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AI Content Is Short-Term Arbitrage, Not Long-Term Strategy

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8 months ago

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AI Content Is Short-Term Arbitrage, Not Long-Term Strategy

For a few hundred bucks, you can hit the big red “publish” button and use generative AI to write every article you’ve ever wanted to write. It’s sorely tempting.

But beyond the short-term dopamine hit of publishing a thousand articles at once, for most businesses, the negatives of AI content will very quickly outweigh the positives.

There’s a small chance of a big Google penalty

First up—there is precedent for getting a Google manual action for publishing AI content at scale.

Back in November, the founder of an AI content tool tweeted about their “SEO heist”. They exported a competitor’s sitemap, turned every URL into an article title, and used AI to publish 1,800 articles:

In some ways, this is part of the cat-and-mouse game of SEO. A website identifies a traffic opportunity, their competitors follow suit. But in the month following the tweet, the site’s traffic tanked to virtually zero:

Most of the site’s rankings plummeted into non-existence, courtesy of a manual action:

List of lost keyword rankings and traffic.List of lost keyword rankings and traffic.

Crucially, I don’t think that publishing AI content means an automatic penalty. AI content detectors don’t work, and even if they did, Google is apparently agnostic to AI use—but it is not agnostic to bad content or bad actors.

And AI makes it very easy to make bad content:

Annotated screenshot of low-quality AI-generated content.Annotated screenshot of low-quality AI-generated content.

I think the penalty happened because:

  • They published 1,800 pages of low-quality content, with no images, virtually no formatting, and many errors, and
  • They tweeted about it and caught Google’s attention.

Even if you don’t tweet about your AI content efforts, the precedent matters: publishing tons of AI content with no oversight is penalty-worthy. For any business building its traffic and audience for the long term, even a small risk of a catastrophic outcome (like a penalty) should give pause for thought.

AI content is extremely, scientifically, mediocre

AI content is, by its nature, mediocre. Mediocrity should not be the end goal of your content strategy.

LLMs, like ChatGPT, work through a kind of averaging. Words are chosen based on how often they appear in a similar context in the model’s dataset, generating “new” content based largely on what everyone else has already said. As Britney Muller explains in her guide to LLMs:

 

“Instead of randomly drawing a word out of a hat, an LLM will focus only on the most probable next words… It’s like a musician reading sheet music, moving through the notes one at a time. The goal is to figure out what the next word is likely to be as the model processes each word in the sentence.”

Britney MullerBritney Muller

To borrow a phrase from Britney, AI-generated content represents the literal “average of everything online.” That’s useful for topics where there’s a single, objective answer (“when was Abraham Lincoln born?”), but less useful for any topic that benefits from nuance, or differing perspectives, or firsthand experience.

You can play with different prompting strategies to alter and shape the structure and style of AI content. But even assuming you go to that length (many AI content tools don’t offer that freedom), you can’t escape a few realities of AI content:

  • It contains no information gain: it can’t conduct research, or share personal experience, or vocalize a defensible opinion.
  • It gets things wrong: it suffers from hallucinations and regurgitates common mistakes and errors.
  • It doesn’t understand you or your business: try getting AI content to tactfully showcase your product in your content (like we do at Ahrefs).

…and this is before we worry about leaking sensitive information, accidental copyright infringement, or the million ways in which unsupervised content could perpetuate bias and misinformation.

It’s easy to look at traffic graphs for AI content and think that “mediocre” content is good enough. But returning to the example of the “SEO heist”, most of their (now lost) rankings were limited to very low competition keywords (as measured by Keyword Difficulty in Ahrefs):

List of keyword rankings and their low keyword difficulty.List of keyword rankings and their low keyword difficulty.

Mediocre content might perform well in uncontested SERPs, but it isn’t enough to compete in SERPs where companies have invested actual effort and resources into their content.

And crucially, it leaves a bad impression on the living, breathing people who read it:

You can’t build a brand with AI content

Let’s assume your AI content works. You publish hundreds of articles and generate thousands and thousands of visits. Is that really the boon it sounds like?

For most companies that pursue SEO, blog posts quickly become the primary source of website visitors. For an extreme example, look at the pages that generate the most organic traffic for Zapier—they are almost entirely blog posts:

List of Zapier's top pages by organic traffic.List of Zapier's top pages by organic traffic.

This is estimated organic traffic (and doesn’t include traffic from other sources), but the point is clear: most of the interactions people have with your company are mediated by content.

