SEO

Local and National Growth Strategies for Franchises

Published

4 months ago

May 31, 2024

Local and National Growth Strategies for Franchises

Franchise SEO is simple. It’s basically local SEO multiplied by the franchise’s number of locations, right? Wrong!

With more locations come greater challenges requiring a more nuanced approach than a typical local SEO campaign.

In this guide, I share successful strategies I’ve used to scale SEO for local and national franchises. It’s split up into three key segments.

You’ll find all the tips you need whether you’re a franchise owner, an in-house marketer, or an agency working with a franchise client.

Franchise SEO (search engine optimization) is a marketing channel that improves the visibility of franchises on search engines like Google. It operates at two levels: a hyper-local level for each individual franchise and a national level for the overall brand.

In a nutshell, SEO for franchises typically involves:

Keyword research for local services
Featuring each franchise in local directories
Listing each location on map services
Creating location landing pages
Eliminating duplicated or thin content
Improving the technical setup of the franchise’s CMS
Tracking results for each location

At a hyper-local level, franchise SEO strategies focus on ensuring each franchise is visible in local search results for the suburb they are located in. This includes visibility of the business listing in maps.

At a national level, the strategy expands to incorporate the overall brand’s visibility across all the cities, states, and regions where it has franchises.

There isn’t a single SEO approach that works best for all franchises because it depends on how the website and branded assets are set up.

Let’s look at a few options you can consider for your franchise’s SEO strategy.

For each franchise location consider doing the following:

1. Establish a consistent local address and phone number

As with regular local SEO, you need to have consistent name, address, and phone number (NAP) details.

Consistency is important because these details will often appear elsewhere on the web. Think of it like a virtual business card that gets shared around. If your business details are inconsistent, it can be a confusing experience for potential customers.

While a regular local business can use the owner’s personal mobile number and home address, this is a risky strategy for a franchise since ownership changes are more common.

It’s best to avoid using the franchisee’s personal details and establish the following instead.

Business name

This is fairly easy. Add the franchise name + the location on the end, like “Xtend Barre Arlington.”

Example of Xtend Barre's business naming conventions for its local franchises

Address

If possible, establish an office that can be used instead of the owner’s home address. Even a virtual office is better to consider than someone’s home address.

Phone number

Display a consistent local number online and forward all calls to the franchisee’s mobile behind the scenes. I recommend using a call tracking service that can provide consistent, localized phone numbers for you to use.

Call tracking allows businesses to connect marketing efforts to conversions. It also bridges the gap between online and offline conversion journeys allowing franchise owners and franchisees to see what marketing campaigns performed best.

Better yet, call tracking also solves a unique challenge for franchises: measuring the success of each location. It’s the best way to assess where weaknesses in national visibility may lie.

There are many ways you can set up call tracking. A basic process would look a little like this:

Select a call tracking provider like CallRail or WildJar.
Set up public-facing numbers to track (use these on your website, business listings, social profiles, and directories).
Set up forwarding so all calls go through to the right person in the right location.
Connect the numbers to your analytics software or create a dashboard to monitor conversions.

2. Create a dedicated page for each franchise

Creating a landing page for each location is franchise SEO 101. And yet, it still surprises me how many franchises don’t do this.

Start by designing a template you can use for each location page. Check out our guide on location landing pages and ensure you include the following features in your template:

Localize the page title and H1 title tag
Feature conversion-focused elements at the top of the page
Add a map showcasing the location of the franchise
Add images of the premises and staff on the ground
If relevant, consider adding a short video or virtual tour
Mention the services available at the franchise
Add social proof elements, ideally specific to each franchise

You can see a great example of this in action on F45’s website.

Sidenote.

I have no affiliation with F45, but I found this franchise’s set up to be a great example of many of the points I make in this article so I will reference it a fair bit throughout.

Each studio has its own page. They all follow the same design template which makes it easy for the franchise’s web design team to add new locations to the website as they open.

While there are many templatized elements, there are also the following unique features for each location:

A unique, location-optimized heading and description at the top of the page.

F45's SEO-optimized hero section for local franchise pages

Contact details for the specific franchise

The class schedule and booking functionality

F45's class schedule for Pooler's franchise location

The on-the-groud team running classes

And while there’s a lot more F45 could be doing, especially when optimizing for non-branded keywords, the SEO performance of these pages is not too shabby.

