SEO
14 Universal Digital Marketing Skills You Can’t Ignore
Social media marketing, search engine optimization, email marketing, marketing automation… the list of digital marketing specializations goes on and on. Of course, they are all different. Yet when you do enough of them in your career, as I have for the past 14 years, you start to identify certain skills that are fundamental to all of those specializations.
The sooner you start to learn those “universal” skills, the better—because those skills act as investments. They will pay off nicely when you work your way toward becoming an expert in a given field or when you switch to another marketing specialization that’s currently trending.
So let me tell you a bit about these universal skills:
- Data literacy
- Understanding different marketing channels
- Copywriting
- Getting around essential digital marketing tools
- Basic design skills
- Assertiveness
- Social intelligence
- Critical thinking
- Curiosity (constant learning)
- Adaptability
- Strong work ethic
- Performing experiments
- Coping with pressure
- Understanding code
Digital marketers swim in a pool of data all of the time. Insights come from data, decisions are based on data, results are in the form of data, and your reports will be filled with data too.
I’m talking about metrics, graphs, trends, and statistics, not to mention the more advanced stuff like predictive analytics. It’s important to develop an appreciation of these things because marketers are required to do these four things really well:
- Report on the past – Example: calculate the conversion rate from trial signups to paid subscriptions
- Analyze the present – Example: calculate the lifetime value of customers
- Predict the future – Example: what type of message can increase your chances of converting the user
- Compare with competitors – Example: what keywords your competitors target that you do not
And all of those four things are impossible to do without knowing where to look for data and how to work with it.
But let’s make it clear: You don’t need to be a data scientist in this role. You have to be data literate. You must learn how to collect, read, and communicate data.
A good example of the level of data literacy you’ll need is shown in this article on creating SEO reports. This is especially recommended if SEO is the specialization you wish to excel in.
Or take this article on 10 Google Sheets Formulas Every SEO Should Know. Stuff like this is your friend in the digital marketing world. It helps you work more efficiently. It makes your work possible in the first place.
How to get better at it
Certifications and courses. You should work on those even if your future employer doesn’t require you to do so. Despite what other people may say, these don’t help you get your next job. But the true reason for doing these courses is to boost your skills and confidence.
Just think about it. To hone the data skills, you need to practice. And to make your skills actionable (not like learning a new language on totally abstract sentences Duolingo-style), you need to practice on real problems. And then you need to be guided on what to learn. Because how can you know this, right?
Here are a couple of courses to get you started:
Even if you don’t specialize in a particular marketing channel, you still need to understand how all of them work and what to use them for. That’s because:
- There is a high probability you will need to work on the intersection of various digital channels (e.g., in a startup or in a small team).
- Your target audience will most likely hang out on different websites and platforms.
- You can improve communication with other people on your team.
- You will make a better decision on what to specialize in.
Let’s face it. Brands today need to embrace something called omnichannel marketing. It’s when a brand is present on, ideally, all marketing channels a prospect is likely to use. Plus, the company should ensure all of those channels work together to create a seamless experience for the prospects.
What this means for digital marketers is that they need to become experts at some of those and understand all of them.
For example, when trying to reach potential customers through search engines, you’re going to think in terms of SEO: search volume, ranking difficulty, SEO content, link building, etc.
But since that same content can be repurposed on other channels, you may want to turn, say, an article into a Twitter thread. Then you’re thinking in terms of short, zero-click content, post engagements, etc.
In a small team, you do that all alone or with somebody who helps you with some deliverables.
As a manager, you may not have direct contact with any of these channels. But it sure does help you understand what your team is doing.
How to get better at it
Try to develop a new kind of “inquisitive” perspective for what you see every day on the internet. So not only consume content from your favorite creators on the web. Try to analyze how they did what you like so much or what made thousands of people engage.
Some creators directly share the secrets of their workshops. At Ahrefs, we do this quite often. In fact, you can learn from our blog and YouTube channel everything that we do for digital marketing. For example, here’s our very own Sam Oh explaining how to overcome some struggles with video creation:
https://youtu.be/QCgDIhvFkCM?t=547
From that point, it’s all about applying what you have learned and analyzing the results.
Only video marketing and podcast marketing don’t utilize text as the main medium. However, even videos and podcasts start as text.
If you like writing, that’s great. This is because you will have a chance to get better at it, as there’s a lot of that in digital marketing. If you don’t like to write but are still serious about digital marketing, try some writing courses—maybe they’ll change your mind.
Believe it or not, we have debated what our tagline should be like for quite some time. How to convey what an all-in-one tool does in one short sentence?
How to get better at it
First, we need to reiterate something: Everyone can learn to write well. Sure, some people may possess a “natural talent” for writing, but this job isn’t about creating the next blockbuster novel or film script. It’s about developing a workshop on writing clearly and convincingly.
