12 Actionable Steps to Drive Newsletter Growth with SEO Content

At Brafton, we’ve found our newsletter subscribers to be our best, most engaged audience. These are our people. They live and breathe content marketing, just as we do. Some even partner with us to create and execute awesome content marketing campaigns for their brands.

Over the last two and a half years, we’ve placed a significant emphasis on growing this subscriber base, and we’ve achieved a 170% increase (and counting!) across 84 countries.

Newsletter subscriptions coming from organic search traffic.

If you’re reading this article, you’re probably looking for ways to grow your newsletter list, too.

SEO blog content has been the foundation for our growth. How does it work? Simple: We create blog content that ranks highly in search, and we make it super easy (and tempting) for readers to subscribe to our newsletter once they visit our blog.

While the concept seems straightforward, the effort is anything but.

Read on to learn how to get users from your website onto your newsletter list, and why email marketing and SEO work so well together.

Part 1: Attracting potential subscribers to your site

The first part of this newsletter growth process is actually getting your potential newsletter subscribers to your website. Here are 5 solid strategies for doing just that:

1. Keyword research

Our blog has been around since April 2010. We’ve published over 7,500 articles in those 12 years.

That’s a lot of content.

But it wasn’t until we rolled out a data-led keyword research and content creation strategy in 2018 that we started seeing significant traction with organic traffic growth:

I won’t go into detail about the strategy we used to get there (you can read about it here), but I will wax poetic about the importance of keyword research and topic selection if you’re looking to grow your blog — and your newsletter subscriber list as a result.

Keyword selection is crucial.

If you don’t choose the right topics to write about, you won’t rank highly in search results. And if you’re not showing up in search, no one is going to come to your website to read your content — or to subscribe to read more from your brand.

2. Great content writing

Great content is your foot in the door with your next potential newsletter subscriber. In an ideal scenario, they come to your site, they read your content, they’re incredibly impressed, and they happily enter their email address to get more of the same from your brand directly into their inbox.

Writing great content not only gets you to appear more often in search and improves your organic visibility, but it’s also the best way to convince a reader to sign up for your newsletter.

What do I mean when I say “write great content?” Well, there’s a creative and scientific element to this part of the process, and we do it because it works:

Using the briefing process we developed, and an extremely talented pool of in-house writers, we’re able to create content that comprehensively covers all potential subtopics and answers all potential questions a searcher might have about the target keyword. In effect, we attempt to use data to create the most comprehensive content on the web for each topic we choose to cover.

This keeps us competitive and ranking well in SERPs, which means more chances for a searcher to land on our blog and subscribe to our newsletter.

3. Content reoptimization

Sometimes the content we create gets old. It becomes outdated and stale, or new competitors create better content than ours and start outranking us.

Reoptimizing a piece of content helps us attract more potential newsletter subscribers to our blog in two main ways:

1. By reoptimizing the blog content, we improve our ranking for our target keyword and, as a result, we start getting more clicks to the page for the targeted audience searching that term.

2. By improving the comprehensiveness of the piece by covering more topics, we rank for a larger number of variant keywords and then drive more clicks to the page.

Here’s the data from a blog post that was underperforming before we did a reoptimization on March 30, 2021, and what newsletter subscription goal completions looked like after the reoptimization, year-over-year:

An increase in newsletter subscription goal completions YoY from a content reoptimization.

Even though the increase in total subscriptions here is relatively small, this was just for a single blog post. Imagine doing this for 50 blog posts a year. At scale, it can make an impact.

4. Audio/visuals in blog content

Some people are just more visual learners than others. They prefer eye-catching infographics and video tutorials over hundreds of words of straight-up written content. And I’m not just saying this without any actual data to back up my claim.

We’ve consistently found that blogs with infographics drive more clicks to our site (compared to blogs that do not feature infographics).

Even though our blogs with infographics make up just ~3% of all of our blog pages, they generate 25% of all the clicks to our blog pages and 21% of all the impressions generated by blogs in search:

They also have a higher CTR (2.0% vs 1.6%) and a better average keyword position (22.4 vs 30.2):

Finally, they tend to generate more backlinks organically:

Blog post: The Anatomy of a Marketing Ideation Workshop (Infographic)

How does this impact our newsletter list growth?

These pages drive more clicks, rank better in search and get linked back to more often. All of these results drive a bigger audience of potential newsletter subscribers to our website to read our content and click “Subscribe.”

5. Pillar pages

When it comes to attracting an organic search audience that is highly likely to subscribe to our newsletter, one of the top strategies we’ve rolled out in the last year is our pillar page strategy.

Over the course of 2021, we published five of these long-form guides. They’re a cross between a blog post and a landing page — and they are search-targeted.

Example of a pillar page targeting the keyword “what is content creation.”

Compared to our blog content, users coming to the site to view these pages tend to bounce less, view more pages per session and subscribe to our newsletter at a higher rate (1.11% vs 0.38%):

I’m not recommending you completely ditch your blog strategy for pillar pages, but they are a great supplemental way to generate more newsletter subscribers per page.

Part 2: Improving on-site newsletter conversion (CRO)

We’ve discussed plenty of ways to improve the content on the page to attract more visitors from organic search. But what happens once they get there? How do we actually get visitors to convert from first-time readers to weekly email subscribers?

Enter: Conversion rate optimization!

CRO is all about finding ways to get site visitors from reading your blog in their browser to receiving your content directly in their inbox. (Which is the ultimate goal, of course). Read on for four on-page elements that’ll likely improve your newsletter subscription conversion rates:

6. Pop-up form

There’s a reason why nearly every site you visit on the web has an annoying pop-up form asking you to subscribe to their newsletter. It’s because it works.

There was a time when our blog didn’t have a pop-up form (back around 2017). We decided to run a test and added the first iteration of our pop-up form, which looked like this:

Here are the results we saw:

• Daily subscriptions without pop-up: 1.59

• Daily subscriptions with pop-up: 8.32

• Change: +532%

We happily kept that pop-up form in its place and never looked back.

In the years since we originally implemented the pop-up, we’ve modified how it behaves so that it’s more likely to capture a form fill. We:

• Redesigned the pop-up to be slightly more clear in terms of what the user is signing up for.

• Adjusted the timing on the pop-up. It used to come up too soon for the reader to make any real judgment on whether they might want to subscribe. We decided to go with 30 seconds, as this time is enough for the user to get the flavor of the post, but still retains most of the users (as we found they start to drop off after 45 seconds).

These may seem like small modifications, but cumulatively they improve the chances that we’re serving the pop-up form at the exact right time for a reader.

We’ve also learned over the years that the more ways website visitors have to subscribe to our newsletter, the better. Here are 3 more elements that we’ve included on-page to drive up our subscription rate:

7. Sticky sidebar

This is one of my favorite CTA elements and I think it really personalizes the experience for the reader on a blog. The sticky sidebar follows you down the page as you read, and the “Subscribe” CTA is always present on the screen. It’s not overly distracting, but it does make it super easy for the reader to subscribe at any time (even if they’ve closed the pop-up form).

