags and audios will give you plenty of ideas for content. Do make sure to include a call to action at the end of your piece of reactive social media content, and paste an appropriate link in your profile’s bio to drive traffic off the platform straight to your website.

Create supporting content off social media

At this stage, most brands are doing the above, but what many brands and creators still aren’t doing is providing supporting content off of social media platforms. As we’ve seen, viral social media trends often transcend their original platform. Google Trends tells us people are searching for trending items on Google in conjunction with those trends taking off. It’s a missed opportunity to ignore the search boosts resulting from viral social media trends or organic influencers’ mentions.

Despite your brand or product not being explicitly featured in the original viral post, there are many ways to put your keyword optimized website content in front of the eyes of this new audience.

Let’s take Emily Mariko’s toaster oven searches to explore the opportunity. If you’re a brand or a retailer selling kitchen appliances, you can create a shoppable landing page featuring Emily Mariko’s most-loved kitchen appliances. Diving into her TikTok videos will show you she’s also a fan of rice cookers, aesthetic non-stick cookware, stove gap covers, blenders… All of these items are being searched for by Emily Mariko’s fans, so you can kill many birds with one stone.

Another piece of content to support toaster oven searches could be “5 toaster oven recipes even Emily Mariko would approve of” — an evergreen article with a trending angle. The list of ideas is endless and a list of brands that can jump on board is too.

You can even give digital PR a go and pitch a piece of trending content like the article above to journalists, essentially providing them with a story for a chance to gain quality backlinks and a potential influx of new customers.

Speaking of publishers and bloggers, they, too, can benefit from creating reactive pieces of content — by increasing website views and putting affiliate links to good use.

As viral social media trends can rarely be predicted and come in and out of style rather fast, it’s important to stay on top of the game, follow what’s going on in the social media space, and react quickly.

How brands can utilize influencer marketing to increase searches and demand

Collaborating with influencers to showcase your brand or product while participating in a trend is another great way to create awareness and increase searches for your product or brand. Not only do influencers have an advantage of an existing loyal audience. Many times, content creators will do a much better job at speaking the unpolished language of social media and your potential new customers, resulting in higher conversions.

This is how Popsockets, a brand known for their phone grips, took advantage of an already existing “Emoji Outfit Challenge”, a challenge in which people filmed themselves matching their outfits to popular emojis. They activated eight of their ambassadors to participate in the challenge by incorporating their product, and reached two million viewers.

If a popular influencer from your niche is already featuring a generic product you sell in a trending piece of content that could translate into follow-up content, or generally creates the type of content your product could be seamlessly incorporated in, don’t sleep on it. Reach out to them for a product placement and use the power of word-of-mouth marketing.You can find influencers in each and every niche or even look beyond your niche. With the right creative spin, even seemingly mismatched pairings can yield successful results these days, as long as there’s still an overlap in the target audience.

Grace Wells, a content creator sharing videography tricks, is a great example. She may not be the first person to come to mind for a promotion of a skincare product or an energy drink, but in her case, such collaborations are very successful. Her viral “making epic commercials for random objects” series on TikTok landed her many brand deals and is now successfully helping brands go viral.

@gracewellsphoto if you’d told me a year ago that I’d be throwing fruit around my house for a living... 😅🎥 #videographer#videomagic#celsiuspartner @CelsiusOfficial ♬ original sound - Grace Wells

Tips on creating an effective influencer marketing campaign

Launching a campaign on social media and trying to make it go viral yourself is where working with influencers across your niche comes especially handy. It helps your campaign gain that initial momentum it needs for it to start trending, generating views and eventually also additional reactive organic content, searches and clicks to your website.

If influencer marketing isn’t something your brand has dabbled in already, here’s some tips on what to keep in mind when creating a campaign that converts before or after you’ve identified a social media trend you want to get involved in.

Define campaign goals and target audience

Before even coming up with a creative angle, always start by defining your campaign goals and target audience. One of the biggest mistakes new as well as established brands make is choosing influencers solely based on popularity or how many followers they have. Your target audience has to overlap and the collaboration has to come across authentic to truly resonate with the audience.

Having your campaign goals clearly defined from the get-go will also help you identify the right influencers to work with and choose the right social media platform(s) for your campaign. Are you looking for brand exposure or do you want to boost sales for a particular product? Even within a single platform like Instagram, there are lots of nuances between what kind of content works on the feed verses on stories. If you wish a high volume of clicks to your site immediately, having an influencer promote your product on their Instagram feed might not be the best option. You’ll need a way for their audience to access a clickable link without having to take additional steps, so a feature on the influencer’s Instagram Story would be a better option. When you find the influencers who can help you achieve your goal, don’t forget to then share your campaign goals with them too, so they can optimize the content for your desired results.

