Twitter’s Brand Equity: 17 Years & 12 Million Keywords

On July 24, Elon Musk made the surprise announcement that Twitter would be rebranding as ‘X’, with a new logo and brand identity arriving quickly after that announcement. Shortly after, X.com started redirecting (302) to Twitter.com.

Any experienced SEO knows how perilous a major site migration can be, and Twitter.com has been accumulating authority for 17 years. Here are a couple of stats from Moz’s Domain Overview tool:

Those are numbers most sites could only envy, with nearly 12M ranking keywords on Google.com alone. Over time, X.com could recover many or most of the non-branded rankings, but what about the equity in searches for the Twitter brand?

Brand search: It’s complicated

According to our data, there are 8.4 Million searches a month in the United States just for the word “twitter” (and that’s probably a conservative estimate), but brand search goes far deeper than that. Consider the Google result for just the letters “tw”:

Not only does Twitter rank #1 for just “tw”, but Google is sending strong brand signals, including expanded sitelinks and a Knowledge Graph entry. While many possible sites and searches begin with “tw”, Google has determined that Twitter.com is — in their own lingo — the dominant interpretation. This is impressive even by large-brand standards.

Something unique to social networks is that people also pair other search phrases with the network’s name. So, we see many searches for prominent figures and brands, such as:

• “Taylor Swift Twitter”

• “Tom Holland Twitter”

• “Fortnite Twitter”

• “Netflix Twitter”

• “NFL Twitter”

We also see brand-like signals for topics paired with the word “Twitter”, prominent Twitter personalities (even without the brand name), inquiries like “Twitter search” and “Twitter login”, and official spinoffs, like “Tweetdeck.” Even popular memes can return brand-like signals.

In addition, Twitter qualifies for a unique, carousel-style format like the one below:

This kind of prime real estate on Google results may carry over to the X brand, but that is entirely at Google’s discretion and may depend on the strength of the new brand.

Quantifying Twitter’s brand power

Across the approximately 12 Million search queries Twitter ranked for in Moz’s data, we examined just the ones that received 150+ searches per month and where Twitter ranked on page one, which left us with about 600,000 unique queries.

We analyzed those 600K queries for brand signals and ended up with 10,149 search queries. While this may not seem like a lot compared to 12 Million, it represents a massive influence of the Twitter brand. All told, these 10K queries drive over 18 Million searches per month.

The problem for ‘X’ is that the vast majority of these brand-like searches reference Twitter or associated brand terms (like “tweet” and “Tweetdeck”) directly. To recapture this search volume and traffic long-term, ‘X’ will have to reach a level of brand awareness where searchers are actively looking for terms like “Taylor Swift X” and “Fortnite X’.

The confusing history of X.com

X.com currently ranks for no keywords in our databases, due to a number of long-term issues. It doesn’t take a lot of math to tell you that this drives zero brand searches. This situation will undoubtedly change, but X.com faces another challenge — it has been used to house a number of sites (with multiple owners) and also has redirected to Musk’s wider brand portfolio. To understand X.com’s more than 25-year history, you really need to see it.

The early years (1995–2000)

Using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, we can capture a bit of this confusing history. The X.com domain was originally owned by Dave Weinstein, who launched the site in 1995 or 1996, in pretty typical mid-1990s fashion:

Sadly, the list of stuff that Rob Walker might want is lost to the sands of time.

In 1999, Elon Musk bought the domain for the first time (he would later re-buy it from eBay). Here’s a screenshot from early 2000 of the original X.com online banking site:

Until the recent rebranding of Twitter to ‘X’, this 2000-era site was the only one to ever house the X.com brand as originally envisioned.

The PayPal years (2000–2011)

Due to a rocky period at PayPal after the merger of X.com and Confinity, the X.com brand gave way to various PayPal brands. In the spring of 2000, the site was briefly rebranded as “X-Finance” and then “X-PayPal” (shown below):

By the fall of 2000, Musk was ousted as CEO at PayPal, and this site was rebranded as just “PayPal” in early 2001. This persisted for a while, with X.com eventually redirecting to the PayPal site. The ‘X’ brand was nowhere to be seen at this point.

In late 2007, X.com was resurrected as PayPal Labs (captured here in 2008):

PayPal Labs persisted for a while, followed by a handful of PayPal experiments, including this “X.com blog” that appears to have nothing to do with the ‘X’ brand (screen shot from July 2009):

These appear to be the only two posts the X.com blog ever had, until it was replaced in spring of 2010 with the PayPal-X Developer Network (not to be confused with X-PayPal):

In summer of 2011, this site was replaced by a new joint venture of eBay (which had acquired PayPal in 2002), PayPal, and Magento called “X-commerce”.

X.com[merce] (2011–2014)

X.commerce, a play on the X.com domain, housed “a new venture in commerce” that sought to integrate the eBay, PayPal, and Magento developer communities:

X.commerce went through a number of iterations, surviving until February of 2014. At that point, eBay seems to have given up on the X.commerce venture and redirected X.com directly to eBay’s corporate site (ebayinc.com).

The Boring hat (2017–2023)

In July of 2017, Elon Musk repurchased X.com and replaced the home-page with just the letter ‘x’. Soon after, X.com redirected to The Boring Company, but not to the home-page — to a page to buy a hat:

Roughly a year later, this was replaced by an under construction page reminiscent of the late 1990s, while living unironically in 2018:

This page soon returned to the letter ‘x’ on a white background. Note that the basic ‘x’ page contained no HTML source code at all nor any clues about the nature of the ‘X’ brand or website. It was literally just one character. This persisted until July of 2023, when X.com was 302-redirected to Twitter.com, which is its current status as of this writing.

The long, uncertain road ahead

The strange history of X.com — regardless of my personal feelings — is an SEO and branding nightmare. X.com has been used and abused by various owners and has spent years just being the letter ‘x’ on a white page, with absolutely no clues as to the brand’s purpose.

During this time, X.com has built roughly zero online brand equity and ranks for nothing. Temporarily redirecting to Twitter.com is a short-term solution, and presumably Twitter.com itself will permanently redirect to X.com at some point. I have no knowledge of Musk’s plans — this is the only reasonable way for X.com to become the permanent home of the ‘X’ brand.

