Blast Off Into the Future: MozCon 2023 Day One Recap

Day one recap contributors were Emilie Martin, Vickie Wu, and Zach Edelstein.

Today, we kicked off day one of MozCon 2023. That’s right - we’re back and better than ever!

We’re in a brand new venue this year, and we’re excited to experience it for the first time with all of you! Whether you joined us in person or via our live stream, we are so grateful to get back together again for another year of MozCon madness.

We hope day one helped set the scene for what the future of search is going to look like. Let’s recap yesterday’s talks.

Opening remarks + State of the Industry — Cheryl Draper

Setting the stage for what’s to come, Cheryl Draper kicks off MozCon 2023, laying out all the important details you’ll need to get through two jam-packed days! From seasoned speakers to our community speakers, Cheryl made sure to let us know what we’re in for this year. Cheryl is joined by fellow emcees Melissa Rae Brown and Cyrus Shepard.

Cheryl let us know the reason we chose the future of search as this year's theme. It has everything to do with Seattle! Very fitting, as Seattle is known as the city of the future and has future-related infrastructure, like the monorail and space needle. We wanted to imagine what the future would look like. A lot has changed since the last time we came together, and we’re forced to think more than ever about the future of search; think of machine learning, artificial intelligence, TikTok, and Google Analytics 4. Every time we log online, there’s something new to digest!

Make sure to take breaks, grab yourself some lunch, and stay hydrated! Remember to follow #MozCon on Twitter, or X, and get involved in the conversation over there.

Am I about to go on a ride or at a digital marketing conference?

Does it matter?! ;) #MozConpic.twitter.com/D4l7hCYBGz

— Holly Miller Anderson | Marketing, SEO, eCom DTC (@millertime_baby) August 7, 2023

Google’s Just Not That Into You: Intent Switches During Core Updates — Lily Ray

Acting as the conduit between us and impactful changes to the Google algorithm, Lily Ray returns to the MozCon stage with her thoughts on why your rankings may have changed during a core update. Following up on her 2022 talk on Why Real Expertise is the Most Important Ranking Factor of Them All, Lily delved deeper into Google algorithm intricacies.

Many SEOs have wondered why Lily and her team are so obsessed with core updates. Lily revealed her origin story starting with getting on the wrong side of Google’s 2012 Penguin update. Lily took her knowledge and experience over to the agency world and did things right, committing to helping businesses suffering from Google core updates.

This Penguin Update slide from @lilyraynyc is freaking me out #mozconpic.twitter.com/423YHQFyFe

— Dr. Pete Meyers (@dr_pete) August 7, 2023

If you’ve been impacted by a core update, to deal with your recovery, Lily recommends prioritizing fixing these issues:

• Changes in user behavior — Lily used the example of the company ‘Playground’, battling with several other companies with the same name online.

• World events and crises — Lily used the example of the keyword ‘masks’ and pages related to them. Previously, costume masks ranked on page one, but during COVID-19, medical face masks took the top spots instead.

• Overhauls to search, like EEAT.

• Relevancy shifts and Quality Deserves Freshness (QDF) — Before the July 2021 updates, if you searched for Steel Dragon, the results that showed up included a game and a hardware store. After the update, they started ranking the rock band, intent shifted, and Google started understanding more about user intent related to the keyword.

• Intent switching — We’ve got the three classics, informational, transactional, and navigational. But we all know there are more than three search intents. Lily mentions buying products, fact-checking recipes, seeing pictures, looking at the news, watching a video, translating, and more. Lily emphasized creating content for each intent you think your users hold when searching. Be everywhere your customers can find you.

Intent shifts are inevitable, and patience is a virtue when it comes down to it. If you’re looking to see where you can find information on Google Core updates, you can see a list of them here.

You can catch Lily performing as our DJ at our closing party at MoPOP.

Why SEOs Need to Start Playing Offense Instead of Defense — Chris Long

Chris turned heads last year with his talk on Advanced On-Page Optimization, and he joined us this year to discuss how to shift to an offensive SEO mindset, helping you to prioritize key initiatives, get stakeholder buy-in, and navigate successful long-term SEO strategy.

