Connect with us

SEO

How Can We Improve Rankings For Older Content? Ask An SEO

Published

on

How Can We Improve Rankings For Older Content? Ask An SEO

How can you help existing webpages get new traction and move up in search rankings?

That’s the question posed by Faith in this edition of Ask An SEO. She wrote:

“I have a few keywords ranking on the fourth or fifth page of Google.

It’s been a year ranking at this position. What should I do to improve the rankings now?”

Adam Riemer from Adam Riemer Marketing shares his response with Miranda Miller, Writer & Editor, in this edition of Ask An SEO.

Evaluating internal pages that may be competing against your candidates for optimization is an important first step, he says.

Improving Page Speed and Core Web Vitals may also give you new opportunities to improve rankings.

Advertisement

Adam shares a step-by-step process for finding opportunities to improve existing content with local schema, improving a user’s on-page experience, getting links from relevant media sources, and more.

You can watch the full video here and find the full transcript below.

Ask An SEO: Improving Rankings With Adam Riemer [Full Transcript]

Miranda Miller: Hello, and welcome to Ask An SEO. … This week, we have with us Adam Riemer from Adam Riemer Marketing, AdamRiemer.me.

The question that people have for you this week comes from Faith.

Faith has a few keywords ranking on the fourth or fifth page of Google. They’ve been stable there for about a year, and she would like to know: What can she do to improve those rankings now?

Adam Riemer: Okay. That’s a good question and comes up way too often. I have to deal with that with a lot of clients. Well, not deal with it, but I get to solve that problem for a lot of clients.

Advertisement

Improving Rankings For Existing Content, Step By Step

Adam Riemer: And basically, the very first thing I do is, I’ll take a tool, whether it’s Authority Labs or Semrush; I think Ahrefs does this too.

And I’ll look to see: Do we have competing pages in those positions?

And is there one with an indent after it, maybe? And from there, I’ll be like, Okay, well… do both of these pages need to exist?

If there is nothing competing and it’s just one page there, I start to look at the page experience, and I say, Okay, why is this not the best experience for the user or for the search query?

And then we start to address, and you can look at, Do we properly explain the concept?

Is the article as good as it could be?

Advertisement

Is it formatted correctly? Could it use some bulking up?

Sometimes, one thing I’ve had to do a lot recently… there’s a case study on my website right now recently, I have to delete most of the copy because people just wrote copy to hit a minimum word count by actually reducing it, and just sharing the actual information.

We’ve been able to pop our clients up to the top positions from there.

Another option you can do, if everything’s perfect and your copy’s great… you can start to look at Page Speed and Core Web Vitals.

That’s not going to move the needle much, but when it does, it’s going to help you convert more traffic and decrease your bounce rate.

Another thing you can try to do is build some internal links from contextually relevant content.

Advertisement

You don’t want to just link to that page off of keywords for the sake of doing it.

Build out your content strategy. Look for previous articles.

If you’re on WordPress, for example, you can log in, click on posts, and then click on pages.

You do this twice and type in the keyword or a similar version of the keyword. And that’ll pull up a list of the actual pages that mention this. And you can start building words that way.

You can also use search operators. We’ll do site, put your URL in, and then in quotation marks, you’ll put in the keyword phrase, and it’ll scan through your website for mentions of that specific keyword or phrase throughout the site.

And now you have a list of pages you can build internal links from.

Advertisement

You can also try doing PR work. So if your content or if your page is genuinely good enough, then you can probably attract backlinks from major media, possibly bloggers.

Tips For Local Businesses

Adam Riemer: If you’re local, go for local websites and complementary companies, and try to do it that way. It won’t be an immediate result, but you will start to see climbing if it’s good.

If it’s a product page and you’re not the manufacturer, it doesn’t make sense to give you an anchor or a backlink.

So what you want to do then is you want to create content that’s worth linking to and get backlinks that way, and pass the authority to the page.

Those are all different ways you can pop up from position or page four and five to the front page of Google and possibly overtake it.

Don’t Forget About Schema

The last thing to look at, and probably should be done earlier, is the schema.