At that point, X.com risks losing a substantial portion of the 10,149 Twitter-branded search queries and 18 Million searches per month previously discussed. Reclaiming those searches and the resulting traffic is not just an SEO task, but will require building the ‘X’ brand in the minds of consumers to the point that they routinely search for celebrities, brands, and topics combined with ‘X’ or X-related terms.

The long-term success of X.com is anyone’s guess, but as the ‘X’ brand is moved to X.com, I predict — based on my experiences with even moderately difficult similar transitions — a substantial loss of search traffic for at least 3-6 months. Given the power of the current Twitter brand and the long, strange history of X.com, losses could easily last over a year.

How To Earn High-Authority Links That Drive Rankings

My agency, Fractl, was founded at the dawn of content marketing, when Google launched its war against paid link networks, and SEOs were scrambling to figure out how to earn domain trust signals. At the time, I was heavily invested in viral marketing research, seeking to understand the intricacies of what drove readers to share and, more so, how to pitch journalists to earn media.

Our case studies grew rapidly as we built Fractl’s research-backed Digital PR processes, and we quickly earned a reputation as “The Michael Jordan of Link Building,” as claimed by our client, who just renewed an annual quarter-million investment in our services. Yet, the industry hums with debate on this recent Ahrefs post along with the quote: “I think SEOs may overvalue links from media sites. They really don’t seem to have much impact”.

For starters, let’s trust Google’s own search experts:

Next, let’s consider several other industry studies and thought leaders:

• “Obtaining links from more authoritative sites has more value than obtaining a large quantity of links” - Eric Enge

• “Sites with better quality sites linking to them tend to be higher in rankings” - HubSpot

• “One good link from a big news site can be more impactful than millions of low-quality links” - John Mueller

Clearly, we’re already building a solid case for how a diverse, authoritative backlink portfolio could help a brand drive its site authority, trust, and organic search rankings. But how can you consistently earn media coverage and avoid spammy link networks?

Ten years ago, I presented viral marketing case studies at MozCon, and while I agree viral marketing isn’t as easy as it used to be in a more saturated industry, I disagree that this kind of ‘earned media’ isn’t valuable to SEO. In my clients' experience, if “Content is King” then “Digital PR is Queen,” and when executed perfectly, KPIs across SEO, Digital PR, Social, and Sales will all soar.

How to earn high-authority links that drive rankings

When I first built Fractl’s Digital PR team, I created a resource for tracking all the publisher feedback we received, which we still utilize today to continuously analyze and refine our processes for earned media. I also spent hundreds of hours interviewing editors and conducting digital PR research to learn: How can we be more effective at creating newsworthy content that breaks through the noise of your inbox?

As content marketing and digital PR go mainstream and more amateurs enter the market, the findings from my research are more important than ever for establishing our industry’s value to publishers versus eroding it with low-quality research and spammed pitches. Here are the four most important lessons I’ve learned over the last decade that will help you execute newsworthy research that publishers love to link to.

1. Your success relies on your ability to educate your client on how to create truly newsworthy research

When it comes to content marketing and digital PR, the most successful teams walk a thin line between creating newsworthy content that writers actuallylove to cover versus a campaign that will be perceived as sponsored content that will be routed to advertorial for a $100k budget and a minimized link value.

If you want to earn high-authority links, you need to focus on creating content that publishers will perceive as newsworthy: research that is relevant to their readership or the mass consumer, is emotionally compelling and often surprising, is generally tangentially related to your industry and product vs. advertorial, and is educational, or better yet, actionable.

If you’re producing truly newsworthy research, then your pitches will routinely elicit positive responses from writers similar to the ones we receive each week:

For example, imagine you’re a HR management tool, Paychex. You have a traditional PR team that’s pushing your product releases and providing executive interviews to select writers who cover brands in that fashion, so your goal in digital PR is to reach new and engaged readers. What topics are tangentially relevant to your brand that the broader consumer would care about, that you could provide research on, and which high-authority publishers would value?

Content marketing campaigns can take many forms and generally comes down to your budget and talent across data journalism, design, editorial, and PR. Over the last eight years, some of our most link-worthy Paychex research has explored:

• Analyzing the rise of polywork

• Job search red flags

• Employer transparency

• Remote HR issues

• Mental health at work

• Employee discrimination

• Team morale before & after COVID-19

• Taking flex-schedules into the future

• Remote employee benefits

• Build a retirement fund

• Retirees rejoining the workforce

• The onboarding crisis

Our campaign Employee Regret After the Great Resignation is an excellent example of how brands can add value in a breaking news cycle by producing research and providing commentary on trending stories relevant to their niche. This campaign earned hundreds of pickups, with a small sample of high-authority links and brand coverage from:

1. Business Insider

2. Fortune

3. Society for Human Resources Management (SHRM)

4. Computer World

5. HR Morning

6. Refinery 29

7. Clever Girl Finance

8. Fox Business

9. Harper’s

10. Huffington Post

11. Morehouse.edu

12. Her Money

13. The Guardian

14. Yahoo

15. iHeart Radio

Ultimately, you should always vet your ideas by asking, “Is this something interesting that I would read, or that I could see myself sharing with a friend?” After all, the best content marketing case studies are legitimately “cool pieces of content.”

2. Level up your research by adding actionable quotes from clients or industry experts

Once you understand the foundational principles for creating newsworthy research for your brand, the next most valuable thing you can do is to make it actionable. The #1 piece of feedback we’ve received across all of our campaigns has been: “Can I interview your client to go along with my story?”

While research can be interesting and valuable, it often lacks the “actionable” hook that writers know their audience needs. To solve this, writers may send a short Q&A for our client based on the broader theme or takeaways from our research, or they’ll request to hop on a quick call with our data journalists to answer more open-ended questions to expand on our methodology and findings. Here are some examples of requests we’ve received from writers when pitching our campaigns:

“I actually would love to learn more about this. Is someone available to speak with me this week or next?” - CNN

“After speaking with my editor I can confirm interest in moving forward with a story about the four-day work-week, and whether or not it is an inevitability, based on this data. If possible I'm hoping to connect with a spokesperson at some point next week.” - Fast Company

“I am interested in covering this study. I would typically ask some HR analysts at research firms for their input, but I’m certainly interested in what Paychex has to say on the issues of better onboarding processes. That would certainly add color to any article.” - Computer World

Generally, it’s most effective for your digital PR team to field the writer's Q&A directly since clients are often tied up with their own objectives, and writers expect a near real-time response to secure coverage. In these instances, we typically only comment on our research versus speaking to a broader theme on behalf of our client.