In a game of chess, you always want to be on the offensive so that you can control the board. But in SEO, we feel like we always have to be on defense. The best SEOs that Chris knows are constantly playing offense; they’re experimenting and looking at the future of search.

So how can SEOs play offense?

• Identify new content opportunities — Chris suggests starting with a content gap analysis, which you can do with Moz Pro - but this is a little on the defensive side. To look at it offensively, we need to know what topical areas we need content for. For example, if we work with personal loans, we might look at all keywords to do with personal loans - we can now build content in this topical area.

• Choosing which pages to optimize — The more advanced way of optimizing content involves finding which categories we need more visibility in. This works on sites with many different topical areas, for example, Macy's.

• Technical SEO prioritization — First, evaluate the percentage of total pages experiencing technical issues, then evaluate issue type. Make sure to take your recommendations as close to the end as possible.
  

If you do tho, you’ll always always be playing defense. @gofishchris#mozconpic.twitter.com/zYHHPf1Sz8

— Yosef Silver (@ysilver) August 7, 2023

• Get data for key initiatives — Getting buy-in is just as important as the SEO work, and one of Chris’ favorite ways to do this is by framing every content initiative as an opportunity cost. What is the opportunity cost of not creating a specific type of content?

• Perform experiments — Chris’ experimentation process includes creating a hypothesis, implementing a testing framework, and measuring the results.

• Chris noted that SEOs need to embrace AI— the SEOs playing offensive are implementing AI in their workflows. According to Chris’ online poll, approximately 72% of SEOs are already doing so, and Chris is confident that AI will enable us to become better creators.

A special announcement from Moz you’re not gonna want to miss!

We’re so delighted to share that Brand Authority is here! Melissa Rae Brown introduced our exciting new metric, available for Moz Pro and Moz API customers. Learn more about how you can use Brand Authority in Dr. Pete’s blog post – Introducing Brand Authority: Measuring the Unmeasurable.

And... Brand Authority is live! #MozCon https://t.co/R9qiPE5b2R

— Emilie Martin (she/her) (@emiliecgm) August 7, 2023

SEO Co-Conspirators: Navigating Complex Systems — Jackie Chu

Jackie Chu discussed tips and tricks for growing organic traffic at scale in 2022 and came back this year to share how you can source and uncover allies, enlist your coworkers, and successfully navigate the political landscape to get your own SEO project prioritized.

The easiest way to get shut down as an SEO is to tell people you need to do things “for SEO”. Jackie has gotten really good at making sure what she needs to get done is taken seriously; she looks to the legal team, the business owner, and the engineering team in organizations to find her allies.

"Piggyback on company-wide key initiatives to get your work prioritised" says @jackiecchu#MozConpic.twitter.com/T14xEabZAb

— Lidia Infante (@LidiaInfanteM) August 7, 2023

Spearhead your accessibility projects with your legal team. Accessibility issues are SEO issues. Web accessibility involves making sure your website and web content are usable for everyone and accommodates all accessibility issues. 4.5% of people are colorblind; that’s quite a lot of people to be excluding. Follow web content accessibility guidelines, and note 4 significant themes: your content needs to be perceivable, operable, understandable, and robust. Jackie recommended checking out bit.ly/seo-access for a complete checklist of web accessibility guidelines.

Enlist the business owner. Identify who would care about your project’s success, tell them what they can get out of it, agree on who will drive what, and highlight the time to see the impact. Instead of saying something like, “We’ll fix broken links that will help SEO,” say, “We’ll fix broken links… to increase traffic and revenue to payments.” Getting buy-in from the business owner can help you scale your impact and build trust and relationships.

When working with your engineering team, ask yourself — is this a bug, or is it a feature? Most engineers want the company to be successful, and it’s important to set them up with accurate information. If it’s a bug, ask yourself if this is a confusing brand experience, if it’s impacting any customer, and if it’s impacting other channels (like SEM). Examples include; the page not rendering, content differences on mobile and desktop, blocking Google bot, rate limiting, and 500 errors.