There was a period when we removed this sidebar from our blog pages and our newsletter conversion rate plummeted. It ticked back up once we added the sidebar back to the page. Lesson learned!

8. Inline subscribe CTA

We started embedding a CTA directly into each blog post. Its design is meant to not be too interruptive, but it’s present as yet another way for users to subscribe.

This inline CTA is included once per blog post, around 50% down the page. We intentionally do not place it too close to the end of the article. This improves our chances of catching someone once they’ve read a significant portion of the content but won’t be missed if they don’t finish reading the entire piece.

9. Dedicated newsletter sign-up page + nav link

As a final on-site CRO element, we launched a dedicated landing page to promote our newsletter:

Like any good conversion landing page, it succinctly (and persuasively, we hope) explains what subscribers get by entering their contact information.

And if they’re not yet convinced, we’ve included a sampling of some of our best blog content for them to peruse before they make the final decision to subscribe:

Every single element on this page is geared toward prompting users to fill out the form.

We use this landing page as a standalone promotional tool both on site and through external channels (paid and organic alike).

• We advertise the page on Google and social platforms.

• We share a link to this page in our email marketing — so friends of subscribers can easily subscribe.

• We even give it a prominent spot in our main navigation:

You may think it’s not worth it to add a “Subscribe” button to your main navigation — it’s pretty important real estate, after all — but it will get you more newsletter subscribers organically as users land on and navigate through your site.

And people do actually navigate to this page and subscribe this way. Since launching the page in January 2021, it accounted for 17.64% of our total on-site newsletter goal completions (in 2021) with a whopping 24.12% conversion rate.

All the on-site elements I’ve covered may seem like tiny, insignificant changes but they 1) took significant research, analysis and effort to implement, and 2) they worked.

Since adding these elements in 2021, we have doubled our newsletter subscription conversion rate:

Small changes can yield big results — and every new newsletter subscriber makes a difference.

Part 3: Enhancing subscriber engagement

Now that we’ve looked at ways to grow your subscriber list and improve your subscription conversion rate, I want to switch gears and talk about what happens once someone does subscribe — and how content is invaluable to and inseparable from newsletter marketing.

Content is what fuels newsletter marketing. You cannot have one without the other. Sure, you can technically run a newsletter that solely shares external sources, but without some sort of original content to include in the email, you’re not going to retain subscribers for very long.

As I mentioned earlier, our newsletter audience is our best, most engaged audience. We hear time and time again about how much they like the content we produce. We like to reward them with even more great content.

Here are the primary ways we’ve kept our newsletter audience engaged with content:

10. Downloadable content & webinars

By offering different types of content, like downloadable assets (eBooks and white papers) and live-streamed webinars and workshops, we’re giving our audience more ways to connect with our brand.

They can dive deeper into a specific topic in their own time with a white paper, or get their real-time questions answered with a webinar or workshop.

From a marketing results perspective, we can see which contacts are most engaged with the content we’re offering by tracking email click-through rate, downloads and webinar sign-ups. It also gives us important insights into which topics and formats work best to improve user experience, and we can double down on those content types in the future.

11. Surveys

One of my favorite ways we’ve connected with our newsletter audience over the years is through surveys.

We ask them questions like:

• What types of content marketing resources do you want more of?

• What’s your favorite area of content marketing to learn about?

• How do you rate your skill level with content marketing (and other areas of marketing)?

• What are your favorite hobbies outside of content marketing?

The feedback they provide is invaluable to our marketing efforts. It’s one of the best ways to know exactly what our newsletter audience wants from us.

If you’re ever unsure about what your audience thinks of your newsletter, or where you might be lacking, a survey is arguably your best resource for those answers. And it doesn’t need to be a complex multi-question survey either — it can be a simple “How are we doing?” button you include in each send.

12. New layout for better user experience

We’ve also changed the look and feel of our weekly newsletter over the years. And we continually work to improve the user experience with these design updates.

Our newest iteration from 2021 contains a variety of sections based on what we’ve found to be most useful for our audience:

• A roundup of recently published blog posts.

• A rotating featured content section where we can promote our latest infographic, job opening or employee spotlight.

• A visual CTA to promote an eBook download or a webinar registration.

My favorite sections of our newsletter are:

Recommended reading

Here, we share industry-related content from other brands in the space. Even if we didn’t create the content ourselves, we want to provide these additional resources to help our audience stay ahead of the content marketing curve. The hope is that they get everything they need (content marketing-wise) from our newsletter, and keep opening up our emails week after week.

Subscribe CTA: “Did you get this email from a friend?”

This section links out to our newsletter subscribe landing page. It’s here to help folks subscribe to our newsletter if it’s been forwarded to them from a friend. People forward emails all the time, and this way, we’ve built in an easy way to encourage new readers to subscribe to our content. It’s a CTA that doesn’t change week to week, so it doesn’t take any effort to maintain, but it’s there to organically generate more newsletter subscribers.

And it does: We’ve found that 10% of people who subscribe via email do so on this page coming from the newsletter.

When determining the best newsletter content and layout for your brand, it’s always most important to do what works best for your audience. You may not achieve the perfect newsletter format right out of the gate, but over time, and by gathering feedback (via surveys or organically through email replies), you’ll get closer to giving them exactly what they want.

When I talk about enhancing newsletter engagement, our goal has always been the same: Be the best possible content marketing resource for our audience. As a result, we’ll get their attention and their loyalty, and possibly even their referral to a friend or colleague — and that helps us continue to grow our subscriber base.

Conclusion

Newsletter marketing has been at the core of Brafton’s marketing strategy for many years now, and we’ve found time and time again that there is plenty of reason to reinvest our efforts into this growth.

I hope the methods I’ve shared have inspired you with plenty of ways to grow your own newsletter list.

Because once you’ve got those readers subscribed, you’ll be unstoppable.

Daily SEO Fix: Competitive Keyword Research

Competitive keyword research is a crucial part of any SEO strategy. It’s vitally important to understand what your competitors are ranking for, so that you can identify the most relevant keywords in your niche or industry.

But before you begin your quest to find new keywords, you need to know exactly who your competitors really are. You might have some idea of who your closest competitors are, but on closer inspection, they may be different. Finding out which sites appear most often alongside your own can give you a fantastic insight into who you're competing against for valuable keywords.

Moz Pro’s competitive research tools allow you to find out exactly who your competitors are, what keywords they rank for and what their top performing content is. You can then use this information to create high-quality content that can compete against what your competitors have published, and get you more traffic to your site.

In the following videos, some of our best and brightest Mozzers will show you what you need to do to get the most out of these tools.

If you’d like to get more details on how you can use Moz Pro’s Competitive Research tools to your advantage, you can book a 1:1 walkthrough with a member of our onboarding team below.

