Google Autocomplete (often referred to as Google Suggest) is one of the first Google search developments that appeared on SEOs’ radar.
Many years ago, Google Suggest was what powered Google Instant results, making a huge impact on users’ searching journeys. SEOs have been using it as a free keyword research tool.
Yet there’s much more to this search feature, especially after all the updates Google has introduced, turning Google Autocomplete into a smart and predictive platform of its own.
What is Google Autocomplete?
Google Autocomplete allows users to easily complete their query by suggesting possible extensions of what they are currently typing:
Google’s suggestions are dynamic — they instantly change as you’re typing your query. Google is trying to predict what a user means to type. These predictions are likely to impact the searching behaviors as people may instinctively choose a suggestion they never meant to type. In other words, Google’s Autocomplete should be an SEO priority.
But there’s another factor making the feature very important for any digital marketing strategy: By default, it delivers suggestions in the address bars of at least three of the most popular browsers: Firefox, Google Chrome, and Safari.
Here’s Chrome’s address bar, which suggests search terms (and auto-completes them) as you type.
Now imagine that your domain is plumber.com and that’s your customer trying to type in your domain name.
This means that in many cases, users will be prompted to search even when they had no intention to, and they will search for the terms that were suggested by Google.
How do Google’s Autocomplete predictions work?
Google’s Autocomplete predictions rely on actual users’ popular searching patterns, i.e. what Google’s searchers tend to type next. In other words, Google’s suggestions reflect the most common search queries.
Additional factors that impact Google’s predictions are:
The searcher’s location
The user’s past searches
Currently trending search queries. For example, many of these suggestions seem to be driven by trending searches:
You can disable your past searching history from messing with your Google predictions by disabling personalization here. This way you’ll get a cleaner insight into your target users’ searching habits.
Use Google’s Autocomplete to research your keywords
Google Autocomplete is perfect for discovering more specific and relevant phrases that searchers are using to solve problems or answer questions, as it extends your search query as you type it. If your query is searched a lot, Google will continue extending it further and further — just keep hitting space at the end of each query:
All of these suggestions provide content ideas by narrowing your initial term down to more specific angles.
While you can do this by using the search box itself, you can also use tools like Suggestion Keyword Finder to make it easier and faster, , as it extends each of your chosen terms deeper to level three:
There are also a few plugins that bring those suggestions right inside your Wordpress post editor.
Use Google Autocomplete to research questions
Question research is useful on many levels, from content ideation to identifying the challenges your customers may be experiencing with your product or service.
Google Autocomplete is one of the most powerful sources of niche questions that your target users routinely type to solve related problems. To find those questions, simply type question words (why, how, where, etc.) in front of your search term in Google’s search box:
To avoid manually doing this, you can use Answer the Public, which uses this trick to create a mindmap of questions based on your keyword:
There are several ways to implement these questions in your content optimization strategy:
Use these questions in your content refresh strategy when optimizing old or outdated pages.
Launch a Youtube series/playlist or even a video course to address each of these questions, one by one. You will have lots of content that you can reuse on your site, on social media, and elsewhere.
Narrato is a handy content creation and collaboration platform allowing you to import these questions and integrate them in your content brief and content itself:
Narrato helps you consolidate a lot of data around each content project helping you create better optimized guides, lead magnets or commercial landing pages.
Use Google Autocomplete to research related concept entities
Extending core keywords is how we’ve utilized Google Autocomplete for years, but the tool has been evolving, and these days it gives even more insight into how people search and what Google considers relevant to your target topic (and buying journey).
Traditionally, Google would generate search predictions prior to you performing a search. Nowadays, Google will help you refine your search query by suggesting alternative terms after you perform the search.
To generate these suggestions, simply put your cursor back in Google’s search box once it loads search results. These are referred to as “search refinements”:
The key benefit of this exercise is that you get to uncover related concepts and entities you may want to include into your optimization strategy.
For example, if you search for [why is google maps slow] and put your cursor anywhere inside your query in the search box, Google Autocomplete will try to help you specify the problem by suggesting [delay time] instead of [slow] and making sure you really mean [maps] and not [google earth slow].
There’s no insight into how Google generates search refinements, but they most probably rely on their users’ searching journeys (i.e the same person typing these queries within one session).
SE Ranking uses search refinements to identify related keywords you’d want to include into your SEO strategy:
Autocomplete search refinements in local marketing
Search refinements have many implications. For example, if you’re a local business, you should use Autocomplete to discover related towns and cities people in your area may be using to find similar businesses. These are all your target keywords:
In this case, a plumber located in Halfmoon, NY will know that they need to have pages targeting Clifton Park, Ballston Spa, and Glenville. They will also find a distinct local competitor to keep an eye on.
Interestingly, Google knows how far away from your location related entities should be. In case of plumbers, Google would suggest locations 10-30 minutes away. But if you search for something like “playgrounds” in the same town, you will only be suggested places within a five-minute drive:
Use Google Autocomplete for organic reputation management strategy
Brand-driven search is when a search query contains your brand or product name.
Your potential customers are using your brand-driven search when trying to figure out if your company is worth dealing with or if your product is what they need.
Obviously, branded search is an essential part of your sales funnel, and the one you cannot fully control.
With Google Autocomplete, branded search becomes even more tricky and less controllable:
Google may prompt your customers to search for your name when they are trying to actually type your domain and get to your site. In this case, Google’s Autocomplete may distract and drive your actual customers away from your site, so you need to make sure that your branded search results will bring them back to your site.
Google Autocomplete may give your customers “ideas” on what they need to do prior to buying from you (and finally get them to change their minds).
For those two reasons, your branded Autocomplete results should be your company’s priority:
Track your rankings for all of these search queries (naturally, you want your pages to rank #1 to instantly take those searchers back to your site).
