How to Make AI Your Writing Sidekick for Content Marketing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has blown up like a supernova. Conversations about AI are happening everywhere. As you browse LinkedIn, read your favorite SEO blog, or tune into a marketing podcast, you will see discussions about AI.

Some marketers see AI as a threat. But that doesn’t have to be the case. You can learn how to work with AI. Building AI into your processes will future-proof your marketing skills if AI takes over the world. As a freelance copywriter and content marketer, I’ve seen ‘I, Robot,’ and I’m not taking any chances.

AI can be your marketing sidekick. You can use AI to support your writing process, be a fresh pair of eyes for proofreading, or act as a second brain. This makes it a powerful companion for content marketing.

AI won’t replace content marketers (yet)

AI opens up a universe of opportunities. As new AI tools emerge every day, so do new ways of using AI in your business and everyday life. You can use AI to do almost anything.

But that doesn’t mean AI will replace content marketers, SEOs, or writers — or, at least, won’t replace them yet.

AI has a lot of potential. But it also has limitations. Before using AI for content marketing, it’s helpful to get to grips with the constraints of AI.

It isn’t sentient

AI doesn’t have a brain like you or I do. It can’t think or feel.

AI’s knowledge is based solely on logic. In contrast, our knowledge is based on a mix of reason and emotion. Our experiences and feelings shape how we see things. But AI doesn’t have that ability.

AI might feign human emotion, but it’s merely an illusion. AI’s emotion is curated. AI can only perceive things based on the information it is fed.

You can’t rely on it to be accurate

Sure, AI is powerful. But it isn’t always accurate. Just like humans, AI sometimes gets things wrong.

When using ChatGPT, you will see a disclaimer stating, “ChatGPT may produce inaccurate information about people, places, or facts.” While AI tools do their best to provide factually accurate information, they still need a human touch.

If you’re using AI, fact-check the information it gives you. This is particularly important when writing YMYL (Your Money or Your Life) content that has real-world effects on the readers. In these cases, a human touch is crucial for ensuring E-E-A-T (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness) runs through your content. AI cannot replicate this, running the risk of your content being inaccurate and low quality.

The output is limited by the input

Getting the best possible results from AI depends on feeding it the best possible information.

It’s like asking someone to design you a logo without giving them the exact details about what you want the logo to look like. They might get it right. But it is more likely that they will get it wrong — and you will end up in a back-and-forth ping-pong match of reiterating the design.

You need to tell AI exactly what you want. Otherwise, it’s going to hazard a guess (and likely get it wrong). Be specific in your request — like really specific. Want AI to give you ten content ideas for a blog post on programmatic SEO? Tell it! Want to make sure those results are all about the SaaS industry? Tell it! The more specific your generative AI prompt is, the better the output will be.

The responses can feel canned

You can get AI to write your landing pages, blog articles, and ad copy. But you might not want to.

Remember how I said AI isn’t sentient? And that the output is limited by the input? Well, both of those factors also contribute to the responses feeling somewhat meh.

AI responses can feel canned. They lack the originality and personality you get from a human writer who knows your brand inside and out.

With that said, you can train some AI tools, such as ChatGPT, to produce content that mirrors your brand’s voice, personality, and tone. You can do this by sharing examples of your writing style, providing background information on your company, and feeding it your tone of voice guidelines. But I’ll share more on that later in the article.

Another attribute that limits the creativity of AI outputs is that it doesn’t automatically consider the user journey stage, their current motivations or desires, or the exact words that drive action for them. AI doesn’t know your deeper brand origins or future goals — unless you train it on them.

All that adds up to creating generic content anyone could write. Use AI enough times, and you will notice familiar patterns in the responses. It sounds like AI.

But AI can be a powerful content marketing sidekick

It pays to be aware of the shortfalls of AI before you add it to your content marketing process. As we’ve established, AI isn’t perfect. But it can still be useful.

You can use AI to optimize the research, writing, and editing phases of content marketing.

You might not be able to rely on AI alone. But you can pair it with a human touch to turn it into a powerful content marketing sidekick.

Here are some ways you can use AI to optimize and streamline various aspects of your content marketing process.

How to use AI in the research phase of content marketing

The research phase of a content marketing strategy can be time-consuming. While every company’s strategy is different, the core elements will follow a similar pattern.

At some point during on-site content planning, you will need to find content ideas, conduct keyword research, and create outlines for blog posts. There are a few ways you can use AI to simplify these content marketing research and planning steps.

Use AI to find content ideas

In its most basic form, the content you create for your brand should focus on two things:

• What you do

• Who you do it for

We can get more nuanced than that by layering in factors like goals, campaigns, and user intent. But most content will cover topics that are related to your business (what you do) and of interest to your audience (who you do it for).

You can use AI to develop content ideas for a wide variety of marketing channels — be it social media, newsletters, blogs, or videos. For the examples shared throughout this article, I’ve used ChatGPT.

A simple AI prompt you can use to find content ideas is:

Write a list of 10 [content type] ideas aimed at [audience] who are [problem they are trying to solve/goal they want to achieve]

In this prompt, the content type should relate to the channel you are creating content for, such as a blog. The audience will align with your target audience. The problem or goal should relate to what your brand does.

For a dog training school, the prompt might look like this:

Write a list of 10 blog post ideas aimed at new dog owners who are trying to train their puppy.

If you put this prompt into Chat-GPT, you will be presented with a list of potential blog post ideas such as “puppy separation anxiety: tips and tricks” or “10 essential commands every puppy should know.”

Work through this list to decide if any of those ideas are viable blog posts. Some might be perfect as they are, while others might need fine-tuning to make sure they align with your content marketing strategy.

Create a hub-and-spoke strategy from those content ideas

Drill down further into each idea to create the bones of a hub-and-spoke strategy. For each idea presented, note what the topic is.

For the blog post idea "10 essential commands every puppy should know,” you can confidently assume the focal topic is “puppy training commands.”

There is likely an array of blog posts you can write about puppy training commands, making this a potentially powerful hub topic for your hub-and-spoke strategy. Rather than doing lots of manual research to find suitable spoke blog post ideas, you can use AI to speed up the process.

Use the following AI generative prompt to ask Chat-GPT for spoke content ideas based on the hub topic:

I am writing a series of [content type] for a [business type] aimed at [target audience].

For the hub topic “[hub topic],” create a table of spoke content ideas.

Applying this to the puppy training commands keyword, the prompt would look like this:

I am writing a series of blog posts for a puppy training school aimed at new dog owners.

For the hub topic "puppy training commands," create a table of spoke content ideas.

In response to this prompt, Chat-GPT generates a table of more specific blog post ideas related to the hub topic “puppy training commands.” This will help you spin out a series of valuable content that strengthens your content visibility for this topic.

Use AI for keyword research

Love it or hate it — keyword research is essential to developing on-site content strategies. It tells you what topics people care about, how popular those terms are, and how difficult it might be to rank in SERPs.

Generic AI tools can’t do in-depth keyword research, so you should still use a keyword research tool like Moz’s Keyword Explorer. However AI can help with the early stages of keyword research.

If you’re starting keyword research from scratch, use AI to generate a list of keywords. Take this a step further by asking the AI tool to group those keywords by search intent. This prompt will look something like this:

Create a list of keywords for [business type/topic]. Present the keywords in a table grouped by search intent.

