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Email Marketing: An In-Depth Guide

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Email Marketing: An In-Depth Guide

Email has revolutionized the way people communicate. From facilitating remote work to monitoring bank balances, it has become an integral part of everyday life.

It has also become a powerful tool for marketers. It has changed the way brands and customers interact with each other, providing incredible opportunities to target audiences at each stage of the buyer’s journey.

In other words, when it comes to getting the most bang for your marketing buck, nothing matches the power of email.

Providing an average return on investment of $36 for every $1 spent, email marketing is one of the most profitable and effective ways of reaching your targets.

Globally used by more than 4 billion people, it has unparalleled reach and is perfect for every step of the buyer’s journey, from generating awareness to encouraging brand loyalty.

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If you’re not currently using email marketing to promote your business, you should be.

But to reap the biggest benefits, you need to do more than just dash off a message and sending it out to your contacts. You need a strategy that will help you nurture relationships and initiate conversations.

In this piece, we’ll take an in-depth look at the world of marketing via email and give you a step-by-step guide you can use to launch your own campaigns.

What Is Email Marketing?

If you have an email address of your own – and it’s probably safe to assume that you do – you’re likely already at least somewhat familiar with the concept of email marketing.

But just to avoid any potential confusion, let’s start with a definition: Email marketing is a type of direct marketing that uses customized emails to inform customers and potential customers about your product or services.

Why Should You Use Email Marketing?

If the eye-popping $36:1 ROI stat wasn’t enough to convince you to take the plunge, here are some other key reasons you should use email marketing to promote your business:

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  • Email marketing drives traffic to your website, blog, social media account, or anywhere else you direct it.
  • It allows you to build a stronger relationship with your targets via personalization and auto-triggered campaigns.
  • You can segment your audience to target highly specific demographics, so you’re sending messages to the people they will resonate with most.
  • Email marketing is one of the easiest platforms to version test on, so you can determine exactly what subject lines and calls-to-action (CTAs) work best.

Even better, you own your email campaigns entirely.

With email, you own your marketing list and you can target your leads however you like (so long as you stay compliant with CAN-SPAM laws).

There is no question that you should be using email marketing as part of your overall marketing outreach strategy.

Now let’s look at some of the different ways you can do that.

What Are The Types Of Email Marketing?

For every stage of the sales funnel, there’s a corresponding type of email marketing. Here are some of the different types you can use to engage your audience and generate results.

Promotional Emails

When you think about email marketing, these types of messages are probably what you think of.

Used to promote sales, special offers, product releases, events, and more, these are usually one of the least personalized types of emails and tend to go out to a large list.

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Usually, promotional campaigns consist of anywhere from 3 to 10 emails sent over a specified time frame. They have a clear CTA that encourages the recipient to take the next step of visiting your site, booking an appointment, or making a purchase.

Informational Emails

This type of email includes company announcements as well as weekly/monthly/quarterly newsletters.

They may include information about new products, company achievements, customer reviews, or blog posts.

The CTA is usually to visit your website or blog to learn more about what’s happening.

Welcome Emails

Sent to new customers or people who have filled out a form on your website, welcome emails encourage recipients to learn more about your company or offering.

These commonly include trial offers, requests to book a demo, or other offerings a new customer will find valuable.

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Nurturing Emails

Any salesperson will tell you the importance of creating multiple touchpoints with potential customers.

Lead nurturing emails focus on building interest in people who are drawn to a particular offering.

The goal of these messages is to push them to the consideration stage of the buying journey.

Re-engagement Emails

Nurturing emails’ slightly more aggressive brother, re-engagement emails are used to warm up customers who haven’t been active lately.

These tend to be more personalized, as you’ll want to show the subscriber that you know and understand the challenges they’re facing.

Survey/Review Emails

User generated content (UGC) lends your brand an authenticity you simply can’t achieve on your own.

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One of the best ways to generate this is via emails soliciting feedback from your customers.

This type of email also gives you insights into your brand’s relative strengths and weaknesses, so you can improve your offerings.

There are a number of other types of emails you can use as part of your marketing efforts, including seasonal emails designed to capitalize on holidays or events, confirmation emails to reassure recipients their purchase was completed or their information received, and co-marketing emails that are sent with a partner company.

In fact, it’s email marketing’s sheer versatility that makes it the cornerstone of any successful marketing strategy. You merely need to decide what you hope to accomplish, then create your campaign around it.

Now, let’s take a closer look at creating and managing your own email marketing.

How Do You Perform Email Marketing?