Ensure your brand visibility in more than organic listings. Google’s SERPs are visual and interactive, which means lots of people may never click those organic results. Those searchers need to keep seeing your brand all over those SERPs to finally be convinced to go to your site:
Branded SERPs often include image and video carousels, People Also Ask boxes, tweets from the brand’s official account, and more. A well-organized reputation management strategy should target all of these search sections and elements.
For your company’s key branded keywords, set up Visual Ping, a change-monitoring platform that will alert you once your branded SERPs add or remove anything. You will also be notified of any changes in your knowledge panel, new results, new images or videos pulled into your branded carousels, changes in local 3-pack, etc.:
Use Google Autocomplete to identify and research entities
Google Autocomplete is evolving together with Google search. As Google is integrating entities (e.g. organizations, books, places, celebrities, movies, shows, etc.) into its algorithm, so does Autocomplete.
When Google considers something an entity, the Autocomplete dropdown will include its logo and the category Google is associating this entity with. Local entities will also include their location:
It’s a good idea to check Autocomplete results for your chosen name prior to registering the domain. Namify makes it easy as you can add domains to the list to check them all before deciding:
It’s a good idea to stay away from brand names that are already identified as entities in the same or neighboring category.
For newly launched projects and products, Google Autocomplete can be used to identify whether Google considers you an entity yet:
Conclusion
Autocomplete is a great (and free) keyword research tool, but it is also a powerful factor that can impact your target customers’ journeys on most popular browsers. For this reason, it’s important to keep an eye on Google Autocomplete suggestions for your important search queries, including your brand-driven queries.
Last year, I pitched a series of technical SEO topics for local SEO on twitter and got lots of positive feedback.
One of these elements of technical SEO that can feel extremely daunting and unfamiliar to local SEOs is speed optimization.
There are some key scenarios when local SEOs should seriously consider speed optimization, even for a small local client. After all, these clients are still impacted by the issues that come along with having a slower website — such as higher bounce rates, lower conversions, and worst of all, a poor user experience.
There are also plenty of instances where speed optimization is a practical next step in your SEO strategy. If your client has great content, great links, but low engagement or rankings, speed issues may be the culprit.
This case study is about a client just like that. The only service my team at RicketyRoo provided during the length of the case study was speed optimization, and we saw some impressive results. In this post, I’ll share our experience, and hopefully this inspires you to take on some speed issues you’ve been nervous to address.
The client
The client is a multi-location residential cleaning franchise with over 40 locations across the United States. The website consists of approximately 580 pages, with a landing page for each location.
Our client’s goal is pretty simple: take a bigger piece of the pie from the larger nationwide home cleaning franchises. Our technical audit showed that the site was very slow, so site speed is where we started.
Our methodology
1. Set up staging environment with WPEngine
Whether you’re using tools and plugins or choose to manually update the website for speed, you should create a staging (or test) environment. Making manual changes to the code that a website is built with (even through a plugin) can break a website. A staging environment is a cloned version of the production site that can be tinkered with without the risk of breaking anything on the live site. Once you have a staging site set up, you can essentially update and change any elements you would like and test without fear of your client losing traffic or leads.
Our speed philosophy is to test and verify. Verifying that the staging site is still functional after making a change and then getting an updated score through the speed tool of your choice is the only way to be confident about the changes you are making.
During this stage, you’re diagnosing issues such as script files returning 404 errors, unused CSS files causing longer load times, and render-block resources. Find these issues and update them. Web.dev is a great resource for finding solutions:
1. Review Core Web Vitals scores to determine where issues lie.
2. Find out what’s taking the longest amount of time from the waterfall
This is why we’re using a staging environment — just in case any of these changes we’ve made breaks something. Check out the live staging site and compare the visual and functionality to the production version of the site. If everything is working as expected, then you’re doing great.
4. Review large images via WebPageTest
The Largest Contentful Paint issues are often caused by images that are too large. There are many guides on how to optimize images out there. If you’re using WordPress, you can also use a plugin like Imagify:
Download any large images, resize, and reduce space
Reupload images at smaller sizes
Check image resolution on staging site
5. Rinse and repeat for other page templates
Everything we’ve done so far we’ll repeat for every template type used on the site. Most sites will have separate templates for location pages, services, categories, blogs, products, contact pages, etc. Each of these page types should be reviewed with a tool like WebPageTest.
6. Install WP Rocket
If your site is on WordPress, you can use WP Rocket to further optimize your site for speed. WP Rocket can sometimes have issues with other plugins or themes used on WordPress sites, so it’s important to test on the staging site first.
7. Review plugins
While we’re on the topic of plugins, you should also review your current plugins and deactivate and remove any that are not in use.
8. Check to see if anything is broken
We’ve made a decent amount of changes at this point. We should review the live version of the staging site again and compare it to the production site.
9. Run through Webpagetest again
Let’s see how we’ve done! If you’re happy with your results then your work is nearly done.
10. Push changes live
Any changes you made should now be pushed to the production site.
11. Annotate changes in GA
Remember to annotate these changes so that you can check back and draw a conclusion from your results for yourself.
Results
Our speed optimization started in July 2020. Soon after, we saw improvement in rankings for non-branded keywords that already ranked in the top 20 positions. The client saw a 32% increase in new users, a 47% increase in phone calls, and a 63% increase in free quote requests in a year-over-year comparison of 2021 to 2020. 2021 saw a 55%+ increase in revenue over 2019 and over 60% in comparison to 2020.
This correlates with an increase in both site traffic and qualified leads. Our client measures qualified leads as scheduled appointments, which grew by 49% PoP.