On top of that, the web is quite specific when it comes to marketing communications because:
- You can write with the help of writing assistants, so grammar is not so scary anymore.
- Things don’t need to be perfect, as the web is used to imperfection. Plus, you will often have that “edit” button.
- Utility trumps creativity.
To get you started, here’s a great, free guide on writing by Julian Shapiro.
Marketing technology, or martech, is what makes the job of digital marketing possible in the first place.
Moreover, better tools can make you a more effective marketer. Some tools just allow you to work faster, share your work easier, and get better results.
Try this: skim through some job boards in a specialization that’s interesting to you. You will start to see the expectations employers have of digital marketers are connected with certain tools.
For example, last time I checked, Ahrefs is a required tool for some 900 jobs in the U.S. (jobs posted on LinkedIn).
How to get better at it
A lot of the essential marketing tools have free trials or even free versions. On top of that, they often have certification programs and other types of educational materials.
For example, if you want to start doing SEO with zero budget, you can get Ahrefs Webmaster Tools for free and hone your skills using educational materials on our site (as I said, you can literally learn everything we do from there).
One path you can take is to start with this introduction to AWT and learn more about Ahrefs and SEO for free in the Ahrefs Academy.
In some instances, you won’t even need a website. For example, Google Analytics has a demo account with prefilled data. On top of that, it has a free certification program.
Generally, there are a ton of different marketing tools out there. But if there’s one tool you definitely need to be acquainted with, it’s Google Sheets (or Excel, if you prefer). But eventually, all roads lead to Sheets. Just browse through Sheets for Marketers to see what kinds of reports you can build with this free tool.
If some tools you want to train with are out of reach, it’s still a good idea to start with the free ones. First off, tools in their respective categories are fairly similar when it comes to structure and core functionality. Second, it’s still a valid way to develop skills relevant to your specialization.
If you think that design is about colors and pretty pictures, digital marketing will challenge that belief time and again.
Design is a language.
With design, you can show the user where to click. With design, you can convey what your brand is about.
In smaller teams, you will need to design stuff on your own. In bigger teams, you will need to communicate with your design team through wireframing and design terminology.
Also, having an eye for detail and a taste for this craft really helps. This is because, as a digital marketer, you’re going to decide on that stuff a lot.
How to get better at it
You should:
- Understand the basic web design principles.
- Learn how you can create better experiences for your users with UX design.
- Follow web design trends.
- Start experimenting with design software. What do marketers design? Usually, those are graphics for content, ads, infographics, presentations, wireframes and, sometimes, entire landing pages. The general rule is that you will be able to design almost anything using professional tools for graphic designers (Photoshop, Illustrator, Gimp). But there’s a steep learning curve, and the process may take some time. I believe marketers generally prefer streamlined tools (Canva, Genially) and tools dedicated to creating digital products (UXPin, Figma, Webflow).
Assertiveness is the ability to express your opinions and stand up for your own beliefs without being hostile or aggressive.
It’s the art of saying “no” in the workplace. It’s the art of firmly admitting to a mistake in the workplace. And it’s the art of confidently expressing appreciation for others in an environment that is competitive by design.
How to get better at it
Practice saying “no” and saying what you really want to say.
Now I’m no psychologist, but I agree with this article from Healthline. It’s a good idea to start practicing assertiveness in some typical, everyday life situations. You can try to:
- Speak up when you’d rather watch a movie at home instead of going out.
- Let your partner know you won’t be able to do a specific errand; don’t be tempted to offer a full backstory.
- Visit a new restaurant and ask for a table that’s in a quieter area or near a window.
Want to become a manager? Start with social intelligence skills. Want to work more efficiently with various contractors? Start with social intelligence skills.
Once you understand how little you differ from other people, you’ll start to speak their language and get work done together more efficiently—without hating your workplace.
How to get better at it
Work on these skills:
- Active listening – This involves being open-minded and empathetic toward others and recognizing their intentions (not everyone is a skilled communicator).
- Fostering positive feelings – A number of studies have shown that this is crucial to effective leadership.
- Observe managers in your workplace and try to identify how their actions and words affected others (if possible) – Did they inspire people to do better work? Do people feel comfortable sharing opinions around them? Or maybe they do things that cause totally unexpected reactions? What would you do differently?
The world of digital marketing is flooded with advice. Some good, and some not so good.
The thing is that you won’t know the difference if you don’t apply critical thinking to what you read, hear, or watch. Including this article.
Sometimes, critical thinking can be the very thing that saves you and your brand from bad marketing ideas. Experimentation is one thing, but some ideas are bad right off the gate:
How to get better at it
You can think of critical thinking as healthy skepticism. I’m not saying, “Don’t trust anyone.” I’m talking about not accepting things at face value, especially when they lead to important decisions.
This requires you to question ideas to uncover two things: a) the kind of argument or evidence that supports an idea and b) what a given idea leads to.