Consider the previous three suggestions when attempting to find your allies at your company. If you learn how to package your SEO projects by framing other people’s motivations, you can start to get them prioritized.

Search Data at Scale — Daniel Waisberg

In his inaugural MozCon talk, Daniel set a precedent for equipping a room full of people with invaluable skills for managing data at scale, using Google Search Console bulk exports.

Now on the #MozCon stage, @danielwaisberg! First time MozCon presenter, handling it like a pro 😎 pic.twitter.com/pc5zPoxQd2

— STAT Search Analytics (@getSTAT) August 7, 2023

Daniel is super passionate about the Google Search Console bulk data exporting functionality. The first milestones of creating this product included asking stakeholders if they could create it, how they should do it, and getting the correct approval. The project moved swiftly to testing internally and eternally, then documentation was written, final tweaks made, and the product was launched!

Big theme of the day I'm seeing...

GETTING BUY-IN. 🤝

Heard it across all four talks so far, even @danielwaisberg talking about shipping new GSC features. Ideas are only one part of the equation. You also need the buy-in to SHIP things.#mozcon

— Josh Gallant 🇨🇦 (at MozCon) (@joshgallantco) August 7, 2023

To access the tool, head to Google Search Console, input your data and receive bulk exports daily for your website. You’ll see site impression, which is aggregated, and it is segmented by country, device type, and more. You can even drill down to specific pages.

To be more efficient in your data analysis, Daniel suggests focusing on planning and optimizing.

• Plan your data pools to avoid surprises, and be smart about how you pull your data. If you have a large website, you can limit your data — N.B. set your expiration date to partition, not your table! Remember to pre-aggregate your data for analysis and set billing alerts and restrictions.

• When focusing on optimization, limit the input scan, sample the data, and use approximate functions.

Daniel wants to make sure search data is available and useful at scale. He recommended SEOs focus on search, Google Search Console, and Google Trends. Check out Daniel’s training on bulk data exports here.

Beyond the Written Word: Future-Proofing Your Content Strategy by Leveraging Multimedia Formats — Azeem Ahmad

We were so happy to have Azeem, one of our fantastic Community Speakers, grace the stage (for the very first time!) Azeem talked us through how to future-proof your content strategy and stay ahead of the competition.

As marketers, we measure too much stuff. Azeem lets us know where we get it wrong; we know what users want, but we often don’t know how they want it. Throwing up blog pages doesn’t cut it anymore.

If we as a community had moved beyond this, there prolly wouldn’t be a slide for it in @azeemdigital’s deck… #mozconpic.twitter.com/e6Fl27XSPY

— James Wirth (@jameswirth) August 7, 2023

To go from basic to advanced in measuring data, Azeem recommends following these steps:

Azeem’s quick-fire tips for creating audio and video content include:

• Weigh in on current events

• Share ‘x things you didn’t know about’

• Stitching

• Day in the life

• Morning routine

• Software demos

• Before and after

• How we do ‘x’

• FAQs

• Viral hack tests

• Mythbusting

• How-to guides

• Trending templates

Check out Azeem’s Whiteboard Friday to learn more about diversifying your content strategy.

From Fear to Forward Motion: Navigating the Future of Analytics with Confidence — Brie E. Anderson

After lunch, Brie entered the stage to remind us of the ever-looming topic of GA4. Just kidding, we’re all pulling up our socks to try and figure out how best to use this new set of analytics to make real business decisions. Brie mentioned that change is hard, but it’s also inevitable.

She guided us through the most important sections of GA4 and how we can put it to work:

• Data stream is how information gets from your website to GA4.

• Events are where you can see what you’re tracking, if it’s important, and if it’s working. This is key for documentation and to meeting your business, marketing, and personal goals.

• You can mark any events of your choosing as Conversions with ease!

• Audiences, while similar to UA, now have unique new features in GA4. For example, you can now add an audience trigger, which will create an event when someone becomes a member of that audience. Time-based audiences are also worthwhile trying out!

• Data Settings — It’s best to speak to a privacy expert to see what’s right for you.

• Product links — Do them!