We also reviewed the CRux data for our client in comparison to closely-ranked competitors. The winner for each UX/speed element is highlighted in yellow. As you can see, our client’s scores are generally higher than competitors that do not rank as well:
Conclusion
Technical SEO can be done, even if you don’t consider yourself a tech expert. Having a backup makes it easy to test out changes with confidence. Never dismiss the importance of a SEO tactic because you’re unfamiliar. Our client saw ranking and improvements as well as a 55% increase in revenue due to Core Web Vital optimization alone. Now that you have a staging website, you’re free to tackle other technical issues you may have discovered but felt uncomfortable with approaching.
It’s a highly competitive market for SEO skills at the moment. But as a hiring manager, how do you ensure that you are selecting the right fit for your team, and not just the available candidates? It’s crucial for the well-being of your existing team, your prospective hires, as well as your SEO performance, to hire well.
Who you hire, when, and in what order can come down to several factors. Working in-house may mean your budget for hiring SEOs is limited, so you might need to find someone who ticks a lot of skill boxes broadly, but less deeply. With an agency, or enterprise team, you may have the luxury of investing in a broad roster of talent where each individual is highly-focused.
Skills needed for a well-rounded team
Not every SEO team is created equal. You have to ensure that you’re hiring in a way that suits your organization. To do this, consider what skill sets already exist in your business and where there are gaps.
SEO skills
First, let’s look at some commonly sought-after SEO skills. I’m loosely categorizing these into practical skills (those that are needed specifically for great SEO performance) and soft skills (those that are needed for a good team dynamic).
Practical skills
Practical skills are often the ones focused on more in the hiring process. After all, we want to ensure our new colleagues are proficient SEOs! How you cover these skills might be a mix of staff, freelancers, and agency support.
On-page optimization
Technical optimization
Digital PR
Data analysis
Strategy development
Project/account management
Soft skills
As important as practical skills are the “soft” ones. These are the skills that are interpersonal and can help your team be efficient and collaborative.
Mentoring
Written and verbal communication
Leadership
Training other departments
Adjacent skills
There are other skills that, whilst not strictly SEO skills, can help your team to function at a higher efficiency. These adjacent skills are often rolled-up into SEO skills, although it’s debatable as to whether every SEO should have an in-depth grasp of them, or merely know how to work alongside those that do.
Data manipulation (R, Python)
Coding
Copywriting and editing
Team management
Budgetary control
These skills are by no means a comprehensive list, but they show you the core elements that your team will need to comprise.
How to assess your team’s skills gaps
Before looking at whether you need to hire new team members, or how to upskill the current ones, you need to look at where the skill gaps are.
If you work closely with the SEOs in your company, you’ll likely already have an idea of where their strengths are, or the areas of SEO that they naturally gravitate towards. Perhaps you have that one person on the team who is always asked the technical questions or is the go-to for help with E-A-T issues.
Determining your team’s areas of weakness doesn’t have to be a long and complicated process. Here are some quick methods of getting a good enough picture of where their competencies lie.
Self-assessment
Your team will know their own strengths and weaknesses well. A good first port of call is to ask them to rate their own confidence with the list of skills mentioned above. Ask them to rate their practical experience of them out of 10, as well as their theoretical knowledge out of 10.
By running this exercise you not only see where there may be skill gaps in your team, you’re also helping your colleagues to take stock of their own areas for development. Through this and a robust development plan, you may be able to fill those skills gaps internally without the need to hire.
External assessment
If your team is small, or their manager is not experienced in SEO, you’ll need the help of an external coach to identify skill gaps.
Bringing someone in from outside your company will remove any bias in assessing the availability of necessary skills on your team. You could consider a career coach, but given the specialism, you may benefit more from bringing in an SEO consultant with management experience.
Peer assessment
A third way to get a good understanding of where there are skill gaps is to ask your team to identify them. They will have a good idea of each other’s strengths and weaknesses and where they would like to see additional resources focused.
Identifying other useful skills and experience
Your team may have experience tangentially related to the work they are doing for you that actually helps them to be better SEOs. When you’re considering the skills gaps in your company, don’t forget to encourage your team to look at these skills that weren’t necessarily developed through work.
Experience gained outside of work
Consider their hobbies and volunteer work. You may be looking to hire externally for the next people manager role because no one on your team currently manages their colleagues. Could a candidate have developed those skills through their outside lives?
Perhaps you have a scout troop leader in your team, sports coaches, or voluntary industry mentors. These skills might not be immediately apparent from a CV or your experience of them at work, but dig a little deeper and you may find the missing skillset or experience you need for your department.
Don’t discount the valuable skills and experiences gained outside of a workplace setting, especially for candidates or team members who are more junior. It may be that they have not had the opportunity to showcase those skills in their careers so far but they excel in them outside of work.
What to do once the skill gaps have been identified
Once you have a better idea of where your team’s skill gaps lie, you have to decide whether to hire, train, or contract out those skills.
You may be able to grow your existing colleagues’ skills to bridge that gap with formal SEO training or like those from Moz Academy. This can also be a great way of keeping your team engaged, with the added bonus of professional certifications.
When considering training, be sensitive to life commitments. SEO is an industry that seemingly rewards “hustle”. However, a lot of people don’t want to carry out more work outside of their contracted hours, even if it is for themselves. Don’t expect your team to always be working to improve their knowledge and skills outside of work. Instead, if you want to build a world class SEO team, give plenty of space within work hours for your team to develop their skills.
If the skill gaps are too significant, you may need to bring that resource in. One way of doing that is through agencies or freelancers, but this isn’t always a cost-effective long-term solution.
Finally, you could hire someone new. Here’s how.
Create a job specification
Use the skills your team is lacking as a foundation for your new role specification. Create a description and list of capabilities around these core skills. For example, if you have identified a need to bring more technical expertise into your team, create a role that focuses on that.