Book a walkthrough

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Identify your true competitors using True Competitor

Our True Competitor feature gives you the ability to pinpoint your closest SEO competitors. By inputting your domain or subdomain, you can see who your top 25 competitors in the search results are.

In this video, Hannah walks you through the steps you need to take to find your true competitors.

Find a competitors top ranking keywords using Explore by Site

Explore by Site lets you check the ranking keywords for multiple competitor domains, subdomains or exact pages.

Not only can you see what each competitor ranks for individually, but also any shared ranking keywords between the sites.

Our onboarding specialist, Varad, shows you what you need to do to get this data.

Find Important Keywords to Improve On with Keyword Gap

Some of the keywords your competitors rank for may be more relevant than others. To find out which ones are the best to target, head to the Keywords to Improve section of Keyword Gap.

In this video, Rachel from the onboarding team shows you how to identify the best keyword opportunities.

Identify Competitors Top Content, URLs and Keywords using Keyword Gap

While creating unique content is something you want to strive for, it’s no harm to look at what your competitors are doing and to use that as inspiration.

In this Daily Fix, Christy highlights how you can pick out a competitor’s top keywords and content in Moz Pro.

How to Learn SEO

Whether you're just getting started, figuring out how to fill in knowledge gaps, training your team on SEO fundamentals, this is the Whiteboard Friday episode for you! With over a decade of experience in the SEO space, Moz’s head of content, Jo Cameron, dives into her own learning journey and talks through everything from understanding your resources and your budget to strategies to keep you on track in real-world projects.

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

Video Transcription

Hello, everyone, and welcome to this edition of Whiteboard Friday. I wanted to talk you through a topic that is close to my heart, which is how to learn SEO. I'm Jo. I'm the head of content here at Moz, and I feel like I've been learning SEO for the better part of a decade. So I feel like I can speak from experience, although I do know that everyone's methods for learning new information, whatever it is, is different.

To get started, I'll take you through how you might want to begin to learn SEO, whether you're getting started from scratch or you're already working in SEO and you're figuring out how to fill in knowledge gaps. Or maybe you have a team and you would like to train them up and get them ramped up on some fundamental SEO topics.

So I'll dive into my own learning journey when I was learning SEO and the fundamentals of SEO. I'll also talk through understanding your resources and your budget so that you can achieve your goals in the time and budget available to you. I'll also talk about a few additional strategies to keep you on track, including topic immersion and applying your learning knowledge to real-world projects.

Why learn SEO?

But first of all, I'll start with why. Why would you want to learn SEO and start to fill in the knowledge gaps with core, fundamental SEO topics? Learning SEO can help you to build your business. It can help you get more traffic to your website, and it can also help you advance your career. 

I began to learn SEO because I wanted to sell more jewelry that I was making on my own website. So my motivation was to get more traffic, and my focus was on what I could do to my website authority, understanding the fundamental knowledge of how search engines function so that I could create content that was exciting to my audience and was digestible for search engine bots at the same time. 

So ultimately driving more traffic to increase my revenue was what started me on this journey. You may as well want to grow your knowledge in order to advance your career, or you may already be working in SEO and want to fill in some of those gaps so that you can achieve your professional business goals.

So whether you are currently running your own business, whether you're working in-house, client-side, or building up a strong SEO team, developing tangible, fundamental, core SEO knowledge is a great way to help you achieve your goals.

Outline your learning journey

The thing I would recommend starting out with, whether it's for you or your team, is to outline your learning journey. 

The first thing to understand is what exactly you want to learn and within what time frame. So this can help you to set your own expectations and keep you on track.

Core SEO concepts

When I was discovering how to sell more jewelry, my learning pathway covered the following fundamental topics. I started out with the fundamental, core SEO concepts. So as part of this experience, I was searching a lot, I was reading a lot online, and I was just trying to digest the lingo. I wanted to understand how Google algorithms worked and what was changing with each update so that I could get a better understanding of how search engines function, how their bots function, and then building up that fundamental knowledge in that area.

Keyword research

That then led me into keyword research, exploring what exactly it involves and then trying to understand how I get in front of my audience, how do I create content that they're searching for, and how do I meet that need. I also wanted to do my keyword research in an organized way, so understanding the strategy behind that, building out a comprehensive strategy that made sense with the time that I had available. Ultimately, what I was trying to get here is to understand and get better insights into the different language that my audience was using, so what people were searching for in my industry.

Page optimization

This then led me into page optimization. So this is all about the different page elements, and I was trying to understand which of these elements I could actually affect in the CMS that I was using at the time. I was also trying to understand how to create the structure in my content so that it was optimized not just for the bots but also for my human visitors so I could give them that great experience when they landed on the page.

Link building

Then I also started to explore link building because building my website authority was really important to me and I didn't understand how to do that. This was quite a big learning curve. I did end up getting a little bit confused around the concept of building and how that worked, how you tread that line between creating content that people want to link to, creating good quality content, 10x content that's impactful and interesting, and then the difference between that and the different link building strategies, and generally how do you build your website authority and how do I do that so that I could achieve my goals and drive more traffic and generate more revenue. 

Digital PR

Then all tied in with that also is understanding that whole spectrum of PR and how it intersects with link building, also more core technical link building strategies and outreach along with broken link building and how you go about putting that into process in a way that makes sense with the time that I had available.

Then I also wanted to explore how to show the impact of my results, so understanding reporting, what to report on, how to track results. This is important whether it's for yourself or for your client and how do you know what you have achieved and whether it has achieved the desired effect.

SEO certification

So undoubtedly there is a vast amount of information available online that covers these topics. But if you do find that overwhelming and you would like a more clearly defined learning pathway outlined for you, there is the Moz Academy SEO Essentials Certification. We cover all of these fundamental topics, and they're all neatly wrapped up in a six-hour course. So if you're wanting to display your knowledge, you can also link up your certification badge with your LinkedIn profile to demonstrate your skills there. The course covers all of those topics. It starts with understanding how search engines determine a site's value, how you identify good keywords and map them to semantic topic groups, along with how SEO fits in with the sales funnel, how to prioritize SEO tasks which is really important when you're time-strapped, how to determine your most valuable content which is great for your website or if you're working with a client who currently already has a bit of content there, and then understanding how to evaluate links, and then, of course, that all-important reporting in order to measure the impact of SEO.

I would have been super excited to take this course when I was learning, and I know it would have saved me a ton of time so that I could have just ingested all of that fundamental information, covered the essential topics when I was getting started.

Understand your resources and budget

So now that you have outlined the topics that you're wanting to cover, I would then recommend getting started understanding your resources that you have available to you. The first one is obviously time. How much time do you have in a day, in a week, and when do you want to get this learning experience completed, whether it's a particular topic or more broadly speaking?