Ideally, instead of being reactive to these requests, you’d solicit a dedicated client PR stakeholder during onboarding and make it clear you need them to commit to a same-day response on high-authority publisher interview requests that are more brand-specific. You would then elicit quotes from this stakeholder during the final draft review stage of any campaign, so your PR team can proactively weave these valuable assets into their pitch.

These interview opportunities can be very exciting to client executives who are eager to build their individual authority and thought leadership in their industry. For example:

Client Coverage on CNET:

Client Coverage on Kiplinger:

Client Coverage on USA Today:

Interview opportunities go a long way in helping your brand provide value to each publisher’s specific audience, so always evaluate how to go the extra mile to deliver actionable advice along with your pitch. In certain circumstances, you might even need to contact external sources, such as nonprofit organizations, who can provide knowledgeable and unbiased opinions in cases where your client isn’t the expert. A great example of this is a female trucker research we produced for a surety bond client, where nearly every editor requested an interview with an actual female trucker. A quick Google search led me to the ‘Women in Trucking’ association, whose board members were more than happy to lend their expertise along with our research:

This on-the-fly partnership helped us land over 170 pickups for our client on both mainstream news sites and niche-relevant publishers:

• Business Insider

• CNBC

• The Street

• NBC New York

• Verve Times

• Commercial Carrier Journal

• CDL Life

• Trucker News

• Supply & Demand Chain

Clearly, the source can come in many forms, but the quotes can be necessary for your success. When in doubt, I always encourage our PR team to include this CTA in the closing paragraph of our pitch: “I’d be happy to offer you an exclusive interview with the CEO, expanding on this research and its implications, if you’re interested”?

3. Always pitch an ‘exclusive’ and preferably password-protect your landing page

While tech publishers are more accustomed to an embargo period on emerging products from Fortune 500 brands, most digital PR teams have the opportunity to provide value in an entirely different way: the ‘exclusive’.

I've done a lot of testing over the last decade leading Fractl’s digital PR department, and I've consistently found that an exclusive, password-protected landing page generally yields the strongest interest from the most authoritative writers. A password strategy ensures publishers perceive your research as ‘breaking news’, which they have ‘the exclusive’ first rights to release. This can be tantalizing in the editorial world, where pay is often correlated to pageviews and engagement, and breaking news can represent the lion’s share of a site’s engagement.

Whereas an embargo sets an industry-wide deadline for writers to adhere to, an exclusive allows the writer to be the architect of a unique breaking story that doesn’t have to be crammed into their editorial calendar based on an external deadline. It’s also generally more engaging to write a unique story instead of racing a dozen other editors to write the punchiest headline on the same embargoed facts.

Lastly, an exclusive makes a writer feel special since you've hand-selected that person instead of using a poorly targeted mass blast approach, which is far too prevalent in the PR industry. In fact, the ‘spray and pray’ tactic will often leave you in an agency-wide ban folder if you’re targeting isn’t on point. I’ve heard about this very real danger in writer interviews I’ve conducted, and Michael Smart attests to this same jaw-dropper in his recent PR newsletter:

In the dawn of artificial intelligence (AI), your time spent investing in meaningful relationships with relevant writers in your industry will be critical to your success.

4. Investing in relationship building by personalizing your pitch vs the ‘spray and pray' approach

With newsjacking or reactive PR, it’s essential to quickly scale your pitching efforts to provide value in a rapidly evolving breaking news cycle. However, when you’re pitching more evergreen research or working in-house or for a select number of clients, it’s far more important to build a meaningful relationship with a writer by taking a moment to connect with them on a personal level.

These are the primary data points I seek out when first attempting to personalize my pitch:

• What does their author bio say about their personal interests?

• Where do they live?

• Where did they go to school?

• Do they have any kids or pets?

• Have they celebrated any major milestones recently?

• What topics matter to them based on what they post and engage with on social media?

• What is their tone like in their writing, and how can I match that in my pitch?

While a few people may gasp at this in-depth personal research, stating, 'I don't want to be perceived as a stalker,' I have hundreds of receipts where writers praise our team for taking the time to personalize a pitch:

I often find that if a writer is ‘putting it out there’ they generally appreciate you taking the time to research those facts and connect with them personally on it when relevant. Need inspiration for how to personalize your pitch? Check out some of the writer responses from our personalized subject lines and intros:

Writer Responses to Fractl Pitches:

• I appreciate you checking out my Twitter.

• LOL hair trauma! So much of it!

• I am a huge sucker for dog photos.

• It’s a pleasure to (virtually!) meet another habitual cleaner!

• Hahaha, love it! 80s songs are the best!

• Ah yes, truly addicted to Love Island. So here for the drama!

• So glad you noticed the skyline and got a little hit of nostalgia!

• Always happy to meet another Ravenclaw meets Slytherin!

• Always good to know there are other eyeliner-loving, cheese-eating gals out there!

• Glad I'm not the only dessert fan. ;)

• Nice, I'm headed back to Michigan for the first time since leaving.

• Thank you. You sound like a great mom!

• I'm sure you can do a marathon, too! It's all about prepping for it!

• I'm always glad to hear from another skee ball fan!

• I strongly agree, it took me a while to not regret my college choices!

• Thanks for your kind words… I was born with a ton of energy!

• I appreciate your affinity for Baby Yoda.

• I, too, am pretty big on Scotch.

• *laughs* Naturally, one can only do so much sassmouthin’.

By differentiating your pitch with personal connections for that individual writer, you’re also quickly demonstrating that you likely did in-depth research to ensure you’re pitching something relevant to this writer that they would value and avoiding journalist pet peeves.