Remember that it’s hard to hire an SEO who is a phenomenal all-rounder. Most of us have our leanings towards tech, content, digital PR, etc. That said…
Be careful of being too narrow
Don’t be overly prescriptive in your job specification, either. Consider whether you really need candidates to have over two years’ of experience with Python. Does this new person have to have the ability to code in HTML, JavaScript, and CSS, or do they just need to know how these languages impact SEO? Do you need someone with copywriting skills, or can they just be great at communicating briefs?
If you create a very rigid “wishlist” of necessary competencies or experience you may miss out on applicants who have the right skill set for the role.
Benefits of overlapping skill sets
There can be benefits of doubling up on competencies within a team. For instance, if you’ve noted that you need a great on-page SEO but you’re getting applicants who also have a technical background, consider that a plus even if you already have great technical SEOs in your team. There’s always more that we SEOs can learn, and bringing in people who have similar specialisms, but different approaches, can help deepen our competency.
How to interview SEOs
There are many, many guides on how to conduct great interviews. What I want to focus on here are the nuances of interviewing SEOs.
In my experience, interviews for SEO roles tend to come in two main flavors:
Discussion about experience and skills
A practical task that usually results in a presentation
What combination of these, the number of stages involved, and who sits in on them differs greatly. But is this the optimum way to assess the competencies of an SEO?
The interview process
How you structure your interview should depend on a number of factors including:
The skill set for the role
The seniority of the role
For instance, an SEO with two years’ experience may require a different set of questions to that of a managerial candidate with 10 years’ experience.
There are a variety of interview techniques and activities you can use to better gauge the suitability of a candidate for a role and help them to understand if your company is the right one for them.
The formal interview
Most of us will have taken part in a formal meeting with a prospective employer. It can be a good way of quickly determining if you have rapport, and in theory, allow for both the candidate and interviewer to dig into skills and experience.
In reality, however, it’s quite a flawed method of assessing fit. Many people simply do not excel within the high-pressure situation of a one-on-one or panel interview. Depending on the role they are applying for, it could be the last time they are expected to perform in that set-up, so why interview them like that? Having a great set of interview questions can help, but to understand an individual’s capability, you may need to dig deeper.
That said, some SEO roles, in particular client-facing account or project management, will require meetings that are actually quite similar in nature to an interview. The formal interview process might be a good stage of assessment for these types of roles.
The informal chat
A less formal method for finding out information about a candidates’ skills and experience is through a more casual discussion. This interview style can be much more laid-back, giving as much space to the candidate to ask questions as the interviewer.
This can be a good way of assessing how a candidate might perform in team meetings, liaise with outside agencies, or communicate with suppliers. For roles that don’t necessarily require sales pitching or formal presentations, then an informal chat is a better route to discern a person’s fit for a job.
Homework task
Often a second or third stage of the interview process is the take-home task like auditing a website and presenting findings, or pitching a marketing project. The idea of the homework is to give candidates some time to think through a problem and work towards their best solution. It allows an interviewer to gain insight into how a candidate might actually go about a real-life SEO issue.
This is a tricky stage to get right, though.
In practice, the at-home element of these tasks can often take a candidate a long time to prepare. Given that they’re likely in several other interview processes at the same time as yours, they may be working well into their evenings and weekends to prepare for all of these tasks.
In addition, these tasks often require access to SEO tools. It’s possible to get free trials for some, but they’re limited in functionality and by trial length, or a candidate may not feel comfortable using their existing employer’s tool licenses to complete work for an interview. It will be better if, as part of this stage, you offer candidates data dumps to work from or give them temporary access to the tools they need to use.
There is also the risk on the candidate’s side that they may well come back with some excellent work and still not get hired. They will have sunk time, energy and expertise into an SEO situation just to have the interviewers say no. In some, unfortunately not atypical cases, the interviewing company may go on to use the candidate’s work even though they haven’t been hired.
On the side of the interviewing company, you also don’t really know how independently the candidate worked on the project. Look at SEO focused forums and subreddits and they are awash with people asking advice on how to best complete a task or present their findings for interviews.
A further complication of these stages is that they often test skills that aren’t necessarily needed for the role. In addition, the tasks usually need to be shared back in the form of a presentation and Q&A. As we’ve already discussed, if presentation skills are not crucial to your role, you may not be assessing the right competencies. After all, a candidate might have found a great solution to an SEO problem, but is this the right format for finding out how they arrived at it if presenting makes them nervous?
Live task
An interview assessment method that is common in the engineering and development world, but hasn’t really made it across to SEO, is the live task. Candidates can be given a problem to solve, or a website to audit, and asked to work on it whilst they are in the interview. This way, they can easily be provided with the tools they need, the risk of them asking for external help is mitigated, and they aren’t required to spend additional time outside of the interview to prepare for it.
It can, however, be quite a daunting prospect for the candidate. To make them more comfortable, consider giving them the site or rough outline of the sort of task they will be working on before the interview. Also make sure to give them the freedom to turn their, and your, cameras and microphones off if on a virtual interview, or for you to leave the room if it is an in-person interview. No one likes being stared at as they work!
Peer interviewing
To ensure it’s not just you getting to know the candidate, but that the candidate gets to know your company well, you could consider including a peer interviewing option.
Here, a candidate gets to sit with a selection of their potential colleagues and discuss what it’s like working at your company. It’s crucial that the meeting does not contain managers or anyone involved in the hiring, so the candidate can feel encouraged to ask the probing questions they want in order to find out if the company is the right fit for them.
Interviewing at the right level
It can be tough to ask the right questions of candidates who are at a different stage of their SEO career than you. If you’ve been in the industry for several years, it might be difficult to identify what someone of their experience should know and be able to achieve. Equally, if you’re not an SEO yourself, but involved in hiring one, you may not know enough about the discipline to really gauge the extent of your interviewee’s knowledge. It’s important to identify the depth of skills you would expect someone at the level you’re hiring for to have. One way of doing this is by looking at the types of problems you would want that person to solve. What skills would need to be present for them to do that? Then look at weighting those skills. Which are absolutely necessary for getting the job done and which would aid to a degree.