F45's franchise SEO performance in Ahrefs' Site Explorer tool

These location pages are a fast-growing segment of F45’s website, reaching almost 45,000 monthly visits in around 10 months.

F45's local franchise SEO keyword growth graph in Ahrefs

If your franchise doesn’t have such pages, start creating them, pronto.

3. Set up a business profile on Google, Bing, and Apple

If you want to put each of your franchise locations on the map, you’ll need to set up business listings on platforms like Google Maps, Bing Places, and Apple Maps.

Here’s an example of what a simple listing looks like on Google:

It is also often the case when someone searches for businesses like yours ‘near me’ (i.e., with unbranded keywords), your business listing may also show up in what’s called a map pack, and it looks like this on Google:

Setting up your business listings on these platforms is free and very straightforward. Click the following links to get started on each platform and follow the set-up wizard or prompts.

Don’t skimp on setting up these business profiles. Make sure you fill out all the information that you can. Get detailed with the services you offer at each location. Take the time to add images. You get the idea.

When adding a link to your website for these profiles, link to the franchise’s dedicated landing page, not the general homepage.

Link each business listing to the franchise's local landing page

For example, the F45 gym in Pooler has added this link to its Google listing: https://f45training.com/studio/pooler/. It takes visitors directly to the page with information about their location. You should follow this strategy for each of your franchises too.

4. Create social profiles for each location

This tip seems like a no-brainer. However, some franchise owners do not release control of social media marketing to their franchisees. As a marketer, you may not be allowed to set up these profiles for your client, so it’s worth checking. If this is the case, and there’s no way to create custom social profiles for each location, skip this step.

Otherwise, set up the social profiles for platforms that make the most sense for your industry.

Make sure you take the time to properly fill out these profiles as you did for the business listings on Google, Bing, and Apple. The same rules apply here too—if there’s a space to add information, add it. Don’t cut corners.

Make sure each of your social profiles links to the dedicated landing page for the franchise it represents instead of the homepage.

Also, make sure the only social profiles added to each landing page are the specific ones for that location. This way you create a network of links and brand properties for each franchise, which can help boost that franchise’s local authority as a micro-brand.

Interlink each franchise's social profiles with their dedicated local landing page.

Building each location’s brand in this way may make it easier to rank for hyper-local keywords instead of relying on the authority of the national brand alone.

5. Feature each franchise in local directories

Local directories are the online equivalent of the Yellow Pages. They feature information about businesses in the local area and function as a fairly easy link-building strategy for franchise SEO. They are essential for developing each franchisee’s local authority.

A great example of a local directory is Yelp. For instance, here’s F45’s Yelp listing for one of their studios:

Example of a Yelp directory listing for franchise SEO

A good way to find directories where you can feature your franchises is to use the Link Intersect report in Ahrefs’ Competitive Analysis tool. It will show you websites that link to your competitors’ sites but not yours.

Select the “Referring domains” tab
Add your franchise landing page in the “Not linking to target” section
Add competitors’ landing pages in the “But link to these competitors” section
Click “Show link opportunities”

Look through the list of sites for directories that you might want to add your franchise to.

Ideally, each franchise location should have a good handful of local directory listings. When these directories ask for links to social profiles, the website, or map listings, add the ones you created for that specific location.

Make it as hyper-local as possible, and avoid adding the national brand’s home page or generic profiles as much as possible.

Franchise SEO at a national level is where things start to get more interesting (and challenging). This is where it stops feeling like a local SEO campaign multiplied by the number of locations.

You have to work smarter than that to scale success at a national level. Here’s how to do that.

Scale keyword research

Normally, scaling keyword research at a national level can be very time-consuming.

If you are new to SEO, I recommend you start by learning the foundations in our comprehensive guide on local keyword research.

Presuming you already have some SEO chops, here are some ways to scale keyword research for national franchises.

First, identify relative search patterns in your country. For example, let’s say you offer mold remediation services. In the United States, “mold remediation” is a more popular search term than “mold removal” or “mold treatment.”

Example of keyword search volumes for mold services in the US

However, in Australia (putting spelling and population differences aside for a moment) it’s more likely that people will search for keywords containing “removal.” Relatively speaking, “remediation” is searched about 1/10th as much as “removal” is searched.

Example of keyword search volumes for mold services in Australia

Once you identify the relative search patterns in the countries you operate in, you can use these as a baseline for all your SEO efforts.