In practice, a well-personalized pitch can look like this:

And the Huffington Post writer’s response says it all:

The KPIs of digital PR and earned media

When executed exceptionally well, this style of PR research can consistently earn high-authority links that drive trust signals and organic search rankings, which can offer a higher ROI and more long-term value than paid channels that require the faucet to constantly be ‘on’ to deliver value. Beyond SEO metrics, this strategy also creates a platform for industry thought leadership, exposes new customers to your product, drives consumer engagement, and produces content that can be repurposed to provide cross-channel value across your social media marketing (SMM), pay-per-click (PPC), and email marketing strategies and throughout your buyer’s journey.

Any SEO professional that’s not a snake oil salesman will tell you that link-building alone is not a silver bullet for organic search rankings. The most effective content marketing and digital PR teams deliver a comprehensive organic search strategy, where they’re focusing on both on-page and off-page strategies to drive organic search growth:

While the increasing lack of attribution for organic search will forever be a struggle, these are the KPIs our clients use to evaluate our work, which we solicit at the start of each engagement so we can report on the KPIs that matter to each of our clients:

1. Imagine we are at the end of our statement of work (SOW) together. What does success look like to you?

   1. “As many do-follow backlinks from top tier domains as we can get, resulting in an overall increase in website keyword rankings and traffic growth.”

   2. “High quality/quantity links, great content/studies, and rankings.”

   3. “Acquiring high authority links at a velocity that will allow us to reverse the organic traffic trend we’re currently seeing and get closer to early 2021 levels.”

   4. “A high number of top authority placements across all of our campaigns. We want to be able to show notable growth in our backlink portfolio.”

   5. “Minimum success threshold is 100 linking domains across the five campaigns, comprising a mix of authority and follow/nofollow. Strong success is 200+ linking domains and meaningful referral traffic from those links.”

Most of our clients are founders, SEO directors, marketing directors, or PR managers who are aligned on these same goals, now more than I’ve seen in the last ten years of running Fractl. What’s enabled us to remain a clutch industry leader as competition heats up? Our ability to consistently produce content and PR strategies that drive organic search and the bottom line:

Data Storytelling: Skills and Elements — Whiteboard Friday

Join Lazarina in this Whiteboard Friday where she discusses the critical skills and elements involved in data storytelling. Learn about data analysis, and data visualization, as well as how to communicate wins and balance relationships with stakeholders.

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

Video Transcription

Hi there. Today we're going to talk about data storytelling. Throughout history, we humans have used stories to communicate information, to cross boundaries, and to also relate to one another. So today we're going to talk about data storytelling and how that can be used as part of an SEO or a marketing consultant's role.

We're going to talk about the four main components of data storytelling and the skills that you need in order to create beautiful data stories.

Data Science

So the first component of data storytelling is data science. So data science is all about knowing what insights you want to extract from your data, but it's also about the technical skills that you need as a consultant or a marketer in order to extract that data.

So it combines a little bit of data analysis. It combines a little bit of data engineering. But it's all about knowing what data you need in order to tell a good story.

Data Visualization

The second component of data storytelling is data visualization. So data visualization is all about knowing how to visualize the data that you have at hand based on the insights that you want to communicate.

It's also about choosing the visuals that help you communicate the narrative that you want to your stakeholders better. So this means if you have a particular data type, whether it's numeric or text-based, it means choosing the visuals or otherwise the charts, the graphs, or tables that will help you to communicate those insights to your stakeholders better.

The Narrative

The third component is the narrative. So the narrative is all about how do you convey insights to your audience. What is most important here is that you learn how to communicate wins, how to evoke emotions in your stakeholders, how to maybe create some urgency with the stories that you are saying, and also how to communicate the relationships between the projects that you're working on and the outcomes that you are seeing within the data.

What is also very important here is to show the cause and impact relationship between the data points, the projects that you're working on, and what the outcomes of these are.

Relationships

The fourth component, the big circle here that typically people don't really consider in data storytelling is actually the relationships.

So when we talk about relationships, it's all about the relationships that you have with your stakeholders. This is something that typically you will need to work on as you are working with your stakeholders. But what is most important here is to understand your stakeholders. Who are they?

What are their hidden motivations? Who are they reporting in to? Or what is the most important outcome for them for this particular project? It's also very important for you to know before you create a report or any sort of data story what success looks like for that particular person and how you can best bridge the gap between the current performance and their ideal performance through the story that you tell.

So now that we have all of these different skills that you need to know, we can see the three main components of a successful data story, and that is first of all the data. We know that the data should be accurate. It should be reliable. So what is most important, when you are looking at your data, is to understand specifically whether there is any sampling applied, whether this is a reliable data source, whether the data is complete.

So these are the kind of questions that you should be asking yourself whenever you are analyzing the data that you want to present to your client. The second very important component and what we have learned is that you need to have a very compelling narrative. So the narrative is a combination between your ability to bridge the gaps between the data and the projects that you're working on.

But it's also a combination between who you are reporting in to. So depending on who your audience is, your narrative is likely going to change even though you are reporting the same data. The third component is actually the visuals that you are going to use. Whenever you are choosing visuals, always think about whether this is the most appropriate way to present the information that you have to that particular audience, because even though sometimes you might prefer to present to the audience in a certain way, like let's say, for instance, a dashboard, that might not be the ideal vessel for this data and for this narrative for the particular person.

Whenever you are choosing your visuals, it's very important not only to think about the platform where you are storing your reports and how you are building them, but it's also important to think about whether you are choosing the most appropriate graphs and charts in order to help the audience understand quickly what the desired actions after the report should be.

So whenever you are thinking about your data, your narrative, and your visuals, click on the link within the blog post because there will be a checklist there to help you through different questions about how to best organize these three elements when you're building your data story. With all of that, we have covered a lesson for data storytelling components and skills that you need to succeed.

Further resources:

Youtube Video: Telling Stories with Data - What is Data Storytelling and How to Implement as a Consultant

Part 1: Beginner’s Guide to Data Storytelling for Digital Marketing Consultants and Analysts - Elements, skills, and components of action-provoking data stories.

Part 2: Six Practical Ways to Implement Data Storytelling in Your Consulting - Actionable examples, tips, and best practices for implementing data storytelling.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Use Google Ads AI & Machine Learning To Run Better Campaigns

Our jobs are changing. Each day, Google Ads relies on a combination of AI & machine learning to manage more of the hands-on work we used to do as campaign managers. This means the future of our work is going to be very different.