If you have little experience in SEO yourself you may need to consult with members of your SEO team, or look to an external advisor to help you.
Be clear about the role’s level
You don’t want to discount an eager, quick learner from a job that only requires a basic understanding of SEO because they didn’t interview as well as your last hire who is now a manager.
Similarly, a candidate may really impress you with their expertise and experience but is the role too basic for them and they are likely to want to advance on from it quite quickly?
Level appropriate questions
To make sure you’re giving your candidates the best chance to shine in their interviews, here are some ideas of questions for each of the main skill sets and how they can be tailored for junior, middleweight, and senior roles.
On-page optimization
Junior
How would you go about optimizing a page to maximize its exposure in the SERPs?
This type of question allows for the fact the candidate might not have direct experience of carrying out this activity themselves, but tests their theoretical knowledge and approach to problem-solving.
Middleweight
Give me an example of when you used on-page SEO to improve rankings of a page. What did you do, why did you do it and what were the results?
This sort of question allows for the candidate to show their direct experience with on-page SEO but does not require them to show responsibility for the strategy behind it. They can show their practical knowledge and also hint at the reasoning behind the activity.
Senior
Give me an example of when you developed and employed a content pruning strategy. What was the strategy, why did you develop it and what was the outcome?
This type of questions allows the interviewer to test the candidate’s strategic reasoning as well as their ability to identify the best methodology for achieving results, and how they analyzed those results.
Technical SEO
Junior
What would you look for when carrying out a technical SEO audit?
This type of question helps to identify whether the candidate has a theoretical knowledge of broad technical SEO activity.
Middleweight
Give me an example of when you’ve encountered a duplicate page issue, what caused it, and how you resolved it.
This type of question begins to examine the candidate’s practical experience in technical SEO and can help you to identify if they have a working knowledge or merely theoretical knowledge of technical SEO.
Senior
Give me an example of a deindexation issue you encountered, how you identified it, and how you rectified it.
This type of question will give the candidate space to demonstrate their end-to-end practical experience of serious and complex technical SEO issues. It will likely allow them to show their experience of setting up alerts and automations as well as how they think through technical problems, communicate those to other teams and work to find a resolution.
Digital PR
Junior
What’s a campaign that you’ve seen recently that you admired, and what would you have done differently?
This tests the candidate’s ability to iterate on ideas without expecting them to have launched campaigns themselves yet.
Middleweight
Give me an example of a campaign that you launched that wasn’t initially successful, and what you did to improve it.
This tests a candidate’s strategic thinking, ability to adapt to the needs and wants of the media as well as giving examples of their work.
Senior
What would be your strategy for launching a campaign to generate links in a highly regulated industry like gambling? How have you overcome struggles with regulated or hard-to-represent industries in the past?
This type of question assesses a candidate’s ability to create a well-considered strategy within a set of limiting boundaries. It also assumes prior experience of more complicated campaigns.
Analytics
Junior
If the company’s core KPI is conversions, what metrics would you look at to see if SEO is helping towards that goal? What additional information might you need?
This question does not assume the candidate has had experience with onboarding a new analytics account before but tests their theoretical knowledge.
Middleweight
What is your process for ensuring data integrity in a new analytics account?
This sort of question will allow the candidate to show that they are conscious of how data can become compromised and their process for ensuring clean data. It will also show whether they understand how they can compromise data themselves.
Senior
Tell me about a time when you deployed a complex tracking solution, your steps, and the reporting you were able to produce through it.
This type of question will explore the depth of experience a candidate has in more complicated analytics and tracking solutions.
Strategy
Junior
What do you feel are the key components to a successful [SEO/digital PR] strategy?
This type of question will test the candidate’s theoretical knowledge of creating strategies and will empower them to talk about their knowledge of auditing, measuring, reporting, and iterating.
Middleweight
Give me an example of a strategy you created that yielded great results, the steps you implemented, and the outcome.
This question allows the candidate to show their own experience of creating strategies and gives them the opportunity to discuss one they are particularly proud of.
Senior
Give me an example of a strategy you created that was not successful and what you did as a result. What would you do differently next time?
Asking this sort of question explores the candidate’s ability to fail well, including how they recover and what they have learned from that experience.
Project/account management
Junior
How would you manage your time if you were asked to complete multiple tasks with the same deadline, but only had time to complete one?
This question allows the interviewer to see how a candidate would handle a situation they are likely to encounter a lot early on in their career. It assesses the candidate’s time management and communication skills.
Middleweight
Give me an example of a time when you had conflicting deadlines and how you managed the expectations of the stakeholders involved?
Through this question an interviewer can get an idea of how a candidate has approached scheduling conflicts and stakeholder management in practice when facing that pressure, rather than what they would hope they would do in theory.
Senior
Give me an example of a project that required significant scope changes and how you handled the communications, time management, and activity allocation considering the changes
This question assesses a more experienced candidate’s approach to project management when there are multiple factors that are impacted by scope change. It allows them to discuss their line management approach, resource allocation and stakeholder communications.
Removing bias in hiring
The SEO industry has typically had a problem with promoting similar faces in conferences, committees, and within jobs. To ensure that your hiring practices encourage diversity, you should look to remove as much bias from the process as possible.
Nameless CVs and resumes
One way of removing bias is to only pass on anonymized CVs or resumes to hiring managers. This way, there is less risk of any implicit bias towards specific naming conventions affecting the hiring process.
It needs to be mentioned, of course, that this is just papering over a bigger issue, and that any employees in charge of hiring should take implicit bias training.