Based on that, you can develop your own objective, independent opinion.
There’s always something new to learn in digital marketing. New technologies, new tactics, new philosophies, Google’s algorithm updates, industry regulations, etc. You’d want to stay on top of that.
If you like to learn new things on a day-to-day basis, digital marketing is definitely for you.
How to get better at it
Well, I guess things related to digital marketing will either be interesting to you or not. I doubt there is some “hack” to make uninteresting things suddenly interesting without fooling yourself.
What you can consider is optimizing information gathering. Trying to read every interesting article or book on all things digital marketing will make you frustrated, as you likely won’t find enough time to consume all of that information.
Solution: try following content curations, e.g., newsletters curated by industry pros like SEOFOMO.
The market and your goals—those things frequently change in marketing.
One day, you may be working on a blog post; on another, you may be doing some conversion optimization experiments.
On Friday, your company may be the leader in your niche; but after the weekend, some other company may start fighting for the same customers.
How to get better at it
I think it’s all about mindset. You need to acknowledge the fact things can change quite fast in this type of work. And this is not necessarily anyone’s “fault.”
Reacting to change is part of the game. If you’re a perfectionist, this may be tough to deal with. When you start in digital marketing, you may be extrapolating your experience from other areas of life. You may have taught yourself to “finish what you started” each and every time. But when conditions change rapidly, there is no virtue in perfection.
If you’re not reliable, honest, and respectful of others, no one will want to work with you. Seriously.
You may get away with some things every now and then, but this shouldn’t be your norm because this “tendency” will only hinder your capability to work in smarter organizations.
How to get better at it
I believe ethics is an area where a person should make conscious decisions. There’s not much advice I can/should give you here.
But if you ask me, one thing that really matters is understanding what consequences your actions will bring in the long term. Ethics is a marathon:
Plenty of news about Fast, the startup which allegedly generated $600K revenue in 2021, burning through most of their ~$100M funding.
I got a reach out to interview in 2020 but immediately passed. It’s because I did my research on the founder CEO. Real shady actions in the past:
— Gergely Orosz (@GergelyOrosz) April 1, 2022
And don’t forget about critical thinking when seeking advice on the matter of work ethic.
This involves devising hypotheses and designing experiments to validate them. It’s important because, oftentimes, it’s the only way to get an objective answer.
Here’s another reason: the recent popularity of growth marketing. It’s a type of marketing that is characterized mainly by prioritizing data over opinions. And as you may have already guessed, the source of that data is often experimentation.
Experiments will come in all shapes and sizes. Here’s an example where we devised an experiment to find out if it’s possible to build links with Google Ads:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uz2bGhdnJN0&list=PLvJ_dXFSpd2u_ABxIRO6RVK3ucKyzn96Y
How to get better at it
Here’s a framework you can use to perform your marketing experiments:
- Analyze – Uncover areas of growth opportunities, e.g., look at the events or pages that cause a user to churn or leave the product
- Ideate – Generate ideas on how to improve the focus area and turn them into an idea pipeline
- Prioritize – Prioritize ideas by using the ICE scoring model (impact, confidence, and ease of execution)
- Test – Conduct the experiment and analyze the results
But before you do, you can dip your toes in growth marketing by seeing the video below—years of growth experiments at HubSpot distilled into a beginner-friendly presentation spanning just ~30 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luNpm9ueFDA&t=672s
Results. This is what digital marketers are hired for.
In marketing, there is always pressure to get results. Because to a lot of companies, there is no such thing as “enough traffic” or “enough sales.”
Having a bad year? Work harder. Having a great year? Great, let’s double that. That’s what you’re going to hear all of the time.
Speaking about time… marketers are always racing against time. Planning ahead and well really helps, but you won’t always be the one in charge of planning.
Every type of organization has its own race against time:
- In agencies, clients demand results ASAP and like to add things at the eleventh hour.
- In startups (especially VC-backed) and small businesses, the hunger for growth and revenue is legendary. There is a reason why most popular growth metrics have time embedded in them (“monthly growth rate,” “annual recurring revenue,” etc.).
- Bigger companies and corporations want to be the best. This means achieving better results in a shorter time than the competition. Also, they like to “squeeze” results before the end of a billing cycle.
How to get better at it
Pressure in digital marketing is normal. Since this is an issue directly related to health and psychology, I will only go as far as telling you what worked for me:
- Assertiveness (point #6 of this article)
- Learning to recognize and enjoy other things in life
- Healthy diet
- Realizing that perfect is not always better (this helps me move faster)
Too much pressure in digital marketing is normal too. (Or should I say “common”?) But there’s a point where pressure stops being your problem and starts to be the problem of the person putting pressure on you.
Sometimes, the only way to cope with it is to find another job. I know. It’s easier said than done. Just remember that your environment has a tremendous impact on shaping your beliefs and attitude. You may thank yourself later for leaving a toxic environment.