We are no longer on the court playing basketball. We are now the coach guiding our team to the finals. Our team, in this case, is Google Ads now. Our job is about guiding the machines and technology and ensuring we are headed in the right direction. If we are not headed in the right direction, we are going to be off course and won’t be successful.

For people who loved pushing buttons and getting their hands dirty in the ad account, this transformation and seismic shift is going to be very hard on you. However, you can harness and strengthen your other skills and make your future very bright. Even brand owners can leverage what they know about their business to be successful with Google ads today.

The key to success today is about prioritizing your ecommerce data and the inputs you provide Google Ads. Google Ads, and all ad platforms, work off data inside your ad account, and the data you provide them. The better the data you provide, the more likely you are to be successful and bring in profitable revenue for your business.

Google Ads does not care about data in your ad account from last year or 6 months ago. The data you have from the previous 30 days is what is key. This means you always need to ensure you are maintaining high quality data signals and make sure you are headed in the right direction.

I will cover 5 ways to prioritize your e-commerce data and give the machines what they want. Are you ready to take your data to the next level?

Conversion Data

Data is worth its weight in gold. However, not all conversion data is created equal. We have seen brands use page views, add to cart, and even button clicks as conversion goals. However, some brands may find a unique use case to look at these metrics. They should not be your primary conversion goal when managing campaigns in Google.

Your primary conversion goal in Google Ads is what Google’s AI technology is going to optimize towards in your ad account. Suppose you set your primary conversion goal as someone buying a product on your site. That means Google will then look at which customers convert on your site and try to show your advertising to people who are more likely to convert. Google’s AI tech looks at everyone searching on Google and tries to match your site to the best people possible. All of this happens in a split second in the background when someone makes a search.

This is why you want to focus on purchases as your primary conversion goal and ensure the data for this conversion goal is accurate. You also want to make sure that you have dynamic revenue being pulled into Google Ads. We have seen ad accounts where someone set up a static conversion value, which is problematic for providing good-quality data. If the static conversion value was set to $100, but some people make a purchase worth $50, and others make a purchase worth $200, then we won’t be giving Google correct conversion values and the correct data around which people buy what products.

Every time you shop online, ad platforms track what you buy, from where, and how much you spend. That way, they can help understand what you are into and try to accurately help serve ads that relate to products you might be into in the future.

Having the wrong conversion data can set you back weeks or even months because you have to start collecting the right data from scratch. If you are running Google Ads, I highly recommend using Google Ads conversion tracking tag, as well as setting up enhanced conversions. Once Google removes all cookies from the Chrome browser, enhanced conversion tracking will be important in continuing to feed conversion data to Google Ads.

First-party Data

First-party data and conversion data go together like grilled seafood and a glass of freshly squeezed juice. It’s a pairing that was made for each out. You just need to know how you can harness this data for Google ads.

What is first-party data? This is the data you have collected about your customers and anyone who has come to your site or purchased from your e-commerce business over the years. How much first-party data each company has will be different, but every company has it.

Google takes your first-party data and wraps it inside a feature called Customer Match. There are many types of customer data, but the most basic kind of data someone would use is our email address. Just make sure you format your data, and Google will gladly take it.

However, you can also use first names, last names, phone numbers, and country of residence. You can also include someone’s address, but you have to include the following information, or Google won’t count the address: country code, postal/zip code, hashed first name, and last name. You can even add conversion values from purchases people made.

The reason you want to provide more than an email address is so Google can match that customer and their data to the data Google already has about that person. The more Google knows about your customers, the better job their AI technology can make sure you rank for the right searches and help you get more customers who match the people already buying from you.

If you are not uploading and using your first-party customer data when running campaigns across Google and other ad platforms. Then you are missing out on the opportunity to provide some of the highest quality data your ecommerce store has access to.

When it comes to your customer’s data and taking it from one platform to another, even if that platform is an internal one at your company, you want to ensure that your customer data is kept safe and encrypted whenever possible. This means being GDPR compliant in Europe, and you have The California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) in California, which other USA states are looking at adopting and or implementing in various jurisdictions.

Google Product Images

We live in a visual world. I know it. Google knows it. Google’s Performance Max and standard shopping campaigns are based on the visuals of your products. However, many brands are sleeping on a great way to leverage this data. Yes, your product images are data signals in the eyes of Google.

Many people don’t always realize that Google scans your product images using their AI technology. This allows Google to look at your shopping feed and try to understand what your products and stock-keeping units (SKUs) are about.

Suppose you sell a pair of black Adidas shoes and forget to include the color black in your shopping feed. Google is going to try and rank you for this search involving black shoes based on your images.

What does this mean for your e-commerce business? Beyond using the image attribute in your shopping feed. You should always use the additional image attribute and ensure you show off your product from different angles as one example. You can also do the following:

1. Include product staging that shows your product in use

2. Highlight parts of your product without showing the entire product

3. If your product is part of a bundle, then you can show parts of a bundle instead of showing all products in the bundle

Having high quality-images that show off your product and the different use cases for your product means you can feed Google more data that they can use to help you rank in SERPs. If you want to take things up a notch, start adding video to your product pages.

Google Product Titles & Descriptions

Your shopping feed is not a one-and-done task. Think of your shopping feed as an organic matter that should be updated and changed as it makes sense for the business. The big reason is that people change, and how we search changes over time. You want to ensure your shopping feed stays up-to-date with those changes. The more data in your shopping feed that you can provide to Google, the easier time Google’s AI is going to have to try to understand what you sell, and match your products to the right searches people are making on Google.

Let's say you sell a product that some people buy for a holiday in your country. Maybe not everyone in your country thinks about buying your product during this holiday season. One thing you should be doing is updating your product title and product description for the products people would buy during the holiday season.

For example, people typically buy certain products from your inventory for Mother’s Day. You can update the shopping feed to capture the traffic and conversions for searches around products to buy for Mother’s Day, you’ll be ahead of the curve. Additionally, Google now knows more about your product and the type of searches you should appear for. Google’s technology is sadly not a mind reader, yet… so we need to make sure we feed all the data points we can.

This seems like a small opportunity, but when you leverage all of these real-time moments across a calendar year, you start to pick up traffic and conversions you were not getting before. This also means you have more customers to market to during Q4 and the holy trinity that is Black Friday, Christmas, and the holiday season in Q4.