Bias testing
There are numerous tests available that identify whether your hiring managers have any subconscious bias towards or against people based on various characteristics. One such suite of tests is provided by Project Implicit, a non-profit organization staffed by international researchers with the mission to educate the public about bias. Their tests cover a range of potential bias such as sexuality, disability, and skin color.
Diverse interview panels
Another way of limiting bias is ensuring a diverse group of people are involved in the decision-making. This means your interviewers represent a diverse cross-section of the public, not just your organization.
Consider foregoing CVs or resumes
To make sure you aren’t hiring people based on years of working, rather than the quality and breadth of the experience they have gained, you may consider doing away with the CV altogether. Instead, candidates can answer a series of questions when applying that assesses their competency for the role.
This can stop hiring managers from weighing suitability based on former job titles (of which the SEO industry has no standard), length of time at previous roles, or impressive-sounding brands. Instead, candidates will be invited to interview based on their aptitude.
Hire people with little experience but great potential
We all had to learn somewhere. At one point in our careers, a manager took a chance on someone with relatively little SEO experience and let us loose on a website. In order to help the industry grow and adapt, it’s imperative that we continue to hire in and train up entry-level SEOs. However, this isn’t something that should be done lightly, and you should always have a good support system in place.
What to watch out for when hiring
There are a few things to be mindful of when hiring SEOs in the current climate.
The reasons behind short periods of employment
There are several reasons why candidates only worked for a year (or less) at a role. Traditionally, short periods of employment have been treated with suspicion, but ours is a flexible and dynamic industry where staying for years and years in a role doesn’t always make sense. There’s also the COVID-19 pandemic to consider, as several companies went through severe hiring and working disruptions.
In addition, it’s important to encourage employees to find the best possible fit for them, which may entail some movement between jobs. Be careful not to dismiss a candidate purely because of short stints in previous positions or companies.
Values fit
As mentioned above, you’ll often want a “culture” type interview round for new hires. The idea being that it can help to determine whether a candidate would fit in well with an existing team or structure.
This isn’t always a great idea, though. If we’re looking to promote diversity in hiring and also bring new ideas and approaches into our teams, then we should hire for values fit and not culture fit.
Culture fit is expecting a candidate to fit in with the existing way of doing things. Values fit is making sure they agree with the core principles on which your business is based, but allowing for differences in approaches, personality, and behaviors.
Conclusion
It’s a tough market to hire in at the moment, because SEO skills are very in-demand. Make sure you aren’t overlooking great candidates or even existing colleagues when trying to build your perfect SEO department.
Be clear about what you need from your team and look both internally and externally for that skill set. Remember to hire for potential and not necessarily for their current experience level, and don’t rule out candidates unnecessarily or arbitrarily.
There is a lot of movement in the market at the moment allowing for amazing opportunities. Make sure you’re setting yourself and your future team up for success.
Competitive SERP analysis (including our recently launched Competitive Analysis Suite) is — by design — based on understanding the broader ecosystems of your ranking keywords. This is great if you’re an established business, but what if you’ve got a brand new site or are still developing your SEO strategy and aren’t ranking for many keywords?
Consider, for example, the fictional site, Dice-E-Shop.com (shh.. just let me have this one). We plug it into True Competitor, wait for some magic to happen, and voila!
Look at all the time you saved!
Okay, it’s not ideal, but there is a solution, and I call it “Aspirational Analysis”. The basic idea is simple — find a few aspirational but realistic keywords (ones that you can hope to compete for in the mid-term), use those SERPs to find aspirational competitors, and analyze those competitors to chart your competitive course.
1. Aspirational keywords
Let’s assume that you don’t know your competitive SEO landscape very well or that you want a fresh perspective on it. What you do know, hopefully, is the general topic and keyword space you want to compete in.
Let’s take our fictional business, Dice-E-Shop.com, and let’s pretend that it’s an online store specializing in handmade tabletop gaming dice. The key to step one is being aspirational but realistic — no vanity keywords allowed.
I’m not trying to make you feel bad. This is purely pragmatic. For example, let’s plug the keyword “dice” into our Keyword Explorer tool. You should get something like this:
That volume may look nice, but not only is the Keyword Difficulty pretty high, but look at that estimated CTR. Let’s take a quick look at the SERP itself …
The #1 organic position is occupied by a job search brand called Dice.com, which also has expanded sitelinks and other brand-specific rankings (such as their LinkedIn page). That brand is going to soak up most of the clicks on page one. This is neither a realistic nor desirable keyword.
I’m going to simplify this process to keep the workflow reasonable, but the next step is a blend of SERP analysis and intuition. We could go down many descriptive paths (“wooden dice”, “DnD dice”, “artisan dice”, etc.), but let’s try out “handmade dice”:
Don’t get hung up on the volume — our aspirational keyword(s) is all about finding a relevant, realistic competitor. It’s not about building a target keyword list. In this case, just by moving to a two-word phrase, we’re in a more reasonable Keyword Difficulty range with a much more attractive potential for organic clicks. In a more competitive market, we might need to reach deeper into the long tail of search, but “handmade dice” will do nicely for now.
2. Aspirational competitors
Let’s dig into the SERP for “handmade dice” a bit. The #1 result is for Etsy, but while they’re probably a good source of competitive intelligence for our new shop, they’re obviously not a realistic SEO competitor.
Here are the next three organic results. I’ve turned on the MozBar Chrome extension to quickly gain some additional insight:
The #2 site has a pretty low Domain Authority (13), and might not have a lot of ranking data. Honestly, though, as a marketer, I’m stuck on the #4 site because of this:
Love it or hate it, that’s certainly a unique selling proposition. What’s great about this analysis is that you can’t really pick the wrong site. This is an exploration of the competition, and you can always loop back and take another path and journey.