Avoid one-off collaborations

Jumping on trends can mislead brands into chasing one-off features, but to allow the influencer’s audience to truly develop a relationship with your product, collaborations that stretch through a longer period of time and include regular, organic product incorporations are much more effective.

Work with a range of influencers

Since influencers often don’t share a fan base despite operating in the same niche, working with several different influencers rather than designing your entire campaign around only one is highly recommended. This will give you an opportunity to tap into different audiences and increase your campaign’s reach. And don’t forget about smaller-sized creators as well! Their engagement rates tend to be higher, a connection and trust they share with their audience deeper, plus they’re more affordable.

Give influencers creative control over their content

Let influencers promote your product in their own unique way, suitable for their personal brand and audience. Authenticity should always be at the forefront. Designing a campaign that will force them to follow a script is a no-go. Instead, create an open-ended brief. Give them rough guidelines on what you want to communicate with your campaign and let them come back to you with their own ideas. The collaboration has to come across organic, not sound like a blatant ad.

Start a social media challenge

Starting a challenge is one of the most popular and effective tactics of influencer marketing. Unlike with typical ambassador campaigns, the point of starting a trend is that anyone can jump in and create their own spin on it, stretching the reach of your campaign and building a sense of exclusivity and community within those participating.

To promote their Cinco de Mayo deal, Chipotle started a #LidFlip TikTok challenge in 2020, asking participants to record themselves attempting to flip the lid onto the bowl without using their hands. It was a fun way to boost awareness of their deal and engage with their community. The videos using the hashtag ended up generating over 700 thousand views.

If you're creating a hashtag to go along with the challenge, just make sure it hasn’t already been used and do a thorough research to avoid any negative connotations that may arise and end up portraying your brand in a negative way.

Be prepared for the influx of searches and purchases

It is important to have everything ready on your brand’s end before the collaboration goes live. From optimized landing pages (to catch the incoming direct and search traffic), to making sure you have enough product stock for a campaign of your size. Though adding a FOMO element can sometimes play to your advantage — as was the case with Little Moons.

Support influencer marketing campaigns with paid advertising

Running UGC ads on your brand’s accounts alongside an active influencer campaign, whether that’s on Facebook, Instagram or TikTok, will add further momentum and exposure to your brand.

For more on how to work with influencers to support your SEO, watch Andy Crestodina's Whiteboard Friday:

Conclusion

Utilizing social media trends and influencer marketing to boost brand awareness, search results and sales is an extremely viable marketing hack brands of all sizes can take advantage of right now. TikTok has completely changed the game — in a good way. As of right now, it’s still a platform where not only paid, but organic content can reach millions, so it’s fairly easy even for new and small brands to join the game of co-creating viral trends and/or producing optimized supporting content to capitalize on searches. And with the rise of social commerce, it will become an even more important tactic.

Case Study: The ROI of Re-optimizing Content (Plus Bonus How-To)

We’ve been re-optimizing Brafton's blog content consistently since 2018. It’s been one of the main SEO strategies we’ve used to increase our blog traffic from 20,000 to 200,000 monthly visitors over the last three years, and we’re continuing with this strategy into 2022 (and probably beyond).

For the purpose of this study, we wanted to answer the question, “How well does content re-optimization work, and is it worth your time?”

But first, let’s back up and get some definitions out of the way.

What is content re-optimization?

In its simplest form, content re-optimization is the process of updating existing content with new material in order to add value to the original piece.

There are many ways content can be updated. Here are some methods we’ve used over the years:

• Adding new visual content, like an infographic, to an existing blog to appeal to readers who are more visual learners.

• Adding a video tutorial to help elaborate on a topic we’re covering.

• Replacing outdated examples featured in a roundup blog post with better, more recent examples.

• Adding missing topic gaps that our competitors are covering but we aren’t.

• Completely re-writing the content in favor of a better target topic (a very drastic measure).

In all instances, we’re adjusting existing content in some way to make it better for our audience. Ideally, that content will also perform better in organic search.

Why re-optimize content?

If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably invested significant time and energy into creating awesome content for your brand — and just like me, you know exactly how much effort goes into every single word published. There’s the planning, the research, the writing, the rounds of review, the copyediting, the proofing, the curation of helpful visuals, and finally clicking “Publish” once you’re done. All of this takes time and participation from multiple stakeholders.

It’s exhausting. And expensive.

It’s in your best interests to protect the time and monetary investment you’ve put into every single piece of content you create for your brand, and make sure it keeps performing at or beyond your expectations. This is why we re-optimize our content at Brafton. Because we’ve found it’s an incredibly cost-effective way to keep our content competitive and generate the business results we expect from our website.

Why this study was conducted

We know that our content re-optimization efforts can take credit for a portion of the organic traffic results we’ve seen on our website. For this analysis, my goal was to calculate the exact impact content re-optimization was making on our blog performance.