From experience, I can tell you that most people don’t work on building a proper custom shopping feed. Let alone updating it throughout the year for a brand. If you are willing to do the work others won’t, you can come out ahead and win.

Google Shopping Feed

We discussed product images, titles, and descriptions, which are all essential attributes for your shopping feed. However, you don’t want to stop there. This is just the beginning and not the end of building out a shopping feed that will help you win against competitors.

Depending on what you sell on your site. There are different attributes you can fill out in your shopping feed. I would look at filling out these attributes as they are the basic ones that every brand needs to do:

• Brand

• SKU ID

• Product Title

• Product Description

• Link

• Image Link

• Additional Image Link

• Price

• Availability

• Global Trade Item Number (GTIN)

• Manufacturer Part Number (MPN)

• Condition

• Google Product Category

If you want to give Google even more data, then the following attributes are what you should fill out and do the work everyone else won’t do to help scale your business. These are optional attributes, but most brands don’t fill them out and then miss out on search traffic and conversions.

• Age Group

• Gender

• Color

• Pattern

• Material

• Custom Labels 0 - 4

• Product Details

• Product Highlights

• Product Type

• Size System & Type

You can find more information about each shopping feed attribute above in Google’s own product data specification, which is a treasure trove of information to help you build the best shopping feed possible. Remember, each attribute is another data point you can feed Google’s AI technology and help them understand what you sell and what type of searches and customers you want to rank for.

Filling out the shopping feed attributes isn’t enough. You want to tailor your shopping feed based on how your customers search for your products and the intent behind their search. Similar to writing a best selling novel, putting words down on page doesn’t mean it’s a best seller. In both cases, you need to put in the work to make it a winner.

Google Merchant Center - automatic improvements

Automatic update is a set of features and settings within your Google Merchant Center account that lets you use Google’s technology to ensure your shopping feed data is as up-to-date as possible. Fair warning, this technology is not perfect, and you should always double-check what the update in your shopping feed looks like after Google is done. Sometimes they get it wrong.

Even though you can use automatic improvements for shopping feed attributes like price, condition, and availability, the one most brands should focus on is image improvements. That way, your brand can put its best foot forward when ranking in the SERPs. Google is not a fan of promotional overlays, text, or logos on images and anything that takes away from your product being front and center.

You can see which images have had promotional overlays removed by checking the warnings in the diagnostics section in your Google Merchant Center account. Look for the title ‘Improved image quality’ in the ‘Issue’ column of the table. On the product detail pages of affected products, you can see the improved and originally uploaded images. If you don’t like the improved image, you can also upload a new image to use in your shopping feed.

Ensuring your shopping feed is updated and stays current with your site data is essential to make sure Google is happy with your brand.

Conclusion

These are just a few of the ways you can use your e-commerce data and help Google Ads run better campaigns:

• Feeding Google high-quality conversion data

• Uploading first-party data to Google Ads to drive better results

• Continuously update your product title & description based on how customer search

• Making sure your product Images tell a story

• Building a custom shopping feed for your brand

• Even setting up your Google Merchant Center account plays a role

Google will take all your data points above and run it through their AI technology, which is going to help them find you even more customers who look like your best customer type. For Google’s AI technology to do this work, you need to make sure you feed the machines high-quality data. Data today is truly worth its weight in gold as all AI technology uses the data they have access to in your ad account to help make better decisions.

If this sounds like a lot of work, you are right. This means you need to have the right person in the driver’s seat to ensure you are headed in the right direction. Putting the wrong person or agency in that seat means you can set your brand back for months (or even years). Making up for that lost time, money, and business growth is not easy.

Get the right person or agency in charge of your financial success by asking the right questions and assessing people based on the qualities that matter when running paid advertising today. Luckily you can catch my MozCon talk: ‘Hiring The “Perfect” Agency: How To Avoid Getting Burned’ to cover this very topic.

There are more ad agencies and freelancers offering services today than in 2019. Hiring is a skill, and we are going to give you the skills during my talk to hire that next agency. This talk is will cover interviewing, pricing, and onboarding with an agency to make your experience as a brand the best one possible. Plus, I have a few other cool topics I will cover… but you have to be at MozCon August 7th & 8th, 2023 to hear everything.

Duane will be speaking at MozCon 2023 this August in Seattle! Join us for inspiring sessions with our incredible lineup of speakers.

We hope you're as excited as we are for August 7th and 8th to hurry up and get here. And again, if you haven't grabbed your ticket yet and need help making a case we have a handy template to convince your boss!

Register for MozCon

6 Ways ChatGPT Can Improve Your SEO

Most of the discourse surrounding the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on SEO has been about content creation. This makes perfect sense. Large language models (LLMs) have fundamentally changed the speed at which businesses and individuals can produce blog posts, marketing copy, social media posts and much more.

I am not the first to provide the caveat that while AI tools can help you speed up your writing process, they can also open up your site to a variety of SEO risks including duplicate content, violations of Google’s E-E-A-T Guidelines, generally robotic copywriting that is devoid of brand voice and personality, and a host of other issues.

AI content generation is certainly something that can help SEOs and businesses in moderation. Google itself has essentially okayed the use of AI, as long as it is with intent to produce “helpful content”. This can be easier said than done.

In this article, I want to highlight some ways that free AI tools like ChatGPT can help SEO’s with all sorts of other tasks, other than creating content. There are a wide range of things that SEOs do everyday that can significantly be sped up or even completely done by free AI tools like ChatGPT. These can range from On-Page SEO optimizations to Technical SEO projects.

Let’s get into it.

1. Create Schema markup

Perhaps the most straightforward way in which tools like ChatGPT can simplify our work as SEOs is by writing schema markup for us. I will keep this section short, as the process in itself is fairly straightforward.

How to Use AI to Create Schema Markup

1. Write a ChatGPT prompt that describes the schema you want to create, and for which page.

2. QA the results and run them through a Schema validating tool.

3. Implement the schema. Submit your URL to Google.

4. That’s it!

Remember, ChatGPT typically will not visit a URL for you, so you will need to paste the entire text of your page in the prompt.