The second one is, of course, budget. So do you have any professional development budget available to you? Is this something that you can potentially build into your current role? Maybe there's a stretch assignment in there. Are there people available to you in your current network that can potentially assist you in understanding what you need to learn and then help you to figure out how you're going to learn it?

Resources

Now that you have outlined the topics you want to cover, let's explore the resources you have available to you. The first big one is obviously time, and the second one is your available budget. So how much time do you have available in a day, in a week, and then also how long do you have available for you to get this learning experience completed? Then also, can you build this into your current role, maybe as a stretch assignment, and how do you have that conversation with your peers? Then exploring whether you do have a professional development budget available to you.

Now the good news is that there is a learning pathway for everyone whatever your budget. If you're still exploring what exactly it is that you want to learn, then the best place to get started is the Beginner's Guide to SEO, which is available on the Moz Learn Center. This is a fantastic piece of content that has helped people learn SEO for nearly a decade now. It was refreshed quite recently by the wonderful Britney Muller. You can take yourself through and teach yourself the fundamentals at your own pace. Honestly, so many professional SEOs tell us that they learned SEO from Moz, and this is often the place they start out. So you'll be treading a path many have walked before you.

But, of course, if you do have a bit of budget and your timeline is kind of tight and you want to put some guardrails around it and you want to keep yourself on track or you want to keep your team accountable, then you would want to look at the courses available on the Moz Academy. The SEO Essentials Certification, which I have mentioned previously, is key for building up fundamental knowledge. We do also have the Technical SEO Certification. So if you want to just launch your knowledge into this next stratosphere, this is becoming more critical as topics like Core Web Vitals bring the world of SEOs and developers closer together. Then, of course, if you're wanting to better understand your industry's competitive landscape, we also have the Competitive Analysis Certification.

With each of these certifications, we have gathered together all of the core fundamentals of each of these topics, and we've supercharged them with unique learning methodologies and you'll be able to engage with on-demand educational videos, quizzes, and task lessons so you can also keep track of your progress as you learn. So if you're finding it a bit of a hard time keeping on track or if you want to speed up your learning or the learning of your team that you're training, then this is a really great place to start.

Long-term learning strategies

So once you've figured out what it is you want to learn, what resources you have available to you, your timeline, I think it's interesting to better understand and explore some long-term learning strategies. So something that we have found quite important, when we build out the SEO certification, is the concept of learning, digesting that theoretical information, confirming it with a quiz, and then being able to apply it, so whether that is within a toolset or in addition to with your own project, whether that's your own website or a client's website.

Apply your knowledge

So when I was starting to learn SEO fundamentals, with each of those topics that I learned about above, I explored how I could apply this to the work that I was doing. I wanted to keep on track with my primary goal, which was to drive more traffic and generate more revenue. By doing this, it helped me understand how much effort it took, and over time I got a better understanding of the impact and roughly how long it took to see results.

So this is a methodology that we apply as part of the Moz Academy certifications. With this combination of theoretical information, educational videos, being able to confirm it with the quizzes and task lessons, you'll be able to flex your recently acquired knowledge.

Now, obviously, the pro tip here that I don't want to skip over is that no matter which pathway you take, you're really looking to apply this to your real-life projects. Whether it's your own website that you have set up on WordPress or you're working with a client, applying this knowledge is key to better understanding how it works, the time it takes to implement, and also better understand the potential outcomes for your site.

Of course, if you are new to Moz, I would also recommend starting the Moz Pro free trial so that you can get stuck into building keyword lists, track your site's performance or your client's site's performance, better understand your site's authority as well as your competitors, and much, much more.

Top up regularly

The other thing that's interesting to understand is that you may be involved in learning something intensely as part of a certification or engaging in free content, and as you go, you'll find that you'll just be topping up on that information. You may not be as focused on a learning pathway. You'll just be topping up. This is something that people will be doing long term. Even if you are working professionally in SEO, you may find that there are changes in the industry or there's a gap in your knowledge that you want to fill. This is a different experience for everyone. So there's nothing new here that I can offer you that hasn't been said before, but spending a little bit of time engaging with blogs, the latest news, following folks on Twitter, and so on is a great way to help you top up on your knowledge and keep on top of any changes going on in the industry.

Connect and engage

The next level to that is turning that social connection and finding a way to engage, so whether that's virtually or in real life. So following industry folks and influencers on Twitter is a really great starting place. But if, like me, you're finding it can become a little bit unruly and you're easily distracted, then it can help to use the social media connections to identify events, whether they're virtual or real life meetups or conferences, so that you can find a way to turn that connection into an opportunity to network and gather more information. Some of the biggest advances in my knowledge have come from engaging in events. I've been fortunate enough to go to a few of those in my time, and I always come away feeling very inspired and have a renewed drive to try new things. Don't forget that we do have MozCon coming up this year in Seattle, and we have some incredible speakers joining us, which I know are going to be very inspirational.

Topic immersion

Then the other thing to consider is topic immersion. Of course, learning does not happen in isolation. So you may find that you spend a dedicated amount of time actually learning, understanding the fundamentals, ramping up on the lingo, and then that is a great way for you to immerse yourself. Then, ongoing, find a strategy or a way that you can continue to be engaged in that topic. 

So whether you are following a more free-flow approach by digesting content that's available online or you want to follow a structured learning track with the Moz Academy, I would advise finding a way that works for you to immerse yourself in the topic regularly. For you, it may look like a couple of minutes a week reading the Moz blog, what we published lately. You could visit the Learn Center and dive into a particular topic. Or you can jump on Twitter and catch up with the latest from Dr. Pete on his featured snippets research.

Whatever that looks like, look back at your goals and what you're hoping to achieve and then identify a way that you can continually immerse yourself in this topic and familiarize yourself with it in a long-term way that is sustainable for you. Remember to check back in and see how you're performing and keep yourself on track.

Best of luck with your learning journey. Whether you are topping up knowledge or learning something new, I hope this has been helpful. Bye for now.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

MozCon 2022: The Initial Agenda

We’re just about three months out from the big event (can you believe it?)! Today, we’re excited to give you a preview of everything our speakers have in store when they take to the stage this year.

With a healthy mix of fresh faces joining us for the first time and fan favorites making a return appearance, our speaker lineup this year is bound to make waves. While a few details are still being pulled together, topics range from technical SEO, content marketing, and local search to link building, machine learning, and way more — all with an emphasis on practitioners sharing tactical advice and real-world stories of how they’ve moved the needle (and how you can, too).

And in case you hadn’t heard, you’ve got two incredible ways to join us this year, a fully immersive in-person experience in Seattle, or through our livestream only pass which will be broadcast live from the Seattle stage. Can’t join us in person or for the livestream? We’ve got you covered with an option to pre-purchase access to the post-event video recording bundle so you can catch the sessions when your schedule permits.

Grab your MozCon ticket today and get ready for all the fun!