Sooner or later, you will be exposed to some form of programming or markup language. How exposed? It really depends.
Your job may require something basic like inserting a tracking tag or editing some lines in your WordPress template. Other times, it may require you to do data analysis for customer databases with SQL or Python.
Learning this skill can save you a lot of time on redundant tasks, especially when you need to perform them at scale. Check out the video below to see an example of how understanding code can make you super efficient at work:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMk2iaJGpSA
That said, I feel that the no-code movement will make us marketers less reliant on coding and more reliant on martech. But there’s no point in waiting for that moment.
Last but not least, learning code really exercises your problem-solving muscles.
Recommended reading: Excel to SQL: Why You Should Make the Switch
How to get better at it
As with data literacy, it’s best to acquire knowledge by completing courses. Here are some good ones:
Final thoughts
As you may have noticed, I chose not to include creativity as one of the main skills. So what about all those famous marketing campaigns that permeated popular culture? What about Mad Men?
I think that creativity has its role in digital marketing, but it’s just not as much of a fundamental skill. And I’m talking about outstanding creativity here, not the “typical” connect-the-dots creativity that any human being is capable of.
The former can help your ads or any type of content to stand out in the crowd, but it does not guarantee efficiency. And it seems that this quality matters the most in digital marketing.
In my opinion, digital marketing is more of a craft than an art form. It’s about being able to discover what works and repeating it until it works. Though, you may often repeat someone else’s work (and that’s not very creative).
So I’d say that, however grim this may sound, don’t strive for creativity in digital marketing at all costs. Don’t make it your #1 priority, as it can hinder your ability to perform effectively.
Got questions or comments? Ping me on Twitter.
SEO
7 Strategies to Lower Cost-Per-Lead
SEO for personal injury law firms is notorious for how expensive and competitive it can be. Even with paid ads, it’s common for every click from the ad to your website to cost hundreds of dollars:
When spending this kind of money per click, the cost of gaining new cases can quickly skyrocket. Since SEO focuses on improving your visibility in the unpaid areas of search engines, you can cut costs and get more leads if you’re savvy enough.
Here are the strategies I’ve used to help new and boutique injury and accident law firms compete with the big guns for a fraction of the cost.
Recommendation
Unlike many other local service businesses, personal injury law firms need to work harder to earn trust and credibility online.
This applies to earning trust from humans and search engines alike. Google has a 170-page document called the Search Quality Rater Guidelines. This document contains two frameworks law firms can use to help Google and website visitors trust them more.
The first is “your money or your life,” or YMYL. Google uses this term to describe topics that may present a high risk of harm to searchers. Generally, any health, finances, safety, or welfare information falls into this category. Legal information is also a YMYL topic since acting on the wrong information could cause serious damage or harm to searchers.
The second framework is EEAT, which stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
This framework applies more broadly to all industries and is about sharing genuine information written by experts and authorities for a given topic. Both YMYL and EEAT consider the extent to which content is accurate, honest, safe, and reliable, with the ultimate goal of delivering trustworthy information.
Here are the things I implement for my personal injury clients as a priority to improve the trustworthiness of their online presence:
- Prominently display star ratings from third-party platforms, like Google or FaceBook reviews.
- Show your accreditations, certifications, awards, and the stats on cases you’ve won.
- If government-issued ratings or licenses apply to your practice areas, show those too.
- Add contact information like your phone number and address in the footer of every page.
- Share details of every member of your firm, highlighting their expertise and cases they’ve won.
- Add links to your professional profiles online, including social media and law-related listings.
- Include photos of your team and offices, results, case studies, and success stories.
Generally speaking, your Google Business listing can account for over 50% of the leads you get from search engines. That’s because it can display prominently in the maps pack, like so: 
Without a Google Business listing, your firm will not show up here or within Google Maps since it is managed completely separately from your website. Think of your Google listing like a social profile, but optimize it like a website. Make sure you create one of these for each location where you have an on-the-ground presence, ideally an established office.
Take the time to fill out all the details it asks for, especially:
- Your firm’s name, address, and phone number
- Your services with a description of each
- Images of your premises, inside and outside the office
And anything else you see in these sections: 
Also, make it a regular habit to ask your clients for reviews.
Reviews are crucial for law firms. They are the number one deciding factor when someone is ready to choose a law firm to work with. While you can send automated text messages with a link to your Google profile, you’ll likely have a higher success rate if you ask clients in person while they’re in your office or by calling them.
I’ve also seen success when adding a request for a review on thank you pages.
For instance, if you ever send an electronic contract or invoice out to clients, once they’ve signed or paid, you can send them to a thank you page that also asks for a review. Here’s my favorite example of this from a local accountant. You can emulate this concept for your own website too:
Recommendation
The most common way that people search for legal services is by searching for things like “personal injury lawyer near me” or “car accident lawyer new york”.