You can also apply these patterns to locations that don’t get many searches or new franchises before you have time to complete a thorough SEO strategy.

Now, you can also argue that people don’t really search at a granular local level that much anymore. They’re far more likely to search for a service “near me” or even to leave the search without a location and expect Google to personalize the results based on their device’s location.

While my experience also agrees with this sentiment, you do in fact need to find granular location keywords if you want to scale national franchise SEO effectively for these reasons:

To unify your Google Ads and SEO strategies nationally
To track and report on local visibility more accurately
To find untapped regional opportunities to optimize for

Here’s how Ahrefs can help shortcut the process

In Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer add a list of all services your franchise offers.
Add the list of locations and regions where you have franchises to the “include” filter.
Segment suitable keywords by location so you can optimize appropriate pages.

For example, let’s say you have a mold remediation franchise. You can add a list of all your services and variations in Keywords Explorer like so:

Using Ahrefs' Keyword Explorer to scale franchise SEO keyword research nationally.

Sidenote.

You can add up to 10,000 keywords at a time so don’t be shy about making it a long list. Make sure you set the correct country location and then hit the search button.

In the Matching Terms report, you’ll want to add all locations in the “include” filter and ensure it’s set to “any word” like so:

Using Ahrefs' filters to segment keywords.

Make sure you add all of the following here:

The exact suburbs each franchise is located in and can service, like Pasadena or Glendale.
The overall city or region where you may have multiple franchises, like Beverly Hills.
The states you operate in, like California.
The zip codes for all of the above, like 90210 for Beverly Hills.
Any relevant abbreviations for all of the above, like CA for California.

Then apply the filter, and you’ll get a condensed list of service keywords in the areas relevant to your franchise. You should see long-tail opportunities like the following:

Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer returning keyword results.

The final step is to segment these keywords based on locations so you can target them to the correct page on your website. How you structure your website will influence your keyword segmentation so let’s look at that next.

Establish an SEO-friendly site structure

Once you have a list of relevant service and location-focused keywords, you need to determine where to target them. There are a few options available to you based on how your franchise CMS is structured.

I recommend the second option to most of my franchise and national SEO clients as it provides the best opportunity for ranking both locally and nationally with one website. However, the third option works just as well if your technical ecosystem can handle managing multiple website assets.

Option 1: One website and each franchise gets a single page

This is a very common option for franchises. It uses a single website for the entire franchise, and each franchisee has only one dedicated page to make their own. It is the structure F45 uses, for instance.

Pros	Cons
Simple to manage Lower risk of duplicated content Brand has more control over visibility Leverages the main brand’s authority	May not rank well for non-branded keywords Limited space to display location-specific info Limits control each franchisee has to market their business

The URL structure for these pages is usually something like www.myfranchise.com/location/franchise-1, and it looks a bit like this when rolled out across the whole website:

Example of a franchise' site structure with each franchisee having only a single page

If you choose this structure, you will need to segment all local keywords based on the franchises for which you create pages. If you find keywords for multiple services in a particular area, they will also be targeted on the same page for the relevant franchise since there are no other pages you can optimize with them.

You’ll need to create dedicated sections on each franchise’s page for each service to do this. Here’s an example of what that might look like:

Example of keyword targeting for multiple services on a single page for each franchisee.

Option 2: One site but each franchise gets a subfolder that can be optimized

This option involves creating a mini content hub for each franchisee. It opens up more SEO opportunities and allows you to target specific services in each location better.

Essentially, instead of targeting all services on one page, like the previous option, you can create separate pages for each service in each location.

Pros	Cons
Improves ranking potential for location-specific service keywords Gives franchisees more control over their marketing visibility Distributes the main brand’s authority at a hyper-local level	Increased risk of duplicated content More pages to manage and optimize Requires more technical nuance for internal linking

The URL structure would be something like:

/new-york
/new-york/plumbing
/new-york/gasfitting

When you create multiple hubs across your website, it may look similar to this:

Example of a franchise' site structure with each franchisee having a content hub.

This option offers many advantages for SEO performance if you can create unique and valuable content for each location. You can segment your keywords at two levels: by location and by service.

But, you should avoid using templated sections or simply spinning content between each hub as this could lead to duplicate content issues. Instead, only create these hubs in the locations where you have a strong presence and can add E-E-A-T factors to differentiate your content about the same service from other locations.