The response is a block of schema code that you can paste into a validator. Note that the response was not 100% perfect, hence the need to QA. ChatGPT missed the name of the publisher organization. Before dropping this code onto the published page in our CMS, I would change the name of the organization from “Example” to “Moz.”

2. Keyword clustering (sample python code)

Another time-saving SEO task that you can jumpstart with ChatGPT is the semantic grouping and categorization of keywords. This can be done within the user interface (UI) of GPT, or through a python script that utilizes OpenAI’s API.

Using the UI, I have had success grouping around 100 keywords at a time. The output will typically be an indented, bulleted list of all your terms categorized into buckets.

A python script gives you more flexibility to increase your number of max tokens and allow you to work with longer lists of keywords.

Below is an extremely simple python script that prompts OpenAI to come up with categories for a list of keywords.

import openai


# Set up OpenAI API key and model ID
openai.api_key = "YOUR_API_KEY"
model_id = "text-davinci-003"


# Define the prompt to use with the OpenAI API
prompt = """
classify the following keywords into semantically related groups:
apple
london
banana
train
car
pizza
sicily
pasta
"""


# Use OpenAI's API to generate text based on the prompt
response = openai.Completion.create(
   engine=model_id,
   prompt=prompt,
   max_tokens=1024,
   n=1,
   stop=None,
   temperature=0.7,
)


# Extract the generated text from the response
generated_text = response.choices[0].text


# Print the generated text to the console
print(generated_text)

The output will look like something like this. You can use this output to modify groupings in your keyword tracking tool of choice, such as Moz Pro. If you are familiar with using Pandas, you can turn the generated_text output into a dataframe for an easy CSV export.

Fruits: Apple, Banana
Cities: London, Sicily
Transportation: Train, Car
Food: Pizza, Pasta

3. Generate meta descriptions

ChatGPT is exceedingly good at taking large amounts of text input and summarizing it. What better way for SEOs to utilize AI’s summarization capabilities than generating meta descriptions? Since meta descriptions are inherently summaries of pages, natural language processing (NLP) models do a good job of extracting the main ideas from multiple paragraphs of text and condensing them into one.

When feeding ChatGPT with text to summarize, you can also include a few keywords that you want it to include in its output. This is another instance where you will need outside data from a tool such as Moz Keyword Explorer to help you find focus keywords. Once you have an idea of the main keyword(s) of the page you want to optimize, you can include those in your meta description prompt. That prompt may look something like this:

“

Summarize the following text in 60 words, and include the following keywords: seo, content strategy
[full page text]

”

In my experience, however, ChatGPT is not very good at limiting its responses to a certain word or character length. You may get something like this, and need to change or remove a few sentences.

Still, this simple task could potentially have saved you 10–15 minutes of working with a blank page (or CMS field) and given you a starting point for your meta description.

4. Create FAQs (and tag them with schema)

Another task that leverages ChatGPT’s summarization capabilities is the creation of frequently asked questions (FAQs).

Prompt GPT to create FAQs for a section of page copy that you paste into the tool, and AI will generate some sample FAQs for you. The responses it gives tends to be brief, which is ideal for tagging them with FAQ schema.

After you’ve reviewed and edited the FAQ suggestions that ChatGPT provides, circle back to tip #1 and paste them back into ChatGPT to generate FAQ schema that you can add to your page.

5. Topical research

While OpenAI’s free ChatGPT tool does not provide Keyword Volume or other important SEO keyword metrics, it can still be an effective engine for generating content ideas related to a given keyword.

When paired with a tool like Moz Keyword Explorer, the results can be powerful.

Begin the process as you would normally approach keyword research. Identify a list of keywords that you want to include in your page. Then, ask ChatGPT to create topic ideas related to these terms.

I find that prompting the tool for around 50 topics gives you a good sample of page ideas without repetition.

The results are not all going to be perfect titles for you to copy and paste into your CMS without reviewing them, but they can rapidly (and I mean RAPIDLY) give you a sense of direction for your editorial calendar, content marketing strategy or even social media posts. Each of the concepts identified here about SEO, focusing on the specified keywords, has the makings of a well-intentioned blog post topic.

6. SEO content briefs

Once you have done your keyword research and compiled terms that you would like to include into a new page on your website, try asking ChatGPT to use them to create a page outline for you, along with a possible page title.

This can serve as a great jumping-off-point for your editorial team (or you) to work with to write your full article. An outline or content brief for a page about keyword research may look something like this:

As is a recurring theme with the use of AI for SEO, the results are not perfect, but they can generate ideas for you to take and run with. For example, you may realize that this outline does not get into the concepts of Search Volume or Keyword Difficulty, which you wanted to address on your page. You can tweak your prompt to specify a few additional keywords that you’d like to include, or manually edit ChatGPT’s output to suit your needs.

My guess is as good as any regarding the direction AI will steer the digital marketing industry, and more specifically SEO. What I do know is that right now, there are so many ways in which AI can make tedious aspects of my job less time consuming, so I can focus my attention on more strategic and big-picture problems. Hopefully this list helps you do the same.

How SEOs and UX Designers Can Work Better Together — Whiteboard Friday

This is the final installment of the three-part series of Whiteboard Fridays with Helen Pollitt on how to work better with folks within your company.

There are a lot of similarities between SEOs and UX designers, and we often have the same goals. How can we work to understand more of the UX designers' priorities and help to communicate our priorities to them? Learn all about how SEOs and UX designers can work better together in this edition of Whiteboard Friday.

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

Video Transcription

Hi, I'm Helen, head of SEO at Car & Classic, and today we are looking at how SEOs and UX designers can work better together. Now, UX designers are a lot like SEOs. No one in the office quite understands their specialism. No one really knows whether they should be in the engineering department, the product team, the marketing team, and they too have probably given up trying to explain their jobs to their family members.

So if there's a lot of similarities between SEO and UX designers, why do we need to have a Whiteboard Friday on how to work better with them? Well, on first blush, actually there's a lot of places that SEO and UX actually overlaps, but oftentimes we're kind of in disagreement about how things should progress. You have spent days looking at the best links to have on your top menu navigation, you have carefully sculpted the pages that should be linked to from that great source of links, and then the UX designer comes to the meeting and asks to cut their menu in half.