• Brie said, “The best and worst thing about GA4 is it’s customizable.” This is especially true for Reports.

• A vital tool in Advertising to make use of is Conversion Paths, which help you see where in the funnel channels are falling.

As much as this change can feel daunting and isolating, Brie shared comforting words as her last sentiment. Us marketers, SEOs, business owners, etc. — we’re all going through it together! GA4 may not feel intuitive initially, but as long as you’re willing to embrace the mistakes along the way, it’ll all be worth it in the end. Brush up on your GA4 skills with the Beginner’s Guide to Google Analytics.

Watching @brie_e_anderson give her #MozCon presentation on GA4 and yowza am I super glad she exists. So many little nuances and randomness of where certain things are that are not intuitive nor have clear documentation.

— Blake Denman 🙃 (@blakedenman) August 7, 2023

Down the Mountain — Noah Learner

Noah spoke on the MozCon stage last year about how to break into new areas with topic maps and rejoined us this year to share his evergreen framework for optimizing your own career, which can be applied to any market. He laid out this repeatable process in four steps:

1) Go wide:

• Create a strong skill set — This can look like working in an agency early on, signing up for sucky work, embracing errors, and finding ways to fuel your curiosity outside of work and within your circle of friends and family.

• Critical thinking is the art of deciding what to do and when to do it. Find and use a decision-making process that works for you, and make improvements regularly!

2) Go deep:

• Find your Ikigai (“reason for being”.) Uncover what ties all the things you love together.

• Don’t be afraid to reach out to your heroes. A like, comment, DM, zoom call, and in-person conversation can take you far. Go into these conversations with the mindset of seeking as much wisdom as possible.

• Join communities with the same types of people and passions. Can’t find them? Build your own!

3) Go big

• Are you a writer? Start a blog. Prefer speaking? Host a podcast (and feature your heroes!). Learn how to speak and ask for what you want.

• Overcome fears through therapy, box breathing, recording and revisiting wins, and remembering your purpose.

4) Give back

• This is arguably the most important step! Your vulnerability and mentorship can make a world of difference for someone else.

This all started with Noah drawing his “Why.” From there, he put in the time and effort to get his flock down the mountain. Now it’s your turn to ask yourself: What’s my dream, and what would I sacrifice to get it?

For all those at #MozCon looking for @noahlearner's SEO Community Slack link: https://t.co/TyKzMtzfna

— Moz (@Moz) August 7, 2023

The SERP Is Dead, Long Live the SERP — Tom Capper

Our very own Tom Capper, following up from his 2022 talk on non-catastrophic keyword research, addressed Google’s ever-changing SERP and looked at Google’s direction for the future.

The first major death of SEO was in 2003: Google Ads. In 2012, the knowledge graph killed SEO. In 2014, SEO killed Google. In 2020, “zero-click searches” killed SEO. Despite all of the “dead SEO’ instances in history, Tom mentions that interest in SEO is only growing.

Tom talked about the elephant in the room: SGE (Search Generative Experience.) Here are some interesting observations Tom made on how it’s performing:

• SGE is appearing less and less, possibly to save costs.

• There’s very little overlap with organic results, indicating that SGE ranking is likely not built on organic ranking.

• “Follow Up” in the SGE is very similar to “People also ask,” and maps are often replicated in the SGE and below it. This points to SGE being built in a rush, with little consideration of redundant results and functionalities.

TLDR: SGE is often not appropriate and can even be wrong a lot of the time.

What happens next? You’ll be happy to hear that there are worthwhile opportunities that will hold up now and in the future for SEOs, businesses, and publishers alike. Tom advises to start investing efforts in Google Business Profiles, Google Shopping, and a human approach to content.

Absolutely loving the research @THCapper did about SGE.

- SGE often pulls from sites not ranking in top positions
- SGE doesn’t show ads
- SGE is redundant w/ other SERP features

Looks like we came to many similar conclusions 👏🏽#MozConpic.twitter.com/z3XXGa9b4a

— Lily Ray 😏 (@lilyraynyc) August 7, 2023

Headless SEO: I’m Sorry, But This Is Happening — Lidia Infante

Lidia joined us for her second year on the MozCon stage. Last year she presented us with tips on SEO gap analysis, but this year, she spoke about headless SEO.

