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8 Must-Have Content Guidelines To Set Writers Up for Success

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8 Must-Have Content Guidelines To Set Writers Up for Success

Brands often turn to freelance writers or marketing agencies to scale up content production.

But that’s not always a smooth process.

A 2021 Semrush report shares that in-house content teams face frequent issues with outsourced writers:

  • Lack of hands-on experience or knowledge (49%).
  • Low-quality content (42%).
  • Multiple edits (36%).
  • Lack of consistency due to different writing styles (27%).

These issues mean your content team has more work to do – just what you didn’t want and what made you outsource the content in the first place!

Now, you can try finding a word magician who can Abracadabra your worries away and makes everything alright.

But it doesn’t always work that way – you do run into some misguided wizards here and there.

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Instead of leaving things to chance, work toward preparing content guidelines you can give the outsourced writers to minimize the challenges of working together

Content Guidelines 101

Content guidelines (or writing guidelines) refer to the information brands or their in-house content teams give their outsourced writers to produce commissioned content.

These include style guides, product information, and access to tools.

Detailed content guidelines provide several benefits:

Save time and money.

Writers may be professionals, but they can’t read your mind, especially if they’re external to your team.

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By sharing the required details with them, you can reduce the revisions on both ends.

In other words, content guidelines give writers an idea and context of what you want and expect from a content piece before they start the draft.

This lets them see the target before they attempt to hit a bullseye, and you don’t have to realign the overall direction after the first draft.

Encourages consistency.

A content brief ensures both writers and editors are on the same page regarding the content style, tone, and goals.

Sets your work in the right direction: Great content is a result of collaboration between brands and writers. By providing detailed writing guidelines, you do your part and show the writers what you want from the content piece.

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Helps you scale content production.

A standard set of writing guidelines lets you grow and scale the content production since you can easily onboard more writers and editors to write and edit content in your brand’s voice and tone.

So, if you provide content guidelines, your issues are gone?

No, that alone won’t cut it. Your results depend on the details you add to those content guidelines.

What To Include In Content Guidelines

  • Welcome packet.
  • Editorial process.
  • Brand style guide.
  • Visual guidelines.
  • Content brief.
  • Persona details.
  • Product information.
  • Industry’s resources.

Once again, external writers can’t read your mind.

They’re not a part of your day-to-day team meetings. In order to make up for this gap, you must provide detailed content guidelines.

1. Welcome Packet

As you start working with new writers, provide them with a welcome packet that includes all the details they need to know to create content for you, including:

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  •  Your brand and its value proposition.
  •  Your content goals.
  •  Topics you commonly write about.
  • FAQs about working with you.
  • People on your team the writers can reach out to for content and billing questions.

Your welcome packet helps onboard new writers and set them in the right direction.

But you still need more guidelines to cover everyday details.

2. Editorial Process

The editorial process details what the writers should expect to deal with regularly – your brand’s content workflow.

It defines the expected timeline for each action after both parties have signed an agreement.

For instance, here’s how my team handles it, from the client’s perspective:

Screenshot from TheBlogsmith.com, June 2022

The writing process can certainly vary case by case, but it’s good to set expectations with writers in terms of what happens before, during, and after they turn in a draft.

3. Brand Style Guide

If there is one must-have with writing guidelines you give to writers, it’s a style guide.

A style guide covers the dos and don’ts of writing for your brand. It provides direction to in-house and outsourced content teams and ensures your content is consistent with the brand ethos.

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This consistency enhances the customer experience and builds customer loyalty.

After years of working as a freelance writer, I shifted to a content agency model.

One of the first things I did to set my agency up for success was create The Blogsmith Style Guide – a document that details my best practices from years of experience working with different clients.

It helps writers capture the voice and tone that The Blogsmith is known for and gives editors a straightforward standard for editing content.

A style guide covers:

  • Grammar (active voice vs. passive voice).
  • Style and formatting requirements.
  • Tone (conversational or formal).
  • Punctuation preferences (oxford comma or not).
  • Word usage (use of abbreviation, inclusive language, or jargon).
  • Spelling preferences (e.g., ecommerce vs. e-commerce).
  • Point of view or pronoun usage (first person or second person).
  • Citations.

If you don’t have a style guide, the Associated Press (AP) Stylebook serves as a good baseline.

4. Visual Guidelines

Most brands include visual guidelines within their style guide, but some like keeping them separate.

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Whatever the case, visual guidelines are a must-have part of your content guidelines, as brand visuals impact the written aspect of content creation.

Not to mention, visual guidelines ensure consistent output if you outsource your graphics.

Make sure to include the following in your visual guidelines:

Image directions

Include everything writers and graphic designers need to know about creating or choosing images for your website, such as: image attribution, featured images, custom images vs. stock photos, text vs. no text in featured images.

Preferred formats

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Share formats you prefer for images and videos, such as .PNG, .JPEG, or .webP.

Image resolutions and sizes

Share your preferred image resolution and file size. For instance, it’s better to limit the file size of images to 250–300 KB to load them quickly on your website and score better in Core Web Vitals.

Colors

Include the brand palette and Hex, RGB, CMYK, and Pantone color codes to account for print vs. digital (and so on). You can also include the purpose of each color (e.g., main vs. accent, headings vs. body content, and so on).

Fonts

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Include the fonts you use for different purposes. For example, Kinsta uses Brandon Text for headings and Roboto for body text.

Logos and icons

Include all versions of your logos and their proper use cases.

You can share your visual guidelines on your website for freelancers and agencies to reference – like Kinsta.

A screenshot of Kinsta’s visual guidelines.Screenshot from Kinsta.com, June 2022

5. Content Brief

A content brief is a writing guide freelance writers can follow when creating a particular content piece for your company.

Compared to the other content guidelines on the list, content briefs differ in topics depending on the assignment – but they are essential to creating a stellar content piece.

A screenshot of Afoma Umesi’s tweet where she highlights the importance of a content brief.Screenshot from Twitter, June 2022

The content brief must include basic information, such as:

  • Client name.
  • Topic.
  • Word count.
  • Article type (blog post, case study, or white paper).
  • Rate.
  • Due date.

More detailed briefs also include additional information that gives the writer context, like:

Intended Audience

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Who are you writing the content for?

Adding your intended audience is crucial, especially if you have multiple target audiences.

It informs the angle you’ll be taking.

For example, content for C-suite executives differs from content targeting entry-level employees.

While some content brief details like competitors may be reusable, intended audience and content goals may vary across pieces.

It’s best to fill out all the information regardless of whether it varies to ensure you don’t miss anything.

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Content Goals And Objectives

What is the purpose of creating the content piece?

One take on the content marketing matrix suggests that content’s four main purposes are to educate, entertain, inspire, and convince.

Whatever the content goal, share that with the writer.

Being clear about your content goals and objectives also makes it easier to do keyword research, determine search intent, and develop a relevant call to action (CTA) for the post.

Also, you can add a short abstract highlighting the important points you want in the piece or provide the writer with a suggested outline.

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Keyword Research

If you’re creating SEO content, include the primary keywords you’re trying to optimize for and instructions or best practices.

For example, you can ask writers to include:

  • Primary keyword in the title and within the first 100 words.
  • High-volume keywords in subheadings.
  • Low-volume keywords in paragraphs.

More than often, your writer or agency will provide this. But you should still plan to review and approve it, so everyone is on the same page before drafting.

Competitors

Include competitors and top-ranking blogs to help writers benchmark content.

It lets writers observe what other brands did well and how they addressed the problem.

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Not to mention, It helps them identify missing information to strategize how to make your content stand out.

6. Persona Details

Buyer personas represent the target audience at different stages of the buyer’s journey.

Including this information in your content guidelines gives writers a better picture of what your customers want and need. They can fill in gaps and tailor messaging to each persona.

If you haven’t had the chance to define your personas yet, HubSpot’s Make My Persona tool is an excellent place to start.

7. Product Information

If you’re asking freelance writers to create product-led content, give them the tools they need to succeed like:

  • A dummy account they can play around with and take screenshots of for tutorials.
  • Case studies that show how customers have used your product and achieved results.
  • Opportunities to interview SMEs (subject matter experts) about the product.

In other words, the writer should know enough about the tool and the problem it solves to address customer pain points and get them to convert.

8. Industry Knowledge

For thought-leadership content, give writers access to information from industry thought leaders and SMEs.

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As a courtesy, before you give writers the details of an SME they can contact, let the SME know a writer will reach out to set up an interview.

Some SMEs may be uncomfortable speaking with other people (or too busy to nail down a specific time for a live interview), so give them the option to do an interview via a meeting, an email exchange, or a prerecorded video or audio response.

Make it convenient for both parties to get the information they need.

Conclusion

Good writing is often a result of collaboration between the brand and writers.

Don’t be a client from hell. Improve the experience of working with outsourced content teams by providing writing guidelines they can use to create content closer to your goals.

More resources:

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Featured Image: sutadimages/Shutterstock



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Time To Replace the Content Marketing Funnel (3 Alternatives)

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Time To Replace the Content Marketing Funnel (3 Alternatives)

You won’t read anything good about the content marketing funnel in this article. Only bad things. Like, it’s too linear and simplistic to address the complexities of customer journeys.

If you need a framework to build your content strategy on, it should probably be a no-funnel framework instead. And there are very good reasons for it.

A funnel in marketing is a multi-stage process that guides potential customers from first learning about a product to making a purchase.

Depending on the version, it has 3 – 6 stages, and it looks something like this:

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Traditionally, all content types have their designated place in each stage:

  • Top: product landing pages, ebooks, guides, most social media posts, etc.
  • Middle: webinars, case studies, lead nurturing programs, etc.
  • Bottom: success stories, white papers, sales enablement materials, etc.

Makes sense, right? Not entirely.

It oversimplifies literally everything important for a content marketer. And because of that, the model gets some things completely wrong and ignores others.

This isn’t just theoretical. I’ve applied the funnel approach at various companies. Initially, it was reassuring, providing a sense of structure and control. However, the deeper I got, the more confusing it became. It started to seem like the sense of order was purely imaginary, as there was no reliable method to verify if people were truly following the funnel.

1. Misunderstands consumer behavior

The funnel model assumes a perfectly linear path from awareness to purchase and tries to rush people through it. Or, actually, it makes you think you should rush people through it with your content.

However, consumer behavior is more complex and non-linear. People often jump between stages, revisit them, or take unique paths to purchase.

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So, the journey is not a funnel; it’s more like a maze.

Illustrative B2B Buying JourneyIllustrative B2B Buying Journey
Source

B2C customer journeys are even more peculiar. Remember that time when you saw an ad and bought that product immediately? Or conversely, how the journey from see to buy lasted for years. I know I can:

Short and long buyer journey examples.Short and long buyer journey examples.

But content marketers shouldn’t try to solve that maze, or cut a straight line through it just for their convenience. They should rather adapt to it.

2. Tries to fit round pegs in square holes

Not all content types can be, nor should be, fit into rigid stages of the funnel, as the model wants it.

Here’s an example based on one of our articles. Which stage(s) of the marketing funnel does our blog post about “How to find low competition keywords” serve?

Example of content fitting multiple stages of the funnel with explanation.Example of content fitting multiple stages of the funnel with explanation.

As you can see, the model can’t handle one of the basic forms of content marketing – a blog post. But take any type of educational content, and you’ll find the same problem. Many content types can serve multiple stages of the funnel or work across them. They can both attract and reengage a visitor or even bring them all the way from discovery to purchase.

Because of that, the content marketing funnel simply isn’t helpful for creating content that’s enjoyable for the user and effective for the business.

3. Neglects customer retention

Customer retention is how good you are at keeping your customers. It’s important because you don’t want customers to buy just once from you; you want to keep coming back so that you don’t need to attract a total stranger each time to make a sale — that’s both hard and expensive.

Here’s another way to look at it. According to the study by Bain and Company, increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. And it makes total sense if you think about it — if someone asked you to generate an extra $1000 in sales in 24 hours, would you go to existing customers or try to find new ones?

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But if you’re practicing the old ways of the funnel, catering to your existing customers is very limited because the funnel ends at the purchase stage. There’s nothing a content marketer can do nor should do after a prospect becomes a customer.

It’s having a party where you’re so focused on inviting new guests that you forget to entertain the ones already inside.

4. Ignores customer expansion

If you only chase new customers and forget about the ones you already have, you miss the chance to make more sales to them or get them to recommend your business to others. Happy customers can really boost your business by buying more and telling their friends about you.

How can content help with that? One good way is to create product-led content. This type of content is designed to show how your product can solve the customer’s problem.

The mechanism is simple: showing product features in action turns a regular user into a power user. They start to use more features and get better value from them, which builds loyalty and gives you a good ground for upselling.

And if that content is really good, people will share it with others, amplifying your brand’s reach.

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The best thing: good content will be recommended not only by your customers. People don’t really need to be your customers or know a lot about your brand to give your content a shout-out on social media.

The best solution to the shortcomings of the funnel is to have no funnel at all. Here’s why:

  • Adapting to consumer behavior, not forcing it. Focus on how consumers naturally interact with content rather than trying to dictate their journey. Make your content easily accessible without imposing how it should be consumed.
  • A more efficient use of content marketing. Content can work both pre-sales and post-sales. It doesn’t have to be useful in one moment in time. It can be designed to stay useful and relevant over time.
  • A more helpful way to create content. No time wasted on deciding whether that guide you’re about to write belongs to the top or middle of the funnel. You can simply focus on delivering value and delighting your audience.

Here are three different no-funnel models that share those advantages.

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This approach is about using your content to directly boost demand for your product, whether before or after a sale.

Instead of sorting content by stages of a sales funnel, you rate it based on how closely it relates to your product.

The Business Potential Framework.The Business Potential Framework.

So for example, for a content marketing tool, topics with high business potential would include content marketing metrics, “B2B content marketing”, “content ideation”, “content optimization”, and “content distribution” (and not an interview with content marketers or “history of content marketing”, etc.).

This scoring system makes planning your content strategy really easy. You can quickly decide how much of each type of content to make. Also, you can use it with other important metrics (we use it with organic traffic potential) to further prioritize content.

Ahrefs has been using this model for years, especially for SEO content, which is most of what we publish. It’s great for understanding which search terms are most valuable.

Take these two keywords below as an example. The first one has a lot more traffic potential but is too broad to easily include our product — it would get a “1.” Conversely, the keyword with less traffic but more focused on SEO would get a “3” because it’s more relevant to our customers and our product.

Traffic potential data via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer.Traffic potential data via Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer.

The Business Potential Framework might be a good fit for you if you’re working in an established industry, where there’s already considerable demand for content directly linked to products like yours. This will make it easier to find topics with a score of 2 and 3. You can gauge that demand by looking at search volume in our free keywords generator.

Free keyword research with Ahrefs' Free Keyword Generator.Free keyword research with Ahrefs' Free Keyword Generator.

The Content Playground, devised by Ashley Faus, reimagines the buyer’s journey as an open, interactive space, akin to a playground, moving away from the traditional funnel’s linear path.

Content playground visualization. Content playground visualization.

It aims to cater to varied audience interests and learning styles by offering a mix of deep dives, strategic frameworks, and practical tips. To achieve this, it covers topics in three levels:

  • Conceptual: covering big ideas and their significance.
  • Strategic: outlining frameworks and processes.
  • Tactical: providing specific, actionable steps.

Staying with the content marketing tool example, topics you would create content about could look like this: “what is content marketing” (conceptual), “developing a content marketing strategy” (strategic), “how to promote content” (tactical).

To illustrate, this content hub on Agile from Atlassian is designed to be a content playground. There is a mix of all three types of content, and the user can start at any point, go as deep as they like, and jump to another topic at any time.

Example of content playground in practice.Example of content playground in practice.

Naturally, the content needs to be interlinked and ungated so consumers may access it however they want and navigate through it freely. The bonus of that is getting organic traffic from related keywords. According to Ahrefs, this one hub attracts over 591k organic visits every month, and it looks like it’s about to get more.

Organic performance graph via Ahrefs.Organic performance graph via Ahrefs.

But a playground doesn’t need to be confined to one site. As long as you tackle a topic with these three types and allow people to access them freely, you can have it scattered across a limitless number of sites and platforms: microsites, blog posts, social media, email, ebooks, etc.

I had a brief chat with Ashley, the mind behind this framework, to understand where this framework fits best. I learned that the framework was developed and tested with B2B marketers in mind, and that’s where it’s most relevant. B2C marketers simply don’t have as big of a problem with customers “coming and going” and re-engaging them on different channels.

There is a way to cover all customer intents, topics, journey stages, and key marketing channels naturally by simply focusing on what matters to your audience and where they are willing to consume content. I call it the Cluster-Channel Network (CCN).

Two core elements of the framework are:

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  • Clusters: thematic groupings of content around a central topic, supported by a network of related subtopics. They represent things people care about.
  • Channels: platforms and mediums through which your message reaches your audience. They represent meeting places that bring you and your audience together to talk about things they care about. Think advertising, email, social media, Google, etc.

CCN ensures a multi-channel presence with content that both attracts your audience and makes your brand an authority in a carefully picked selection of topics.

What’s more, this is an efficient framework because it allows you to “squeeze out” the most of any topic. That’s an important benefit because there are only so many topics a brand can comfortably cover, without creating turning into a content farm spinning irrelevant content just for the sake of traffic.

The framework consists of five steps.

  1. Identify relevant clusters: choose clusters aligned with your brand’s expertise and audience interests.
  2. Define subtopics: within each cluster, pinpoint subtopics for comprehensive coverage.
  3. Produce core content: select a primary channel and format for in-depth content, making this your centerpiece to attract traffic from other platforms.
  4. Distribute across channels: repurpose the core content into smaller, channel-specific formats.
  5. Interlink clusters and subtopics: connect related clusters and subtopics. Chances are, people interested in more than one cluster (e.g. SEO and content marketing).

If we were to visualize this framework consisting of four clusters, it would look something like this:

Visualization of the Cluster-Channel framework. Visualization of the Cluster-Channel framework.
Content playground could be visualized as a fully connected network with 3 node sizes.

So if we used content marketing as a cluster, one of the subtopics could be AI content. For that subtopic, you could create a blog post about ethics in content marketing in the AI era and distribute it as a thread on X, offer that topic to podcast hosts, etc.

This framework will work best if you have the resources to be present on multiple channels and you’re committed to long-term goals (building trust and authority takes time).

Tip

You can find clusters and subtopics very fast using Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. Just plug a broad term related to your product (your cluster), and let AI do the brainstorming.

Using AI to aid keyword research process in Ahrefs.Using AI to aid keyword research process in Ahrefs.

From a bit over 10 keywords the AI found for me for the word “SEO”, Keywords Explorer found over 32k keywords which then organized into 3466 ready-to-target topics in a matter of seconds. All with traffic potential and keyword difficulty metrics to help with prioritization.

Clusters by Parent Topic report in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer. Clusters by Parent Topic report in Ahrefs' Keywords Explorer.

Final thoughts

On a final note, the topics you choose to cover are as important as these frameworks. Check out our guide to content ideation to never run out of ideas.

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Got questions or comments? Find me on X or LinkedIn.



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How to Avoid Ruining SEO During a Website Redesign

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How to Avoid Ruining SEO During a Website Redesign

It’s too easy to break your SEO during a website redesign. Here’s a foretaste of what can go wrong:

  • Loss of rankings and traffic.
  • Loses of link equity.
  • Broken pages.
  • Sluggish page loading.
  • Bad mobile experience.
  • Broken internal links.
  • Duplicate content.

For example, this site deleted about 15% of organic pages (yellow line) during the redesign, which resulted in an almost 50% organic traffic loss (orange line). Interestingly, even the growth of referring domains (blue line) afterward didn’t help it recover the traffic.

Fortunately, it’s not that hard to avoid these and other common issues – just six simple rules to follow.

Easily overlooked but could save the day. A backup ensures you can restore the original site if anything goes wrong.

Ask the site’s developer to be prepared for this fallback strategy. All they will need to do then is redirect the domain to the folder with the old site, and the changes will take effect almost instantly. Make sure they don’t overwrite any current databases, too.

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It won’t hurt to make a backup yourself, too. See if your hosting provider has a backup tool or use a plugin like Updraft if you’re using WordPress or a similar CMS.

Testing your site for Core Web Vitals (CWV) and mobile friendliness before it goes live is the best way to ensure that your new site will comply with Google’s page experience guidelines.

The thing is, a website redesign can seriously affect site speed, stability, responsiveness, and mobile experience. Some design flaws will be quite easy to spot, such as excessive use of animations or layout not scaling properly on mobile devices, but not others, like unoptimized code.

Ask your site developer to run mobile friendliness and CWV tests on template pages as soon as they are ready (no need to test every single page) and ask for the report. For example, they should be able to run Google Lighthouse on a password-protected website.

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An SEO audit uncovers SEO issues on your site. And if you do it pre-and post-launch, you will easily spot any potential new problems caused by the redesign, especially those that really matter, such as:

  • Unwanted noindex pages.
  • Sites accessible both as http and https.
  • Broken pages.

So before the new site goes, click on New crawl in Site Audit and then again right after it goes live.

Starting a new crawl in Site Audit.Starting a new crawl in Site Audit.

Then after the crawl, go to the All issues report and look at the Change column – new errors found between crawls will be colored red (fixed errors will be green) .

Change column in All issues report. Change column in All issues report.

You might want to give some issues higher priority than others. See our take on the most impactful technical SEO issues.

Tip

You can access the history of site audits by clicking on the project’s name in Site Audit.

How to access crawl history in Site Audit (1).How to access crawl history in Site Audit (1).
How to access crawl history in Site Audit (2).How to access crawl history in Site Audit (2).

By URL structure, I mean the way web addresses are organized and formatted. For example, these would be considered URL structure changes:

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  • ahrefs.com/blog to ahrefs.com/blog/
  • ahrefs.com/blog to ahrefs.com/resources/blog
  • ahrefs.com/blog to blog.ahrefs.com
  • ahrefs.com/site-audit to ahrefs.com/site-audit-tool

Altering that structure in an uncontrolled process can lead to:

  • Broken redirects: redirects leading to non-existing or inaccessible pages.
  • Broken backlinks: external links pointing to deleted or moved pages on your site.
  • Broken internal links: internal site links that don’t work, hindering site navigation and content discoverability.
  • Orphan pages: pages not linked from your site, making them hard for users and search engines to find.

Naturally, you should keep the old URL structure unless you’re absolutely sure you know what you’re doing. In this case, you will need to put some redirects in place. On top of that, make sure to submit a sitemap via Google Search Console to help Google reflect changes on your site faster.

Tip

Google also advises submitting a new sitemap if you’re adding many pages in one go. You may want to do that if that’s the case in your redesign project.

Redesigns often include some kind of content pruning or simply arbitrary deleting of older content. But whatever you do, it’s crucial that you keep the pages that are already ranking high.

Traffic is one reason, but since these pages are already ranking, chances are they’ve got some backlinks you risk losing.

To make sure you’re not cutting out the good stuff, use two reports in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer: Top pages and Best by links.

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Top pages report is a list of all the pages on your site ranking in the top 100, appended with SEO data and sorted by traffic by default. So, just one click on your left-hand side, and you’ll see a list of your best “traffic generators”.

Top pages report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer.Top pages report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer.

The Best by links report follows the same logic, but the focus is on links (both external and internal) and it shows all crawled pages on your site (not only the ones ranking in top 100).

Best by links report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer.Best by links report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer.

You can also plug in any page in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and see whether it can be cut without any damage to the site’s organic performance.

Looking up single page organic performance in Site Explorer. Looking up single page organic performance in Site Explorer.

Recommendation

If part of the redesign is an inventory cleanup, you can still get traffic to products you don’t offer anymore if you create an “archive” page and link to a place where visitors can find more similar products. E-commerce sites and hardware brands do that regularly.

Example of an archive page. Example of an archive page.

This way, you can still rank for related terms, and the user experience is better than simply redirecting old products to new products.

Lastly, if you find yourself in a situation where the new design imposes significant changes to your top-ranking pages, take extra caution when altering these elements:

Final thoughts

While an overall site redesign might sound like a good moment to introduce some SEO, you need to think about the traffic and backlink equity the site has already earned. If you change too much in one go, you won’t know what worked and why, and maybe more importantly, what didn’t work and how to fix it.

Truth is, SEO is always about experimentation. You can have a well-educated guess, but you can never really know what will happen.

Want to share your SEO story here? Let me know on X or LinkedIn.

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There’s No Such Thing as “Accurate” Search Volume

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There’s No Such Thing as “Accurate” Search Volume

I often post my favorite new Ahrefs features on X. And last time I announced our newest addition to Keywords Explorer, someone replied with this:

Which was not the first time I saw us being criticized for the accuracy of our search volume metric.

But here’s the kicker…

There’s NO SUCH THING as an accurate search volume:

  • The volumes in Google Keyword Planner aren’t accurate.
  • The “Impressions” in GSC aren’t accurate either.
  • And the metric itself is just an average of the past data.

I already published a pretty detailed article about the search volume metric back in 2021. But I don’t think too many people have read it.

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”

André Gide

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So let me address this topic from a whole new angle.

First of all, what do SEOs even mean when they ask for search volumes to be “accurate?”

Well, the less experienced folks just want the metrics in third-party tools to match what they see in Google Keyword Planner (GKP).

But the more experienced ones already know all Google Keyword Planner’s Dirty Secrets:

  • The numbers are rounded annual averages.
  • Those averages are then assigned to “volume buckets.”
  • Keywords with similar meaning are often grouped together and their search volume summed up.

In other words, the search volume numbers that you see in GKP are very imprecise. And once SEOs learn that, they no longer use GKP as their baseline of accuracy.

They use GSC.

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Ok. So the numbers in GKP are rounded and bucketed and clustered together and all that. But Google Search Console (GSC) shows you the actual impressions for a given keyword, right?

Well, did you know that a simple rank-tracking tool can easily pollute your GSC impressions?

Think of how many different “robots” might be scraping the search results for a given keyword, and therefore giving you a fairly inaccurate impression of its real (human-driven) search volume.

And besides, in order to see the actual monthly search volume your page has to be ranking at the top 10 for thirty days straight. And it should rank nationwide, just in case the search results might differ based on the location.

On top of that, I’m sure GSC is no different from any other analytics tool in the sense that it might have certain discrepancies in “counting” those impressions. I mean, go compare the “Clicks” you see reported by GSC with your server log files. I bet the numbers won’t match.

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How much time do you think would pass between you selecting a certain keyword to rank for and actually having your page rank at the top of Google for it?

According to our old research, it could be anywhere from two months to a year for a newly published page to get to the top. Don’t you think the monthly search volume of a given keyword will change by then?

That’s actually the exact reason why we’ve added search volume forecasting to our Keywords Explorer tool. It uses past data to project what would likely happen to search volume in the next 12 months:

Is it accurate? No.

But does it help to streamline your keyword research and make better decisions? Absolutely.

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Let’s do a thought experiment and imagine that there was an SEO tool which would give you a highly precise search volume for any keyword. What would you use it for? Would you be able to accurately predict your search traffic from that keyword?

No!

You can’t know for sure at which position your page will end up ranking. Today it’s #3, tomorrow it’s #5, the day after is #1. Rankings are volatile and you rarely retain a given position for a long enough period of time.

And even if you did: you can’t get precise data on the click-through rate (CTR) of each position in Google. Each SERP is unique, and Google keeps rolling out more and more SERP features that steal clicks away. So even if you knew precisely the search volume of a keyword and the exact position where your page would sit… you still would not be able to calculate the accurate amount of search traffic that you’ll get.

And finally…

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Pages don’t rank for a single keyword! Seven years ago we published a study showing that a typical page that ranks at the top of Google for some keyword would actually rank for about a thousand more related keywords.

So what’s the point of trying to gauge your clicks from a single keyword, when you’ll end up ranking for a thousand of them all at the same time?

And the takeaway from all this is…

Here at Ahrefs we spend a tremendous amount of time, effort and resources to make sure our keyword database is in good shape, both in terms of its coverage of existing search queries, and the SEO metrics we give you for each of these keywords.

None of our SEO metrics are “accurate” though. Not search volume, nor keyword difficulty, nor traffic potential, you name it.

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But none of them can be.

They’re designed to be “directionally accurate.” They give you an overall idea of the search demand of a given keyword and if it’s a lot higher (or lower) compared to some other keywords which you are considering.

You can’t use those metrics for doing any precise calculations.

But hundreds of thousands of SEO professionals around the world are using these exact metrics to guide their SEO strategies and they get precisely the results that they expect to get.



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