For instance, take a look at the monthly search volume on these “near me” keywords for an injury and accident lawyer:
People also commonly search at a state, city, and even suburb level for many legal services, especially if it’s an area of law that differs based on someone’s location. To optimize your website architecture for location keywords like these, it’s best practice to create dedicated pages for each location and then add sub-pages for each of your practice areas in that location.
For example, here’s what that would look like:
The corresponding URL structure would look like this:
- /new-york
- /new-york/car-accident-lawyer
- /new-york/personal-injury-lawyer
- /new-york/work-injury-lawyer
Pro Tip:
Check out my guide on franchise SEO for local and national growth strategies if you have many offices nationwide.
A topic hub is a way to organize and link between related articles on a website. It’s sometimes referred to as a topic cluster because it groups together pages that are related to the same subject matter.
If you run a small firm or your marketing budget is tight, I recommend focusing on a single area of law and turning your website into a topical hub. You can do this by publishing different types of content, such as how-to guides, answering common questions, and creating landing pages for each of your services.
For example, if you currently offer services for immigration law, criminal defense, and personal injury compensation, each appeals to very different audience segments. They’re also very competitive when it comes to marketing, so focusing your efforts on one of these is ideal to make your budget go further.
Most areas of law are naturally suited to building out topic clusters. Every practice area tends to follow a similar pattern in how people search at different stages in their journey.
- Top-of-funnel: When people are very early in their journey, and unaware of what type of lawyer they need, they ask a lot of high-level questions like “what is a car accident attorney”.
- Mid-funnel: When people are in the middle of their journey, they tend to ask more nuanced questions or look for more detailed information, like “average settlement for neck injury”.
- Bottom-of-funnel: When people are ready to hire an attorney, they search for the practice area + “attorney” or “lawyer”. Sometimes they include a location but nothing else. For example, “personal injury lawyer”.
This pattern applies to most areas of law. To apply it to your website, enter your main practice area and a few variations into Keywords Explorer:
Make sure to include a few different variations like how I’ve added different ways people search for lawyers (lawyer, attorney, solicitor) and also for other related terms (compensation, personal injury, settlement).
If you check the Matching terms report, you’ll generally get a big list that you’ll need to filter to make it more manageable when turning it into a content plan.
For example, there are 164,636 different keyword variations of how people search for personal injury lawyers. These generate over 2.4 million searches per month in the US.
You can make the list more manageable by removing keywords with no search volume. Just set the minimum volume to 1:
You can also use the include filter to only see keywords containing your location for your location landing pages:
There are also a number of distinct sub-themes relevant to your area of law. To isolate these, you can use the Cluster by Terms side panel. For instance, looking at our list of injury-related keywords, you can easily spot specific body parts that emerge as sub-themes:
Other sub-themes include:
- How the accident happened (at work, in a car)
- How much compensation someone can get (compensation, average, settlement)
- How severe the injury was (traumatic)
Each of these sub-themes can be turned into a cluster. Here’s what it might look like for the topic of neck injuries:
People tend to ask a lot of questions related to most areas of law. As you go through the exercise of planning out your topic clusters, you should also consider building out a knowledge hub where people can more easily navigate your FAQs and find the answers they’re looking for.
Use the knowledge base exclusively for question-related content. You can find the most popular questions people ask after an accident or injury in the Matching terms > Questions tab:
You can also easily see clusters of keywords for the top-of-funnel and mid-funnel questions people ask by checking the Clusters by Parent Topic report. It groups these keywords into similar themes and each group can likely be covered in a single article.
Here’s an example of how Smith’s Lawyers has created a knowledge base with a search feature and broad categories to allow people to find answers to all their questions more easily.
The easier you make it for people to find answers on your website, the less inclined they are to go back to Google and potentially visit a competitor’s website instead. It also increases their interaction time with your brand, giving you a higher chance of being front-of-mind when they are ready to speak to a lawyer about their case.
Some areas of law lend themselves to certain types of interactive content. An obvious example is a compensation calculator for injury and accident claims. Doing a very quick search, there are over 1,500 keywords on this topic searched over 44,000 times a month in the US.
The best part is how insanely low the competition is on these keywords:
Keyword difficulty is graded on a 100-point scale, so single-digit figures mean there’s virtually no competition to contend with. It’s not all that hard to create a calculator either.
There are many low-cost, no-code tools on the market, like Outgrow, that allow you to create a simple calculator in no time. Other types of interactive content you could consider are:
- Quiz-style questionnaires: great for helping people decide if they need a lawyer for their case.
- Chatbots: to answer people’s questions in real-time.
- Assessments: to pre-qualify leads before they book a meeting with you.
- Calendar or countdown clock: to help people keep track of imminent deadlines.