Step 1: Establish Your Goals

The section above should have made it clear that the type of email campaign you’ll run will depend on what you’re hoping to accomplish. Trying to do everything with one email will lead to confused recipients and a watered-down CTA.

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Set one goal for your campaign, and make sure every email in the series works toward it.

Step 2: Build Your List

Now it’s time to determine who will be on the receiving end of your campaign. You do this by building your email marketing list – a process you can approach from several directions.

The most basic way to build an email list is by simply importing a list of your contacts into your chosen email marketing platform (more on that later).

One caveat: Before you add anyone to your list, make sure they have opted into receiving emails from you – otherwise you’ll run afoul of the CAN-SPAM Act guidelines mentioned above.

Other options for building a list from scratch via a lead generation campaign: provide potential customers with discounts, compelling content, or something else of value and make it easy for them to subscribe and you’ll generate high-quality leads.

Some marketers buy or rent email lists, but in general, this isn’t an effective way to perform email marketing.

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The primary reason you don’t want to do this is because of lead quality. You’re not going after people who are interested in your brand but instead are blindly targeting leads of questionable quality with emails they haven’t opted in to.

In addition to violating consent laws, which could potentially hurt your IP reputation and email deliverability, you risk annoying your targets instead of encouraging them to try your offering.

Step 3: Create Your Email Campaign

Now that you know who you’re targeting and what you’re hoping to achieve, it’s time to build your campaign.

Email marketing tools like HubSpot, Constant Contact, and Mailchimp include drag-and-drop templates you can employ to create well-designed and effective email campaigns.

We’ll dive deeper into these platforms a bit later, but now, let’s talk about some fundamentals and best practices to help you get the best results:

  • Make your emails easy to read – No one wants to read a long wall of text. Structure your emails using strategically placed headers and bulleted lists for easy scanning.
  • Use images – Ideally, you want your emails to capture the reader’s eye and attention. Visuals are a great way to do this.
  • Write a compelling subject line – The best-written email in the world is useless if no one opens it. That makes a compelling, intriguing subject line paramount. Don’t be afraid to try different iterations, just be sure to keep it short.
  • Add personalization – Emails that are targeted to a specific person, including addressing them by name, are more likely to generate responses. Your email marketing platform should allow you to do this with relative ease.
  • Make conversion easy – If you want click-throughs, you need to make it easy for readers. Make sure your CTA is prominent and clear.
  • Consider your timing – As with most types of marketing, email campaigns tend to perform better when they’re properly timed. This could mean a specific time of day that generates more opens, a time of the week when purchases are more likely, or even a time of year when your content is most relevant. This will probably require some experimentation.

Step 4: Measure Your Results

You’re not going to get your email campaigns right the first time. Or the second. Or the fifth. In fact, there’s really no endpoint; even the best campaigns can be optimized to generate better results.

To track how yours are performing, you’ll want to use the reports section of your email marketing platform. This will help you understand how people are interacting with your campaigns.

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Use A/B testing to drill down into what’s working best.

Generally, you’ll want to look at key metrics like:

  • Open rate and unique opens.
  • Click-through rate.
  • Shares.
  • Unsubscribe rate.
  • Spam complaints.
  • Bounces (the number of addresses your email couldn’t be delivered to).

Choosing An Email Marketing Platform

Manually sending out emails is fine if you’re only targeting three or four people. But if you’re trying to communicate with dozens, hundreds or even thousands of targets, you’re going to need some help.

But there are currently hundreds of email marketing platform on the market. How do you choose the right one for your unique needs?

Should you just go with one of the big names like HubSpot,  Klaviyo, or Mailjet? How do you know which one is right for you?

While it may initially feel overwhelming, by answering a few questions you can narrow down your options considerably.

The very first thing you need to determine is your budget. If you’re running a small business, the amount you’re willing to spend on an email service platform is probably considerably less than an enterprise-level company.

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If you’re an entrepreneur, you’ll probably find that a lower-priced version of a platform like Sendinblue or Constant Contact provides you with all the functionality you need.

Larger companies with bigger marketing budgets may wish to go with an email marketing platform that provides higher levels of automation, more in-depth data analysis and is easier to use. In this case, you may prefer to go with a platform like Mailchimp or Salesforce’s Pardot.

The good thing is that most of these email service providers offered tiered pricing, so smaller businesses can opt for more inexpensive (or even free) versions that offer less functionality at a lower price.

The next thing to consider is the type of email you want to send.

If your primary send will be newsletters, a platform like SubStack is a great choice. If you’re planning on sending transactional emails, you may want to check out Netcore Email API or GetResponse.

For those of you planning on sending a variety of marketing emails, your best choice may be an option that covers multiple email types like ConvertKit or an omnichannel marketing tool like Iterable.