You'd think I shouldn't be nervous about public speaking anymore, but no #MozConpic.twitter.com/HcQhtVinzK

— Lidia Infante (@LidiaInfanteM) August 7, 2023

If you’re not sure what ‘headless CMS’ is, it refers to a CMS that deals only with content, not the front-end experience of a website. This type of CMS allows you to post content anywhere — the web, apps, and more via API.

Given this definition of a headless CMS, what is different about headless SEO? Lidia described the pros and cons of a headless CMS for SEO. The downside is traditional CMS will allow you to use plugins like Yoast to help with your search optimization.

There are several advantages of using a headless CMS, including the ability to reuse content across apps and other platforms, as well as internationalization.

Lidia provided a checklist of 7 implementations you need to request from your development team to get started with your headless CMS:

• Request all the key meta tags, including title, meta description, meta robots, viewports, and more.

• Give your content editors a customizable URL slug.

• Define your XML Sitemap setup. You will need to create a validation rule so that only 200 indexable canonical URLs get added. You will also need to define your preferred update frequency.

• Make room for structured data. This is one of the most exciting aspects of headless SEO. For example, you can create a rule in your CMS that generates FAQ schema for the appropriate sections on your page.

• Validate your headings’ hierarchy. This is key for accessibility.

• Perform a parity audit. This means you will need to make sure that all JavaScript looks the same to users and Google.

Views on Views of Video SEO — Crystal Carter

Crystal is all about the visuals! In 2022, she presented us with her views on how to use visual search to your advantage, and this year, she brought her wealth of knowledge to the topic of video SEO. Crystal mentioned that video SERPs account for an average of 20% of untapped keyword opportunities; there has never been a better time to improve your video SEO.

Why is on-page video SEO important? Well, because users love video, and the prevalence of videos in the SERP is up 45% YoY! Crystal dove into the data and uncovered that Google’s addition of video content in its SERPs is largely connected to TikTok’s success. Google is using video to help drive competitive, strategic objectives.

84 minutes a day watching videos… 👀@CrystalontheWeb#mozconpic.twitter.com/90mstcQxMg

— Josh Gallant 🇨🇦 (at MozCon) (@joshgallantco) August 7, 2023

Why is video SEO different from page optimization? Primarily because video content can appear in the SERPs in a variety of ways. Videos can even appear multiple times in the same SERP, in places like a recipe result, YouTube result, and webpage simultaneously.

How do we optimize on-page videos for SEO? Crystal dives into these three components of video SEO success:

• Video content — Use high-quality file format and thumbnails. Optimize your content by using keywords in your script and making sure that you satisfy user intent.

• Video platform — Use YouTube! This one is pretty simple, according to Crystal. YouTube has 48m pages ranking on the SERP right now, far above any competitor. Leveraging YouTube gives your content the best chance to rank. On a more technical level, video defaults on YouTube meet Google video indexing specs such as supported format and full video schema. Crucially, every YouTube video is indexed, so yours will be!

• Video webpage — This page should meet all technical SEO foundations, as well as include a transcript. Additionally, make sure your images are always above the fold!

GA4 added a new Organic Video channel to help SEOs measure the performance of this content. There has never been a better time to grow your audience by embracing on-page video SEO.

The Evolution of Content & the Future of Our Industry — Ross Simmonds

Ross ended day one of MozCon with a bang, following up on his talk in 2022 on finding your way to SEO and content success. This year, he spoke on the evolution of content and the future of our industry as we know it – touching on the question of whether AI is actually coming for our jobs or not.

Ross takes down a common statement circulating in the marketing community: AI-written content will NEVER drive results. Ross’s approach is to use AI as a way to augment or supercharge your own skillset.

We’ve all been lied to.