Option 3: Multiple websites or subdomains, one for each major location

Although rare, some franchises allow franchisees to build their own dedicated website either on a separate domain (myfranchiseflorida.com) or as a subdomain (florida.myfranchise.com).

Pros	Cons
Gives loads of control to each franchisee for their marketing Allows each franchisee to update their community with news and local updates	More website assets to manage Technical SEO can become a challenge across multiple website assets Requires more governance to maintain brand consistency and quality

While the SEO community debates whether subdomains or subfolders are better, we’ve found no discernable SEO benefit to choosing one over the other.

So if it makes sense within your CMS to create a subdomain for each location or to give each franchisee a separate website, go for it.

Here’s an idea of what that ecosystem might look like when segmenting your keywords:

Example of a franchise' site structure with each franchisee having their own separate website.

Sidenote.

It’s important that you don’t make the choice to give each franchisee their own website because of vague advice that it’ll “be better for SEO. Only take this approach if it makes sense for non-SEO reasons and is easily achievable in your CMS and technical ecosystem. If you do not implement this approach correctly, you risk many technical challenges that will hinder SEO and cost a lot to fix.

Create regional content and internally link it together

Many franchises forget to optimize their websites for the general cities and locations where the brand has a presence.

For example, F45 has multiple gyms in New York:

And there are quite a lot of searches for gyms in New York:

Example keywords and search volumes for gyms in New York.

However, F45’s website does not have a page optimized for gyms in New York, so it doesn’t rank for any of these keywords.

The solution is simple. Create pages for the general regions, cities, and states where:

You have a presence, even a single franchisee in the area is enough.
And, there is some search volume for your services in the area.

Design the pages to accommodate multiple locations, and to programmatically add new locations as you add them to your website.

You can either design such a section using map functionality, like so:

Using a map design feature to add multiple franchise locations to a page's design.

Or you can simply create cards or listings for each location, like so:

Using a card layout to add multiple franchise locations to a page's design.

As you plan these pages, consider the internal linking opportunities you can capitalize on. Ideally, you can add a bunch of internal links programmatically so that you don’t need to worry about this as new locations are added to your website.

Here’s what that might look like:

Link from the regional page to each franchise within the region.
Link from each suburb or franchise page to the relevant regional pages.
Cross-link nearby regions and suburbs to each other.

Track performance for each region

Implementing scalable franchise SEO strategies is one part of the puzzle. The other is your ability to monitor the performance of each regional hub.

Thankfully, segmenting and monitoring keywords by location is fairly easy with Ahrefs. We offer three options depending on what works best for your business model:

Track pages for each region using Portfolios
Set up custom location-specific tags in Rank Tracker
Use the Ahrefs API to show regional performance within your own analytics dashboard

The easiest option is to set up a separate portfolio for each region you wish to track and add all pages relevant to that region within the portfolio.

Using Ahrefs' Portfolio feature for segmenting local pages and tracking performance.

While this is suitable for smaller franchises without many locations or regions to set up, it may not be suitable for larger franchises or for those who want to compare their share of voice against competitors in the same regions.

In this case, our Rank Tracker is a far more suitable option. Set up a new project and add your keywords, taking the time to tag each keyword with the relevant region.

Segmenting franchise keywords in Ahrefs' Rank Tracker.

Tags will help you segment the data to see how specific regions perform compared to others.

Once the project is set up, you can navigate to the “Tags” report to see metrics for each region you created as a tag. Here’s an example of some tags we’ve set up on our own website:

Example of the Tags report in Ahrefs Rank Tracker.

You can also add some competitors and monitor their visibility for the same regions. The Competitors > Tags report will be especially helpful to show you the areas where competitors may have stronger search visibility than you.

And finally, if you already have an existing dashboard or analytics platform, you can use our SEO API to pull performance data into the same dashboard automatically.

It’s the fastest way to scale performance tracking nationally and monitor search visibility for each of your franchise locations. However, you’ll likely need to enlist the help of your developers to get the ball rolling.

Implementing franchise SEO best practices may be challenging depending on the specific CMS used to create the franchise website and how the site has been set up.

Here are the most common challenges to look out for.

1. Scaling SEO on a custom CMS can be difficult

Many franchise sites are built on custom CMS’ that are not inherently SEO-friendly. These CMS’ may present technical challenges if they limit your ability to optimize the technical setup.