Let’s get into it!

Methodology

I focused strictly on written content updates that had been made to our blog posts between January 1, 2021, and October 31, 2021. Using this timeframe, I was able to use all 16 months’ worth of Search Console data for the metrics analyzed:

• 41 articles were analyzed.

• The articles had been republished with written content updates — their publish dates were updated at the time of the re-optimization.

• Each article had a unique keyword target.

• Primary tools used:

  • Search Console. I compared the three-month timeframe before the republish date with the three-month timeframe after the republish date.

  • Ahrefs. I took a snapshot of the data from three months pre- and post-re-optimization.

• Each article selected had been indexed for a minimum of three months before being re-optimized, with a subsequent three months of data to evaluate.

• Metrics evaluated (and which we were looking to improve with re-optimization):

  • Clicks to the URL from the target keyword.

  • All organic clicks to the URL.

  • Total number of page-one keywords each URL ranks for.

  • Target keyword position for the URL.

  • Total organic impressions for the URL.

Results: More clicks to URL from target keyword

Our primary goal with re-optimization is to increase the number of clicks each page is generating. The first thing I wanted to look at was how well this works for each blog’s specific target keyword (with the understanding that these aren’t the only keywords these blogs will get clicks from — more on that in a bit).

Using Search Console, I looked at how total clicks have changed/improved after each individual blog’s republication:

Clicks to the blog post for the target keyword “creative content.”

According to the data pulled from Search Console, 41.46% of the articles had more clicks to their URL for their target term after being re-optimized. In aggregate, all articles saw a 5.89% increase in clicks to their target keyword after we re-optimized them.

Results: More total clicks to re-optimized content

re-optimized blog posts also rank for more keywords related to the target keyword — and I wanted to track that change not only for our target keywords, but for all the keywords these blogs rank for. This is because, when we do written content updates, we are often filling in topic gaps to make the piece more comprehensive. With more mentions of these related topics, there’s more chance to rank for related keywords as well. This then drives up the total number of clicks to the page.

Here’s an example of what that looks like:

Increase in total clicks to URL post-re-optimization for a blog about structuring a marketing team.

Data from Search Console showed that 85.37% of the articles had more total clicks from all keywords in the time period after they were re-optimized. In aggregate, the re-optimized articles received 29% more clicks after they were updated and republished:

Bonus: The data shows a 0.96 correlation between re-optimization and total clicks generated — a near-perfect correlation.

I could end my study right here and walk away perfectly happy with our decision to continue with our re-optimization strategy in 2022. But there’s more to the story…

Results: More page-one keyword rankings from variant keywords

As an added benefit, many of the blogs we re-optimized started ranking on page one for other terms related to our target keyword:

Total Page 1 keyword rankings for the keyword “creative content.”

Our data shows 43.9% of the re-optimized articles had more page-one keyword rankings after their republish date. In aggregate, all articles ranked for 36.45% more page-one keywords after they were re-optimized.

Results: Target keyword position changes

For this part of the analysis, I looked at how the blog’s ranking position changed for its target keyword — comparing the timeframes from before and after the article’s republication.

With Search Console, I can see a three-month average position for our target keyword and can compare those numbers pre- and post-re-optimization.

Example of improved rank positioning in Search Console, for the keyword “paid search marketing.”

73.17% of the articles had a better average ranking position for their target keyword after being re-optimized, according to Search Console data:

56.1% of the re-optimized articles had improved target keyword positioning after the re-optimization, according to Ahrefs:

Results: More organic search impressions

As far as results go, I’m more interested in the clicks coming to the blog, but it’s important to look at changes in click behavior in the context of search impressions. After all, a searcher can’t click on your result if you’re not even appearing in the SERP.

By looking at the change to impressions from before and after the re-optimization, we can get a better understanding of the impact of ranking for more of these related keywords.

Example of how total impressions have changed after a blog post about sales enablement content was re-optimized.

This is also where we saw the most impressive return for our efforts — every single article we re-optimized had more organic search impressions after it was republished.

100% of the re-optimized articles generated more impressions after they were updated and republished, according to Search Console data. In aggregate, the re-optimized articles generated 62.35% more impressions after their updates.

Insights: Why re-optimization matters for SEO

The main reason for re-optimizing content is to drive more qualified traffic to your website. By re-optimizing existing content, you’re enhancing a blog post or a landing page that’s already working for your audience.

In addition:

1. Google rewards fresher content

Each time we re-optimize a blog post, we update its publish date to reflect the time the changes were made. We also manually submit the article to Google for reindexing so there’s a higher chance Google will notice our content updates as quickly as possible.