Backlinks are like the internet’s version of citations. They are typically dark blue, underlined text that connects you to a different page on the internet. In SEO, links play a very important role for a few different reasons:
- Links are how search engines discover new content. Your content may not be discovered if you have no links pointing to it.
- Links are like votes in a popularity contest. The more you have from authoritative websites in your industry, the more they elevate your brand.
- Links also help search engines understand what different websites are about. Getting links from other law-related websites will help build relevancy to your brand.
Think of link building as a scaled-down version of PR. It’s often easier and cheaper to implement. However, it is very time-intensive in most cases. If you’re doing your own SEO, hats off to you!
However, I’d recommend you consider partnering with an agency that specializes in law firm SEO and can handle link building for you. Typically, agencies like these will have existing relationships with law-related websites where they can feature your brand, which will be completely hands-off for you.
For instance, Webris has a database of thousands of legal websites on which they have been able to feature their clients. If you don’t have an existing database to work with and you’re doing SEO yourself, here are some alternative tactics to consider.
Expert quotes
Many journalists and writers benefit from quoting subject-matter experts in their content. You could be such an expert, and every time someone quotes you, ask for a link back to your website. Check out platforms like Muck Rack or SourceBottle, where reporters post callouts for specific experts they’re looking to get quotes from or feature in their articles.
Guest posting
If you like writing content, you can alternatively create content for other people’s websites and include links back to your site. This approach is more time intensive. To make the effort worth it, reach out to websites with an established audience so you get some additional brand exposure too.
Updating outdated content
If you’re checking out other people’s legal content and you ever notice a mistake or outdated information, you could reach out and offer to help them correct it in exchange for a link to your website.
Naturally, you’ll need to recommend updates for sections of content that relate to your practice areas for this to work and for the link to make sense in the context of the content.
Final thoughts
SEO for personal injury lawyers is one of the most competitive niches. High advertising costs and high competition levels make it difficult for new or small firms to compete against industry giants.
As a new or emerging firm, you can take a more nimble approach and outrank the big firms for low competition keywords they haven’t optimized their websites for. It’s all about doing thorough research to uncover these opportunities in your practice area.
Want to know more? Reach out on LinkedIn.
SEO
Google Ads To Phase Out Enhanced CPC Bidding Strategy
Google has announced plans to discontinue its Enhanced Cost-Per-Click (eCPC) bidding strategy for search and display ad campaigns.
This change, set to roll out in stages over the coming months, marks the end of an era for one of Google’s earliest smart bidding options.
Dates & Changes
Starting October 2024, new search and display ad campaigns will no longer be able to select Enhanced CPC as a bidding strategy.
However, existing eCPC campaigns will continue to function normally until March 2025.
From March 2025, all remaining search and display ad campaigns using Enhanced CPC will be automatically migrated to manual CPC bidding.
Advertisers who prefer not to change their campaigns before this date will see their bidding strategy default to manual CPC.
Impact On Display Campaigns
No immediate action is required for advertisers running display campaigns with the Maximize Clicks strategy and Enhanced CPC enabled.
These campaigns will automatically transition to the Maximize Clicks bidding strategy in March 2025.
Rationale Behind The Change
Google introduced Enhanced CPC over a decade ago as its first Smart Bidding strategy. The company has since developed more advanced machine learning-driven bidding options, such as Maximize Conversions with an optional target CPA and Maximize Conversion Value with an optional target ROAS.
In an email to affected advertisers, Google stated:
“These strategies have the potential to deliver comparable or superior outcomes. As we transition to these improved strategies, search and display ads campaigns will phase out Enhanced CPC.”
What This Means for Advertisers
This update signals Google’s continued push towards more sophisticated, AI-driven bidding strategies.
In the coming months, advertisers currently relying on Enhanced CPC will need to evaluate their options and potentially adapt their campaign management approaches.
While the change may require some initial adjustments, it also allows advertisers to explore and leverage Google’s more advanced bidding strategies, potentially improving campaign performance and efficiency.
FAQ
What change is Google implementing for Enhanced CPC bidding?
Google will discontinue the Enhanced Cost-Per-Click (eCPC) bidding strategy for search and display ad campaigns.
- New search and display ad campaigns can’t select eCPC starting October 2024.
- Existing campaigns will function with eCPC until March 2025.
- From March 2025, remaining eCPC campaigns will switch to manual CPC bidding.
How will this update impact existing campaigns using Enhanced CPC?
Campaigns using Enhanced CPC will continue as usual until March 2025. After that:
- Search and display ad campaigns employing eCPC will automatically migrate to manual CPC bidding.
- Display campaigns with Maximize Clicks and eCPC enabled will transition to the Maximize Clicks strategy in March 2025.
What are the recommended alternatives to Enhanced CPC?
Google suggests using its more advanced, AI-driven bidding strategies:
- Maximize Conversions – Can include an optional target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition).
- Maximize Conversion Value – Can include an optional target ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).