Sticking with our dog training school example, the prompt would be:

Create a list of keywords for a dog training school. Present the keywords in a table grouped by search intent.

You’ll then be presented with a neat table of keywords you might be able to use. The keywords likely won’t be perfect, but it’s a great starting point.

Go through the list and research each keyword in Moz’s keyword research tool to get more data, including metrics such as Difficulty and Monthly Volume. You can then use your keyword research to see which keywords you do (or don’t) want to use and find other viable keywords.

Using AI for keyword research is great for getting the cogs turning, taking you from a blank page to a list of keywords. Grouping by search intent lets you take that rough keyword research one step further, making sure you’re covering various user journey stages.

Use AI to write blog post outlines

Okay, by this point, you should have a bunch of target keywords and blog post ideas. You’re almost ready to start putting pen to paper. But before you write your blog post, you need to plan a first draft.

You can use AI to help you write the first draft of blog post outlines. AI-generated first drafts won’t be groundbreaking. You will need to cast your eyes over it and optimize it with your amazing brand, customer, and market insights and knowledge.

While they aren’t perfect, they give you a good blog post template you can then tweak and improve.

Input this AI prompt to generate blog post outlines:

Write a blog post outline for a blog post titled "[blog post title].”

The main keyword for this blog post is "[main keyword]"

You guessed it, we’re sticking with the puppy training example! Based on the puppy training research we’ve done so far, the AI prompt might look like this:

Write a blog post outline for a blog post titled "10 essential commands every puppy should know.”

The main keyword for this blog post is "puppy commands"

Chat-GPT will then give you a blog post outline split into sections, including the introduction, main content sections, and a conclusion.

As this post focuses on the “10 essential commands,” Chat-GPT has given a listicle-style blog post outline. It has also shared a list of additional resources at the end you might want to reference in the post.

You can then review the outline that Chat-GPT has provided and apply your topic knowledge, adapt based on your experiences, and carry out additional research to improve the outline before you start writing the article.

How to use AI in the writing phase of content marketing

The sidekick powers of AI don't stop when you start writing. When you’re writing content, the process will be predominantly human-led. Your tone of voice matters. As do your personal experiences, opinions, and insights. Those are the things that make your content unique and that AI can’t do very well. So don’t replace your uniqueness with generic AI content.

You can, however, use AI as a sub-writer to assist with the writing phase of content marketing projects.

Use AI to adapt your tone of voice

If you’re writing content and want to make sure it has a particular voice, you can use AI to tweak the tone of your writing. This can help make sure your content aligns with your brand voice and the page intent.

If you’re writing content for a sales landing page, you will want that content to sound more persuasive than an educational blog post. AI can help you adapt your content to make it better suit its intended purpose.

Use AI to adapt your content’s tone of voice by using generative AI prompts such as:

• Make the following text sound more [adjective]

• Improve the following text by using a [tone of voice type] tone of voice

For a sales landing page, these prompts might look like this:

• Make the following text sound more persuasive and encouraging

• Improve the following text by using a persuasive and confident tone of voice

Remember, the output from AI depends on the input. You can improve these prompts by providing more details. You could, for example, ask AI to use metaphors or similes in its version or to use simple vocabulary and short, snappy sentences.

You could even tell it your brand values to make sure those are taken into consideration for tone of voice content.

AI doesn’t always get the tone of voice right. Often, it will exaggerate the voice. Whatever AI provides, you will need to edit manually. But it can be great for finding inspiration and unraveling the thread for words you could use or changes you could make.

I never copy and paste the output given by AI. Instead, I’ll look for words, sentences, or content styles that stand out to me. I’ll then refine my content manually based on any learnings gleaned from the AI version.

Starting the paragraph with the word “Enroll,” for example, encourages action and lets the reader know the intention of the content. This is far more persuasive than the softer, descriptive opening line “In these classes…” used in the original content.

This feature is far from perfect, but it can be useful if you’re experiencing a classic case of writer’s block.

Use AI to generate headlines

The headline is one of the most crucial elements of a blog post. A compelling, well-written headline gets clicks. It drives traffic to your blog post and gets more eyes on your content.

Yet, headlines can be the hardest thing to write. Do a quick Google search, and you will find hundreds of formulas for writing compelling headlines or tools to improve your existing headlines.

When writing headlines, you should account for your target keywords and the intent of the content. If you’re writing an educational blog post that teaches readers how to do something, you will likely use phrases like “how to.”

The only issue is that having an endless list of “how to” articles on your blog starts to look boring and repetitive. You can mix this up by asking AI to generate potential headlines for your blog articles.

Use the following prompt to get AI to generate headlines for your blog posts:

Write a list of 10 potential headlines for a blog post about [blog post topic]. This blog post [brief description of blog post].

Using our puppy training school example, this prompt might look something like this:

Write a list of 10 potential headlines for a blog post about puppy commands. This blog post shares 10 essential commands any new puppy owner should know when training their puppy.

As this example is a listicle, it makes sense that Chat-GPT includes the number in the headline. However, you can see a variety of headlines you could potentially use that sound more compelling than just “10 essential commands every puppy should know.”

The headlines also use power words like “must-know” and “ultimate” to entice readers to click through to the article. Meanwhile, words and phrases like “learn,” “teaching,” and “training 101” let the reader know the article has an educational intent.

These outputs offer a great first draft of some potential headlines. You can then fine-tune these headlines using well-known headline best practices.

This prompt doesn’t have to just be used for blog articles. You can adapt it for YouTube video headlines or email subject lines.

You can also use AI to generate headline formulas that you can use when writing headlines in the future. Do this by using a prompt such as:

Write 10 headline formulas that can be used to write blog post headlines. Display these as a table and make sure they cover a variety of content types such as [types of blog posts you typically share]

As always, you can drill down further into this by asking AI to prepare several headlines for each article type. You can then tweak the formulas and keep these on hand next time you’re writing an article.

Use AI to summarize your writing

Every blog post should end with a conclusion that gives the TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) low down of the article.

Typically, your conclusion should summarize the article by sharing the key takeaways. It should succinctly wrap up the article, leaving a lasting impression on the reader.

You might also want to use the conclusion to encourage readers to take action. This might include prompting them to read related articles, encouraging them to get in touch, or directing them to additional resources.

If you’re using ChatGPT-4, you can input longer content. This makes it great for asking ChatGPT to summarize long-form blog articles. You can also use AI tools that have specifically designed conclusion generation features, such as WriteMe or LongShot.

Use the following AI prompt to get AI to summarize your content:

Summarize the following content and provide the key takeaways. This will be used to write the conclusion for the blog post about [brief description of the blog post]

For our puppy training school example, this prompt will look like this:

Summarize the following content and provide the key takeaways. This will be used to write the conclusion for the blog post about the 10 essential commands any new puppy owner should know when training their puppy.

In this example, I only shared a snippet of a blog post to give you an idea of how this might look.

You can even take this prompt a step further by asking Chat-GPT to provide the key takeaways as a bullet-pointed list.

This quickly transforms a long-form article into a scannable list of key takeaways. You can then use this output to get a quick overview of the blog article so you can easily write your conclusion.

Use AI to write meta-descriptions

While they might only be short, writing high-quality meta descriptions requires skill. The right meta description can be the deciding factor in whether someone clicks through to your website or not.

Luckily, you can use AI to distill your on-page content into a couple of short sentences you can use as a meta description.

You can get ChatGPT to write meta descriptions by using the following AI prompt:

Summarize the following content into a 2 sentence meta-description

The optimal length for a meta description is between 50 to 160 characters. Run the AI-generated output through a word count checker to ensure it’s a suitable length. If not, you can either ask AI to generate a shorter version, or you can edit it manually.

In the above example, ChatGPT generated a meta description that was 195 characters long. As this is slightly longer than desired, I inputted the prompt, “can you make it slightly shorter?”

In response, ChatGPT cut the original output down to 145 characters while maintaining the key takeaways of the article.

How to use AI in the editing phase of content marketing

Before any content sees the light of day, it needs to go through a couple of rounds of revision. These revisions will either be conducted by the original writer or by editors, proofreaders, or content managers.

But reviewing your own content is hard. You’re too close to it. You know it inside out. I like to give myself one day between writing my first draft and proofreading it. This makes sure I’m looking at my content with fresh eyes.

But you don’t have to edit or proofread your content alone. Your AI content writing sidekick can come in useful during the editing phase of content marketing.

Use AI to clarify your writing

If you’re writing about complex topics, your content can easily become overwhelming for the reader. It might be laden with jargon or use niche analogies that only a small subset of people understand. The trouble with this is that complex content runs the risk of alienating your reader.

On the flip side, being too creative with your writing can also have a negative impact. Perhaps you’ve tried to write content that’s witty or overflowing with metaphors to create a vivid emotional reaction. Except it doesn’t quite land how you expected. The meaning and purpose of the content are lost in creativity.

Both scenarios are examples of how being “clever” can negatively affect the impact of your content. As writers, we live by the rule of being “clear over clever.” Yes, being clever is great. It turns heads, captures attention, and shows people you know what you’re talking about. But it should never come at the expense of your writing being clear and easy to understand.

If you’ve written something that you think might be clever rather than clear, you can use AI to clarify your writing.

AI prompts such as “Does this text make sense?” or “Make this text easier to understand” let you check and improve the clarity of your writing.

You can use the AI output to see whether it has understood your content or if the original meaning has been lost. In its response, Chat-GPT will tell you what it interpreted the text as, and it might also provide suggestions for improving your copy. You can then use this information to rewrite your content so it is easier to understand.

Use AI to simplify your writing

I have the habit of being a bit of a waffler when I’m reading. My default writing style is to use all the words. So, when proofreading my content, I sweep my content for long sentences and large blocks of text. I will then highlight these and simplify them.

To speed up this process, you can use AI to simplify content so it’s shorter and more readable.

Some AI prompts you can use to simplify your content are:

• Make the following text shorter and snappier

• Explain [topic] to me like I’m 7 years old

• Make the following text easier to read

If we input a large block of text, you can see how the prompt “make the following text shorter and snappier” produces a simplified version of the original content. You can then comb through your content, making it short and more readable.

Final thoughts — AI can be a powerful content marketing sidekick

AI isn’t perfect, but it can be an invaluable asset for content marketers, acting as a powerful sidekick at every stage of the content creation process.

Guided by well-crafted generative AI prompts, you can optimize your content. From kickstarting content research with keyword research to creating hub-and-spoke content strategies, generating headlines, and clarifying your writing, AI can streamline your content marketing efforts across content research, writing, and editing.

Remember, you can’t rely on AI alone just yet. Your content still needs a human touch if you want it to outperform your competitors — especially when writing for YMYL topics and niches where E-E-A-T is crucial.

For the best results, pair AI’s capabilities with human creativity, experience, and expertise so you can stay ahead in the ever-changing world of content marketing.

Author names: Do They Matter? How to Attribute Content

Few aspects of my job drive me to extreme internal conflict, but the subject of author attribution is one that tears my brain in two.

My writer brain says, “Yes, absolutely! Writers’ names on all that they create! Credit where credit is due!”

My marketer brain is apparently more reserved because I find myself asking myself questions such as:

• Who deserves the credit for this article? The actual writer? The entire team of researchers who helped provide data? And what happens if a totally different writer updates the article later?

• Will the author’s name support this content’s performance, or would it be better received if a more well-known subject matter expert had their name on it?

• Does it need a name at all, or is that just distracting extraneous information?

So, who’s right? Me, or me? (I like the odds on this one.)

Let’s try to get inside Google’s mind to figure this out — first, by reviewing what Google has said on the matter, then by looking at some real search results from Google.

What does Google say about author attribution?

Google has grappled with author attribution for a long time, as evidenced by the birth and gradual death of the Google Authorship experiment that carried on for several years in the early 2010s.

In the end, the folks at Google decided they’d rather use algorithms to try to identify the author of any given piece instead of relying on the oft-forgotten, occasionally misused, rel=”author” tag.

The search giant seems confident that they could do this, as evidenced through comments made by Google leaders such as, “We are not using authorship at all anymore… we are smarter than that.”

But where their confidence really comes through is in their extensive collection of patents. As pointed out by Olaf Kopp, writing for Search Engine Land, there are ample methods by which Google can attempt to identify the author of a piece, including:

• Author vectors: Identifying the unique style of a writer and using that to attribute content.

• Author badges: Using identifying information such as an email address or name to verify authors.

• Agent rank: Assigning content to an agent (an author or a publisher), and using backlinks to, in part, determine the rank.

And there’s more. It’s not known which, or how many, of these are used actively in search algorithms — and if so, how they’re used or how heavily they’re weighted.

So, is that the end of it? Author attribution doesn’t matter because Google “just knows”?

No, that’s way too easy. See, we also have cues from Google pros like John Mueller and Danny Sullivan advising people to strive for highly authoritative content by way of having experts write or proofread content on their area of expertise.

Furthermore, Google’s own Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines include specific instructions on “Finding Who is Responsible for the Website and Who Created the Content on the Page,” and highlights author-related observations for both low-quality and high-quality content.

The Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines are the guidebook that search quality evaluators use to analyze organic Google results to provide feedback on the effectiveness of Google’s algorithm. If low-quality results end up in SERPs, they flag it.

So, why would they need guidance on identifying authors and responsible parties if it doesn’t matter?

The answer: It might just matter.

What do Google’s search results tell us about author attribution?

OK, now we know what Google says about the subject:

• It’s not necessary to name authors in content…

• Because Google already knows who wrote what on the internet…

• But it’s also advisable that content is created or checked by experts who have authority on the topic.

So, do actual Google search results reflect that?

Last year, I published the results from a study I conducted in an attempt to isolate which factors are really, truly important to demonstrate E-A-T (this was before the addition of the second E).

My writer’s brain approached that study with the idea that author attribution had to matter. And what I found was somewhat disappointing to that version of myself but validating to the marketer in me.

First: A quick primer on how this study went.

I chose seven categories and ten queries for each category. I searched all 70 queries, clicked on all 647 Page 1 results, and took notes. If a particular element was highly prevalent on Page 1 results, I considered it to be important. If it’s more common in the Top 3 results than the overall Top 10, then I’d view it as very important.

I looked for a bunch of author-related factors:

• Author name

• Author has previously been published online

• Author is affiliated with the organization

• Author is a guest contributor

• Detailed author bio is available

• Links to the author’s website, social accounts, or other information

• Link specifically to LinkedIn (I counted this one separately)

• Multiple authors or contributors listed

And here’s how each of these factors performed in my study:

Author name

• 46% of Page 1 results attributed their content to a person, a group of people, or to an organization.

• 43% of Top 3 results did the same.

Of all the 32 factors I looked for, this was number 15 in the study, following truly important things like HTTPS and having original research published on-site (you can see a detailed description of each of the factors I analyzed here.)

Does this tell us that authorless content is OK? I’d say it’s actually a reflection of the types of content being served. There are plenty of times when author attribution simply isn’t needed.

Now, let’s look at the rest of the author-related factors I considered. For the rest of the study, I considered the overall 647 results, as well as the results for what I called the “author set,” which is the 298 results that included an author name.

Previously published author

• 36% of Page 1 results had a named author who clearly had previously been published online.

• 35% of Top 3 results showed the same.

It doesn’t seem to matter one way or the other how much previous publishing experience the writer has. But, among those results that did name an author, how common was previous publication?

Among our author set, the percentages look a bit different:

• 79.2% of Page 1 listings with listed authors had previously published authors.

• 81.3% of Top 3 results with listed authors showed the same.

There’s a bit more experience among Top 3 results’ authors than among the general Page 1 results’ authors. This could reflect higher-domain publishers’ (which are likely to rank well already) careful discernment of the authors they work with. Or, this could show that experience matters for ranking — alternatively, it could indicate that experience is good for creating quality content. Practice makes perfect.

Author affiliation: In-house vs. guest contributor

Do guest posts perform better than in-house written content? It looks to me that there’s no real advantage in one approach or the other.

• 23% of Page 1 results had authors who were clearly affiliated with the organization (e.g. they were employees).

• 22% of Top 3 results had the same as above.

• 13% of Page 1 results had authors who were clearly guest contributors.

• 12% of Top 3 results had the same as above.

It’s more common to have an author who’s affiliated with the publishing organization. But that doesn’t mean it matters. The nearly identical results for Page 1 vs. Top 3 results for both of these factors show that it’s not particularly critical.

The author set reinforces my theory that author affiliation doesn’t really matter much:

• 49.33% of Page 1 results with named authors were in-house contributors.

• 50.33% of Top 3 results showed the same.

• 28.86% of Page 1 results with named authors were guest contributors.

• 28.57% of Top 3 results showed the same.

This could actually be a reflection of how difficult it can be to attract high-quality guest posters instead of how important either strategy is. To establish a guest posting program (which is what you’d want to do to support an ongoing guest post initiative), you’ll need a few things, including:

• Lots of traffic. Guest authors like to contribute to websites that get views.

• A good reputation. Otherwise, what will incentivize them to contribute?

• A manager. Guest post programs can get complex quickly, between vetting writers, approving topics, proofing content, and the publication and distribution of it all.

Author bio and links

Including an author biography or links to their personal website, portfolio or social media profiles can help readers learn more about whose content they’re reading. It also gives search crawlers more opportunities to get to know the content creator.

I considered these items separately:

• Detailed author bio (as opposed to a sparse, unhelpful one).

• Links to the author’s personal website, portfolio or social media, excluding LinkedIn.

• Links to the author’s LinkedIn profile.

Detailed author bios were the most common, with 22% of both Page 1 and Top 3 results containing one. Next up were links to authors’ personal websites, portfolios, or social media profiles, which showed up 18% of the time on Page 1 and 16% of the time in Top 3 results. Finally, 11% of Page 1 listings had LinkedIn profile links for the author, whereas only 10% of Top 3 did.

The only one of these factors that really changes when looking at the author set is the detailed bio. 48.3% of Page 1 results’ authors had one, whereas 51.7% of Top 3 did. So, it’s a small difference, but it’s enough to make me think that a bit of information about your author could be beneficial.

Multiple contributors listed

I called this multiple contributors rather than multiple authors because this category includes listed activities like:

• Editing

• Proofreading

• Fact-checking

• Contributing (e.g., providing research, interviews, or written content but not having written the entire thing)

• Updating

Could listing multiple contributors on your content help it rank? My results don’t really support that. This was a find that disappointed not just my writer’s brain but my marketer’s brain, too.

• 17% of Page 1 results listed multiple contributors.

• 13% of Top 3 results did, too.

Among our author set, 36.58% of the Page 1 results had multiple contributors listed, and so did 32.97% of the Top 3 results.

Here’s my disappointment: Many of the results I analyzed included multiple contributors because they were being fact-checked or reviewed by professionals in that field, like doctors checking medical content — exactly the type of thing Google advises.

Similar to the guest posting factor I considered above, this could be a reflection of the practicalities of having in-depth content that requires multiple hands before it’s published. It’s another activity that requires a lot of time, talent, and resources.

When — and why — should you attribute your content?

By now, we’ve learned that author attribution kind of matters for ranking but isn’t a make-or-break factor on its own.

Or is it?

I’ve come to the opinion that it depends on the type of content in question (my marketer’s brain takes the lead). Regardless of which method you choose, here are some of the benefits you could gain through your choice:

• Demonstrate your brand’s authority. Choosing the right author attribution can highlight your organization’s expertise.

• Give credit to the creator. When it’s appropriate to attribute the true author, doing so can help build a positive relationship with that author and gives the added benefit of boosting their online portfolio (which should, in the long term, add further credibility to the content they create for your brand).

• Provide information for readers and crawlers. Attribution helps the humans and robots who review your content to find more information about the topic as well as the expert who wrote it.

Here are some common marketing content types and appropriate options for author attribution:

Blog posts

Posts written for your organization’s blog are a prime opportunity to show off author credentials, or it could be an opportunity to highlight the expertise of your in-house experts (whether they penned the content or not).

Here are some questions to ask when deciding how to attribute blog content:

• Is the author a true expert on this subject? If yes, include their name.

• Will this author contribute regularly to your blog? If yes, all the better to include their name.

• Is this author well-known or respected in this field? If yes, definitely list their name.

If your author isn’t an expert in that topic, you could attribute the content to an actual expert to lend authority to the piece. In that case, it’s recommended to have that person read over the content to get their sign-off.

Another option for organization blogs is to attribute the content to the organization itself or to the group of people who are in charge of reviewing content. For example, lots of Mayo Clinic’s articles are authored “By Mayo Clinic Staff.”

Guest articles

Guest article attribution can be considered in much the same way as blog posts. If the author is a real expert (which is more likely when working with guest-post programs, as many choose their contributors carefully), including their name can add credibility to the piece.

Crediting a guest post can boost awareness or reinforce brand recognition among readers. For example, this Marketing Week article about TikTok is sponsored by the social media brand, but no author is listed. The piece’s main purpose is to spread awareness of TikTok’s capabilities as a marketing platform.

Landing pages

Landing pages are designed to get viewers interested in taking some type of action with your company. There are tons of types of landing pages:

• Commercial landing pages that discuss the virtues of your products or services.

• Conversion landing pages, which people see after clicking on an ad.

• Subscription landing pages, where people sign up for your newsletter.

• Company landing pages, such as your about page or careers page, which support people exploring your company with a variety of intents.

In any of these cases, it’s not necessary to attribute your content. Someone at your organization likely wrote them or, at the very least, reviewed the content for accuracy and brand consistency. It’s assumed that the responsible party for this type of content is your organization as a whole.

Pillar pages

Pillar pages are sort of like blog posts in that they are highly informational and support people who want to learn more about a particular subject. Where they differ from blog posts is in the depth of their content — usually, they’re breaking down a multifaceted topic, instead of focusing on just one facet like a blog post might do. In fact, pillar pages often link out to blog posts that dive deeper into relevant subtopics.

Because pillar pages address big, broad topics and link to articles for further reading, they are powerful topical authority pages.

Including an author’s name could add credibility to these pages, but it could also take away from it. Without an author’s attribution, the assumption is that, like landing pages, your organization at large is responsible for the content. And, if it’s covering a topic that’s central to your brand identity and linking to the many articles you’ve published on your blog covering the matter, then it may be best to let this content be “authored by your organization.” A great example of this is the Moz SEO Learning Center.

After all, your company’s credibility and expertise matter most when building brand trust — not the individual writer who happened to pen the piece.

Press releases

Press releases are announcements from your organization, meant to be distributed far and wide by a wire service. The tone should be congruent with your brand voice, your brand logo should be included, and details about your organization are a must.

In almost all cases, press releases are authored “by your brand.” That said, a real person should always be included as the media contact. This is the person that people — especially journalists — can contact to learn more about your brand and the announcement.

Original research and thought-leadership content

Original content and original research are going to be hugely important for SEO in the years ahead. Google’s own communiqués about the Helpful Content Update, E-E-A-T, natural language processing abilities in search, and more prove that Google really does care about original content.

Original research was one of the 32 points I checked for during the study, and it was more prevalent than even authors’ names — signifying that not all original research had an attributed author.

• 64% of Page 1 results’ websites had original research available.

• 70% of Top 3 results’ sites did, too.

Original research is any type of content that includes unique information that the company gathers, analyzes, and publishes itself. To name a few, these could be in the form of:

• Surveys

• Annual reports

• Original product reviews

• Website or organization data

• Grant or funding information

The decision to attribute original research depends on the type of original content in question. Things like annual reports and grant information could feasibly be authored “by your organization,” whereas original product reviews may read more trust-worthily if readers can get to know the actual people who tested the product.

At Brafton, we conduct original research to learn more about the state of the content marketing industry, and the blog post written afterward is attributed to the blog post’s author. We’ve chosen to do that to match the style on our blog (we love our authors because they’re all experts at what they’re doing, and it’s a great opportunity for them to showcase their talent).

To attribute or not to attribute: Who won the debate?

I’m pleased to announce that I won this argument against myself. More importantly, I’ve decided that both of my selves — writer me and marketer me — are correct.

My marketer self might be slightly more right, though.

Attributing content can be worthwhile for your brand and the author in lots of situations.

However, there are plenty of other situations where attributing an expert who didn’t actually create the content but did review or otherwise consult on it can lend credibility to your brand.

Finally, there are actually plenty of instances where there’s no need to attribute anyone at all.

In the end, it all depends on the purpose of the content and your goals with it.

SEO Forecasting — Whiteboard Friday

Learn how to forecast and demonstrate the value of your SEO efforts in this week's Whiteboard Friday with Tom Mansell. Quantify predicted SEO value, close performance gaps, and calculate ROI.

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

Video Transcription

Welcome to this week's edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Tom, Director of Organic Performance at Croud. Today, we're going to talk about SEO forecasting and more specifically how you can do it. With digital budgets being more scrutinized than ever, there's a lot more pressure to demonstrate the value of your SEO activity back to your business or your client organizations.

So today, we're going to spend some time talking about the process that I go through in order to do that forecasting and demonstrate that value. Now, I will say it's not an exact science. We're effectively trying to predict the future, which is quite difficult.

But there are processes that you can go through in order to begin to quantify that predicted SEO value.

What do you need for SEO forecasting?

So before we kick off, there are a few things that you'll need in terms of data in order to build your forecast. Firstly, 12 months traffic data.

So this is effectively you can use your analytics platform or you can use Google Search Console to pull down 12 months' worth of organic data by month. Secondly and most of the time you're working within a business or you're working with clients, you will be set a target of what that predicted future SEO performance needs to be.

So that's incredibly important to bring into your forecast as well. Thirdly, the keywords that you'll target across the course of your campaign, that's really important to help try and demonstrate the incrementality that you're going to be building for your business or your clients. Then, finally, the click-through rate model that's somewhat linked to point number three here.

Click-through rate model allows you to start to reverse engineer by each keyword how much traffic they are driving and, by improving those keyword positions, how much additional traffic you're going to be driving through to your website. So those are four things that you'll need before you set out on this journey. What we'll end up with, when you've gone through this process, is a graph like this.

So effectively, a very clear demonstration of what we've achieved over the last 12-month period from that traffic data that you've got up here and then some different scenarios. So firstly, your baseline. This is effectively what we think performance will be if we don't do any value-added SEO activity.

Then we've got our forecast in the green here. So using all of that keyword data that you have, what we think the incremental value will be from your SEO activity improving the positions for those keywords. The black dot is the target that you need to work towards.

So very quickly what you can start to see is where you've got that gap from the keywords that you're targeting against that initial target that you've been set by your business or your client organization, and that will start to tell you, actually, there are probably more keywords, more expansion that we need to do within our SEO strategy to close that gap.

Then, finally, as that year progresses and you progress through your SEO campaign, what the traffic is that you're actually generating and how that tracks against the forecast that you've built. So this, ultimately, is what we'll end up with, which you can show to your superiors, your client organizations to demonstrate the value of your SEO activity.

How to get your baseline

Now, breaking that out into a little bit more detail, in order to get this baseline, there are a couple of different methods that you can use in order to get that data. The first is what I call the basic method, so taking the last 12 months of your organic data that you've got.

Then you can use Google Trends and you can look at Google Trends to see the brand growth that has been delivered over the last 12 months, and you can use that to quantify what we think naturally will happen based on the strength of the brand as measured by Google Trends.

So that's one way that you can build a basic baseline to build a model whereby you've got no SEO activity happening over the next 12 months. The second option, which is what I prefer to use, is using a time series model. Now, there are lots of different formulas that you can use in Google Sheets and Excel.

I've got one down here. It's called the FORECAST function, and effectively what that does is it looks at the data over the last 12 months, and it starts to draw parallels from that data and begins to forecast what you think will happen or what it thinks will happen over the next 12-month period from all of that historic data that you fed it.

This is a really powerful way to get this accurate as possible baseline from your activity.

Understand the incremental data

Now, we move on to incrementality. So how do we begin to influence this green line here? So there are two things that we must have in order to do this.

The keywords that we're targeting as part of our campaign, we need to collect with those keywords the monthly search volume and also the current ranking position, where are those keywords currently ranking in search. Then we need to use Google Search Console to pull down the non-branded click-through rate, and that's important because that will start to help us understand how much traffic we're driving from those keywords and as we begin to improve those keyword positions, what the incremental traffic will be, which gives us this green line here.

An optional metric that we can put in is keyword difficulty. Now, that's useful because if you can understand how difficult it is to target or drive improvements from each of those keywords, you know the rate of change that you need to put forward with regards to your increase factors. How quickly are we going to drive incremental ranking performance for those keywords?

If it's super, super competitive, it's probably going to take us longer to influence those increases. If there's minimal competition on those keywords, we'll be able to drive that incrementality a lot quicker.

So now that we've got this graph here, which models clicks in terms of how we're driving positive performance over the next 12 months, there are further things that we can do to bring in revenue metrics.

For example, which makes this a much more attractive proposition for finance teams and those in charge of your budgets.

So if you bring in conversion rate and average order value data, you can apply that on top of the incremental clicks to understand how much more revenue you're going to be driving for your business or your client organization. Then, with that data, you can also begin to calculate the return on investment, so effectively looking at the incremental revenue that you're driving divided by the cost of investment.

So how much money are you putting into your SEO activity in order to achieve those results? That calculation will give you an ROI number, which is really, really appealing when you're putting this in front of finance teams and budget holders. So I hope that's been useful. There is a link down here to a worksheet, which we've attached to this Whiteboard Friday.

It allows you to put in the raw data up here. Then, from that, you'll get a model much like this. So I hope that's useful. Hope this Whiteboard Friday has been useful and thanks for watching.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

How to Future-Proof Your Brand with SEO

The digital landscape is evolving quickly, and businesses must adjust their marketing techniques to maintain a competitive edge. You need to be able to transform how you operate your business and engage with your customers.

If you’re aiming for long-term success, you should learn how to future-proof your brand. This is no longer an option but a necessity. You’ll need to adopt a forward-thinking and strategic plan to be ready for the future to maintain your market share and remain relevant in the ever-changing search landscape.

SEO has become an essential building block to securing your brand’s future. Customers have turned to search engines to discover products and services, empowering brands to improve their online visibility, organic rankings, and the ability to attract and retain customers.

So, how can you make sure that you future-proof your brand?

Let’s explore how SEO can help your business establish credibility and authority, setting yourself up for growth and prosperity. Learn how to equip your brand for the future while leaving a lasting impression on your target audience.

The role of SEO in ensuring the long-term success of brands

SEO plays a big role in ensuring your website reaches your target audience. I like to compare SEO to a compass guiding brands in the right direction. Imagine it being a secret ingredient that will help your business to survive and thrive online.

So, how exactly does SEO do this?

It does the magic of making your brand visible to the right audience. Imagine having your business on a main street with heavy human traffic and selling a product everyone needs. You are nearly guaranteed daily sales. This is the same thing SEO does for your business.

According to Brian Njogu, the founder of SmartProfitsHub:

“SEO is about building a foundation for your business that will help you attract new customers, grow your online presence, and achieve your goals.”

SEO is not about appearing in search engine results. It’s about appearing on the first page and attracting valuable traffic.

Here’s an example: You are planning a lunch date, and you search for the “best restaurant in London.” You will most likely click on the top results on the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). This is how SEO helps businesses attain the top slots on the SERPs, helping them earn more clicks and visibility.

The best thing about SEO is that it’s a long-term investment. You will still experience results years after implementation. This means getting a steady traffic flow to your website without straining your marketing budget.

SEO also brings about brand credibility. When your website ranks high on the SERPs, your brand becomes more credible and authoritative. Who wouldn’t want that?

For your SEO to work, you don’t need just an SEO strategy. You also need the right mindset and commitment to play the long-term game.

8 Steps to future-proof your brand with SEO

Every business owner's dream is to have a business that will last and run in the foreseeable future. But, the ever-changing digital landscape makes it difficult to promise this. Here is where SEO comes in. It has the potential to offer success now while setting your business up to thrive in the future.

Let's look at the steps you can take in future-proofing your brand with SEO.

1. Understand the evolving SEO landscape

SEO is evolving, and techniques that used to work may no longer work. To keep on track, it would help if you understood the latest SEO trends and know how they affect your brand.

User intent optimization is one of the best techniques you can adapt for your brand. It involves selecting keywords that match the user's search intent and answering their questions with relevant content.

The best SEO practice for this is searching your query on Google and seeing how it interprets the intent.

The image below shows the intent of the keyword “premium pet food,” which is commercial.

The mobile-first indexing is another Google practice that you should be aware of. It ensures your website is responsive on smartphones while saving traffic that comes on mobile. You’ll want to ensure that the navigation of your website is smooth on mobile. Also, ensure all buttons are easy to click, the text is readable, and the images load correctly. Research by Statista shows that mobile online usage has increased significantly, so you should make your website mobile-responsive.

To keep up with SEO's evolving landscape, you must keep track of the ever-changing algorithms or risk losing your rankings overnight.

You must also understand user behavior to keep up with the competition.

Machine learning and AI have also had a great influence on search engine algorithms. This technology analyzes how users interact with content to deliver relevant results. Search engines are built in a way in which they learn user behaviors and serve up what they need. This is why learning how they work will help you secure a future for your brand.

2. Conduct a comprehensive SEO audit

When future-proofing your business, it is important to understand your position, strengths, weaknesses, and opportunities to stand a chance against your competition.

Every successful SEO journey demands a thorough self-assessment. It would be best to understand what is working, what isn't, and what needs improvement. Think of it as a digital health check-up. For example, identifying your high-performing keywords will help you create relevant content that resonates with your audience, and you can do this with Moz’s Keyword Explorer.

You should also check your SEO technical health. Even if you have quality content on your website, your SEO technical health needs to be checked, as it will affect your performance and ranking.

Use tools like Screaming Frog and Site Bulb to check your technical SEO health, Google Search Console to check your website's performance, and Moz Pro to identify common on-page issues. Using tools will help you identify your website's SEO technical health, keyword performance, and traffic.

The screenshot below shows a website performance on Google Search Console.

In your SEO strategy, be sure to conduct a thorough competitor analysis. This will help you examine your competitor's SEO strategies, keyword choices, backlinks, and content tactics. Use this information to build a better strategy to help you outrank your competitors and secure your brand's future.

3. Establish a solid SEO foundation

Establishing a strong SEO foundation is a sure way to future-proof your brand for SEO. You should identify target keywords, optimize your pages, and craft content that resonates with your target audience.

Picture the keywords you choose as the pillar of your SEO strategy. Relevant keywords will help you understand your audience and what they seek. You should work with keywords with a decent search volume and that match with the searchers' intent. This is where all the gold is buried.

The image below shows a keyword I researched via Moz’s Keyword Explorer tool. These keyword metrics can help you to understand how difficult it may be to rank for a keyword, as well as how you might like to prioritize it.

According to Louis Smith, the founder of Louis Smith E-commerce SEO:

"An effective Keyword research process is the foundation of organic growth campaigns, driving the discovery and attraction of a larger audience. It unveils the language and intent of your target audience, guiding you to create content that resonates and enhances visibility in search engine results."

You also need to work on your on-page optimization. Once you’ve completed your keyword research, you should optimize your meta descriptions and titles with your chosen primary and secondary keywords. Let them act like breadcrumbs for search engines.

Having high-quality content is a gateway to future-proofing your brand. It makes your visitors stick around much longer and get the urge to share it with their connections. This helps increase traffic and conversions. Quality content on your website will bring you closer to future-proofing your brand. Great content acts like a digital feast that keeps your audience returning for more. When writing your content, address your audience's needs by answering their questions. Optimize it by using relevant keywords and distributing them naturally in your content.

Different audiences love to consume content differently. Therefore, feel free to experiment with a variety of content formats like videos, infographics and podcasts to reach a bigger audience.

Also, you should have a strategic internal linking strategy in place throughout your content. This will help search engine crawlers navigate and index your web pages effectively while also providing greater context to your web pages.

Having user-friendly URLs improves user experience, leading to improved SEO, so make sure to think thoroughly about the URLs you are publishing. Lastly, pay attention to your site structure. A website with a good structure helps visitors navigate your website easily. This helps them to engage with your content more, increasing the dwell time.

4. Adapt to algorithm updates and industry changes

To survive in the digital landscape, you must keep up with algorithm updates and industrial shifts. Algorithms reshape the way search engines crawl, index, and rank search results. Website owners are, therefore, forced to adapt to these changes.

So, how can you survive these sudden changes?

To survive algorithm updates, you should stay informed, continue learning, and become flexible in your SEO approach. Join communities or have a network that can provide valuable insights into new algorithm updates.

When new algorithm updates are released, adapt quickly and look at them as opportunities for growth. Algorithm penalties can be a big blow. Think of them as being given a second chance to fix what is broken. To sort out the penalties, you’ll need to analyze the issue causing the penalty, fix it accordingly, and appeal for reconsideration. Imagine them as a ticket to getting back on track.

Search engine algorithms will keep on evolving. Therefore, your SEO strategy should be flexible, with room for the potential of new algorithm updates. You can only keep up with algorithms by continuously learning, adapting to change, and understanding user behavior and new trends.

5. Build a strong backlink profile

To successfully future-proof your brand, having a strong backlink profile is vital. It acts as a vouch of confidence by other users, and having one helps you rank and build digital credibility. This will help you now and in the future. I like to compare backlinks to positive online recommendations that influence your search rankings and Domain Authority. Your website becomes more credible and trustworthy with a great backlink profile.

Keep in mind — not all backlinks are good. Good backlinks are from trusted sources and are relevant to your content. On the other hand, bad links can be from spammy websites or perhaps are irrelevant to your content and are not worth paying attention to.

You need relevant, high-quality backlinks to future-proof your brand for SEO. Here are ways you can acquire backlinks for your brand:

• Write guest posts for reputable brands.

• Write high-quality content that others may want to reference.

• Network with influencers, bloggers, and industry leaders — this can lead to opportunities for collaboration.

• Reach out to websites to explore link building opportunities.

• Share your content with communities. If people like it, they will share it with their network, which could possibly lead to more backlinks.

Always inspect your backlink profile and remove any bad backlinks. Moz Link Explorer is a great tool to explore and track the health of your profile. Google Search Console is a free tool that can also help you see an overview of your website’s backlinks.

6. Leverage user experience for SEO success

A great SEO strategy that aims to optimize user experience (UX) is key to securing a digital future for your brand. Great user experience influences search engine rankings and how users interact with your website.

A well-designed and user-friendly website will attract visitors and encourage them to interact with your content and stay longer on your website. When your website’s user experience and SEO are in harmony, they can help you boost your SEO rankings.

Having a user-friendly website design is the secret recipe to enriching your user experience. The design should be clean, have straightforward navigation, and have a reasonable font size to foster user satisfaction.

Also, you should consider having a responsive design to cater to user browsing using different devices. Taking this approach will boost engagement and lead to longer dwell times.

Never underestimate your website’s loading speed. A website that loads fast and can be accessed on mobile is vital in determining how well you rank. Today, speed and mobile friendliness are ranking factors that Google uses to rank websites.

To optimize for seed, you should:

• Optimize your images

• Minify CSS and Java script-codes

• Reduce the number of redirects on your website

• Use content delivery networks

Use Google Analytics to inspect bounce rates and dwell time to understand user interaction, among much more. Low bounce rates and high dwell time indicate quality and relevance.

7. Monitor and analyze your SEO performance

The journey to future-proofing your business with SEO is more than developing and executing a content strategy. It requires you to monitor and track your SEO performance and make data-driven decisions.

You need to understand that analytics in SEO is not all about numbers but the stories those numbers tell. For this to become successful, keep an eye on your progress.

SEO tools like Google Analytics can help you monitor traffic, user behavior, and conversion rates. On the other hand, tools like Moz Pro can help with keyword tracking, competitor analysis, and backlink insights. These tools will help you pinpoint what is working and what is not.

To make data-driven decisions, you should configure your analytics platform. Understand your goals, such as tracking form submissions or e-commerce transactions as your performance indicators. Check out Preeti Gupta’s article on creating custom reports in GA4 to learn more.

Track your keyword rankings, traffic, and conversion rates. Organic traffic will tell you how many people are finding your website on Google, keyword rankings will show you how effective your SEO efforts are, and conversions will show you how many visitors have become paying customers.

Understanding these metrics will help you understand the efficiency of your SEO efforts and identify areas to improve.

Make a point to regularly look at your data to spot and remove unwanted weeds to keep your SEO efforts in check.

8. Embrace emerging SEO opportunities and technologies

Are you doing some digging to find out the latest trends affecting your business? If you haven’t adapted to AI and generative technology, it is high time you did. This will give you a competitive edge that will help you future-proof your brand.

AI can help you work more efficiently. You can use tools such as ChatGPT to analyze data to find relevant keywords to make you stay competitive, among much more. Generative AI will help you shift your focus from keyword-based optimization to semantic search. This will help your website rank higher in search results by providing visitors with more relevant and accurate information.

Voice search is another trend that is getting more attention today. Most people are finding it easier to talk more than to type more. Voice assistants like Siri and Google Assistant have taken over, and people are talking to their devices more than ever. This is why your website should adapt to this trend by being mobile-responsive.

Failing to optimize your website for voice search can be a missed opportunity. So, how do you optimize your website for voice search? The first thing is to learn how to speak like your customers. Use more natural phrases that they could use when speaking. Focus on answering the questions “why,” “what,” "who," “where,” and “how” in your content.

Valuable content is another trend you shouldn’t ignore. Always make sure your content answers the questions of your audience and meets the E-E-A-T guidelines.

Schema markup is another critical aspect of SEO that you should take note of. It helps search engines understand your content type and what it’s about. Schema markup is code added to key elements like product reviews, ratings, events, blogs, FAQs, and web pages to provide extra context, helping your website to stand out in the crowd. Implementing schema on your website can lead to more traffic and clicks.

Wrap up

So, there you have it. You are one step closer to future-proofing your brand with SEO. Use these strategies as your secret weapon to stay ahead in your SEO game.

Always remember to keep your eyes peeled for any industry twists and fine-tune your online presence. Doing this will not only help you future-proof your brand but also carve a permanent spot online. So, put on your armor, adapt, and enjoy the ride to your digital success.

August 18 Algo Update: The Cyclone Before The Storm

Around August 18, just prior to the August Core Update announcement, MozCast recorded extremely high temperatures, peaking at 127°F. This stood out even compared to August’s unusually high ranking-volatility and the Core Update itself (so far).

While it’s easy to lump this volatility into the August Core Update, we recorded a distinct and probably unrelated event — a massive drop in indented results on page-one SERPs.

Indented results drop 50%

An indented result in Google is any organic result that’s grouped under another, higher-ranking result from the same domain. For example, below is a screenshot of a search for “Excalibur” that pulls up Wikipedia pages for both the sword and the film.

Between August 17-19, the percentage of page-one Google SERPs with indented results in the MozCast 10K tracking set dropped from 24.10% to 12.04%, as shown below.

Half (almost exactly 50%) of SERPs with indented results lost them over this two-day period, and that loss has not recovered as of the writing of this post.

Indented = Promoted organic

Here’s why this matters and why this change shook up the SERPs: Indented results are often (not always) promoted from lower-ranking organic results. Consider this indented result from a search for “banquet halls” in Portland, Oregon, on August 17.

These two results effectively ranked 1st and 2nd. On August 20, the indented result (now a stand-alone organic result) dropped to 4th place, with a Places Pack and People Also Ask feature between 3rd and 4th, resulting in a substantial vertical drop.

And below is a set of indented results from a search for “green card renewal” on August 17.

These results effectively occupied the 1st through 3rd positions. As of August 25, these results were split into 1st, 3rd, and 5th, with a People Also Ask feature before the 5th result.

Long-term trends (18 months)

While we can’t predict the future, this drop is consistent with a long-term trend. The graph below shows the percentage of page-one Google SERPs with indented results over the past 18 months.

The most recent drop is squeezed at the very end, but there was also a sizable drop at the end of July 2022 and a steady decline in the year since then. Keep in mind that Google had only reinstated indented results a few months earlier (at the end of 2021). This trend could reverse, of course, but my hunch is that Google’s initial roll-out was too aggressive.

Since this is effectively a re-ranking layer and doesn’t seem to be connected to the quality of individual results, there’s not much you can do about it. It’s like the car next to you at the stoplight turning down their music. Whether you like the song or not, they control the volume.

The volatility itself can be frustrating and adds to the noise of an already loud summer, but this shake-up should not impact your primary ranking for any affected SERPs. In some cases, if you were ranking below someone else’s intended results, you may even see minor gains. As always, keep your eyes open, monitor your organic search traffic, and try not to panic.

Why Should SEOs Measure Brand? — Whiteboard Friday

In this Whiteboard Friday, Tom discusses why SEOs should measure their brand, with specific reference to Moz’s new metric, Brand Authority.

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Video Transcription

Happy Friday. I'm Tom Capper, Senior Search Scientist at Moz. Recently at MozCon we launched a new metric, Brand Authority, and in this Whiteboard Friday I just want to briefly explain why we think this is important, why we think that going forward SEOs are going to care more and more about measuring brand.

Why SEOs should care

This is something that I personally have been thinking about for quite a long time. This is a study I put out in 2021, which hopefully will be linked below. This is just showing that in terms of domain level ranking correlation, branded search volume, which is not the same as Brand Authority but is a simpler metric that I had available at the time, branded search volume was actually nearly as well correlated with rankings as Domain Authority and certainly more so than links to domain.

This is interesting to me, and I've been doing studies like this since around 2017. Although I didn't work at Moz back in 2017, but little did I know at the time there were people at Moz thinking about this too, and this is something that Moz has actually had in the works for a very long time. Even when I started at Moz about two and a half years ago, there was already a prototype of this metric, and it was something that we were thinking about and sort of improving on and iterating on.

Now the reason why I think this is interesting is that there are a few reasons why this could be the case. Well, why is it that a simple, somewhat silly metric, like branded search volume, can be nearly as well correlated with rankings as Domain Authority? How does that happen? Well, one answer that a lot of SEOs will jump to is, oh, maybe it's a ranking factor.

I don't think so. I'm a bit of a pedant. Personally, for something to be a ranking factor, I think that needs to be a metric which is a direct input into Google's ranking systems. I can't be certain. I don't work at Google. I don't think that branded search volume is a ranking factor. But there are a bunch of other ways that it might play into rankings, which I think are interesting or should be interesting to SEOs.

One of them is that most of us agree and I certainly think links are a ranking factor. Brand and links have a lot of interplay. If you think about the things that you might do to build links, a lot of them will also result in increased interest in your brand. You think about things like digital PR. Similarly, a lot of the things that you might do as brand marketing result in you getting links.

The better established you are in the industry, the more people are talking about you, these are the things that you would do as brand marketing, right, those will result in people linking to you because you're an authority or because you're mentioned in their campaign or whatever it might be. SERP signals I think is another potential factor here. Now this is a controversial one. A lot of people don't believe that Google takes into account SERP behavior, or maybe it does it indirectly or something like that.

I think SERP signals probably do play some sort of role in Google's algorithm. I've written about that elsewhere. I won't get into it now. But having a strong brand will definitely impact things like click-through rate from the SERP. Even if you don't think that affects ranking, you probably do care about click-through rate from the SERP. So if people get to a SERP, they see three sites, and they've heard of one of them, which one are they clicking?

It's quite simple, right? Then lastly, obviously we've been talking a lot in the last few years about E-A-T and now E-E-A-T, expertise, authority, and trust. This is kind of what Google originally set out to measure with links. But brand, however they might want to measure that, is very relevant. If you're talking about expertise, authority, and trust, that's all related to brand.

So these are sort of some of the big reasons why I think that SEOs should care about brand at least.

How to approach your job as an SEO

If we think about how these translate, there are a lot of things that once you start recognizing that brand might influence rankings, it might change how you approach some other parts of your job as an SEO. So, for example, if you work with other marketing channels, well, it's going to help you to talk to them and to get buy-in for what you're doing and then to get buy-in for what they're doing if you can recognize that there are a lot of these positive side effects.

If you're working on a brand campaign, it might influence SEO. If you're working on SEO, it might influence brand, this kind of thing. Obviously, for you to leverage this, you do need to be able to measure it. Then also a lot of SEOs have been thinking about the role of links. Now I saw a survey I think most recently last year from [indecipherable]. I've seen a few of them over time.

In recent years, most SEOs, when polled, think that links either are of declining importance or will be of declining importance in the future. Now, obviously, this is speculation. But we can all agree that links are not what they were in the early days of SEO. They're not the be-all and end-all anymore. You can't do links alone as SEO.

So if you're thinking about links maybe having a gradually declining value, then you might want to think about, well, what would Google replace that with as an authority signal. Again, I think brand is a pretty good answer, or at the very least it's correlated with a lot of things which are a pretty good answer. Lastly, I think there are many other use cases here, but one of the ones that's most exciting to me is sort of competitive analysis or strategy work, where you're trying to position yourself within your industry and figure out what's important, how you relate to competitors, this kind of thing.

Compare Brand Authority to Domain Authority

So this is a visualization that we have in Moz Pro at the moment, where you can put in your site on Domain Overview, and it will show you how you compare on both BA and DA to some competitors. So I've done this here for autotrader.com. I should say right now Brand Authority, it's in beta. It's currently quite U.S. leaning in the results it will give you.

That will change over time, probably very soon. But right now, it's quite U.S. leaning. So this is autotrader.com, not, for example, autotrader.co.uk. They are different companies weirdly. So auotrader.com, it turns out they have a stronger brand but a slightly weaker domain than their competitor Edmunds. That tells them something about where they might want to focus their efforts, what might be causing them to do better or worse in certain scenarios, this kind of thing.

Then if you compare it with a site like cars.com, they can see, okay, they've got a quite similar level of Brand Authority, but a much stronger domain. So if they're being outcompeted by cars.com, then maybe links wouldn't be the focus area, for example. You can have your own theories.

You'll know your own competitor space. You'll know how you'll use this information. But I think being able to show a C-level or show your manager or show your clients this kind of contextual data can be really useful both in setting expectations and in thinking about what your priorities might be as a brand. Anyway, I hope that gave you some food for thought.

Please do go and try out the metric. There will be lots of links below I'm sure. Thank you very much.

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