Now, I’m not saying you can achieve the same results simply by changing the publish date to an article and not changing anything else, but a more recent publish date is likely a signal to Google — and searchers — that your content is fresh and probably contains useful and relevant information. They may be more likely to click on your content.

From a behavioral standpoint, when I perform a Google search, out of habit, I change the search filter to only see results from the last year (and sometimes I’ll only look at content if it’s published within the last month). I’m picky, and I can imagine other searchers are, too. Have you ever glanced at the publish date of the top results and chosen to click on the newest one?

Updating the content’s publication date at the same time we re-optimize it is our attempt to better serve the behavior of searchers and encourage more clicks.

2. Topic comprehensiveness (not word count) leads to more clicks

When we set out to re-optimize a blog post or a landing page, we’re not just looking to beef up its word count and call it a day. A longer word count doesn’t always equal more clicks.

Instead, we strive for topic comprehensiveness, and often that means we are building on what’s already there. But not always. Sometimes we’ll remove sections that are no longer relevant.

What’s important is that we’re comparing our content to competitors in the space, and finding ways to improve on what we’re missing. And we’re doing all this to serve our audience with the best content we possibly can. As a result, our content covers more ground and gets more impressions and then, ultimately, more clicks.

Conclusion

By honing your message around a target topic and adding value to your content with a re-optimization, you’re giving Google more reasons to serve your content to its users.

In a perfect re-optimization scenario, Google notices you’ve provided more useful information, your content will rank higher in search for your target keyword, and you’ll get more clicks to your page. And best of all, those clicks will be visitors that are highly interested in what your business has to offer!

Adding more information to an existing blog post or landing page makes your content more comprehensive. You cover a broader range of related topics, and therefore there are more chances to rank for those variant keywords. This is what helps extend your reach beyond just that initial set of target keywords.

And the more chances you have to rank for these variant topics, the better. The more often you show up in search, the more users will start recognizing your brand. They might even start searching for your brand name directly.

Bonus: Re-optimize your own content and analyze your results

Checklist: How to determine which content to re-optimize

If you’re sold on content re-optimization — great! — but you’re also probably wondering where to start.

I’ve created a checklist that I use for the Brafton blog to help me decide whether or not I should spend time (and money) to re-optimize a piece:

1. Look for pages that have had a dip in ranking position or estimated traffic. This will be the first flag that you might want to re-optimize your content.

2. Check the current content’s score in a TF-IDF tool (I recommend MarketMuse or Clearscope) to see if there is room for improvement. If your content score is lower than the tool’s recommended score, it’s a hint that you probably have some missing topics to cover.

3. Check ranking changes/SERP-rank volatility to see what’s changed on page one. Take a look at the top 10 ranking positions and how those results have changed over time. A SERP with a lot of volatility or new competitors coming onto the first page is a good sign that you’ll need to improve your content to stay competitive.

4. Look at the current results on page one and determine if you can still realistically rank there. If you’ve been outranked for a SERP and you can’t reasonably get back onto the first page, your efforts might be better spent elsewhere.

5. Estimate the traffic you might gain from your page-one ranking. Don’t forget that clicks decline the farther down the page you rank.

6. Ask yourself: Is this good enough? If yes, then proceed to the re-optimization!

Walkthrough: How to tie content re-optimization to ROI

Now for the fun part — diving into your own data to find out if your updates made a meaningful impact on your business goals.

Speaking of goals, you’ll want to make sure to determine the goals that make the most sense to your business and what you’re trying to accomplish with organic search before starting on this re-optimization strategy.

Some examples:

• More clicks to the blog, year-over-year.

• More website conversions from organic traffic.

• Better brand awareness in search.

If you’re just starting to re-optimize your content, I recommend bookmarking this article and coming back to this section later. While it’s true that performing updates to your content may have an immediate impact on your content — a jump in keyword position, perhaps — you’ll want a decent chunk of data to perform your analysis. And the only way you’ll get that is with time.

Step 1: Choose content to analyze

Once you’ve got a few months of data to work with, you can start your analysis. Say you re-optimized a few blog posts three months ago (and these blogs have been live on your website for at least six months). Add those URLs to a spreadsheet. Here’s the template I used for my study if you want to start there.

Step 2: Note publication date, and determine timeframes for analysis

Log your republish date for each article in the sheet. Then determine the timeframe for three months before your republish date and three months after (not including the actual republish date). 

Tip: You can search this in Google Search for an accurate answer, no calculator or calendar required:

Step 3: Pull your data

For each metric you’re looking to measure, pull the data from the two separate timeframes:

Step 4: Analyze your data

It might look like steps 1-3 are quick and easy, but they’re surprisingly time-consuming and tedious. Once you’re done you’ll have a lovely block of data to analyze. Calculate the changes for each article individually, and in aggregate, to see how your optimization efforts paid off.