So, let’s go back over to True Competitor and plug in ArtisanDice.com. You’ll get back something like this (edited for size):
Due to a high keyword overlap (at 22%), Etsy scores high on our Rivalry metric, but, as previously discussed, is out of reach. Immediately after, though, we get a number of sites that look pretty viable, and we could easily visit those sites or research them in Keyword Explorer to learn more. Even the site that doesn’t look relevant at first glance (Help-action.com) turns out to be a blog for Dungeon Master resources and might have useful content ideas.
3. Aspirational analysis
I’d argue that we’ve already unearthed some pretty interesting information, but let’s take it a step further. I’m going to plug those top three aspirational competitors (after Etsy) into our new Keyword Gap tool. Here’s a sampling of the competitive keyword gap:
Note that, because we’re using an aspirational competitor (and not our own site), the “Traffic Lift” and “Your Rank” data have to be interpreted differently. This report is from the perspective of our aspirational competitor (ArtisanDice.com).
That said, we’ve got a solid start to finding opportunities in the space and keywords our soon-to-be competitors are targeting. We can easily start to piece together themes, like popular materials, which may even inform our product decisions.
The “Top Competing Content” report gives us a glimpse at some of the most effective content from our aspirational competitors, including a sampling of ranking keywords. I’ve edited this list down to show a few patterns, including pages themed around stone dice and d20s:
Now, we can explore these pages directly for inspiration. We could even put these pages back into our “Explore by Site” tool in Keyword Explorer and get keywords for the exact URL:
This niche page (targeting oversized d20s) ranks for 43 keywords in our data, including:
oversized d20
giant d20s
large 20 sided dice
jumbo 20 sided dice
oversized d20 dice
massive d20
huge 20 sided dice
giant d20 die
Even a sampling of this list is rich with synonyms and the kind of natural-language terms you should consider when building content around this niche.
4. Aspirational automation
While I’ve written this workflow around Moz tools, there are many ways to go about it, including manually using the SERPs themselves. There are two benefits to automation, though, and why I hope our Competitive Analysis suite can empower you to do better work faster.
First, even knowing very little about this space (other than being an occasional gamer and owning a few d20s in my time), the analysis in this post took less than an hour. If I were building a business in this space, I’d have been able to get at critical insights quickly.
Second, automation allows us to quickly branch and iterate. Let’s say that, after this first analysis, we decided to focus on stone dice or specifically on the DnD market — we could easily repeat this analysis to find niche competitors, keywords, and content. We could even start over with an entirely new aspirational keyword — as many times as it was useful. We could separately analyze product and content competitors, providing future direction for both our shopping pages and blog/marketing pages.
One last thing: aspirational analysis isn’t just for new sites. Sometimes, we all need to escape our own biases, and performing competitive analysis on other, diverse sites in our industry can open up new insights or areas we may be missing entirely.
Google holds over 85% of global desktop search traffic and gets billions of searches per day. Google’s advertising revenue through Google Ads was $209.49 billion in 2021, the majority of which came from search advertising.
Google Ads is very competitive and Google uses an auction system to decide which ads to show. When a search query is made with a keyword that has multiple bidders, Google Ads runs an auction to determine which ads are eligible to be shown for that keyword and their ad positions. Only ads that meet minimum quality requirements will be shown for a relevant search term.
With so much competition, how can advertisers improve their performance on Google Ads? In this blog post, I cover the importance of Quality Score in the Google Ads auction. For more details about the Google Ads auction process and Ad Rank, read my last post on Understanding the Google Ads Auction & Why Ad Rank is important.
What is Quality Score?
Quality Score is Google’s estimate of the quality of your ads, as compared to those of other advertisers. It helps ensure that the ads that are most relevant to the search term are shown at a higher position in the search results, so it is based on the relevance of your ad to the search term, the likelihood that your ad will receive clicks when shown, and the user experience offered by your landing page. Every keyword in your account is assigned a Quality Score from 1 (bad) to 10 (excellent) and can be viewed in the keyword table.
Quality Score should be used as a diagnostic tool to improve the quality of your ads, keywords, and landing pages to increase ad performance, and is measured by the performance of three components:
1. Expected CTR
2. Ad relevance
3. Landing page experience
Each of these components is given a rating of “Above Average”, “Average”, or “Below Average”. This rating is determined by comparing your ads with other advertisers who ran ads for the same keyword in the past 90 days.
Why is Quality Score important?
The Quality Score of your ads and keywords is important for the success of your Google Ads PPC (pay per click) campaigns, as they can impact:
Whether your ads are shown — Quality Score determines if your ads are eligible to be shown at all in the results for a search query.
Your ad position — Quality Score is one of the main factors that is used to determine your ad position or Ad Rank on the search results.
Your Cost Per Click (CPC) — Your Quality Score determines the actual cost per click (CPC) you pay for your ads. Ads with a higher Quality Score pay a lower CPC, while lower quality ads are charged a higher CPC which may be closer to their max CPC.
Whether ad extensions are shown — Ads have to have a high Quality Score for ad extensions to be shown with the ads. Ad extensions provide additional business information and can include call extensions, location extensions, and site links. Ad extensions help to increase the clickthrough rate (CTR).
Your ad performance —Higher quality ads and landing pages tend to have a higher CTR, higher conversion rates, and lower bounce rates.
How often your ads are shown — More relevant ads will have higher ad impressions on the SERP.
How to improve Quality Score and ad performance
To improve your ad performance, and compete successfully in Google Ads auctions, you should focus on optimizing the three components of Quality Score.
1. Review the Quality Score of your search keywords
The first step is to review the Quality Score of your search keywords in the keywords table. For each keyword, you’ll see the Quality Score along with ratings for expected CTR, landing page relevance, and ad relevance. If you get a rating of “Average” or “Below Average” on any of these components, follow the tips listed below to better optimize. If you get a “-” in the Quality Score columns, it means there aren’t enough clicks and impressions for that keyword to determine the values.