Register for MozCon

The Emcees

We have two incredibly entertaining MozCon Emcees this year to guide you through each day and keep the show rolling along:

Ola King

User Researcher | Moz

Rob Ousbey

SEO Consultant

The Speakers

Take a gander at who you'll see on stage this year, along with some of the topics we've already worked out:

Amalia Fowler

Founder | Good AF Consulting

Leadership and Community in Search Marketing: Strong Teams, Better Results

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

Amanda Milligan

Head of Marketing | Stacker

The Untapped Power of Content Syndication

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

Amanda Jordan

Director of Digital Strategy | RicketyRoo

The Future of Local Landing Pages

Location landing pages are extremely important for local business but are often repetitive and uninteresting. This presentation will focus on strategies that can make your location landing pages useful and interesting to search engines and site visitors. We'll discuss ways to incorporate first party data, third party data, and user generated content to create local landing pages that don't fall short.

Andy Crestodina

Co-founder / CMO | Orbit Media Studios

SERP Strategies

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

Areej AbuAli

Head of SEO | Papier

Unlocking the Hidden Potential of Product Listing Pages

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

Chris Long

VP of Marketing | Go Fish Digital

Advanced On-Page Optimization

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

Crystal Carter

Head of SEO Communications | Wix

Search What You See: Visual Search Tactics, Tools, and Optimizations

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

Dana DiTomaso

President & Partner | Kickpoint

More Than Pageviews: Evaluating Content Success & Correcting Content Failure

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

Debbie Chew

SEO Manager | Dialpad

How to Capitalize on the Link Potential of a Research Report

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

Emily Brady

SEO Consultant

Get Your Local SEO Recipe Right with Content & Schema

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

Hanna Smith

Founder | Worderist

Myths, Misconceptions, & Mistakes (Lessons Learned from a Decade in Digital PR)

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

Jackie Chu

SEO Lead, Intelligence | Uber

SEO In the Enterprise: Tips and Tricks for Growing Organic Traffic at Scale

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

Joe Hall

SEO Consultant & Principal Analyst | Hall Analysis

Understanding Key Performance Factors: Using Data to Make Smart Decisions for Organic Search

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

Karen Hopper

Performance Marketing Strategist | Razorfish

Beyond the Button: Tests that Actually Move the Needle

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

Lidia Infante

Senior SEO Manager | Big Commerce

SEO Gap Analysis: Leverage Your Competitor's Performance

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

Lily Ray

Senior Director, SEO & Head of Organic Research | Amsive Digital

Why Real Expertise is the Most Important Ranking Factor of Them All

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

Miracle Inameti-Archibong

SEO Lead (Insurance) | MoneySuperMarket Group

Achieve Accessibility Goals with Machine Learning

3.8 million US adults aged 21-64 have a visual impairment, but 98% of the world’s top one million websites don’t offer full accessibility. One of the top issues is image alt text. This session walks you through easy, scalable alt text generation — an intuitive and easy to understand tutorial, with most of the heavy lifting already done for you.

Noah Learner

Product Director | Two Octobers

Breaking into New Areas with Topic Maps

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

Paddy Moogan

Co-founder | Aira

The Future of Link Building: What Got Us Here, Won’t Bet Us There

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

Paxton Gray

CEO | 97th Floor

How True Leaders Transform a Marketing Department into a Dream Team

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

Dr. Pete Meyers

Marketing Scientist | Moz

Rabbit Holes: How Google Pushes Us Down The Funnel

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

Petra Kis-Herczegh

Solutions Engineer | Yext

Things I Learned from Sales Teams that Every SEO Should Know

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

Tina Fleming

Senior Brand Strategist | Designzillas

How Marketing Data Intelligence Skyrocketed Our B2B Conversions

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

Tom Capper

Senior Search Scientist | Moz

Trash In, Garbage Out: A Guide to Non-Catastrophic Keyword Research

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

Wil Reynolds

Founder & VP of Innovation | Seer Interactive

Keyword Research for Thanks Instead of Ranks

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

Will Critchlow

CEO | SearchPilot

Moneyball is the Future of SEO

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

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We hope you’re as jazzed as we are for July 11th–13th to hurry up and get here. And again, if you haven’t grabbed your ticket yet, we’ve got your back.

New Competitive Research Suite: Actionable Data to Drive Real Results

I once compared keyword research to an avalanche – it’s loud, exciting, and you’re likely to end up buried alive. Over the years, as I’ve tested new product ideas (even with enterprise SEOs), I’ve found that people don’t really want all the data. They want the right data.

I’m thrilled to announce Moz’s Competitive Research Suite, built from the ground up to drive targeted data and actionable insights about your competitors, your competitive keyword gap, and your content gap. Instead of telling you, though, let us show you.

Your keyword gap, reinvented

I recently bought some sunglasses from Goodr. Let’s pretend I’m analyzing their competitive SEO landscape, and I’ve picked three targeted competitors in the online sunglasses market that specialize in active customers and sports sunglasses. I’d first enter the sites in the mini-wizard:

You can choose your market and either Domain or Subdomain for the target site and each competitor. After some summary statistics about the sites, you’ll see the “Keywords to Improve” section, which looks something like this:

Scroll horizontally to see our all-new Traffic Lift metric, Keyword Volume, Keyword Difficulty, your current ranking, and the ranking of each of your chosen competitors.

More signal = actionable results

If you did a traditional keyword gap analysis, you might look at each competitor individually and manually dig through the intersections. Let’s say we put SportEyes.com into our own Keyword Explorer. The first few results look something like this:

This is perfectly useful data about one competitor’s rankings, except for one problem — Goodr doesn’t sell swim goggles or ski goggles. Even intersecting a couple of competitors could easily produce irrelevant results, competitors’ branded terms, or keywords where your site already outranks competitors and has very little to gain. Put simply, there’s a lot of noise.

Keywords to Improve is a new way of thinking about the competitive keyword gap. We focus on keywords where your site ranks in the top 20 (you can easily expand this in the filters), but is outranked by one or more competitors. We also attempt — by analyzing on-SERP signals — to filter out branded and brand-like terms.

We cut through the noise, boost your SEO signal, and surface actionable results.

Lift your traffic, lift your ROI

We SEOs love big keyword volume numbers, but here’s the hard truth — even if we could perfectly accurately estimate volume, it’s a bit of a fantasy. If you create a competitive keyword research spreadsheet with 10,000 keywords with an average volume of 1,000, are you going to guarantee your boss those 10 Million visitors? Of course not.

What if you have no capacity to rank for that keyword? What if sites like yours (including your competitors) have a realistic ranking cap? SEO isn’t a process of going from no ranking to #1 on every keyword imaginable, and even #1 doesn’t get all the clicks.

All of this is why we’re introducing Traffic Lift. The Traffic Lift column looks at what we think you could gain by moving from your current ranking to your competitors’ best current ranking. In part, it’s tough love. Living in a fantasy isn’t good for business. More importantly, it’s a way to prioritize. See the sample results below:

Unlike swimming goggles, a product Goodr doesn’t even sell, cycling and running sunglasses are product categories that are very relevant and where they’re outranked by similar competitors. There is ample room for improvement here and real ROI. Traffic Lift finds the wins.