If you’re an agency or freelancer working with a franchise, learn the CMS and what’s possible for SEO before quoting on services or promising results. In particular, make sure you learn about the:

Technical capabilities for customizing SEO essentials like sitemaps, robots.txt files, and permalinks
Ability to add content and links to pages programmatically
Customization options for page layouts and design

2. There’s a high risk of duplicated content or doorway pages

Franchise websites are at risk of duplicate content, often caused by templated pages that do not allow franchisees to add unique information about their locations.

This is why I’m a big advocate of adding custom elements to your templates and only creating pages for which you can add unique information.

To diagnose if your franchise site has a high degree of duplicate content, check out the Duplicates report in Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool.

Duplicate content report in Ahrefs Site Audit.

3. Maintaining brand consistency and SEO governance

Maintaining brand consistency and SEO governance can be a challenge as your franchise grows.

While it’s tempting to minimize the amount of content each franchisee can add to the website and the social profiles they’re allowed to create, doing this can hurt your entire brand’s visibility at a national level.

Instead, you can try centralizing your marketing efforts by:

Sharing a detailed brand guide with each franchisee, marketer, or stakeholder involved in promoting the brand.

Considering a headless CMS that allows non-technical franchisees to make edits without needing developers. This setup also minimizes the risk of publishing mistakes.
Hiring an agency or marketing team that works with all franchisees and maintains brand consistency across all assets.

Grow your franchise’s SEO visibility with Ahrefs

When implemented correctly, franchise SEO improves your franchise’s visibility in search engines at both a local and national level.

But, it can be hard to scale franchise SEO without the right tools to help. With Ahrefs you can:

Search up to 10,000 local service keywords with one click
Monitor share of voice and traffic value for each location
Track performance for each location against competitors
Audit technical issues in any CMS
Use our API to automate performance + competitor tracking

Feel free to contact our enterprise team to see how we can help you grow your franchise’s SEO visibility today, or reach out to me on LinkedIn if you have any questions I can answer.

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Related Topics:Franchises Growth Local National seo Strategies

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Squarespace Update Strengthens Its Robust Website Builder

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Max

Squarespace announced updates to their Blueprint AI, automating website creation, and enhancing their tool suite—further strengthening their website building platform for small and medium-sized businesses.

Squarespace

Squarespace is known for their easy to use drag and drop interface that allows user to select a template, modify it with a few clicks and to drag and drop web page elements in order to create a professional looking website. Over 2% of all websites are reported to use Squarespace, showing that it’s a popular choice website building platform for small to medium size businesses.

Blueprint AI

Blueprint AI, launched in late 2023, is Squarespace’s proprietary AI website builder that helps users create a website by answering questions related to what kind of site they’re trying to create. The AI then creates a template based on the answers to the questions. Users can then use Squarespace’s full suite of editing features to further modify their website then modify to suit their needs and create a true custom website.

Other Improvements

Squarespace also announced other improvements that help users switch web page layouts and apply changes, a one-click style changer that instantly creates new style combinations, and a new hub for managing the website brand identify.

The announcement explained:

“Layout Switcher:
An adaptive layout menu that enables faster website design experimentation—offering a set of flexible compositions with one’s content automatically embedded, then applied instantly to a page.

Site Themes:
One-click styling combinations that make it easier to preview and apply a new website aesthetic—via handpicked font pairings, color palettes, button styles and more, with recommendations aligned to a customer’s brand personality.

Brand Identity Management:
A central hub for crafting and storing one’s unique brand identity that guides Squarespace’s AI writer to instantly generate first draft, on-brand copy populated across key surface areas, including website text, content descriptions, and client documents, among others.”

Takeaways

Squarespace has about 20 years experience helping businesses easily build websites and start doing business online. This announcement shows that Squarespace continues to improve the already excellent platform that gives businesses the chance to effectively compete online.

Read Squarespace’s announcement:

Squarespace Refresh 2024: Introducing a New Era for Entrepreneurs

Featured Image by Shutterstock/IB Photography

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SEO

Why Content Is Important For SEO

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September 26, 2024

Max

Content is SEO. More specifically, it’s one side of the SEO relationship. One core function of search engines is to connect users with the information they’re looking for. That information might be a product listing, a review, a news story, an image, or a video.

The other core function of search engines is to retain users.

Search engines retain users by ensuring their confidence and trust in the displayed results. Over time, they build expectations that using their platform is a safe, streamlined experience that quickly leads users to what they want.