Advertisement

A lot of people forget that schema.org does update its libraries regularly. So you’ll want to go in and say, Do I have everything here? Did I add a video?

And is there video object schema?

Do I have FAQs on here?

Or did I add some, and is there FAQ schema?

If it’s listed as an article, because maybe you’re a publisher, there’s probably a part, and you can nest it in the has part portion of the schema.

And those are always… you can actually take your page from the fourth and fifth page of Google and bump it up to page one while achieving some featured rich results.

Advertisement

Evaluating A Visitor’s Page Experience

Miranda Miller: That is awesome. That’s great information, Adam.

I have a couple of follow-up questions for you.

I was wondering – when you’re evaluating page experience, the experience that any given user is having on that website and on that specific page, do you use tools to help you with that?

Or is it a largely manual process, and what are you looking for?

Adam Riemer: Depends on what I’m looking at on the page, specifically.

If I notice it’s just going really slow, then I’ll use webpagetest.org. That’s my first go-to tool because the waterfall is very easy to dissect, and they’ve now added Core Web Vitals – that’s similar to what you’ll see in Search Console.

Advertisement

So that way, I can say, Okay, this is rendering first. This is coming, or this is being pulled in first before we actually start to render the page, and we can move it to the end. It doesn’t need to be there.

We can identify all the fonts and everything else that’s slowing down the page.

We can also look for scripts and code that aren’t being used anymore – because it’s all just right there in front of you.

Another thing I’ll do is, a lot of time, branding teams will come in and say, “No, this is the messaging that we have to use.

And this is what we want for our thing, for our product or our service or our content.”

When in reality, that’s what they want. That’s not what the end user or what these search engines think.

Advertisement

And if you’re not going to give the proper words and the proper message to your users, then you’re not going to get those users.

So what I do is I make that same branding team go on a video call outside, both of us, and we will start saying the H1 tag and the top blurb to random people or the students, saying, What does this mean?

What do we offer? What do we do?

Nine times out of ten, people can’t answer, and they have no idea. And it really drives it home.

I’ve made a fortune 500 CEO actually stand outside and say what his branding team made us put on the website – it did not go well.

But it drove the point home: That nobody knows what it is we do or sell or what the content of the article’s supposed to be.

Advertisement

And this is a great way to start to make it resonate; okay, let’s keep the messaging while keeping branding and tax. So there’s a good balance. So really, it just depends on what the goal is and what we’re looking at for page experience.

Tips For Getting Noticed By Busy News Media Professionals

Miranda Miller: That’s great. And the other thing I wondered about is when we’re talking about link building and getting in front of news media and, you know, people who might give you a relevant link.

What tips do you have to stand out in a jam-packed inbox?

Adam Riemer:

Avoid “MeWe” syndrome and compliment them.

And I actually did this with a client yesterday. I said, “Your email was not the best it could have been.”

Advertisement

They were like, “Why? We covered everything.”

That’s the problem. Let’s go through and read this.

And every time a sentence starts with “I,” ”We,” “Ours,” or “My,” I put a finger up. And if those words appeared in the sentence again, they get two fingers for each one.

So within the first three sentences, we had already hit 10 fingers pointing up.

How is this about the journalist? They were like: “Because they write about this topic.”

But it’s not about the journalist. “About the journalist” means you’ve read two or three of their articles and probably visited their social media.

Advertisement

So what I do is I look for an older article that they’re probably proud of and a recent one that are both topically relevant.

And then I say,

“Hey, thank you for your article about this, this and this. The point about halfway down where you mention WordPress versus Wix versus GoDaddy, for example, and the way that you called out the brand new features that launched, I had no idea that you could do this with X, Y, and Z CRM systems or CMS systems.”

So then you want to say, “I also notice you updated here where you have WordPress versus Squarespace. Have you considered doing a comparison chart and maybe adding X, Y, Z in, and X, Y, Z would be the new client?” Just to introduce and say, they have these features, including the ones you personally enjoyed in your review under the pros and cons list here.

And now what you’re doing is you’re showing you actually read it, and you’re giving a reason to include, and you’re saying, this is the only one.