Your competitors’ top content

A little more tough love — keywords aren’t action. Keywords are potential. A mountain of keywords is more likely to bury you than benefit you. We can help you find the best keywords, but ultimately, we want to understand how those keywords are shaped into content.

Our first-generation (and there’s much more to come) Top Competing Content report shows you how your keyword gap is being served by your competitors. Let’s look at the Goodr data:

The “Top Ranking Keywords” are just a sampling, but here we can see, for example, how one competitor’s page is capturing multiple keywords related to “cycling sunglasses”. Now, you can start to see how those keywords function as a concept and you’ve got specific competitor pages to target.

This is the next step of competitive keyword research — going beyond a pile of individual, unrelated, and even irrelevant keywords to a plan of action that includes targeted, high-lift keywords, targeted content, and a top-level view of the competitive landscape.

If you want broader data or a different viewpoint, there’s a full range of filters and sorts to let you adjust our default settings. Of course, you can also export both Keywords to Improve and Top Content Competitors to carve through the pile as you please.

True competitors, truer results

In September of 2021, we launched True Competitor, and I promised that it was a first step in Moz’s new approach to competitive analysis. True Competitor is now more than a stand-alone tool — it’s a starting point to understanding your keyword and content gaps:

From True Competitor, you can now easily select up to three competitors and run your Keyword Gap analysis. As you can see, this is how I kicked off my Goodr example, even though I had almost no knowledge of their competitive landscape. Imagine what you could do with your actual knowledge of your site, your customers, and even your prospects.

Even for Goodr, this journey I took is just one possible journey. I chose to focus on sports sunglasses, but there are dozens of niches that they could explore, even as a relatively small site. Competitive analysis isn’t one and done — it’s a process of surfacing opportunities, acting on those opportunities, and re-evaluating as your competitors evolve.

The Competitive Analysis Suite is now available to all Moz Pro customers, and we’d love to hear your feedback via the ‘Make a Suggestion’ button in the app.

Sign up for a free trial to access the Competitive Research Suite!

Already a Moz Pro customer? Log in now for instant access!

Your First Three SEO Tests

Emily Potter, Head of Customer Success at SearchPilot, is an SEO A/B testing expert. Today, she returns as a Whiteboard Friday host to share with you the first three SEO tests you should run to kick-start your SEO testing program.

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

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz. I'm Emily Potter. I'm Head of Customer Success at SearchPilot. If you haven't heard of us before, SearchPilot is an A/B testing software that was built specifically for the SEO industry. We run large-scale SEO tests on enterprise websites.

Today I'm here to share with you the first three SEO tests ]that you should run to kick-start your SEO testing program. But before we get into that, there are some foundations that we need to cover first. That's how to write a strong SEO hypothesis and then how to prioritize your SEO tests.

Writing a strong hypothesis

Starting with your hypothesis, you might not think of it this way, but every SEO optimization that you're making is trying to impact one of three mechanisms, and these three mechanisms are the only way we can improve organic traffic. At SearchPilot, we call these our three core levers. 

CTRs

So that's improving your organic click-through rates independent of rankings. By that I mean, yes, you can improve your organic click-through rates by going from position two to position one, but there are other ways you can do that as well. That's ways that you enhance your search results so that you stand out against search competitors, like getting rich results or rich snippets.

Ranking for more keywords

Next there's ranking for more keywords. That's ranking for keywords that you didn't before. It's improving your organic reach. So if you're ranking for more keywords, you're in front of more people, that's probably going to drive more organic traffic to your website. So that's our second lever that we can pull.

Improving existing rankings

Our last lever is improving our existing rankings. So that's links, improving Core Web Vitals, adding more content. All of those big, known ranking factors that we can target with SEO tests, that's a big driver of organic traffic.

So the three core levers, we need to be pulling at least one of them to have a valid SEO hypothesis. If you come up with a test idea and you can't actually find a way that it clearly pulls one of these core levers, then it's probably not a true SEO hypothesis and you probably shouldn't run it. You might want to consider running it as a CRO only test instead, but it shouldn't be your SEO testing program.

Now we can pull more than one of these levers. Think of something like title tags. That improves our rankings and it changes our appearance in the SERP, so that improves our click-through rates and maybe independent rankings as well. But that's okay. We just want to capture that in our hypothesis that we're going to pull more than one lever.

Prioritizing test ideas

So now that you know how to write a strong SEO hypothesis, let's talk about how to prioritize your SEO test ideas. At SearchPilot to do this, we use two core metrics. We look at potential impact and then level of effort or LOE.

In this quadrant, I have, on the vertical axis, high level of effort to low level of effort, and on the horizontal axis, I have high impact to low impact. In the upper left-hand quadrant I put "Avoid." So those are high level of effort tests that are also low potential impact. These are tests that are going to have heavy uplift from your engineering team, but aren't likely to pull a core lever and therefore probably not a good test for you to run and probably not worth your time. Just rule these tests out. Make them not even a priority.

Upper right-hand quadrant, we have high impact tests that are also high level of effort. So those are things like internal links or anything that's going to involve a lot of engineering support, but you know is going to potentially be a big win. It strongly pulls one of these levers. So you really want to put these in, but they probably require project management. It involves multiple teams working together, that sort of thing. Plan those in later. They shouldn't be your first three tests.

In the lower left-hand quadrant, we have low impact tests that are also low level of effort. I put this in amber because you should have these in your testing program. You still want to run them. Again, they shouldn't be your top priority tests, but sometimes they produce surprising results. So these are things that maybe pull a lever but are easy to implement. Or they are low impact changes, like adding alt text, that we know don't cause big swings in organic traffic, but, again, you might get surprising results. Or they're just good practice to do anyway.

Lastly, we have what I call the sweet spot. Those are your high impact tests that are low level of effort. So these ones we want to prioritize. They pull the lever strongly but they actually don't require that much effort for us to put in, and those are your biggest return on investment tests and you should prioritize them.

So now that we know how to write a strong SEO hypothesis and we know how to think about prioritizing our test ideas, let's talk about the first three that you should run.

Test 1: Title tags

Test number one, title tag tests, and yes, even if Google is overwriting your title tags, definitely still be testing them. We've seen wins even since that rollout, and it's definitely low-hanging fruit that you can grab. Title tag tests impact both click-through rates independent of rankings and they also impact your rankings. So that's why there are such big swings that we get from them. So something like adding price to your titles, good test, probably just targeting click-through rates. Something like adding a really big, primary keyword might impact both your click-through rates and your rankings. Put these in. Low level of effort, high impact tests, they're in our sweet spot.

