SEO
4 Ways To Boost SEO ROI With No Overhead Costs
This post was sponsored by ResultFirst. The opinions expressed in this article are the sponsor’s own.
Your CEO wants to know how important your SEO team is in the company’s big picture.
The CFO wants to make sure you’re staying within your tight marketing budget.
Meanwhile, shareholders want to see a higher return on investment (ROI) with limited cost.
So, how do you transform your SEO team into an ROI powerhouse without breaking your budget?
We’ll show you how to improve your ROI through an updated keyword ranking strategy and some untapped SEO strategies for enterprise SEO teams.
And some of these SEO strategies only cost money when they work.
We’ll teach you how to work more efficiently with a smaller in-house marketing budget.
1. Get More Qualified Visitors: Add Mid-Volume Keywords To Your SEO Strategy
You know the drill. Your CEO wants to see millions of visitors pouring into your site with a minimum spend.
Enter SEO.
Your SEO team focuses on high-volume keywords and branded keywords to make sure traffic flow improves.
However, once website traffic begins to increase, shareholders seem to start focusing on the next key metric – return on investment (ROI).
Suddenly, your CEO starts asking to see conversion data and asking how many hours went into each conversion:
- How many hours went into nurturing each visitor?
- How many of those nurtured visitors converted into a sale?
- How many fell out of a long marketing funnel?
- How many of those visitors are converting into true profit?
- Is all of this work financially paying off?
Then, you realize that high-volume keywords and branded keywords only attract top-of-the-funnel visitors, a.k.a people who are the farthest away from making a purchase.
The excitement begins to fade – your marketing team has spent hundreds of hours nurturing those top-funnel visitors to the consideration stage, only for 4.31% of visitors to convert.
Each hour spent nurturing reduces the ROI of SEO.
It’s time to make sure that the leads entering your website are closer to the conversion phase of your marketing funnel.
After all, less work to transform a visitor into profit means higher ROI.
The key: pivot your SEO team’s focus towards adding more mid-volume and low-volume keywords to your SEO strategy.
Why Should I Allocate SEO Bandwidth To Mid- & Low-Volume Keywords?
To make sure that your website leads are closer to conversion, allocate SEO bandwidth toward mid- and low-volume keywords.
What’s The ROI Difference Between High-Volume & Mid-/Low-Volume Keywords?
High-volume keywords, such as the short-tail keywords [iPhone 14] or [Android], are great for awareness and traffic. But because visitors who enter your site through high-volume, short-tail keywords are in the awareness stage of the marketing funnel, only 3% of these visitors may convert.
Mid-volume and low-volume keywords, such as the long-tail keywords [buy 256GB iPhone 14 pro max], have a 23% chance of converting with less work.
How To Increase ROI With Mid- & Low-Volume Keywords
To add mid-volume and low-volume keywords (a.k.a long-tail keywords) to your SEO strategy, simply repeat your in-house keyword research strategy to focus on search intent.
Re-performing your initial keyword research with search intent will naturally help you uncover the long-tail keywords you need to get more qualified leads and search visibility.
The Easy Way
Don’t have the budget to repeat keyword research for more qualified search terms?
Look into:
- Hands-on pay-for-performance SEO agencies that combine your current keyword strategy with a well-balanced mix of short-tail and long-tail keywords. Bonus, you only pay for results; there are no budget-wasting retainers.
- Automated SEO tools, which will still require bandwidth for configuration and quality control.
2. Audit The True ROI Of Your SEO Strategy: Reduce Unnecessary Marketing Spend
Being wise about how you allocate your resources is the second key to higher ROI.
Ask yourself:
- Are your marketing teams aligned with your SEO goals?
- Are you streamlining and automating simple SEO tasks to improve bandwidth and innovative output from your key players?
- If you’re outsourcing parts of your SEO strategy, is their success resulting in net profit?
If the answer to any of these questions is no, you may be accidentally lowering the ROI of your SEO results.
Focus on these key areas to solve the largest unnecessary drains on your marketing budget.
Cost Reduction Tip 1: Ensure Content Marketing, PPC & SEO Are Aligned For Higher Success
Sharing strategies and data between marketing teams can help your organization save bandwidth costs while improving how you optimize and manage campaigns.
Siloed enterprise marketing teams can quickly become one of the largest sources of budget drain.
In fact, 13.9% of marketing managers and department heads cited alignment with other departments as a major hurdle to SEO success in 2022.
However, when broader interdepartmental collaboration is implemented, you can quickly see the ROI of SEO strategies increase.
The Problem
ROI is severely lowered when PPC teams, content marketing teams, and SEO teams are not communicating with each other, content can quickly overlap, causing cannibalization, repeat work, and more.
The cost of duplicate work, educational meetings, and strategy repairs cause unnecessary additional costs toward a conversion.
The Solution
Reduce repetitive work and raise ROI by:
- Using proven data from recently completed campaigns. Save time on SEO research by leveraging successful PPC ad copy as a starting point for SERP titles and meta descriptions.
- Combining and sharing PPC and SEO keyword research.
- Sharing Google Ads and Search Console data between teams to save time on experimenting and help avoid mistakes.
- Discovering SERP ownership and allocating ad spend to SERPs that have higher competition.
- Locating and combining content pages that directly compete with SEO-focused pages, then working together to focus those content creation resources on new, high-ROI targets.
By reducing repeat work for the same conversion, you can quickly raise ROI.
Cost Reduction Tip 2: Safely Streamline & Automate SEO Tasks
In 2022, the majority of marketing managers and department heads cited a lack of resources as their largest hurdle toward SEO success.
The Problem
ROI drops when your team is stretched thin; high-quality output decreases and mistakes are made.
Mistakes take time to correct, and to your CEO, time is money that’s taken away from ROI.
The Solution
Raise ROI by investing in AI and machine learning tools that save time and help allow the output of higher-quality work from your teams.
Time saved = lower conversion costs = higher ROI.
AI and machine learning can reduce conversion costs by up to 20%, with up to 70% of the cost reduction resulting from higher productivity.
To get started, uncover which simple SEO tasks can be automated and taken off of your team’s plate.
AI can safely automate time-consuming tasks and augment SEO performance through:
- SERP anomaly detection.
- Ranking and traffic report updates.
- Backlink profile creation.
- Gathering manual SEO data.
- Backlink sourcing.
- Initial keyword research reports.
- Topic research and article structure.
By allowing tools and AI to perform those tasks, you’ll find:
- Fewer costly mistakes and correction periods, because your team has more time to focus on quality instead of racing to complete their tasks.
- Less time-spend on time-consuming work, allowing your team to focus on needle-moving strategy and collaboration.
- Faster paths to scalability and growth within your SEO team structure.
Each of these elements directly influences the ROI of SEO.
Cost Reduction Tip 3: Audit The ROI Of Outsourced SEO
Your CFO and CEO are highly focused on costs to operate versus profit.
You should be, too.
Outsourcing SEO tasks solves any bandwidth problems your marketing team has, but how do you know if the cost of the retainer is worth the ROI?
The Problem
ROI drops when retainers enter the picture.
When there is an expense simply because your company signed the contract or because the agency requires three months of setup time, it can be hard to prove that your agency choice was a good idea.
The Solution
Learning how retainers impact your ROI can help you paint a better picture of success.
Calculating your SEO strategy’s ROI and including retainer costs plus the time it takes to get to page 1 is key.
- When is your outsourced SEO agency expecting results to begin?
- How many months of the retainer will you be paying before that?
- How much money could you save paying only for results?
In this scenario, the first SEO results are seen around month four.
With traditional SEO billing, you’ve already spent $4,000 for the first conversions.
With pay-for-performance SEO billing, you’ve only paid $450 for the first conversions.
After discovering the cost impact of your current retainers, try exploring other types of SEO agencies.
3. Hire Specific Top Skills: Scale Your SEO Team Into A High-Impact Powerhouse
Like searching for the perfect SEO agency, hiring new SEO professionals can be an ROI-draining gamble.
So, in order to positively impact your ROI, the key is to look for specific traits for the perfect enterprise SEO professional.
Look For These Traits In Your Next Enterprise SEO Hire
In addition to critical thinking, great speaking and writing ability, technical and programming skills, and analytics knowledge, you should also look for these key enterprise SEO traits:
- Inherent knowledge of your business and its vertical(s).
- A multidisciplinary mindset with a collaborative nature.
- SEO reporting mastery and the ability to communicate results in ways that matter to your CEO.
- A solid foundational understanding of how search engines crawl, index, and rank content.
- Experience creating and maintaining technical documentation.
- Deep experience with AI-assisted SEO tools and platforms.
By crafting your enterprise SEO team around these skillsets, you automatically attune your team towards high-quality, high-ROI results.
Scale Your SEO Department Effortlessly With No Recruitment Costs
This year, many marketing and SEO budgets are lower than usual.
If hiring is not included in your budget for this year, it’s still possible to scale your SEO program.
You can avoid hiring expensive SEO teams in-house and work with a pay-for-performance agency like ResultFirst to affordably scale your SEO program.
4. Implement Pay-Per-Performance SEO Into Your SEO Strategy
As you know, the startup costs of onboarding a new SEO agency can cause your ROI to plummet as you wait for results.
In some cases, the first true SEO results from a retainer SEO contract can take up to six months, effectively causing your conversion value to be much lower than your CPC.
A great alternative to traditional SEO agency models is the pay-for-performance (PFP) SEO model.
While you work with your PPC team for immediate visibility on SERPs, a PFP agency can begin working on your search visibility for free.
What Is Pay-For-Performance SEO?
Pay-For-Performance (PFP) SEO is a performance-based service model in which you are only charged when your SEO campaign is successful and your SEO goals are achieved.
So, once you reach the desired ranking for your top keywords, then, and only then, will you be charged.
PFP SEO works primarily to boost rankings, increase web traffic, and drive more revenue through:
- Industry Analysis.
- Competitor Analysis.
- Complete Website Audit.
- Keyword Research.
- Complete On-Page SEO Suggestions.
- Backlink Acquisitions.
Outperform Your Competition & Grow Your Digital Marketing Initiatives With ResultFirst
Pay-For-Performance SEO is here to address your economic challenges by allowing your company to achieve greater results with less marketing spend.
Ready to increase organic traffic, improve rankings, and boost conversions for your business – all while saving money and getting the most return on your investment? Start marketing with ResultFirst today!
Image Credits
Featured Image: Used with permission.
SEO
Big Update To Google’s Ranking Drop Documentation
Google updated their guidance with five changes on how to debug ranking drops. The new version contains over 400 more words that address small and large ranking drops. There’s room to quibble about some of the changes but overall the revised version is a step up from what it replaced.
Change# 1: Downplays Fixing Traffic Drops
The opening sentence was changed so that it offers less hope for bouncing back from an algorithmic traffic drop. Google also joined two sentences into one sentence in the revised version of the documentation.
The documentation previously said that most traffic drops can be reversed and that identifying the reasons for a drop aren’t straightforward. The part about most of them can be reversed was completely removed.
Here is the original two sentences:
“A drop in organic Search traffic can happen for several reasons, and most of them can be reversed. It may not be straightforward to understand what exactly happened to your site”
Now there’s no hope offered for “most of them can be reversed” and more emphasis on understanding what happened is not straightforward.
This is the new guidance
“A drop in organic Search traffic can happen for several reasons, and it may not be straightforward to understand what exactly happened to your site.”
Change #2 Security Or Spam Issues
Google updated the traffic graph illustrations so that they precisely align with the causes for each kind of traffic decline.
The previous version of the graph was labeled:
“Site-level technical issue (Manual Action, strong algorithmic changes)”
The problem with the previous label is that manual actions and strong algorithmic changes are not technical issues and the new version fixes that issue.
The updated version now reads:
“Large drop from an algorithmic update, site-wide security or spam issue”
Change #3 Technical Issues
There’s one more change to a graph label, also to make it more accurate.
This is how the previous graph was labeled:
“Page-level technical issue (algorithmic changes, market disruption)”
The updated graph is now labeled:
“Technical issue across your site, changing interests”
Now the graph and label are more specific as a sitewide change and “changing interests” is more general and covers a wider range of changes than market disruption. Changing interests includes market disruption (where a new product makes a previous one obsolete or less desirable) but it also includes products that go out of style or loses their trendiness.
Change #4 Google Adds New Guidance For Algorithmic Changes
The biggest change by far is their brand new section for algorithmic changes which replaces two smaller sections, one about policy violations and manual actions and a second one about algorithm changes.
The old version of this one section had 108 words. The updated version contains 443 words.
A section that’s particularly helpful is where the guidance splits algorithmic update damage into two categories.
Two New Categories:
- Small drop in position? For example, dropping from position 2 to 4.
- Large drop in position? For example, dropping from position 4 to 29.
The two new categories are perfect and align with what I’ve seen in the search results for sites that have lost rankings. The reasons for dropping up and down within the top ten are different from the reasons why a site drops completely out of the top ten.
I don’t agree with the guidance for large drops. They recommend reviewing your site for large drops, which is good advice for some sites that have lost rankings. But in other cases there’s nothing wrong with the site and this is where less experienced SEOs tend to be unable to fix the problems because there’s nothing wrong with the site. Recommendations for improving EEAT, adding author bios or filing link disavows do not solve what’s going on because there’s nothing wrong with the site. The problem is something else in some of the cases.
Here is the new guidance for debugging search position drops:
“Algorithmic update
Google is always improving how it assesses content and updating its search ranking and serving algorithms accordingly; core updates and other smaller updates may change how some pages perform in Google Search results. We post about notable improvements to our systems on our list of ranking updates page; check it to see if there’s anything that’s applicable to your site.If you suspect a drop in traffic is due to an algorithmic update, it’s important to understand that there might not be anything fundamentally wrong with your content. To determine whether you need to make a change, review your top pages in Search Console and assess how they were ranking:
Small drop in position? For example, dropping from position 2 to 4.
Large drop in position? For example, dropping from position 4 to 29.Keep in mind that positions aren’t static or fixed in place. Google’s search results are dynamic in nature because the open web itself is constantly changing with new and updated content. This constant change can cause both gains and drops in organic Search traffic.
Small drop in position
A small drop in position is when there’s a small shift in position in the top results (for example, dropping from position 2 to 4 for a search query). In Search Console, you might see a noticeable drop in traffic without a big change in impressions.Small fluctuations in position can happen at any time (including moving back up in position, without you needing to do anything). In fact, we recommend avoiding making radical changes if your page is already performing well.
Large drop in position
A large drop in position is when you see a notable drop out of the top results for a wide range of terms (for example, dropping from the top 10 results to position 29).In cases like this, self-assess your whole website overall (not just individual pages) to make sure it’s helpful, reliable and people-first. If you’ve made changes to your site, it may take time to see an effect: some changes can take effect in a few days, while others could take several months. For example, it may take months before our systems determine that a site is now producing helpful content in the long term. In general, you’ll likely want to wait a few weeks to analyze your site in Search Console again to see if your efforts had a beneficial effect on ranking position.
Keep in mind that there’s no guarantee that changes you make to your website will result in noticeable impact in search results. If there’s more deserving content, it will continue to rank well with our systems.”
Change #5 Trivial Changes
The rest of the changes are relatively trivial but nonetheless makes the documentation more precise.
For example, one of the headings was changed from this:
You recently moved your site
To this new heading:
Site moves and migrations
Google’s Updated Ranking Drops Documentation
Google’s updated documentation is a well thought out but I think that the recommendations for large algorithmic drops are helpful for some cases and not helpful for other cases. I have 25 years of SEO experience and have experienced every single Google algorithm update. There are certain updates where the problem is not solved by trying to fix things and Google’s guidance used to be that sometimes there’s nothing to fix. The documentation is better but in my opinion it can be improved even further.
Read the new documentation here:
Debugging drops in Google Search traffic
Review the previous documentation:
Internet Archive Wayback Machine: Debugging drops in Google Search traffic
Featured Image by Shutterstock/Tomacco
SEO
Google March 2024 Core Update Officially Completed A Week Ago
Google has officially completed its March 2024 Core Update, ending over a month of ranking volatility across the web.
However, Google didn’t confirm the rollout’s conclusion on its data anomaly page until April 26—a whole week after the update was completed on April 19.
Many in the SEO community had been speculating for days about whether the turbulent update had wrapped up.
The delayed transparency exemplifies Google’s communication issues with publishers and the need for clarity during core updates
Google March 2024 Core Update Timeline & Status
First announced on March 5, the core algorithm update is complete as of April 19. It took 45 days to complete.
Unlike more routine core refreshes, Google warned this one was more complex.
Google’s documentation reads:
“As this is a complex update, the rollout may take up to a month. It’s likely there will be more fluctuations in rankings than with a regular core update, as different systems get fully updated and reinforce each other.”
The aftershocks were tangible, with some websites reporting losses of over 60% of their organic search traffic, according to data from industry observers.
The ripple effects also led to the deindexing of hundreds of sites that were allegedly violating Google’s guidelines.
Addressing Manipulation Attempts
In its official guidance, Google highlighted the criteria it looks for when targeting link spam and manipulation attempts:
- Creating “low-value content” purely to garner manipulative links and inflate rankings.
- Links intended to boost sites’ rankings artificially, including manipulative outgoing links.
- The “repurposing” of expired domains with radically different content to game search visibility.
The updated guidelines warn:
“Any links that are intended to manipulate rankings in Google Search results may be considered link spam. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.”
John Mueller, a Search Advocate at Google, responded to the turbulence by advising publishers not to make rash changes while the core update was ongoing.
However, he suggested sites could proactively fix issues like unnatural paid links.
“If you have noticed things that are worth improving on your site, I’d go ahead and get things done. The idea is not to make changes just for search engines, right? Your users will be happy if you can make things better even if search engines haven’t updated their view of your site yet.”
Emphasizing Quality Over Links
The core update made notable changes to how Google ranks websites.
Most significantly, Google reduced the importance of links in determining a website’s ranking.
In contrast to the description of links as “an important factor in determining relevancy,” Google’s updated spam policies stripped away the “important” designation, simply calling links “a factor.”
This change aligns with Google’s Gary Illyes’ statements that links aren’t among the top three most influential ranking signals.
Instead, Google is giving more weight to quality, credibility, and substantive content.
Consequently, long-running campaigns favoring low-quality link acquisition and keyword optimizations have been demoted.
With the update complete, SEOs and publishers are left to audit their strategies and websites to ensure alignment with Google’s new perspective on ranking.
Core Update Feedback
Google has opened a ranking feedback form related to this core update.
You can use this form until May 31 to provide feedback to Google’s Search team about any issues noticed after the core update.
While the feedback provided won’t be used to make changes for specific queries or websites, Google says it may help inform general improvements to its search ranking systems for future updates.
Google also updated its help documentation on “Debugging drops in Google Search traffic” to help people understand ranking changes after a core update.
Featured Image: Rohit-Tripathi/Shutterstock
FAQ
After the update, what steps should websites take to align with Google’s new ranking criteria?
After Google’s March 2024 Core Update, websites should:
- Improve the quality, trustworthiness, and depth of their website content.
- Stop heavily focusing on getting as many links as possible and prioritize relevant, high-quality links instead.
- Fix any shady or spam-like SEO tactics on their sites.
- Carefully review their SEO strategies to ensure they follow Google’s new guidelines.
SEO
Google Declares It The “Gemini Era” As Revenue Grows 15%
Alphabet Inc., Google’s parent company, announced its first quarter 2024 financial results today.
While Google reported double-digit growth in key revenue areas, the focus was on its AI developments, dubbed the “Gemini era” by CEO Sundar Pichai.
The Numbers: 15% Revenue Growth, Operating Margins Expand
Alphabet reported Q1 revenues of $80.5 billion, a 15% increase year-over-year, exceeding Wall Street’s projections.
Net income was $23.7 billion, with diluted earnings per share of $1.89. Operating margins expanded to 32%, up from 25% in the prior year.
Ruth Porat, Alphabet’s President and CFO, stated:
“Our strong financial results reflect revenue strength across the company and ongoing efforts to durably reengineer our cost base.”
Google’s core advertising units, such as Search and YouTube, drove growth. Google advertising revenues hit $61.7 billion for the quarter.
The Cloud division also maintained momentum, with revenues of $9.6 billion, up 28% year-over-year.
Pichai highlighted that YouTube and Cloud are expected to exit 2024 at a combined $100 billion annual revenue run rate.
Generative AI Integration in Search
Google experimented with AI-powered features in Search Labs before recently introducing AI overviews into the main search results page.
Regarding the gradual rollout, Pichai states:
“We are being measured in how we do this, focusing on areas where gen AI can improve the Search experience, while also prioritizing traffic to websites and merchants.”
Pichai reports that Google’s generative AI features have answered over a billion queries already:
“We’ve already served billions of queries with our generative AI features. It’s enabling people to access new information, to ask questions in new ways, and to ask more complex questions.”
Google reports increased Search usage and user satisfaction among those interacting with the new AI overview results.
The company also highlighted its “Circle to Search” feature on Android, which allows users to circle objects on their screen or in videos to get instant AI-powered answers via Google Lens.
Reorganizing For The “Gemini Era”
As part of the AI roadmap, Alphabet is consolidating all teams building AI models under the Google DeepMind umbrella.
Pichai revealed that, through hardware and software improvements, the company has reduced machine costs associated with its generative AI search results by 80% over the past year.
He states:
“Our data centers are some of the most high-performing, secure, reliable and efficient in the world. We’ve developed new AI models and algorithms that are more than one hundred times more efficient than they were 18 months ago.
How Will Google Make Money With AI?
Alphabet sees opportunities to monetize AI through its advertising products, Cloud offerings, and subscription services.
Google is integrating Gemini into ad products like Performance Max. The company’s Cloud division is bringing “the best of Google AI” to enterprise customers worldwide.
Google One, the company’s subscription service, surpassed 100 million paid subscribers in Q1 and introduced a new premium plan featuring advanced generative AI capabilities powered by Gemini models.
Future Outlook
Pichai outlined six key advantages positioning Alphabet to lead the “next wave of AI innovation”:
- Research leadership in AI breakthroughs like the multimodal Gemini model
- Robust AI infrastructure and custom TPU chips
- Integrating generative AI into Search to enhance the user experience
- A global product footprint reaching billions
- Streamlined teams and improved execution velocity
- Multiple revenue streams to monetize AI through advertising and cloud
With upcoming events like Google I/O and Google Marketing Live, the company is expected to share further updates on its AI initiatives and product roadmap.
Featured Image: Sergei Elagin/Shutterstock
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