Many visitors won’t ever see your carefully crafted homepage or product landing pages. Their entire perception of your company—its ethos, beliefs, quality standards, helpfulness—will be shaped by the blog posts they read.

Are you happy with AI content making that first impression?

Think of the time and effort that went into your core website pages: endless variations of copy and messaging, illustrations and visual design, tone of voice, rounds of review and finessing… and compare it to the effort that goes into AI content, published en masse, unread, unedited.

It’s easy to think of content as “just an acquisition channel,” but in reality, your 800 AI-generated SEO posts will have a bigger impact on the public perception of your brand than your latest product landing page.

People don’t buy from junk content

The point of content marketing is to help sales. Everything you create should, in some way, help people to buy your product or service.

The types of keywords AI content is good at ranking for are typically low commercial value and unlikely to lead to a sale. By way of example, here’s the estimated traffic value for the “SEO heist” site’s organic traffic, at its peak:

Graph of traffic value: $117k from 590k pageviews.Graph of traffic value: $117k from 590k pageviews.

Sidenote.

Traffic value measures the equivalent monthly cost if a site’s traffic from all keyword rankings was paid for through PPC advertising—so it acts as a good proxy for the commercial value of a keyword (a high traffic value means companies think the keyword is lucrative enough to bid on).

And here’s the Ahrefs blog, with a similar amount of estimated organic traffic… and a traffic value six times higher:

Graph of traffic value: $721k from 570k pageviews.Graph of traffic value: $721k from 570k pageviews.

Most of the benefit of AI content boils down to lots of traffic, fast—the quality and purchase intent of that traffic is a distant second.

Great, if your entire business model is monetizing mountains of traffic through affiliate links or ad networks. But for every other type of business, traffic is only half the battle. In order to help sales and grow the business, content also needs to:

  • Leave a lasting impression and help readers remember your company.
  • Encourage people to visit again and again (and not bounce forever on the first post).
  • Build trust in and affinity for the real people behind the brand.

Here’s another AI content example. How well does this guide to “Removing Dashes from ISBN Numbers in Excel” tick those boxes?

Example of AI-generated contentExample of AI-generated content

AI content is good for generating traffic but bad at building trust. There’s no recognisable voice, no firsthand experience or narrative, and no real person behind the writing (unless you take the Sports Illustrated route and also create AI-generated authors for your content).

At best, it’s like reading a Wikipedia page: even if you help the reader solve a problem, they won’t remember you for it. While traffic is great (and more traffic is usually better than less), it can’t come at the expense of trust.

There’s no moat for AI content

Here’s the most important problem with AI content: there is no barrier to entry. Anyone can do it, virtually for free. If it’s easy for you to publish 1,000 articles, it’s easy for your competitors to do the same, and their competitors, and their competitors…

So even assuming you get good results from AI content—how long will those results last?

At best, AI content is a form of short-term arbitrage, a small window of opportunity to build tons of traffic before a competitor, or a dozen competitors, decide to do the same. With most AI-generated content being pretty similar, there will be no “loyalty” from readers—they will read whatever ranks highest, and it will only be a matter of time before your content is challenged by a bigger fish, a company with a bigger budget and better SEO team.

Over time, you will be outcompeted by companies able to put more effort into their articles. So just skip right to the end of the cycle and create content that has a defensible moat:

  • Interview real people and share new information that other publications haven’t covered,
  • Collect original data in the form of industry surveys, polls, and data analysis,
  • Tell personal stories and share the unique, firsthand experiences of the topic that nobody else can.

Or put another way:

Final thoughts

There are plenty of good use cases for LLMs in SEO and content marketing. You can brainstorm keywords and titles, generate metadata and alt text at scale, write regex queries and code snippets, and generally use LLMs as useful inputs into your creative process.

But for most businesses, hitting the big red “publish” button and publishing thousands of AI-generated articles is a pretty bad use of LLMs, and a pretty bad idea overall. And even if AI content gets good enough to render most of these objections irrelevant, we will still have the problem of zero barrier to entry; if it’s easy for you to do, it’s easy for your competitors.

AI content is short-term arbitrage, not a long-term strategy.



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The 100 Most Searched People on Google in 2024

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8 hours ago

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October 9, 2024

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The 100 Most Searched People on Google in 2024

These are the 100 most searched people, along with their monthly search volumes.

100 most searched people on Google in the U.S.