These strategies are expected to deliver comparable or superior outcomes compared to Enhanced CPC.
What should advertisers do in preparation for this change?
Advertisers need to evaluate their current reliance on Enhanced CPC and explore alternatives:
- Assess how newer AI-driven bidding strategies can be integrated into their campaigns.
- Consider transitioning some campaigns earlier to adapt to the new strategies gradually.
- Leverage tools and resources provided by Google to maximize performance and efficiency.
This proactive approach will help manage changes smoothly and explore potential performance improvements.
Featured Image: Vladimka production/Shutterstock
SEO
The 25 Biggest Traffic Losers in SaaS
We analyzed the organic traffic growth of 1,600 SaaS companies to discover the SEO strategies that work best in 2024…
…and those that work the worst.
In this article, we’re looking at the companies that lost the greatest amount of estimated organic traffic, year over year.
- We analyzed 1,600 SaaS companies and used the Ahrefs API to pull estimated monthly organic traffic data for August 2023 and August 2024.
- Companies were ranked by estimated monthly organic traffic loss as a percentage of their starting traffic.
- We’ve filtered out traffic loss caused by website migrations and URL redirects and set a minimum starting traffic threshold of 10,000 monthly organic pageviews.
This is a list of the SaaS companies that had the greatest estimated monthly organic traffic loss from August 2023 to August 2024.
Sidenote.
Our organic traffic metrics are estimates, and not necessarily reflective of the company’s actual traffic (only they know that). Traffic loss is not always bad, and there are plenty of reasons why companies may choose to delete pages and sacrifice keyword rankings.
| Rank | Company | Change | Monthly Organic Traffic 2023 | Monthly Organic Traffic 2024 | Traffic Loss |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Causal | -99.52% | 307,158 | 1,485 | -305,673 |
| 2 | Contently | -97.16% | 276,885 | 7,866 | -269,019 |
| 3 | Datanyze | -95.46% | 486,626 | 22,077 | -464,549 |
| 4 | BetterCloud | -94.14% | 42,468 | 2,489 | -39,979 |
| 5 | Ricotta Trivia | -91.46% | 193,713 | 16,551 | -177,162 |
| 6 | Colourbox | -85.43% | 67,883 | 9,888 | -57,995 |
| 7 | Tabnine | -84.32% | 160,328 | 25,142 | -135,186 |
| 8 | AppFollow | -83.72% | 35,329 | 5,753 | -29,576 |
| 9 | Serverless | -80.61% | 37,896 | 7,348 | -30,548 |
| 10 | UserGuiding | -80.50% | 115,067 | 22,435 | -92,632 |
| 11 | Hopin | -79.25% | 19,581 | 4,064 | -15,517 |
| 12 | Writer | -78.32% | 2,460,359 | 533,288 | -1,927,071 |
| 13 | NeverBounce by ZoomInfo | -77.91% | 552,780 | 122,082 | -430,698 |
| 14 | ZoomInfo | -76.11% | 5,192,624 | 1,240,481 | -3,952,143 |
| 15 | Sakari | -73.76% | 27,084 | 7,106 | -19,978 |
| 16 | Frase | -71.39% | 83,569 | 23,907 | -59,662 |
| 17 | LiveAgent | -70.03% | 322,613 | 96,700 | -225,913 |
| 18 | Scoro | -70.01% | 51,701 | 15,505 | -36,196 |
| 19 | accessiBe | -69.45% | 111,877 | 34,177 | -77,700 |
| 20 | Olist | -67.51% | 204,298 | 66,386 | -137,912 |
| 21 | Hevo Data | -66.96% | 235,427 | 77,781 | -157,646 |
| 22 | TextGears | -66.68% | 19,679 | 6,558 | -13,121 |
| 23 | Unbabel | -66.40% | 45,987 | 15,450 | -30,537 |
| 24 | Courier | -66.03% | 35,300 | 11,992 | -23,308 |
| 25 | G2 | -65.74% | 4,397,226 | 1,506,545 | -2,890,681 |
For each of the top five companies, I ran a five-minute analysis using Ahrefs Site Explorer to understand what may have caused their traffic decline.