We’ve been told:

- Gum can’t be digested
- Driving with a dome light on is illegal
- AI written content will never drive SEO results

All nonsense. #Mozcon

— Ross Simmonds (@TheCoolestCool) August 7, 2023

In a world that is so hyper-fixated on content and whether or not AI can replace the process of creating it, Ross explains the need for marketers to embrace the full content growth framework to stand out while being able to incorporate AI to supercharge the process. Here are the key areas in which Ross recommends using AI tools to evolve your content:

Research – Tools like ChatGPT can help summarize and analyze large documents for you to use as research for your new content.

Create – Use AI to reverse engineer great content, and help you determine what performs well.

What checklist does AI utilize to generate great content?

Generally the same kind of checklist a human would use to generate great content.@TheCoolestCool#MozConpic.twitter.com/9OG5QrWbcr

— James Wirth (@jameswirth) August 7, 2023

You can also use a keyword research tool like Moz Pro to export a list of keyword suggestions and then feed that file into ChatGPT to help you come up with content ideas!

Distribute – Create once, distribute forever! Using AI, you can take a piece of content you’ve created and summarize or repurpose it. Use ChatGPT to create tweets based on your content and similar Tweets that you’ve made before.

Optimize – Upload a piece of content and have ChatGPT make recommendations on SEO optimizations.

Ross’ final takeaway is that if you are hesitant to embrace AI, embrace experiments. Find ways to test these tools not to replace your marketing strategy but to enhance it.

Catch more from Ross in his Whiteboard Friday: How Content Is Evolving Thanks to AI.

On to day two!

The first day of MozCon 2023 provided many insights, and it seems that the unintentional theme of the day was getting SEO buy-in! Glad to hear we’re all on the same page; we need to be in order to keep up with the future of search.

We launched our new metric, Brand Authority - have you checked your own Brand Authority score yet? Let us know your archetype on X.

We hope you enjoyed happy hour on the summit terrace and are now ready for another day of MozCon magic!

Introducing Brand Authority: Measuring the Unmeasurable

We all recognize the power of brands, but too often the value of brand building is reduced to hand-waving and wishful thinking. Today, Moz makes the power of brand measurable.

Starting today, you’ll find something new in our Domain Overview tool: a Brand Authority^TM score for your domain (or any domain you choose to analyze):

You’ll also see a new visualization – a four-quadrant grid – that compares your Brand Authority and Domain Authority to your closest online competitors. Here’s an example for electric car maker Lucid Motors:

It’s easy to see how Lucid stacks up to their closest search competitors and where they might need to build more authority. Lastly (for now), we’re launching a new API endpoint for API customers to access Brand Authority directly.

What is Brand Authority?

Brand Authority is a (1-100) score developed by Moz that measures a domain’s total brand strength. Where Domain Authority measures your ability to rank on search engines, Brand Authority measures your broader influence across marketing channels.

Why Brand Authority?

We know that brands matter, online and in the broader world. We see the influence of brands on search results, even if the details of that influence can be hard to pin down. Consider this illustration from Google’s own Quality Rater Guidelines:

When someone in 2023 searches for “apple,” Google knows that they probably mean Apple the company (i.e., the “dominant interpretation” or “dominant intent”). Even if Apple.com didn’t get their SEO quite right or hadn’t built quite enough link equity, people expect it to come up first.

We also know that Google understands real-world entities and tries to represent them in search, which might include Knowledge Graph results and other rich search result features. Google’s job is to model the real world, and brands are a huge part of that world.

The problem is that while we all intuitively understand what a “brand” is and have our own idea of which brands are important, we often resort to hand-waving when it comes to measuring brand strength. At best, we’re limited by our own biases and influences.

How does it all work?

When someone goes to Google and searches for “apple,” or “apple store,” or “apple customer service,” they already have knowledge of and exposure to the Apple brand. Likewise, if they search for terms like “iPad,” or “MacBook,” or “AirPods Pro,” they’ve been influenced by the Apple brand even if they never used the word “apple.”

Brand Authority uses two core Moz strengths: (1) Our deep knowledge of search results and rich search features, and (2) Our massive database of search volume information. Using Google’s rich results and brand signals, we can detect a wide variety of brand terms to understand how often people are looking for that brand and compute a score.

What can you do with it?