SEO success depends on being found by your target audience for what they are looking for and consistently providing a satisfying user experience based on the context of the queries they type into search engines.

Search Is Built On Content

The core function of search engines is to help users find information. Search engines first discover webpages, they parse and render and they then add them to an index. When a user inputs a query, search engines retrieve relevant webpages in the index and then “rank” them.

Search engines need to know what pages are about and what they contain in order to serve them to the right users. In concept, they do this quite simply: They examine the content. The real process behind this is complicated, executed by automated algorithms and evaluated with human feedback.

Google constantly adjusts and updates it algorithms with the goal of ensuring the most relevant content is served to searchers.

This relationship between searchers, search engines, and websites, has come to define the internet experience for most users. Unless you know the exact URL of the website you intend to visit, you need must find it via a third party. That could be social media, a search engine, or even discovering the website offline and then typing it in. This is called a “referral,” and Google sends 64% of all website referrals in the U.S. Microsoft and Bing send the next largest amount of referrals, followed by YouTube.

Getting discovered by people who don’t already know you depends on search engines, and search engines depend on content.

The SEO Value Of Content

Google has said it prioritizes user satisfaction.

It’s confirmed that user behavior signals impact ranking.

At this point, whether this relationship is causal or correlative doesn’t matter. You must prioritize user experience and satisfaction because it’s a key indicator of SEO success.

Written language is still the primary way users interact with search engines and how algorithms understand websites. Google algorithms can interpret audio and videos, but written text is core to SEO functionality.

Enticing clicks and engaging users through content that satisfies their queries is the baseline of SEO. If your pages can’t do that, you won’t have success.

High-quality content and user experiences aren’t just important for SEO; they’re prerequisites.

This is true for all advertising and branding. Entire industries and careers are built on the skills to refine the right messaging and put it in front of the right people.

Evidence For The SEO Value Of Content

Google highlights the importance of content in its “SEO fundamentals” documentation. It advises that Google’s algorithms look for “helpful, reliable information that’s primarily created to benefit people,” and provides details about how to self-assess high-quality content.

Content, and how well it matches a user’s needs, is one of the core positive and negative factors in Google’s ranking systems. It updates systems to reduce content it deems to be unhelpful and prioritize content it deems to be helpful.
In fact, Google’s analysis of the content may determine whether a page enters the index at all to become eligible to rank. If you work hard to provide a good experience and serve the needs of your users, search engines have more reason to surface your content and may do so more often.
A 2024 study in partnership between WLDM, ClickStream, and SurferSEO suggests that the quality of your coverage on a topic is highly correlated with rankings.

Content And User Behavior

Recent developments in the SEO industry, such as the Google leak, continue to highlight the value of both content and user experience.

Google values user satisfaction to determine the effectiveness and quality of webpages and does seem to use behavioral analysis in ranking websites. It also focuses on the user intent of queries and whether a specific intent is served by a particular resource.

The satisfaction of your users is, if not directly responsible for SEO performance, highly correlated with it.

Many factors affect user experience and satisfaction. Website loading speed and other performance metrics are part of it. Intrusive elements of the page on the experience are another.

Content, however, is one of the primary determiners of a “good” or “bad” experience.

Does the user find what they’re looking for? How long does it take?
Is the content accurate and complete?
Is the content trustworthy and authoritative?

The answers to these questions reflect whether the user has a good or bad experience with your content, and this determines their behavior. Bad experiences tend to result in the user leaving without engaging with your website, while good experiences tend to result in the user spending more time on the page or taking action.

This makes content critical not only to your SEO efforts on search engines but also to your website’s performance metrics. Serving the right content to the right users in the right way impacts whether they become leads, convert, or come back later.

Leaning into quality and experience is a win all around. Good experiences lead to desirable behaviors. These behaviors are strong indications of the quality of your website and content. They lead to positive outcomes for your business and are correlated with successful SEO.

What Kinds Of Content Do You Need?

Successful content looks different for each goal you have and the different specific queries you’re targeting.

Text is still the basis of online content when it comes to search. Videos are massively popular. YouTube is the second-most popular search engine in the world. However, in terms of referrals, it only sends 3.5% of referral traffic to the web in the U.S. In addition, videos have titles, and these days, most have automated transcripts. These text elements are critical for discovery.

That isn’t to say videos and images aren’t popular. Video, especially “shorts” style videos, is an increasingly popular medium. Cisco reported that video made up 82% of all internet traffic in 2022. So you absolutely shoulder consider images and video as part of your content strategy to best serve your audiences and customers.