Possible explanations include Google penalties, programmatic SEO, and AI content.
| Causal | 2023 | 2024 | Absolute change | Percent change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | 307,158 | 1,485 | -305,673 | -99.52% |
| Organic pages | 5,868 | 547 | -5,321 | -90.68% |
| Organic keywords | 222,777 | 4,023 | -218,754 | -98.19% |
| Keywords in top 3 | 8,969 | 26 | -8943 | -99.71% |
Causal is a finance platform for startups. They lost an estimated 99.52% of their organic traffic as a result of a Google manual penalty:
This story might sound familiar. Causal became internet-famous for an “SEO heist” that saw them clone a competitor’s sitemap and use generative AI to publish 1,800 low-quality articles like this:
Google caught wind and promptly issued a manual penalty. Causal lost hundreds of rankings and hundreds of thousands of pageviews, virtually overnight:
As the Ahrefs SEO Toolbar shows, the offending blog posts are now 301 redirected to the company’s (now much better, much more human-looking) blog homepage:
| Contently | 2023 | 2024 | Absolute change | Percent change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | 276,885 | 7,866 | -269,019 | -97.16% |
| Organic pages | 32,752 | 1,121 | -31,631 | -96.58% |
| Organic keywords | 94,706 | 12,000 | -82,706 | -87.33% |
| Keywords in top 3 | 1,874 | 68 | -1,806 | -96.37% |
Contently is a content marketing platform. They lost 97% of their estimated organic traffic by removing thousands of user-generated pages.
Almost all of the website’s traffic loss seems to stem from deindexing the subdomains used to host their members’ writing portfolios:
A quick Google search for “contently writer portfolios” suggests that the company made the deliberate decision to deindex all writer portfolios by default, and only relist them once they’ve been manually vetted and approved:
We can see that these portfolio subdomains are now 302 redirected back to Contently’s homepage:
And looking at the keyword rankings Contently lost in the process, it’s easy to guess why this change was necessary. It looks like the free portfolio subdomains were being abused to promote CBD gummies and pirated movies:
| Datanyze | 2023 | 2024 | Absolute change | Percent change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | 486,626 | 22,077 | -464,549 | -95.46% |
| Organic pages | 1,168,889 | 377,142 | -791,747 | -67.74% |
| Organic keywords | 2,565,527 | 712,270 | -1,853,257 | -72.24% |
| Keywords in top 3 | 7,475 | 177 | -7,298 | -97.63% |
Datanyze provides contact data for sales prospecting. They lost 96% of their estimated organic traffic, possibly as a result of programmatic content that Google has since deemed too low quality to rank.
Looking at the Site Structure report in Ahrefs, we can see over 80% of the website’s organic traffic loss is isolated to the /companies and /people subfolders:
Looking at some of the pages in these subfolders, it looks like Datanyze built thousands of programmatic landing pages to help promote the people and companies the company offers data for:
As a result, the majority of Datanyze’s dropped keyword rankings are names of people and companies:
Many of these pages still return 200 HTTP status codes, and a Google site search still shows hundreds of indexed pages:
In this case, not all of the programmatic pages have been deleted—instead, it’s possible that Google has decided to rerank these pages into much lower positions and drop them from most SERPs.
| BetterCloud | 2023 | 2024 | Absolute change | Percent change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | 42,468 | 2,489 | -39,979 | -94.14% |
| Organic pages | 1,643 | 504 | -1,139 | -69.32% |
| Organic keywords | 107,817 | 5,806 | -102,011 | -94.61% |
| Keywords in top 3 | 1,550 | 32 | -1,518 | -97.94% |
Bettercloud is a SaaS spend management platform. They lost 94% of their estimated organic traffic around the time of Google’s November Core Update:
Looking at the Top Pages report for BetterCloud, most of the traffic loss can be traced back to a now-deleted /academy subfolder:
The pages in the subfolder are now deleted, but by using Ahrefs’ Page Inspect feature, it’s possible to look at a snapshot of some of the pages’ HTML content.
This short, extremely generic article on “How to Delete an Unwanted Page in Google Docs” looks a lot like basic AI-generated content:
This is the type of content that Google has been keen to demote from the SERPs.
Given the timing of the website’s traffic drop (a small decline after the October core update, and a precipitous decline after the November core update), it’s possible that Google demoted the site after an AI content generation experiment.
| Ricotta Trivia | 2023 | 2024 | Absolute change | Percent change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | 193,713 | 16,551 | -177,162 | -91.46% |
| Organic pages | 218 | 231 | 13 | 5.96% |
| Organic keywords | 83,988 | 37,640 | -46,348 | -55.18% |
| Keywords in top 3 | 3,124 | 275 | -2,849 | -91.20% |
Ricotta Trivia is a Slack add-on that offers icebreakers and team-building games. They lost an estimated 91% of their monthly organic traffic, possibly because of thin content and poor on-page experience on their blog.
Looking at the Site Structure report, 99.7% of the company’s traffic loss is isolated to the /blog subfolder:
Digging into the Organic keywords report, we can see that the website has lost hundreds of first-page rankings for high-volume keywords like get to know you questions, funny team names, and question of the day:
While these keywords seem strongly related to the company’s core business, the article content itself seems very thin—and the page is covered with intrusive advertising banners and pop-ups (a common hypothesis for why some sites were negatively impacted by recent Google updates):
The site seems to show a small recovery on the back of the August 2024 core update—so there may be hope yet.
Final thoughts
All of the data for this article comes from Ahrefs. Want to research your competitors in the same way? Check out Site Explorer.
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