Test 2: On-page keyword targeting

Next we want to run on-page keyword targeting tests. So things that are changing the keyword targeting maybe to something like a higher search volume keyword. This can be adding content. This can be updating headings. H1 changes fall into this category. I put these as low to medium impact and low to medium level of effort. So generally still pretty easy to run. Not going to cause as big of swings as title tags, but we definitely want to prioritize those in early on, targeting our rankings.

Test 3: Structured data to win rich results

Third, I put structured data to win rich results. These are medium to high level of effort, but also medium to high impact. So this is things like adding schema, review schema to get review snippets. They tend to involve a little bit more effort because oftentimes you might need engineering resources to get that schema into your HTML, or you might need to get the data somehow that you want to include in the structured data. But they're important SEO tests, and they tend to have a little bit less lift than other higher impact tests that are also higher level of effort.

Bonus: Internal linking

For example, I've put a bonus on here — internal linking tests. These fall into that quadrant that are high impact, high level of effort. Internal linking tests are high level of effort not only because you need engineering resources oftentimes to implement them. It's also really difficult to figure out the measurement for these tests. That's because we're changing two different pages. We're going to expect to see an impact on the pages where we're adding the links. We're also going to expect to see an impact on the pages that are receiving a link. But these cause big wins for SEO, so we definitely want to plan these tests in, but not one of your first three tests. These are going to be targeting your rankings.

So that's what I have for you today. Again, your first three SEO tests to run — title tag tests, improving your keyword targeting on the page, and adding structured data to win rankings. As a bonus, plan in those internal linking tests, but it's going to involve a lot of different teams probably to get those done. And then, remember, if you're not coming back to one of these core levers, if you're not improving either click-through rates independent of rankings, ranking for more keywords, or improving your existing rankings, probably not an SEO test.

That's all I have for you today. Thanks, Moz.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

How to Win Potential Consumers with Customer Journey Mapping on Google

If your website is like most others, there is likely a mismatch between the content you provide, and what your prospective customers search for on Google.

This article is about understanding your potential customers and their conversation with Google by using the customer journey mapping method to provide them with the best content. The idea came to me when watching internal user experience teams at our agency, and I hope it will inspire you as an SEO to leave your spreadsheets for a moment and start working with sticky notes (yeah, sticky notes).

Later in the article, as an example of the method, I will show you how a Danish insurance firm managed to come out of nowhere and dominate the conversation for a strategically important insurance product.

I have built +100 customer journey maps over the last year, so I am excited to share my knowledge with you.

I will come back to this later, but let's get a few definitions in place first:

What is a customer journey?

The customer journey is a model, which describes the stages a prospective customer goes through in order to convert to your solution. It is a way for us as marketers to understand what challenges a user confronts during their journey. When we understand it, we know how our marketing efforts should show up at every stage.

There are many different customer journey models, but I prefer the classic AIDA model, adding the Loyalty stage at the end.

Here is a description of the five stages with examples of typical Google queries:

Awareness: The prospects realize that they have a problem or desire and actively start searching on Google. For example, they may think, “Hey, I'm coughing. How do I get rid of it?” and search for “How to stop coughing?” (40K monthly queries in the US).

Interest: The prospects start searching for simple solution queries. An example is “cough medicine” (59K monthly queries). In this stage, they will also look for substitutes (e.g. “honey ginger tea”).

Desire: The prospects become more educated and refine their search to find the right solution for them. They search for different attributes of the product such as segments (“infant cough medicine”) and types (“non drowsy cough medicine”). This is also the customer journey stage where users subsequently get into the buying mode with best/cheapest/discount queries (e.g. “best coughing medicine for dry cough”). They also begin to search for brands. Typical queries on Google could be “Delsym cough medicine” (5.2K monthly queries) and comparison queries, like “Delsym vs Robitussin” (1.6K monthly queries).

Action: The prospects have made their choice and are ready to take action. A typical search would be “Delsym near me” (90 monthly queries).

Loyalty: The prospects have turned into clients and could have questions about the newly purchased product. A typical example could be "Delsym side effects".

What is customer journey mapping on Google?

Customer journey mapping is a traditional exercise when working with user experience (UX), trying to visualize the typical touchpoints for a user and thereby understand how to create a frictionless experience.

As I mentioned in the intro, I had a light bulb moment watching our UX teams. Why couldn’t SEOs adopt this practice and map up the customer journey with Google data? Where UX teams use qualitative interviews, eye tracking, client feedback and gut feeling, Google data is the hard data that’s missing.

The idea of doing customer journey mapping on Google was born.

We have the data right at our feet. With Google's own data sources (e.g. Google Search Console) and third party tools (e.g. Moz Keyword Explorer), SEOs can map out a large part of the customer journey.

Just look at your user data in Google Analytics, and you will see how dominant Google is. According to a study by GrowthBadger, across industries 50-90% of all traffic came from Google. While social media is a great activation channel in 2022, prospects still go to Google when they need to educate themselves before they contact you.

By mapping the entire customer journey on Google we understand:

1. What are the major topics that potential clients are querying on Google?

2. What is the search intent behind the conversation potential clients are having with Google, that might match our USPs?

3. Where are the “peak ends”, meaning the most important conversation touchpoints on Google, that can win or lose a future customer?

4. What is the timeline of search intent, so we understand how to prioritize content development?

Why you should use customer journey mapping on Google

There are three main arguments for why you should use customer journey mapping.

1) Targeting specific keywords is outdated. We need to focus on owning user intent instead.

Especially with Google's introduction of BERT in September 2019, they understand searches better than ever. And with their MUM update, the search experience will become even more impressive. This also means that we, the SEOs, have to adapt to these advances, focus less on targeting specific keywords, and instead focus on the user intent.

To give an example, all the keywords below have the same intent and should be seen as one:

• sleeping bag wash

• Wash sleeping bag

• How to wash sleeping bags

• Best way to wash sleeping bags

The total monthly search volume for this search intent is 4,000 monthly queries in the US, so this is a big touchpoint to overlook in your content, if you sell sleeping bags.

2) We need to share SEO data insights with marketing teams – and do it fast.

It should be our aim to break out of the SEO silo and ensure that SEO supports marketing strategies and activities.

People in your marketing department may not even know that Google Search Console exists, and even fewer may have access, so SEOs need to share the insights from this goldmine of data.

SEO silo analysis can take weeks, but when aligning with the rest of the company, speed is crucial. Decisions in marketing are made on a daily basis, so SEOs need to be able to provide data quickly. A customer journey map can be created inside a few hours, and is a great way to visualize data in ways that any non-SEO can understand.

3) Topic clustering doesn’t give you the full picture.

Are you already working with topic clustering and think that customer journey mapping sounds like the same? It’s not.

A normal topic cluster only covers the Interest/Desire stages in the customer journey. A topic cluster consists of the main page (the money page), which ranks for the most important keyword (e.g. “car insurance”) and various supporting pages (pillar pages), which will rank for secondary keywords (e.g. “car insurance for teens” and “car insurance calculator”).