Both can enhance text-based webpages and stand on their own on social platforms.

But for SEO, it’s critical to remember that Google search sends the most referral traffic to other websites. Text content is still the core of a good SEO strategy. Multi-modal AI algorithms are getting very good at translating information between various forms of media, but text content remains critical for several reasons:

Plain text has high accessibility. Screen readers can access it, and it can be resized easily.
Text is the easiest way for both people and algorithms to analyze semantic connections between ideas and entities.
Text doesn’t depend on device performance like videos and images might.
Text hyperlinks are very powerful SEO tools because they convey direct meaning along with the link.
It’s easier to skim through text than video.

Text content is still dominant for SEO. But you should not ignore other content. Images, for example, make for strong link building assets because they’re attractive and easily sharable. Accompanying text with images and video accommodates a variety of user preferences and can help capture attention when plain text might not.

Like everything else, it’s down to what best serves users in any given situation.

SEO Content: Serving Users Since Search Was A Thing

Search engines match content to the needs of users.

Content is one-third of this relationship: user – search engine – information.

You need content to perform SEO, and any digital marketing activity successfully.

The difficulty comes from serving that perfect content for the perfect situation.

So read “How To Create High-Quality Content” next.

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Why Your Keyword Strategy Isn’t Driving Enough Traffic (And How to Fix It)

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Max

Why Your Keyword Strategy Isn’t Driving Enough Traffic (And How to Fix It)

This post was sponsored by Moz. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.

The scope of modern keyword strategy is expansive and crosses many disciplines. As Google leans further into user experience and user signals as part of its ranking algorithms, research, execution, and testing must become more interwoven and refined.

If your keyword strategy is underperforming and you’re struggling to drive traffic, rankings, or even onsite conversions, your keyword strategy could be missing critical components.

The following is a look at common mistakes and how to address them. You’ll see screenshots and examples of how you can solve keyword strategy issues and improve workflows during the keyword research stage using the premium keyword research features in Moz Pro, but you can get started free with Moz’s Keyword Explorer tool.

Mistake #1: Failing To Target Intent

You can’t just pick a keyword you want to rank for and move straight into writing a page. What you want to target is the first part of a complex equation, of which the user is the most important part.

Intent can be expressed as a set of questions:

Why is the user searching for the query?
What does the user expect to find?
What do search engines deliver to meet this intent?

You must answer these questions to build content that fits neatly between the expectations of searchers and the search engines. Whether you’re a beginner in keyword research or you’re a professional SEO who wants to brush up on the fundamentals, you must understand the relationship between queries and search intent. Content that does not satisfy intent will result in a poor user experience, which leads to negative engagement signals, which will hurt your ability to rank.

You must understand the relationship between queries and search intent. Content that does not satisfy intent will result in a poor user experience, which leads to negative engagement signals.

If enough of your content is misaligned with user intent, it could impact your entire site, as you won’t be seen as trustworthy or authoritative.

If individual pages or your keyword strategy as a whole is underperforming, this is one of the first things you should audit because a mismatch between search intent and your content will kill those pages, whether they’re old or new.

You also need to keep in mind that intent changes. This can be due to one-off events, seasonal changes, or algorithm updates.

Here are some examples of intent:

Purchase intent: the user is actively looking for a product to buy.
Comparison intent: the user is shopping around and comparing products.
Informational or educational intent: The user wants to learn something.

Screenshot from Moz

Intents can be quite complicated, and you’ll need to rely on your own audience research to get granular. But a tool can help speed up the process by showing you the general intent of a keyword and what is currently ranking on the SERP.

Explore by Keyword in Moz Pro makes it easy to see keyword intent at a glance for individual keywords and a whole batch of keyword suggestions. Let’s look at the keyword [best convertible car seat].

You can probably already guess the intent, and the tool confirms that it’s a commercial intent keyword. This means users are looking to compare products and features to find the best suited for them. Remember, this is based on the results in the SERPs, so it’s giving you some more intel into what Google expects a user’s intent to be, which we’ll discuss more in a bit.

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Screenshot of Moz Pro

As you go through the research process, you can use a combination of factors such as Difficulty and intent to discover related keywords worth pursuing to bolster your strategy.

Mistake #2: Not Conducting Competitor And On-SERP Research

When you’re in the weeds of data tables and strategy, it’s easy to forget one of the most simple and critical rules in SEO.