# Keyword Search volume
1 donald trump 7450000
2 taylor swift 7300000
3 travis kelce 4970000
4 matthew perry 3790000
5 kamala harris 2730000
6 joe biden 2480000
7 caitlin clark 2400000
8 olivia rodrigo 2100000
9 jd vance 2060000
10 billie eilish 1720000
11 sabrina carpenter 1680000
12 kate middleton 1660000
13 patrick mahomes 1570000
14 gypsy rose 1520000
15 jason kelce 1490000
16 mihály csíkszentmihályi 1460000
17 timothee chalamet 1450000
18 tyreek hill 1380000
19 lola beltrán 1350000
20 lebron james 1330000
21 lauren boebert 1310000
22 barry keoghan 1300000
23 brock purdy 1280000
24 drake 1250000
25 griselda blanco 1210000
26 ryan reynolds 1200000
27 zendaya 1180000
28 scottie scheffler 1170000
29 aaron rodgers 1170000
30 casimir funk 1170000
31 zach bryan 1150000
32 tom brady 1150000
33 jacob elordi 1140000
34 blake lively 1130000
35 millie bobby brown 1120000
36 margot robbie 1110000
37 luisa moreno 1110000
38 bruce willis 1090000
39 v 1090000
40 eminem 1050000
41 cillian murphy 1040000
42 anthony edwards 1020000
43 peso pluma 1000000
44 fani willis 1000000
45 etel adnan 1000000
46 dua lipa 991000
47 jennifer aniston 986000
48 bianca censori 983000
49 megan fox 982000
50 shannen doherty 977000
51 mike tyson 973000
52 megan thee stallion 971000
53 ariana grande 960000
54 james baldwin 958000
55 britney spears 954000
56 oj simpson 941000
57 lainey wilson 937000
58 dan schneider 933000
59 emma stone 932000
60 raoul a. cortez 930000
61 dolly parton 926000
62 joe burrow 925000
63 anya taylor-joy 925000
64 amanda bynes 924000
65 danny masterson 920000
66 matt rife 918000
67 kendrick lamar 912000
68 messi 901000
69 bronny james 901000
70 adam sandler 898000
71 james earl jones 897000
72 coco gauff 892000
73 michael jackson 884000
74 victor wembanyama 870000
75 pink 865000
76 luka doncic 861000
77 selena gomez 861000
78 jelly roll 861000
79 jonathan majors 840000
80 justin fields 824000
81 meghan markle 821000
82 florence pugh 819000
83 post malone 813000
84 jayson tatum 808000
85 diddy 804000
86 justin jefferson 799000
87 sza 794000
88 ana de armas 793000
89 cj stroud 790000
90 ben affleck 788000
91 jake paul 786000
92 zac efron 783000
93 scarlett johansson 779000
94 deion sanders 771000
95 dr. victor chang 760000
96 andrew tate 759000
97 jason momoa 756000
98 pedro pascal 755000
99 bad bunny 744000
100 christian mccaffrey 735000

100 most searched people on Google globally

# Keyword Search volume
1 taylor swift 17000000
2 trump 12400000
3 matthew perry 9100000
4 sydney sweeney 8500000
5 travis kelce 7500000
6 oppenheimer 7300000
7 messi 7000000
8 elon musk 6500000
9 sinner 6300000
10 cristiano ronaldo 6100000
11 kate middleton 5900000
12 billie eilish 5200000
13 joe biden 5000000
14 xxxtentacion 5000000
15 大谷翔平 4900000
16 virat kohli 4800000
17 jenna ortega 4700000
18 v 4600000
19 ronaldo 4600000
20 kamala harris 4300000
21 olivia rodrigo 4200000
22 griselda blanco 4000000
23 margot robbie 4000000
24 cillian murphy 3800000
25 carlos alcaraz 3600000
26 dua lipa 3600000
27 zendaya 3600000
28 djokovic 3500000
29 bianca censori 3500000
30 jude bellingham 3400000
31 alcaraz 3400000
32 millie bobby brown 3400000
33 ana de armas 3300000
34 sabrina carpenter 3300000
35 henry cavill 3300000
36 ryan reynolds 3200000
37 ice spice 3200000
38 anne hathaway 3100000
39 timothée chalamet 3100000
40 putin 3100000
41 barry keoghan 3000000
42 lana rhoades 3000000
43 michael jackson 3000000
44 peso pluma 3000000
45 ariana grande 3000000
46 jacob elordi 3000000
47 lebron james 3000000
48 blake lively 2900000
49 bruce willis 2900000
50 lamine yamal 2900000
51 emma stone 2900000
52 shubman gill 2900000
53 simone biles 2900000
54 rohit sharma 2900000
55 brad pitt 2900000
56 eminem 2900000
57 jennifer aniston 2800000
58 timothee chalamet 2800000
59 mike tyson 2700000
60 megan fox 2700000
61 lola beltrán 2700000
62 caitlin clark 2700000
63 leonardo dicaprio 2700000
64 johnny depp 2600000
65 scarlett johansson 2600000
66 selena gomez 2600000
67 drake 2600000
68 mihály csíkszentmihályi 2600000
69 anya taylor-joy 2500000
70 madonna 2500000
71 britney spears 2500000
72 max verstappen 2500000
73 jeremy allen white 2500000
74 gypsy rose 2500000
75 andrew tate 2500000
76 kylie jenner 2500000
77 travis scott 2400000
78 fabrizio romano 2400000
79 jennifer lawrence 2400000
80 meghan markle 2400000
81 hardik pandya 2400000
82 keanu reeves 2400000
83 angelina jolie 2400000
84 glen powell 2400000
85 jd vance 2400000
86 shannen doherty 2300000
87 jungkook 2300000
88 jason momoa 2300000
89 jennifer lopez 2300000
90 bellingham 2200000
91 jeffrey epstein 2200000
92 justin bieber 2200000
93 florence pugh 2200000
94 kim kardashian 2200000
95 ben affleck 2200000
96 haaland 2200000
97 zac efron 2200000
98 tyson fury 2200000
99 imane khelif 2100000
100 adam sandler 2100000

How to find relevant people-oriented keywords in your niche

In almost every industry, there are celebrities, professionals, or influencers that other people want to emulate. For example, an amateur tennis player might want to know which tennis racket Novak Djokovic uses. Or a football player might want to know the shoes Trent Alexander-Arnold wears.

In fact, Equipboard has taken this idea seriously and created a site around the gear used by professional musicians.

You can do the same for your industry too.

Here’s how:

  1. Go to Keywords Explorer
  2. Enter the names of famous people in your niche
  3. Go to the Matching terms report
  4. Filter for keywords related to gears using the Include filter

Keywords related to gear used by tennis prosKeywords related to gear used by tennis pros

For example, if I entered the names of professional tennis players (Roger Federer, Emma Radacanu, Rafael Nadal) and filtered for tennis gear keywords (e.g., shoes, racket, wristband, shorts), I see 960 potential keywords I could target. If I were a tennis site, I could create a category page for each celebrity and list out all their preferred equipment.

Another way is to enter a relevant keyword into Keywords Explorer, go to the Matching terms report, and observe keyword patterns. For example, if I were a fitness site, I could enter “weight loss” into Keywords Explorer.

celebrity names weight losscelebrity names weight loss

The first thing I’ll notice is that many people are actually interested in how certain celebrities lost their weight. The second thing I notice is that the keywords all form a pattern: [first name][last name] weight loss.

As such, I can use the Word count filter to look for keywords that have 4 words, which gives me a list of celebrity-related weight loss keywords:

celebrity weight loss keywordscelebrity weight loss keywords

Want to do keyword research for your site? Sign up for Keywords Explorer.

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WordPress Announces New Executive Director

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19 hours ago

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October 9, 2024

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WordPress announced a new Executive Director. The response on social media was notably lacking in enthusiasm.

Automattic CEO and WordPress co-creator Matt Mullenweg announced a new Executive Director for WordPress.org after the previous director’s resignation. Social media reactions, while generally positive, were notably subdued, with many comments focused on the recent WordPress controversy.

New Executive Director

Mullenweg announced that Mary Hubbard, was hired as the new Executive Director. Hubbard was formerly the Chief Product Officer for WordPress.com from 2020 and will begin her new position on October 21st. She recently resigned as the Head of TikTok Americas, Governance and Experience.

The Executive Director position at WordPress.org opened up after the resignation of 8.4% of Automattic employees, including the previous Executive Director Josepha Haden Chomphosy. Mullenweg offered employees who wished to leave $30,000 or the equivalent of six months pay, whichever was higher. The severance package was offered after the recent issues between Automattic, Mullenweg and WP Engine (WPE) which resulted in WPE filing a federal lawsuit against Mullenweg and Automattic, alleging attempted extortion.

Muted Response To Announcement

A post in the popular Dynamic WordPress Facebook Group generated 21 responses within seven hours, with most of the comments a discussion about the recent drama and the Mullenweg’s ownership of WordPress.org and other similar topics (view the discussion here, must join the private group to view).

The response to the official WordPress.org announcement on X was muted, with about equal amounts of people posting welcomes as those who were taking the opportunity to post their displeasure and opinions about recent events.

Seven hours after posting the announcement there were only 15 responses, 21 retweets, and 117 likes.

Screenshot Of Tweet

Typical Expressions Of Welcome

Typical Other Responses

Read the official announcement on WordPress.org

Please Welcome Mary Hubbard

Featured Image by Shutterstock/michaelheim



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Pro-Tech SEO Checklist For Agencies

Published

2 days ago

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October 8, 2024

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Pro-Tech SEO Checklist For Agencies

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

When you’re taking on large-scale projects or working with extensive websites with hundreds to thousands of pages, you must leverage advanced technical SEO techniques.

Large websites come with challenges such as vast site architectures, dynamic content, and the higher-stakes competition in maintaining rankings.F

Leveling up your team’s technical SEO chops can help you establish a stronger value proposition, ensuring your clients gain that extra initial edge and choose to continue growing with your agency.

With this in mind, here’s a concise checklist covering the most important nuances of advanced technical SEO that can lead your clients to breakthrough performance in the SERPs.

1. Advanced Indexing And Crawl Control

Optimizing search engine crawl and indexation is foundational for effective technical SEO. Managing your crawl budget effectively begins with log file analysis—a technique that offers direct insights into how search engines interact with your clients’ websites.

A log file analysis helps:

  • Crawl Budget Management: Essential for ensuring Googlebot crawls and indexes your most valuable pages. Log file analysis indicates how many pages are crawled daily and whether important sections are missed.
  • Identifying Non-Crawled Pages: Identifies pages Googlebot misses due to issues like slow loading times, poor internal linking, or unappealing content, giving you clear insights into necessary improvements.
  • Understand Googlebot Behavior: Know what Googlebot actually crawls on a daily basis. Spikes in the crawl budget may signal technical issues on your website, like auto-generated thin, trashy pages, etc.

For this, integrating your SEO log analyzer data with GSC crawl data provides a complete view of site functionality and search engine interactions, enhancing your ability to guide crawler behavior.

Next, structure robots.txt to exclude search engines from admin areas or low-value add-ons while ensuring they can access and index primary content. Or, use the x-robots-tag—an HTTP header—to control indexing at a more granular level than robots.txt. It is particularly useful for non-HTML files like images or PDFs, where robot meta tags can’t be used.

For large websites, the approach with sitemaps is different from what you may have experienced. It almost doesn’t make sense to put millions of URLs in the sitemaps and want Googlebot to crawl them. Instead, do this: generate sitemaps with new products, categories, and pages on a daily basis. It will help Googlebot to find new content and make your sitemaps more efficient. For instance, DOM.RIA, a Ukrainian real estate marketplace, implemented a strategy that included creating mini-sitemaps for each city directory to improve indexing. This approach significantly increased Googlebot visits (by over 200% for key pages), leading to enhanced content visibility and click-through rates from the SERPs.

2. Site Architecture And Navigation

An intuitive site structure aids both users and search engine crawlers in navigating the site efficiently, enhancing overall SEO performance.

Specifically, a flat site architecture minimizes the number of clicks required to reach any page on your site, making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your content. It enhances site crawling efficiency by reducing the depth of important content. This improves the visibility of more pages in search engine indexes.

1728370563 412 Pro Tech SEO Checklist For Agencies

So, organize (or restructure) content with a shallow hierarchy, as this facilitates quicker access and better link equity distribution across your site.

For enterprise eCommerce clients, in particular, ensure proper handling of dynamic parameters in URLs. Use the rel=”canonical” link element to direct search engines to the original page, avoiding parameters that can result in duplicates.

Similarly, product variations (such as color and size) can create multiple URLs with similar content. It depends on the particular case, but the general rule is to apply the canonical tag to the preferred URL version of a product page to ensure all variations point back to the primary URL for indexing. If there is a significant number of such pages where Google ignores non-canonical content and puts them in the index, consider reviewing the canonicalization approach on the website.

3. JavaScript SEO

As you know, JavaScript (JS) is crucial in modern web development, enhancing site interactivity and functionality but introducing unique SEO challenges. Even if you’re not directly involved in development, ensuring effective JavaScript SEO is important.

The foremost consideration in this regard is critical rendering path optimization — wait, what’s that?

The critical rendering path refers to the sequence of steps the browser must take to convert HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into a rendered web page. Optimizing this path is crucial for improving the speed at which a page becomes visible to users.

1728370563 875 Pro Tech SEO Checklist For Agencies

Here’s how to do it:

  • Reduce the number and size of the resources required to display initial content.
  • Minify JavaScript files to reduce their load time.
  • Prioritize loading of above-the-fold content to speed up page render times.

If you’re dealing with Single Page Applications (SPAs), which rely on JavaScript for dynamic content loading, then you might need to fix:

  • Indexing Issues: Since content is loaded dynamically, search engines might see a blank page. Implement Server-Side Rendering (SSR) to ensure content is visible to search engines upon page load.
  • Navigation Problems: Traditional link-based navigation is often absent in SPAs, affecting how search engines understand site structure. Use the HTML5 History API to maintain traditional navigation functionality and improve crawlability.

Dynamic rendering is another technique useful for JavaScript-heavy sites, serving static HTML versions to search engines while presenting interactive versions to users.

However, ensure the browser console shows no errors, confirming the page is fully rendered with all necessary content. Also, verify that pages load quickly, ideally under a couple of seconds or so, to prevent user frustration (nobody likes a prolonged loading spinner) and reduce bounce rates.

Employ tools like GSC and Lighthouse to test and monitor your site’s rendering and web vitals performance. Regularly check that the rendered content matches what users see to ensure consistency in what search engines index.

4. Optimizing For Seasonal Trends

In the retail eCommerce space, seasonal trends influence consumer behavior and, consequently, search queries.

So, for these projects, you must routinely adapt your SEO strategies to stay on par with any product line updates.

Seasonal product variations—such as holiday-specific items or summer/winter editions—require special attention to ensure they are visible at the right times:

  • Timely Content Updates: Update product descriptions, meta tags, and content with seasonal keywords well before the season begins.
  • Seasonal Landing Pages: Create and optimize dedicated landing pages for seasonal products, ensuring they link appropriately to main product categories.
  • Ongoing Keyword Research: Continually perform keyword research to capture evolving consumer interests and optimize new product categories accordingly.
  • Technical SEO: Regularly check for crawl errors, ensure fast load times, and confirm that new pages are mobile-friendly and accessible.

On the flip side, managing discontinued products or outdated pages is just as crucial in maintaining site quality and retaining SEO value:

  • Evaluate Page Value: Conduct regular content audits to assess whether a page still holds value. If a page hasn’t received any traffic or a bot hit in the last half-year, it might not be worth keeping.
  • 301 Redirects: Use 301 redirects to transfer SEO value from outdated pages to relevant existing content.
  • Prune Content: Remove or consolidate underperforming content to focus authority on more impactful pages, enhancing site structure and UX.
  • Informative Out-of-Stock Pages: Keep pages for seasonally unavailable products informative, providing availability dates or links to related products.

Put simply, optimizing for seasonal trends means preparing for high-traffic periods and effectively managing the transition periods. This supports sustained SEO performance and a streamlined site experience for your clients.

5. Structured Data And Schema Implementation

Structured data via schema.org markup is a powerful tool to enhance a site’s SERP visibility and boost CTR through rich snippets.

Advanced schema markup goes beyond basic implementation, allowing you to present more detailed and specific information in SERPs. Consider these schema markups in your next client campaign:

  • Nested Schema: Utilize nested schema objects to provide more detailed information. For example, a Product schema can include nested Offer and Review schemas to display prices and reviews in search results.
  • Event Schema: For clients promoting events, implementing an Event schema with nested attributes like startDate, endDate, location, and offers can help in displaying rich snippets that show event details directly in SERPs.
  • FAQ and How-To Pages: Implement FAQPage and HowTo schemas on relevant pages to provide direct answers in search results.
  • Ratings, Reviews, and Prices: Implement the AggregateRating and Review schema on product pages to display star ratings and reviews. Use the Offer schema to specify pricing information, making the listings more attractive to potential buyers.
  • Availability Status: Use the ItemAvailability schema to display stock status, which can increase the urgency and likelihood of a purchase from SERPs.
  • Blog Enhancements: For content-heavy sites, use Article schema with properties like headline, author, and datePublished to enhance the display of blog articles.

Use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool tool to test your pages’ structured data and identify any errors/warnings in your schema implementation. Also, use Google’s Rich Results Test to get feedback on how your page may appear in SERPs with the implemented structured data.

Conclusion

Considering their long SEO history and legacy, enterprise-level websites require more profound analysis from different perspectives.

We hope this mini checklist serves as a starting point for your team to take a fresh look into your new and existing customers and help deliver great SEO results.

Image Credits

Featured Image: Image by JetOctopus. Used with permission.

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

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