Or you can say, “X, Y, Z company has this feature just like this company. And just like that one, but it’s not available there. And they’re actually doing this. I work with them. I would be happy to give you a complimentary account if you’d like to review it.”

If it’s just a product page… like, we’re both wearing T-shirts. So maybe it’s the top 30 T-shirts or the best 30 T-shirts for interviewing on Search Engine Journal.

Advertisement

So we go in, and we see Cosmopolitan and Refinery 29 and Rolling Stone and all these other publications – one, you’re going to need an affiliate program because they’re all affiliate sites now.

And two, you’re going to also need to cater to the journalist. Well, that’s actually not true because the journalists in those publications specifically do have editorial control, and not everything on those lists has to be an affiliate link. It just helps, which means you don’t get your backlink because it’s gonna go through a 307 redirect.

But this is me rambling. And I’m sorry, please keep me focused.

Miranda Miller: You’re good.

Adam Riemer: Good for hours.

Miranda Miller: That is a lot of great advice. And as an editor, I can tell you, we can smell it a mile away if you’ve just dropped our name in there and didn’t actually, like, put any homework into what the publication is about and why we would link to you.

Advertisement

And yeah. If… what did you call it? “MeWe” syndrome – if you’re just talking about yourself. You’re just that guy in the corner at the party. Nobody wants to talk to you, nobody wants to give you a link.

Well, thank you, Adam. I really appreciate your time.

Adam Riemer: Can I finish the one part real quick? Sorry. So, yeah.

So when you’re going through that list, it’s not enough. You can click on the author’s name, and you’ll see all of the articles they’ve written.

So what you want to do then, because we’re going to be pitching our T-shirt, is we want to say: “Okay, your article here, I had no idea that Lululemon produces T-shirts.”

And then say, “In your recent one, the third one down where you featured the green T-shirt with XYZ prank is stunning. Thank you for the link off to Nordstrom. Our company offers this type of T-shirt, which is missing. It’s made from an eco-friendly thing here, which I notice may be a big topic for you because you wrote about eco-friendly hair ties and eco-friendly telephones.”

Advertisement

I’m just looking at stuff that’s on. And it sounds weird. I have hair ties. I just bought them for my neighbor.

That’s how you get in front of them: You show that you actually paid attention.

You thank them for their advice, and you cater to what matters to them and take out the mentions of “I, we, and our,” and talk about them to them and compliment their work. That’s how you do it.

We get about… out of every five emails we send, we get about three responses, and usually, at least one of those turns into a yes, because we take the time. We don’t have as much outreach, but it’s more effective outreach.

Miranda Miller: Nice. I love that. There’s no spray-and-pray happening. Exactly. Well, thank you, Adam,

Adam Riemer: I’m sorry for interrupting.

Advertisement

Miranda Miller: No, no, you’re good. And thank you, Faith, for the great question.

We will have a transcript and some highlights from Adam’s advice and the tips that he shared on searchenginejournal.com. So check that out, and you’ll find a link there to submit your own questions for Ask An SEO. Until next time. Thank you.

Adam Riemer:

Bye, thanks for having me.


Editor’s note: Ask an SEO is a weekly SEO advice column written by some of the industry’s top SEO experts, who have been hand-picked by Search Engine Journal. Got a question about SEO? Fill out our form. You might see your answer in the next #AskanSEO post!

Source link

Advertisement
Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address

SEO

How to Avoid Ruining SEO During a Website Redesign

Published

on

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.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

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:

Advertisement
  • 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.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement



Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

SEO

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

Published

on

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

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

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…

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

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.



Source link

Advertisement
Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

SEO

5 Key Enterprise SEO Trends For 2024

Published

on

By

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.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

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.

Advertisement

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:

Advertisement

Featured Image: Sutthiphong Chandaeng/Shutterstock

Source link

Keep an eye on what we are doing
Be the first to get latest updates and exclusive content straight to your email inbox.
We promise not to spam you. You can unsubscribe at any time.
Invalid email address
Continue Reading

Trending

Follow by Email
RSS