Most of the information you need is on the SERP.

When you evaluate the SERP of a given keyword, you can gain a lot of information with the right approach. But you’re going to need to get good at reading between the lines.

You can use the existing pages on a SERP to understand how well the query is being satisfied and what competitors are and are not doing. If the SERP has many high-quality pages, you can learn a lot from the strategies your competitors use. If there are pages that you consider low-quality, based on your knowledge of the subject matter, then you’ve identified an opportunity.

So, to properly research SERPs, you need a few skills:

Understanding of design and UX to identify suboptimal user experiences or understand why some pages may be outperforming.
A deep understanding of the subject matter covered by the keyword so that you can identify which pages provide trustworthy, high-quality information.
Knowledge of the user intent behind a query so that you can match the intent with the experience that the ranking pages deliver.

From there, you can evaluate the quality of the pages and choose where to focus your efforts. If you’re lacking information or you can’t find a good angle of attack, then start looking at similar SERPs for related keywords or related intents. If you can find a SERP with sufficiently different results but related search intent, you can compare and contrast.

Going back to our research related to [best convertible car seat], let’s take a look at the SERP. We can do it right inside Moz’s tool:

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Screenshot from Moz Pro

Yikes! This is going to be a tough one. We’ve got Reddit and Wirecutter on there.

Luckily, there are options. Using the “questions” tab in the “keyword suggestions” tool, you can discover questions that searchers ask relatively frequently. Some of them may have the potential for a related keyword strategy.

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Screenshot from Moz Pro

Even though the head term will be difficult to rank for, you can see a lot of “informational” intent related to this search. This is an opportunity to build trust with highly motivated consumers.

Mistake #3: Not Organizing Your Research

If you do keyword research intermittently or only at the beginning of campaigns, you might be missing important opportunities to refine your strategies.

Keyword research needs to be checked and refined as your strategy changes and the SERPs get updated.

It’s critical that you set yourself up for success when you begin a new campaign or strategy. You don’t want to do a ton of work and leave it in a disorganized state because, eventually, you will need to update your pages and reassess the strategy behind them. You can save yourself a lot of time by preparing for this eventuality and setting up a strategy that’s easy to jump back into.

Building keyword groups and lists help you understand how pages fit into the broader categorization of your website. It’s also a good idea to use a tool that tracks your progress so that when you return to strategy, you can see the past performance of pages at a glance.

With Keyword Lists in Moz Pro you can to upload your own sheet file or build a list by typing it out. Once the list is in the system, you get a ton of insights about the keywords both individually and in aggregate, as you can see from the screenshot of the sample list below.

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Screenshot from Moz Pro

Mistake #4: Not Building Entity And Topic Maps

The way you organize information is critical at two levels.

The first is on the page. How you present information, in what order, and in what format is critical to the experience of a page. If you can match this well with intent, you’ll provide users with a good experience and improve conversion rates.

The other level is site-wide. You must build a content and keyword strategy around topics and entities. This is how you build a content library that’s friendly to both users and advanced search algorithms. Building entity maps correctly helps you compete in an AI-heavy environment because you’re speaking the language of AI algorithms that work by connecting entities together through context.

Building these maps of context between topics also helps you to build a robust strategy and discover opportunities your competitors may have missed. Every page you add to a broader topic is an opportunity to reinforce your authority, succeed in a unique SERP, and transfer that SEO power to your other pages through internal linking.

Moz’s “similar SERPs” tool comes in handy here. With Moz Pro, search by keyword and filter by Similar SERPs. Tada! By analyzing the top-ranking pages for your target keyword you’ll see other keywords those competing URLs ranked for. With this list of new keywords, you can identify opportunities to strategically expand your content based on that topical analysis. It’s a great way to see where there’s overlap in SERPs.

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Screenshot from Moz Pro

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Screenshot from Moz Pro

So stop missing out on opportunities your competitors are capitalizing on. With the advanced keyword research features in Moz Pro you can streamline your research process, enabling deeper keyword analysis and smarter strategies. Prioritize intent, enhance user experience, increase conversions, and rank for the queries you need.

Stop missing out on traffic! Unlock the power of Keyword Explorer with over 500 million traffic-driving keywords.

Start your free trial today and fix your keyword strategy for real results.

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by Moz. Used with permission.

In-Post Image: Images by Moz. Used with permission.

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