You're there terrified about your internal link equity, and they're there terrified that none of the users can ever find the stuff that they're looking for on your website. But actually, oftentimes we have the same end goal. We want visitors to get to the website and be able to access the pages and the products and the stuff that's on that site well and enjoy the process of being there.

So actually, our end goals are fairly similar. So how can we work to understand more of the UX designers' priorities and help to communicate our priorities to them?

Understand UX and design principles

Well, first off, I would suggest we need to start by understanding some UX and design principles. Get familiar with things like visual hierarchy and context and understand what it is that UX designers are looking to do when they are making changes to the website.

If you do that and upskill yourself, then you are going to find you understand where they're coming from a lot more, and that's going to help you to communicate the reasons why something could be a great idea from an SEO perspective and then find the compromises when it's not going to be. Also, talk to them, get their wish lists of things that they want to see happen on the website. Now, this is easier to do if you work in-house because you can just go and talk to your UX designers.

If you work freelance or for an agency, it's a bit harder to do. But if you go and ask your client if you can spend a day with their UX design team, you're probably going to win a lot of favors from them, and it could be a day out of the office, so win-win. But when you've got an idea of what their wish list is, all the stuff that they would love to see happen to the website, you are better equipped to then tell them about things like issues and problems that there might be.

So for example, if the UX designer says that they want to take your 20,000 product e-commerce store and distill it down to a single web page, you can tell them why that might be an issue, and if it goes ahead, well, at least the redirect mapping will be simple. You also should get yourself involved in the kind of conversations that your UX designers are having. So go to the meetings that they're in.

Get involved in product team decisions, so that you are there when these kind of things are first being suggested and talked about. So if there is anyone talking about the possibility of changing your website and making it into a single web page, you can be there saying, "Actually, that's probably not the best idea," before the plans and things that get set into motion are too far along.

Train your UX team in SEO

Next, you want to look at training your UX team.

So this is really important because you want to make sure that the UX team understands SEO principles as well as you understanding UX principles. So talk about things like navigation elements. Why are they important to SEO? What are the risks associated with them removing things from the navigation? What is link mapping? What is it all about the hierarchy of the website?

Try to explain to them these concepts so they understand why you might be saying no to some of their recommendations, and again, you can try to compromise and find a solution. That goes for links in general. Actually, the way that the UX team might want to implement a link and make it work could be great for users, it might look great, but it could have some underlying SEO issues with it. So talk about what SEO needs from links, what makes a link SEO friendly and allows the bots to crawl it, so that the UX team can make decisions and recommendations based on that data.

Talk to them about things like Core Web Vitals and actually the overlap between what we're looking for from an SEO perspective and actually what they want for users, because a lot of the time that's quite aligned. So for example, explain how having a banner load in after the rest of the page is loaded could be a problem for cumulative layout shift, and tell them that scrolling banners are always a bad idea, not necessarily because they're any worse from an SEO perspective, but they just look terrible, and I'd like them to just stop if they could.

Talk to them about things like copy and why we do need copy on a page. We don't need copy on every page because not every page is important from an SEO perspective, but for those that are, we do need to have copy. But that doesn't mean we have to have reams and reams of copy that a user has to scroll through on their mobile before they actually get to the list of products that you sell. That there are ways that we can implement copy on a page that's a lot more friendly for users.

So we can look at things like tabs or concertinas, things that reveal the copy when an interaction is made. That means that users aren't having to look at all of the history of somebody's recipe and why it was that they decided to bake an apple crumble because of their grandmother and how their grandmother loved apples and that it fell from an apple tree, and you know all the kind of good stuff that you always have to scroll through when you're just trying to find a simple recipe on these recipe websites.

You don't have to do that in order for SEO to be considered for that page. You can look at things like teaching them about the risks of them making a change to a website. So yes, okay, maybe we do want to redesign the nav. But what do we need to do as SEOs? What do we need to understand before we can say, "Yeah, let's do it"? So talk to them about the risks involved with them making simple changes.

For them, they might think that just changing the wording on a button won't have any impact, but for us, we know that anchor text does have some importance. So how can we educate our UX designers so they understand that when they're making changes, some of them will need to be run past the SEO team first? Finally, why are we always going on about designing things mobile first? Explain that to your team so they understand why you really need to see how things are going to look on a mobile design as well as a desktop, because actually we need to see if there's parity between the two.

We need to see whether the mobile version of the website has everything that it needs for Google to understand the context and the relevancy of the page. That's really important, but it's not always something that the UX team have had communicated to them. So make sure you do that.

Create guidelines for your UX team

Next, try to create some guidelines for your UX team. So rather than continually telling them all these things, perhaps you can actually document it so they have a source to go back to.

Look at how they manage to document their own internal design decisions. So if they have a way of doing things, how do they document it? Is it in a central workspace? Or do they have some guidelines that they actually send out to every member of the team? How do they document them? See if you can start copying that method and making sure your UX designers are familiar with the ways that you need things to happen on the website for SEO reasons.

Also, maybe you can input on their design system because most websites will have a set way of doing things from a design perspective, and some of those might have some SEO impacts, things like links and buttons and that kind of stuff. So can you actually have a say in the design system that's been created for the website?

Get buy-in from your UX designers

Lastly, you want to get buy-in from your UX designers so that they enjoy working with you and they look forward to hearing your recommendations and thoughts, and they don't constantly see you as a source of no.

So show them where SEO helps UX. So things like usability, load speed, how actually if a search engine is able to get through your website, well, it probably means a user is able to get through the web website well as well. So you're helping the UX end goal by making sure that SEO is incorporated into those kind of decisions. Talk to them about the importance of conversion rate for SEO.

That actually, we don't just want to see traffic land on a web page and we don't care where it goes after that. We are just as concerned about how users use a website as they are. We want to make sure that they are able to complete the goals on the website, that they can buy the product, that they can find the information, because that's essentially why we've driven traffic to that page in the first place. So do try and reinforce that you and your UX team have got very similar goals.

Finally, give them access to data and try and share some of the data that they have as well, because they will be monitoring things. They'll be looking at stuff that we just don't have the software to monitor. So can you share data with each other that helps both sides understand a little bit more about what's going on? Thank you so much for listening.

I'm going to go off and try to find a way of explaining my job to my family members, and hopefully I can tell that to the UX team as well.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com