Selecting the right keywords for each search query is essential for success with Google Ads. You need to make sure to select relevant keywords that are specific to the ads and match the intent behind the search query. Use the Keyword Planner tool in Google Ads to pick specific keywords based on search volume and competition.
Don’t use generic keywords, as they’ll result in your ad being shown for unrelated searches and that will waste your ad budget. For example, if you sell natural dog food, use “natural dog food” as the keyword in your ad, not the generic keyword “dogs”. You can also use long-tail keywords to target specific search queries.
3. Create ads with specific keywords
Creating ads with specific keywords helps to increase ad relevance and expected CTR. Use the keywords from the previous step in your ad text, especially the headlines, to show that the ad is directly relevant to the search query and fulfills search intent. You can use dynamic keyword insertion to update ads with keywords from successful ads in your ad group.
You can also add more headlines and descriptions. Responsive search ads, now the default ad format in Google Ads, allows you to enter up to 15 headlines and four descriptions, and uses machine learning to combine them into multiple ad combinations. Create at least 10 headlines and multiple descriptions so that there are more ad combinations available to show, and make sure they’re unique.
If your ads are targeting a local area, mention relevant locations in your ads. You can use location insertion in responsive search ads to dynamically enter a city, state or country. Locations are selected from your campaign location targeting.
When creating responsive search ads, utilize the ad strength indicator to gauge your progress, and aim for ad strength of “Good” or “ Excellent”. Ad strength measures the relevance, quality, and diversity of your ads.
4.Organize keywords into relevant ad groups
A Google Ads PPC campaign will typically contain several ad groups. Ad groups help to organize your keywords and ads by a common theme, such as the products and services that are being promoted in the ads.
All the keywords in an ad group should be specific to the ads in that ad group. To increase ad relevance and keep your targeting specific, don’t have more than 20 keywords in one group. If you have ads targeting different search terms, you should create different ad groups for each target.
Since Google Ads is pay-per-click bidding, you can set a CPC bid at the ad group level, which would apply to all the keywords in that ad group. You can also set CPC bids for individual keywords. The CPC bids help to determine your ad position and the amount you are willing to pay for a click on your ad.
As seen in the examples, to advertise dog food and dog beds, I would create an ad group for dog food and a separate ad group for dog beds. Each ad group would contain only the keywords and the ads that are specific to that service.
5. Use negative keywords
To build a targeted Google Ads PPC campaign that’s focused on your target customers, you need to exclude search terms that aren’t relevant to your campaign. Negative keywords increase ad relevance by ensuring that your ads are triggered only for the keywords you want to target and shown for relevant search queries. They also decrease unwanted clicks on your ads, which helps to reduce wasted ad spend and increases ROI.
When building a negative keyword list, you want to exclude search terms for items that you do not sell. However, it’s important to choose negative keywords carefully and make sure that they don’t overlap with keywords you are targeting, since they’ll prevent your ads from being shown for those terms.
After your PPC campaign runs for a while, there will be search terms that you aren’t targeting that you’ll want to add as negative keywords.
To add negative keywords to your ad group or campaign, or to build a list of negative keywords from search terms:
Sign into your google ads account
Click “keywords” on the left dashboard
Click “search terms” on the left dashboard
Check the box next to the search term you want to add as a negative keyword
Click “add as negative keyword” on top
For example, if I want my ads to show only to customers searching for dog food and not for dog beds, I would add “dog beds” to my list of negative keywords so that my ads are not shown for those search queries.
6. Improve CTR
The expected CTR is one of the factors that is used to calculate the Quality Score of your ads. To improve the clickthrough rate of your ads:
Your ads should highlight a unique or compelling benefit of your product or service (extended return policy, one year warranty), which include seasonal and time-sensitive offers around holidays and special events. Always make sure the offer advertised is reflected on the ad’s landing page.
Your ads should have strong CTAs (Buy now, Call now, Order now, Get a Quote). Ensure the CTAs and ads are consistent with the landing page as well.
If your ad meets the quality thresholds mentioned above, up to four ad extensions (links with extra business information) can be shown, so make use of these to improve CTR even more.
7.Improve the landing page experience
The landing page linked to the ad must be relevant and consistent with the ad, matching any offers. It should have high quality content, related images and a strong CTA. In addition, your website should be mobile-friendly, fast-loading, and easy to navigate to provide a great user experience.
So don’t send all ad clicks to a generic home page. For example, if your ad is selling dog food, your landing page should be specific to dog food. If you also sell dog beds, create a different landing page with ads and keywords that are specific to dog beds.
Always be sure the landing page follows optimization best practices, using an H1 header with a clear page title and the the main keywords used in the ad. Place the primary keyword towards the beginning of the title.
Your business contact information should be easy to find on the landing page to help build trust with your customers and let them know how they can reach you. Also include trust symbols like industry mentions and awards to further build trust.
The landing page shown for dog food above is a great example of a Google Ads landing page. I searched for “natural dog food” and clicked through from the Google Ad shown. The landing page is specific and relevant and continues the conversation from the ad. It has quality content, clear images, and a strong call to action which is visible above the fold.
It's filled with reasons why I should choose their dog food: “fresh, whole ingredients”, “powered by science”, “tailored to their needs”, “change you can see”, etc. If a consumer is still unsure, they add plenty of trust symbols at the end of the page to convince them. Their landing page speaks to their target customer, dog owners, and will be effective in converting them.
Conclusion
Google Ads is very competitive and Quality Score is an important factor in the Google Ads Auction. It is used to determine which ads are shown on the Google search results, how often the ads are shown, and what the ad ranking will be. It also determines how much you pay for a click on your ads.
By improving the three components of Quality Score, you can improve your ad quality and performance in Google Ads. You can also decrease your CPC costs, increase your ad position, compete effectively with other advertisers, and better reach your target customers on Google.