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You can narrow down your options by determining your must-have features and internal capabilities.

Some things you’ll want to consider include:

  • The size of your lists.
  • Your technical skill level.
  • Your HTML editing requirements.
  • Template variety.
  • Your need for responses/workflows.
  • A/B testing needs.
  • Industry-specific features.

While there is significant overlap in functionality between email marketing platforms, each has some variation in capabilities.

Ideally, you want something that will integrate with your other marketing tools to help take the guesswork out of the equation.

You should request demos and trials of your finalists to find which is best for your needs. If you’re working with a team, be sure to loop them in and get their feedback.

Tips For Maximizing Your Results

Email marketing is a powerful tool for any business. But there’s both science and art to it.

Here are some additional tips to help you get the most from your campaigns:

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  • Avoid being marked as spam – According to HubSpot, there are 394 words and phrases that can identify your email as junk mail. These include “free,” “lowest price,” “no catch” and “all new.” You should avoid these whenever possible. To be doubly safe, have your recipients add you to their safe senders list.
  • Run integrated campaigns – Email marketing serves to amplify the power of other marketing channels. If you’re running sales or promotions, you should include an email aspect.
  • Clean up your list regularly – Keep your email database up to date to ensure deliverability and higher engagement. If a subscriber hasn’t responded to your re-engagement efforts after six months, it’s probably safe to scrub them from your list.
  • Harness the power of automation – Autoresponders are a great way to follow up with customers and subscribers, or strategically target someone after a certain event or action. Learn how to set this up on your email marketing platform and it will save you lots of time while boosting returns.

Email Marketing Is A Powerful Tool

There’s a reason why email marketing is prevalent in the modern world – it works.

And that means you should be using it to promote your brand and drive sales.

Hopefully, by this point, you have a good idea of not only what email marketing can do for you, but how it works, and how to create and optimize your own campaigns.

There’s really no better way to connect with our audience and convey the value of your brand.

Now get to work – you have customers to attract.

More resources:


Featured Image: Africa Studio/Shutterstock

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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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5 Key Enterprise SEO Trends For 2024

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5 Key Enterprise SEO Trends For 2024

SEO has undergone many transitions and disruptions in a short time.

Enterprise SEO has been at the center of some fundamental transformations over the past year.

Adapting to the ever-changing needs and demands of consumers, integrating AI into search engines, and the influx of new generative AI SEO and content tools have forced organizations to adapt and evolve their marketing strategies.

In this article, I will delve deeper into five key enterprise SEO trends for 2024 with tips to help you keep pace with change and prepare for future success accordingly.

What Is Enterprise SEO?

Enterprise SEO is typically associated with implementing SEO strategies within large-scale organizations.

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It predominantly applies to sizable brands with multiple departments and complex infrastructures. This can include large – and multiple – websites that offer a diverse array of products and services.

One of the key differences between standard SEO and enterprise SEO is the need for the workflow management of stakeholders, strategic planning, and ensuring strategies align with an organization’s broader – and, in many cases, multiple – objectives.

How Enterprise SEO Has Changed

In 2024, enterprise SEO trends will be shaped by technological advancements, changing user behaviors, and the evolving search landscape.

It’s no secret that the way search engines utilize generative AI to create new user experiences is changing how enterprises look at, and understand, what is happening in the search engine results pages (SERPs).

This includes shifting from pure keyword research leveraging data-led insights to understanding conversational intent that triggers search results.

Whether you are searching via traditional results or in Google SGE labs, results now contain more sources and multiple content formats. As a result, enterprises must become more innovative and proactive in their SEO and content marketing approaches.

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The great thing to see is that the role of SEO is growing and expanding in this new AI era.

Image from author, February 2024SEO and AI becoming priority in 2024

5 Essential Enterprise SEO Trends To Watch In 2024

1. Understanding Market Shift And Ever-Evolving Consumer Preferences

SEO is such a dynamic and intense discipline that, for the majority, it can be a ‘heads down,’ laser-focused, task-by-task approach.

However, especially when we look at enterprise SEO and large-scale projects, it is essential to take a step back and ensure you have a pulse on what is happening at a macro level.

For enterprise SEO experts, it is crucial to stay on top of the latest trends and developments in consumer behavior, especially during economic shifts. These shifts can significantly impact how businesses align their more extensive SEO and content strategies to match business objectives.

For example, the pandemic saw rapid shifts in shopping preferences for products related to staying at home.

In any era-changing economic conditions, the importance of SEO reaches an all-time high due to its cost efficiencies and compounding returns, such as branding and data-driven insights into products and all major digital strategies such as paid search, email, and social.