Customer journey mapping covers the full customer journey including the early part of the funnel and the post-sales stage. These two stages are important to pay attention to, in order to be seen as a topical authority by Google, and of course to help your prospective consumer along their entire journey.

Early-funnel

Studies have shown that helping a user early in the process will make them remember you later on. At an early stage of the journey, the prospect is not yet aware of the solution, so they will do symptom queries. This type of query isn’t so easy to identify, but this also means that your competitors are probably missing out on them. This can be a great opportunity for extra traffic.

To research symptom queries you need to think like your prospect. What would they search for when they aren’t sure what they’re looking for? A way to validate if the symptom queries are relevant for you, check in “Related searches” at the bottom of page one on Google, if any solution queries are listed. It is an indicator, if it is a relevant query or not.

Another important aspect is to educate the prospect so they won’t choose the wrong solution. In my last Moz Blog post on SEO sprints, I showed an example of prospects searching for yellow-tinted glasses for driving at night. This is the wrong solution, because opposing cars have blue lights. This is important content to provide your audience, in order to lead prospects in the right direction. What is a misconception in your industry?

Post-sale

The post-sale queries are very valuable, because these are queries done by actual clients. This is not only about helping them out with their actual problem, but it is also an important touchpoint to warm them up for their next conversion.

If you want to identify post-sale queries quickly, then use this regex formula in your Google Search Console:

\b(clean|broken|wash off|shattered|polish|problem|treat|doesn’t work|replace|doesn’t start|scratch|repair|manual|fix|protect|renew|coverage|warranty)[” “]

If you do not rank well for the queries that show up, then you most likely have a content gap.

Not all of your content will convert directly. Some content is more apt for micro conversions (see a video, read another piece of content, download pdf). With customer journey mapping, you’re forced to place the search intent in order of appearance. This will help you understand how to structure your content and what a piece of content should do.

How to build a customer journey map using Google data

Let me walk you through the process.

Step 1 : Define your persona and your objective

What do we want to obtain, and who is our persona/s? This important first step ensures that we create the scope for the mapping.

Step 2 : Get the data and map out the intents

Next up is to map out the user intent. I will initially use the client’s Google Search Console.

I will filter 12 months of data for a specific keyword. I will then go through my keyword list. In this example I am doing a map for “Natural playgrounds”. One intent is “natural playground equipment”. I have marked three queries below, which have the same intent: Natural playground equipment, Nature playground equipment and Nature play equipment.

This is one intent identified. Usually, I write the intent on a sticky note with the search volume and the average ranking. Here is an example below from a session.

When I am not able to find more intents in Google Search Console I will add data from third party tools such as Moz Explorer. Here I have inserted the keyword “Natural playground” in the suggestion box, and a list of relevant keywords appear.

Step 3 : Map the post-its in a funnel

I then draw up a sales funnel on a whiteboard, where I place the sticky notes. I will move them around and cluster them, where it makes sense. I will eventually revisit my tools to get more data, if I see gaps in the funnel. This should be a quick process. This is how my whiteboard ends up looking:

When I have completed this exercise I have a great understanding of the prospects’ conversation with Google. The next step is to insert the intents in PowerPoint, so it can be presented to the client. Here is an example. The traffic lights show how the site performs (Green = Rank 1-3 in Google. Yellow = Rest of page 1. Red = Page 2 or worse.). The size of the bubbles represent the search volume.

When a map like this is presented, it will naturally kick-start a focus on how we can convert all the intents to green.

How a Danish insurance firm won prospects with customer journey mapping

Købstædernes Forsikring is one of the oldest insurance firms in Denmark, established in 1731. Historically, they have not focused on SEO, so when I started helping them, they had very little non-branded presence on Google.

Step 1 - We want to own the conversation on Google for “salary insurance”

“Salary insurance” is a product offered by all the insurance industry players. If you lose your job, then with this insurance, you can cover 90% of your salary. This is a strategically important product for Købstædernes, and Google is a big touchpoint in their prospects’ customer journey.

Step 2 - Let’s get the data for “salary insurance” and create a customer journey map

To get an understanding of potential customer search intent, we created the following customer journey map. Each bubble represents a search intent. The size of the bubble shows the relative search volume and the color represents their average ranking. I use traffic light colors to visualize this (Green: ranks in top 3, Yellow: Rank 4-10, Red: Outside page 1 on Google).

To map out the conversation with Google, I used their Google Search Console data, supported with third party tools such as Moz Keyword Explorer. Furthermore, I held an interview with the product team to understand the potential client profiles better, so I could identify the initial symptom searches.

Since the marketing team at Købstædernes are not SEO savvy, then a customer journey map was a great way to explain that we were not part of the conversation at all. They immediately grasped our starting point, and could help by identifying the interesting conversations we should be part of. Furthermore, they could take the conversation insights and use them in the rest of their marketing mix.

Step 3 - Executing on the insights from the customer journey map

When the marketing team signed off on the journey map, we moved on to the second part, which was to understand what content to build, repurpose, and optimize. To be able to match topics between prospects' conversation with Google and the content on the website, we needed to optimize 10 pages and create five new pages.

As with most organizations, Købstædernes does not have unlimited resources. Thus, the customer journey map was a great asset to understand how to prioritize their efforts. Content in the lower funnel should be produced first.

Over a period of two months, my small team managed to perform these tasks. While it is not the topic of this article I would like to mention that a project management tool such as Asana, Monday.com, Trello or other is necessary to ensure an efficient process. If you use a spreadsheet (Excel, Google Sheets or other) focus on tasks can easily be forgotten. With a project management tool you can assign tasks, set deadlines, describe tasks and sub tasks, insert tags etc. I see it time and time again that when key employees leave a SEO project is put on hold. I would therefore strongly urge you to use one of these tools to avoid brain drain and focus.

The results after 10 months

Here is the development after 10 months. As you can see, we have managed to own a big chunk of the conversation:

Traffic has gradually increased, with 100% growth for the last three months compared to the prior period.

In summary

Google is by far the biggest touchpoint in most customer journeys across industries, so it is obvious that hard data from Google Search Console and third-party tools such as Moz Keyword Explorer can help us understand user intent. Customer journey mapping on Google is a model to enable the data by visualizing it, ensuring that the full marketing team understands the prospects’ conversation with Google.

At the same time, it gives a clear overview of content prioritization, which is an important point, since most teams have limited resources.

Let me end with a few tips about customer journey maps:

1. Make sure you have a clear goal with your customer journey. If there is more than one goal, break the customer journey into several different customer journey maps.

2. Understand your USPs to focus on the relevant search intent. If necessary, break down the broader user intents into smaller ones on underlying customer journey maps, to get a better overview.

I hope this blog post about customer journey mapping has inspired you to think about how you can understand your prospects' conversation with Google in a new way. Happy mapping!