Anytime you need to connect a website to a brand and understand its broader influence, you can use Brand Authority. A few key use cases include:

(1) Strength and gap analysis

Brand Authority can help you better assess your strength as a brand and identify opportunities for improvement. Super-optimizing your website could result in diminishing returns (and poor ROI) if no one knows who you are. On the other hand, if you’re a more well-known brand but are lagging online, investing in your SEO and content efforts might be money much better spent than more offline advertising.

(2) Assessing brand value/potential

From sales prospects to M&A targets to reputation management clients, Brand Authority allows you to measure a brand’s broader strength and influence and help determine if they’re a good opportunity for you. Many underperforming sites might be built by solid brands with ample room for growth, while some seemingly strong sites could be built around virtually unknown companies, creating challenges to broader marketing efforts.

(3) Measuring impact of digital PR

While everyone hopes to get authority-passing links from their digital PR efforts, a big part of the PR game is the viral power of the mentions themselves. Brand Authority provides PR agencies with a quick and easy way to illustrate the broader impact of PR campaigns by measuring the actual word-of-mouth influence of the brands that pick up your stories.

By making the concept of brand concrete, we hope that Brand Authority opens up new opportunities for marketers, even beyond SEO. We look forward to seeing how you put Brand Authority to work as the metrics and tools evolve, and we’d love to hear your stories.

Site Architecture Optimization for Seasonality — Whiteboard Friday

Areej discusses site architecture optimization for seasonality in this edition of Whiteboard Friday. The key focus is on asking yourself when your business’s peak periods occur and strategically planning before, during, and after those periods.

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

Video Transcription

Hey, everyone. I'm Areej AbuAli. I'm the founder of Crawlina, an independent SEO consultancy, and I am here today to talk to you all about site architecture optimization for seasonality, with a focus on e-commerce websites.

What is Seasonal SEO?

Seasonal SEO is this concept of driving conversions during a period of increased interest.

Now, it could be one of many reasons. It could be event-based. It could be time-based. It could be because of a product. So some examples that come to mind when they're event-based is let's say it's Valentine's Day or it's Mother's Day or Father's Day. When it comes to a specific time period, it could be because it's the end of the year or it's January or it's summer.

Then, when it's product-based, it's usually around this concept of a new product launch, like the new iPhone, or the new MacBook, or so forth.

The Main Question to Ask

The question that you always have to make sure you ask when you work on any new website is this question of, "When are our peak periods?" It's very, very important for us to not assume when the peak periods are, that you actually ask that and to bear it in mind in our SEO strategy.

So the way I like to kind of split it is this concept of what happens before peak, what happens during peak, and then what happens after peak, and this is what we'll walk through now one after the other.

Before Peak

So let's start with before peak. It's this idea of splitting everything into what we benchmark first and then what we plan and then what happens when we go live.

Benchmarking Phase

So when we talk about benchmarking, the first question we usually ask is, "How did you perform last peak?" It's important for us to take a step back to make sure that we have benchmark data in place to understand what was our traffic like, what was our revenue like, how many leads did come through, because in order for us to, down the line, be able to assess and understand what happened in this peak period.

Forget all about your typical type of monthly reports. Peak reporting tends to be very, very different. It focuses on actual KPIs that matter to the business, and it compares you with this peak in comparison with a previous peak period. The second question is, "What is the opportunity this peak?" So for this specific peak that's coming up, you are usually expected to do some form of forecasting of what the traffic and revenue is going to look like.

We can do that based on current rankings, based on seasonal search volume. Then, off the back of that, we can have our forecasted traffic and our predicted revenue uplift. Sharing that beforehand is very important so that stakeholders can be onboard and everyone is aware of what to expect and what's coming next.

Planning Phase

Then, when it comes to the planning phase of your before-peak period, this is usually where you're going to spend a lot of the time.

Now, it's really, really important that we don't leave this to the last minute. This is usually at least a quarter in advance of a peak period coming up. So the first thing is making sure all your reporting is set up, have those automated dashboards in place so that they're able to curate that data as you go. Seasonal page updates, now it could be one of many things. Of course, the homepage will probably get some updates.