  • Market conditions can force organizations to prioritize specific competitor strategies.
  • Search algorithm updates may prioritize credibility and authoritative sources, which means content should be optimized accordingly. I will share more on this later in this article.
  • Economic changes can also accelerate the use of new technologies, requiring businesses to be flexible and adaptable, and exercise caution in adoption.

Enterprise SEO pros must liaise with key management stakeholders monthly to ensure their strategies align with key business priorities to avoid going down unproductive pathways.

You must use data analytics effectively to understand target audiences and what is changing.

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As enterprise SEO is a multi-stakeholder discipline, insights must be fed into organizational strategies to create more holistic, not just channel-agnostic, individualized experiences.

These can range from lead magnets that take the form of tailored marketing communications to customized product content and campaigns.

2. Using Generative AI For SEO And Content: Managing Risk Vs. Reward

According to Bloomberg Intelligence, by 2032, generative AI will be worth $1.3 trillion. Additionally, Gartner research shows that SEO and content marketing are two of the highest areas of increased investment.

5 Key Enterprise SEO And AI Trends For 20245 Key Enterprise SEO And AI Trends For 2024

Numbers vary depending on the source, but if you drill down, well over 2,000 generative content AI tools are flooding the market. No doubt you hear about a new one in the news every week!

The challenge for enterprise SEO pros who want to boost content productivity and performance lies in balancing the risk versus reward of using these tools.

Risk: Some of the content generative tools focus on velocity over quality. This is challenging for the consumer and search engines and limits the chance of your brand being discovered in a sea of nonsense.

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This is because they are based on single-source, low-quality data sources that are not trained to understand your audience’s needs and wants. They have no understanding of what works in content & SEO.

For brands, this means the content can get buried below irrelevant, low-quality spam-like articles. Over time, I expect Google to solve this.

In addition, as a result, we are seeing more and more government and organization institutions building ethical AI and content creation guidelines and standards related to data use, regulation, and governance.

Always remember the risks.

  • Generative AI has severe limitations and liabilities, including the tendency to “hallucinate” by fabricating information when it doesn’t have an answer.
  • It can state misinformation so convincingly a reader new to the topic may believe it to be fact.
  • It lacks creativity and produces output that tends to be generic and formulaic.
  • The content produced is only as good as the input (prompts) and oversight (editorial process) –garbage in, garbage out.

Reward: On the flip side, if correctly used, generative AI tools can help improve content productivity and scale content for SEO campaigns.

  • Help give valuable insights and inspiration: The cornerstone of successful campaign development is the strategic generation of ideas. Marketers can create compelling content by using generative AI to uncover popular search terms, monitor social media trends, and discover unique angles and ideas.
  • Accelerate content production creation efficiency: Generative AI can also help segment audiences based on demographics, preferences, and behaviors, enabling you to tailor personalization strategies and unique experiences. It can also assist in timely (short-from) email marketing and crafting specific messages for each key target audience.
  • Scale productivity and performance: For enterprise SEO pros who use platforms rather than multiple tools with disparate data sources, AI-generated content can be created in one platform that also helps you streamline workflows. Due to built-in privacy considerations and guardrails, platform-specific generative AI tools are likely safer to use. They can create content based on your existing assets and utilize high-fidelity and secure data based on search and content patterns. These are helpful for efficient content discovery and distribution, allowing you to focus on strategy and creation.

Recommendations from all-in-one platforms also act as a content and SEO best practice assistant.

3. Preparing For Search Generative Experiences: Your Content And Your Brand

The transition to Search Generative Experiences (SGE) marks the most substantial transformation in the history of search engines – and a seismic shift that will impact all industries, affecting every company and marketer globally.

SGE represents a paradigm shift in SEO, moving beyond traditional keyword-based tactics to embrace the power of generative AI.

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5 Key Enterprise SEO And AI Trends For 20245 Key Enterprise SEO And AI Trends For 2024

As AI emerges and becomes almost a “mediator” between a company’s content and its users, one search can produce results that would have previously taken five separate searches.

Take retail shopping as an instance: AI will start to recommend a complete shopping experience that gives consumers an experience that contains many channels and sources and multiple forms of media.

For consumers, this promises deeper and more interactive experiences, leading to increased engagement and time spent on Google.

For brands, it means higher value clicks once a consumer is ready to visit your website.

I have been monitoring this (at BrightEdge) for a long time. I see experiments in critical areas that you should keep an eye on! For example:

  • Testing of over 22 new content formats in SGE results.
  • There are many warnings in the healthcare and YMVL industries, as Google is exercising caution.
  • New visual content formats are used in industries such as e-commerce.
  • More reviews are being added to results in areas like entertainment.
  • There is a big focus on places (local) being integrated into results.

To help SEJ readers and the whole community, you can view for free (ungated) the data behind all these findings and a step-by-step guide to understanding this Ultimate Guide to SGE.

Note: This is still in Google Labs and has not been rolled yet. However, from the above, I firmly predict this is a matter of when, where, and how it will proceed.

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4. Understanding And Adapting To New Search Behaviours: Data And Conversational Intent

Utilizing data to grasp user behavior and the underlying intent in conversations will be crucial for SEO success in both traditional and AI-driven search results.

Search is becoming conversational, and marketers must focus on user intent, advancing their understanding of their audience from simple keyword optimization to grasping conversational intent and extended phrases.

For users, this translates into more captivating and immersive experiences, leading to increased time spent on Google. This optimizes their search, guiding them swiftly to the most pertinent websites that cater to their unique needs.

For marketers, navigating your search presence becomes more intricate yet more fruitful. Anticipate reduced but higher-quality web traffic. Identifying key searches that activate various types of results is essential.

Clicks will carry greater monetary value due to enhanced conversion rates. This is because consumers are more ready to act after being informed and influenced by prior interactions and data from Google.

Marketers need to guarantee that their content strategy not only answers the specific query but also considers the broader context in which the query is made. This will help ensure targeted and effective engagement with users.

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However, the core fundamentals of technical and website SEO remain the same. They will become more critical as marketers shift to optimizing their sites for higher-value traffic and clicks.

  • Ensure your site is fast and responsive, it is structured, and the content is optimized for human readers. It should be structured to answer their questions in the most engaging and user-friendly way.
  • Ensure your content assets are primed for conversion with clear CTAs.

Focusing on contextual signals will be vital for content marketers who want to maximize performance.

For example, schema markup, E-E-A-T, and HCU (even though not regarded as ranking factors) are vital, so search engines and users send signals so they can understand the context behind your site and content.

  • Leverage data to decode user behavior and the intent behind conversations, using this insight as a catalyst for generative AI outcomes.
  • Develop and refine various content types, such as videos and images, to enhance engagement.
  • Coordinate marketing efforts across paid media, social platforms, and public relations to create a unified content campaign strategy.
  • Concentrate on tracking metrics like traffic and converting high-quality down-funnel traffic as consumers spend more time on Google before making informed decisions and visiting your website.

And, as I know, you are now thinking. Yes, SGE could mean slightly less but more qualified traffic.

5. Managing Omnichannel Marketing: Managing SEO And Multiple Marketing Disinclines

SEO has long shifted from being a siloed channel, but enterprises must make changes now as consumers and search engine demands drive the need for even closer collaboration.

Given that the SERPs and AI-generated SGE results encompass a variety of media types and formats – including social media, reviews, and news sources – content marketers will need to get closer than ever to their SEO, digital branding, design, social media, and PR teams.

Google search for [food delivery near me]Screenshot for search for [food delivery near me], Google, February 2024Google search for [food delivery near me]

Consumers are no longer consuming media in silos, and that means marketers cannot operate SEO and digital marketing in silos. More than managing PPC and SEO campaigns with a bit of social media will be required in 2024.

This is especially true as AI-powered results contain multiple formats and sources. Whether you are a big brand or not, whoever provides the best experience will win in 2024 – so expect some curveballs from your competition.

This means the relationships between people, processes, and technology must change.

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Make sure you are aligning your teams and managing workflows across:

  • Design – Images and video.
  • Branding and PR – Messaging and company reputation.
  • Content – From text to design to social.
  • SEO – PPC and Website teams.
  • Customer Service teams – For reviews.
  • Sales teams for advice on down-funnel CTAs on your site.

For enterprise SEO pros, platforms are the only way you can do this.

Key Takeaways For Enterprise SEO Success In 2024

SEO today is going to be different than SEO tomorrow. SEO tomorrow will be different than the search in March.

Search and AI todayImage from author, February 2024Search and AI today

Change is the core constant we all share in this industry. Time has shown us that those who keep up with trends and adapt quickly survive and thrive.

As SEO advances alongside AI, keep a core focus on monitoring consumer behavior.

Never forget many of the core principles of SEO still apply, but be ready to help your organization become more agile so your success in enterprise SEO and AI is guaranteed.

In 2024, regardless of the search source, once a consumer clicks, brands that give them the best experience win.

More resources:

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Featured Image: Sutthiphong Chandaeng/Shutterstock

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