Your product landing pages, your PLPs and your product detail pages, in a lot of cases, some of these pages might have been forgotten for a while since they haven't been touched since the last seasonality. Then, of course, ensuring how we're internally linking between those. Now, your navigation is a hero when it comes to that, and it's very, very important for us to ensure that we're internally linking between our PLPs and our PDPs and our supporting content assets and our supporting blog assets.

Then, when it comes to the content updates that you need to be doing, evergreen is your friend. It's very, very important for us to rely on pages that already have authority as opposed to creating new pages from scratch, making sure that we don't forget about our meta tags and updating the different dates, depending on where we are in the year. But also stick to what worked before as opposed to trying to create something from scratch every time.

Tech checks are very important. A lot of times, with seasonal pages, depending on if they're an event page or a product page, then it might be that we kind of forget something that's blocked or something that's not indexed or something that's not crawlable. So ensuring that there is a plan in advance when you are about to go live for all of these pages to be crawlable and indexable by Google.

Then, finally, having an out-of-stock plan is really, really important. Let's make sure that we do not 404 pages just like that when they are temporarily out of stock, and let's make sure that we actually have a plan in place and we are liaising with different teams to ensure that we know when is something about to go out of stock and what needs to be done at that point.

Going Live

Then, when it's time for go live, you probably, by that point, have your go-live checklist ready to go, making sure that everything is crawlable, everything is indexable, what needs to be in the navigation is there, your pages can actually be found. Then just take a breath. It's really, really important at that point. It's usually been at least a month or two or four prior, especially if this was a big seasonal page for you or a big seasonal period for you to ensure that you kind of step back.

Before peak is usually where most of the work is done.

During Peak

So then, during peak, this can be an event that lasts a day. It can be something that lasts a week, or it can be the whole of Q4, for example. So it's very, very dependent on which specific peak period you're working on. But make sure you're monitoring your data as you go, right? So that data benchmarking that we did up here is very, very important, because at that point, we know how we performed the last time around.

So keep on top of these numbers and know, "Have we reached our target yet? Our prediction for revenue uplift, are we there at this point, or are we still quite behind?" Make sure that you're checking on the tech the whole time. Is out-of-stock going to become a problem soon? Should we make sure that we make any amendments to some of our pages?

Are all of our products live? Is everything crawlable? Is everything indexable? Also, just make sure you're updating stakeholders as you go. Especially if it's a longer period than expected, then don't wait for them to come up to you and say, "Oh, have we hit our targets yet?" or, "What are the numbers looking like?" It's very, very important with some of those reporting automated setup that we had in the first place, just make them really transparent and make them very, very easy for stakeholders to be able to access.

After Peak

After-peak period, it's kind of all about communication at that point. You're probably going to get a lot of questions, and SEO is just one channel. Your organic traffic and your organic revenue is just one channel amongst many more. It's going to be very, very important for the business as a whole to communicate how it went, which channels hit target, which ones didn't.

Whether it's good news or it's bad news, it's very, very important to be as transparent and open as possible about what the data looks like and what some of our learnings are. Now, something I always encourage is doing a retrospective action plan. Now, this is a meeting that will most probably include a lot of different stakeholders from different teams.

But the important thing is to kind of talk about what went well, what didn't go so well, and what are the actions that we're going to take off the back of that. There might be some things that went really well that we want to make sure that we continue doing for our next peak periods. But there might be others that were quite a bit of a challenge, for example, a miscommunication with the tech team, or a problem with a content piece that wasn't updated, or something along those lines.

With those, we want to make sure that we have a plan put forward of how we avoid this happening the next time around. This is also usually the best time to plan for next peak and ask for any additional resources that you might potentially need. Let's say you need a dedicated dev the next time around, or let's say you want more content resource, for example. This is usually the best time to put a case study forward of this is what happened this peak period, and we want to ensure that we perform and do even better the next time around.

So, yeah, with this, I hope it kind of gives an easy way for us to have SEO strategies moving forward, especially with a focus on seasonal peak periods and how we can handle those for e-commerce or also for other sites in general. Thank you so much for joining.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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: