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How to Plan & Run an SEO Campaign (Step-by-Step Guide)

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How to Plan & Run an SEO Campaign (Step-by-Step Guide)

An SEO campaign is a structured set of tasks that should lead to better rankings on search engines. If you actively do SEO, you likely engage in SEO campaigns, whether you call it that or not.

But what should the process from campaign idea to evaluation look like? There are often many steps and people involved, so proper planning is needed to achieve effectiveness and the desired outcome.

We’ve run many SEO campaigns, including some unique ones. You’ll learn to navigate the process from start to finish with many examples along the way.

These are the steps we’ll go through:

  1. Discover and prioritize your SEO opportunities
  2. Set up an SEO objective
  3. Outline the process to achieve the objective
  4. (Re)write the content
  5. Acquire and build backlinks
  6. Monitor the results
  7. Evaluate the campaign

Let’s dive in.

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1. Discover and prioritize your SEO opportunities

The first rule of planning SEO campaigns is simple. Don’t start if you lack information and data to back up your decisions. You can come up with countless SEO campaign ideas. But without research, you can’t tell which opportunities are worth pursuing and prioritizing.

The research we’re going to dive into will help us estimate the effort needed to run any SEO campaign and its potential impact. This concept can be illustrated by the Impact Effort Matrix:

Impact Effort Matrix. Y axis labeled "impact." X axis labeled "effort." 4 sections from top in clockwise direction: "quick wins," "long term project," "not going to happen," and "backlog."

Now, because an SEO campaign is defined as a set of tasks, we’ll assume that all the ideas will fall into the two quadrants on the right side.

We need two essential sets of SEO data that will help us come up with the SEO campaign ideas and add them into the matrix. Welcome to keyword and backlink research. If you’ve already done this, feel free to skip to the second step.

Keyword research

Keyword research is the process of understanding the language your target customers use when searching for your products, services, and content. It then involves analyzing, comparing, and prioritizing the best keyword opportunities for your website.

Now, I’m not going to dive into the process of keyword research, as we have a whole guide about that. But do note planning and running a campaign is more advanced than just picking a few keywords and writing content about them.

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Here are a few use cases that are worth pursuing as an SEO campaign based on keyword data:

Most of these require an outreach campaign on top of the content creation to maximize the potential. That’s where the other set of data comes into play.

Backlink research

Backlink research is the process of understanding what makes websites link to one another in your niche and gathering link opportunities for your own pages. Basically, it’s about getting all the necessary information to grow a strong backlink profile for your website that should lead to better rankings.

A lot of backlink research stems from a sort of SEO competitive analysis. It can be in the form of analyzing intersecting links where you check which websites link to your competitors but not to you. This Link Intersect report can be accessed in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer:

Link Intersect results

Then we can analyze the type of content that gets the most links (link bait) in your niche in the Best by links report in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer:

Best by links report results

Or do the most straightforward analysis, which is going through the Backlinks and Referring domains reports—all in Site Explorer:

Backlinks report results

Getting all this research and processes right allows you to launch outreach campaigns that should get high-quality backlinks to your most important pieces of content. Technically, any outreach campaign can be considered an SEO campaign on its own. (Ideally, it’s best to launch it right after the “content creation” step.)

2. Set up an SEO objective

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Got an SEO campaign idea that’s worth pursuing? Great! You should set up an objective for that. In other words, what should be the quantifiable outcome of that campaign? What are you aiming to achieve?

Everyone’s SEO objectives are different. But generally, the four most common ones revolve around:

  • Increasing conversions and sales from organic traffic.
  • Increasing search visibility (share of voice) for a set of keywords.
  • Ranking higher for a highly competitive keyword (to outrank a competitor, drive a lot of traffic, etc.).
  • Getting high-quality backlinks.

If you’re not sure which objective to choose, these four are always a good starting point.

For example, one of our latest SEO campaigns revolved around creating a “stats” page and then building links to it (to test how successful we’d be so that we could create a case study about it).

The main SEO objective was to rank in the top three for “seo statistics” within three months. Another objective that would help to get us there was to build at least 20 high-quality backlinks to the page from an outreach campaign. 

We SEOs can’t really guarantee any results, but these objectives should still adhere to the popular SMART objectives guidelines. You need to find a good balance between the specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and timely parameters of the objectives.

The time period is arguably the most difficult parameter to estimate. For better ranking objectives, I suggest going for at least three months, preferably even six months and more if your website isn’t generally highly competitive on the SERPs.

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Based on our research, only 5.7% of newly published pages get to the top 10 search results within a year. And if they do, it mostly takes between two to six months:

Bar graph showing most pages achieve high DR in 2 to 6 months

Domain Ranking (DR) shows the strength of a website’s backlink profile compared to the others in our database on a 100-point scale. It’s a solid proxy for assessing how competitive a website can be on the SERPs.

By the way, if your time frame is long enough (six months+), your keyword ranking and backlink objectives may eventually go hand in hand. The better the content’s backlinks, the higher the chances that content will rank well. And the higher a page ranks, the more people will see it and link to it naturally.

Once you know what you’re aiming for with the campaign, it’s time to start planning.

Recommended reading: How to Set the Right SEO Goals With 3 Examples

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3. Outline the process to achieve the objective

Let’s now dissect the one big SEO campaign into a structured set of tasks. To help us get there, we’ll use the “SEO goals” pyramid concept:

SEO goal pyramid divided into 3 sections (from top to bottom): outcome, performance, process

What we’ve set up in the previous step is the outcome goal and maybe even some performance goals that are evident right away, such as the need to build backlinks. We’re going to uncover the rest of the steps and goals now.

Let’s continue with the example of the SEO campaign for our “stats” page. The outcome goal was to rank in the top three search results for “seo statistics” within three months.

Here, we can tell there are two performance goals that serve as the best way to achieve the outcome goal:

  1. Write the best SEO statistics page
  2. Build at least 20 high-quality backlinks to the page via an outreach campaign

The first performance goal is obvious. But setting up the second goal is more nuanced because pages ranking at the top for the most competitive keywords tend to have hundreds, if not thousands, of backlinks earned throughout many years—numbers that you can’t achieve with an outreach campaign.

That’s now largely the case of the “seo statistics” keyword as well. There are pages with thousands of backlinks from thousands of referring domains:

Don’t be discouraged by these numbers, though. Most backlinks come from spammy websites and can be completely disregarded.

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Since you should only go after potentially high-quality backlinks, it’s better to look at the whole backlink profile of those pages ranking at the top by clicking on the caret and going over to the Backlinks report:

SERP overview for "seo statistics"; notably, caret showing "backlinks"

What I’ve just discovered is the #4 page doesn’t have any backlinks from pages that drive solid organic traffic despite it having thousands of backlinks:

Backlinks report results

Some other pages there do indeed have hard-to-beat backlink portfolios. But getting to the top of this SERP seems achievable for us within a relatively short period of time.

Based on some basic research, we can see hundreds of link prospects. This makes getting more than 20 acquired backlinks a doable task.

What’s left is to further dissect the performance goals into process goals:

  1. What do we need to do to write the best SEO statistics page?
  2. What do we need to do to build over 20 high-quality backlinks?

I already went ahead with the link building aspect, so I’ll stick to expanding on this area. It’s reasonable to expect a 5% outreach conversion rate. This means, on average, we need to reach out to 400 email addresses to get 20 backlinks.

This outreach process may include the following steps:

  • Narrow down link prospects to include only high-quality websites with the potential to link to you
  • Automatically find and validate email addresses
  • Have a convincing reason to reach out (e.g., they were missing some SEO stats or included outdated ones)
  • Put it all together into a table for automation purposes and/or tracking your progress
  • Write the outreach emails
  • Send the outreach emails
  • Do follow-ups

If you want to see this process in action, we’ve documented it in a video for the SEO campaign I mentioned earlier:

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMcA-8nalL8

The completed SEO goals pyramid can then look like this:

SEO goal pyramid divided into 3 sections (from top to bottom): outcome, performance, process. Each section now has short writeup about the goal and how to measure said goal

You can also do this for the other performance goals. Now, you’ll have the whole SEO campaign process outlined. You can then start assigning tasks that will take you from start to finish.

As discussed earlier, most SEO campaigns largely revolve around writing or rewriting content. That content should either rank well on the SERPs by itself or at least help your other pages rank by passing link equity from all the attracted backlinks to these pages.

Let’s take a look at a few tips that will help you (re)write both keyword-focused content and link bait content. And if you come across a good keyword that can be covered in a way that will also attract many backlinks, even better—just combine both approaches.

Writing keyword-focused content

I’ll use this very article as an example. We had an older version of this article targeting the keyword “seo campaign” on our blog for a long time, but it never ranked well:

Site Explorer overview of original article on SEO campaign

The reason seems evident. When we take a look at the top-ranking pages for “seo campaign,” we see that the vast majority of them are guides. There’s not even one case study in sight:

SERP overview for "seo campaign"; all results are guides

One of the most important aspects of creating content to rank well on search engines is to align with search intent. It’s the “why” behind a search query.

In this case, most people looking up “seo campaign” want to see a guide on how to plan and run one. That’s exactly what this updated version does and why it has a much higher chance of ranking well.

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Providing the right angle of the content to the readers is only one of the main aspects we have to take into account here.

For example, before I even write an outline, I think about the goal of the article, the expected search intent, my angle, how I can make it stand out (i.e., USP, which stands for unique selling proposition), and how much I can naturally mention our product (business potential on a scale from 0 to 3):

Michal's plan for the article

These are all general tips on writing whole pieces of content. You may want to plan and run a more specific type of SEO campaign, such as optimizing for featured snippets in bulk.

Writing link bait content

You should already know what type of content attracts the most links in your niche based on the backlink research mentioned earlier. That’s the easy part. Creating link-worthy content can be quite challenging and often requires a lot of effort.

In the marketing software industry that we’re in, the types of pages that get links most easily are:

  • Industry insights and data studies.
  • Landing pages with free, ready-to-use marketing tools.
  • Statistics pages.

Apart from the statistics pages, it’s close to impossible to develop such content without help from your data science and engineering teams.

But this also means there is a lack of such content types. Thus, having them on your site may result in you getting great links. Make your content the best entry on the SERP to be worth those links.

Recommended reading: Deconstructing Linkbait: How to Create Content That Attracts Backlinks

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5. Acquire and build backlinks

SEO campaigns rarely end at just publishing content. That’s half of the job. What matters as much as content creation is content distribution that triggers link acquisition.

It’s even more important with link bait content that isn’t made for getting organic traffic. All the work will be in vain without proper content distribution.

Here’s what I mean by proper content distribution:

  • Plan an outreach campaign to get backlinks and/or exposure from prominent people in your niche
  • Promote the content with social media ads on top of the standard organic social posts that usually have limited reach
  • Share it with your email subscribers
  • Repurpose your content into social media posts, Quora answers, newsletters, etc., and share repeatedly
  • Update your internal links so readers of your other articles can click through and pages can pass their link equities

Of course, the outreach campaign is most relevant for the link building point. Sure, you can get links by simply getting the content in front of many people’s eyes, but it’s the direct email with a specific link building pitch that can get you the results quickly.

We have already looked into the steps and analysis required for planning an outreach campaign and creating link bait content. But we still haven’t discussed the power of public relations (PR) that can take the content distribution and link acquisition to a whole different level.

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For example, when I analyzed the SEO strategy of Wise, I found one of the many aspects that stood out is how its creative PR campaigns intertwined with SEO goals.

Here’s its “nothing to hide” campaign, which addresses the issue of hidden fees in finance and banking:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZufqOLl6ajE

What makes this clearly successful in terms of SEO is the supporting content on its website that attracts some of the links from big media names:

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Referring domains report results

All this being said, there are no limits to link building campaigns. You can choose the good old proven way of attracting links or go with something even more creative as part of a larger PR campaign.

We’re now beyond the tactical execution of the campaign, and it’s time to shift to “analytics” mode. That’s a piece of cake when compared to all the planning and running of the campaign.

Get back to your SEO objectives and think about the KPIs and metrics needed to evaluate the campaign. Here are a few use cases of what metrics to track for some example outcome objectives:

  • Sales objectives – Organic conversions and assisted conversions in Google Analytics (or alternatives) from the pages that were part of the campaign.
Conversions data in Google Analytics
  • Search visibility objectives – Set up a keywords tracking project in Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker and tag keywords relevant to the campaign.
Rank Tracker overview
  • Keyword rankings objectives – Keyword rankings in Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker or Organic keywords report for the campaign page in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer.
Organic keywords report results
  • Backlinks acquisition objectives – Backlinks and Referring domains reports in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer to check retrospectively. You can use Ahrefs Alerts to get regular backlink acquisition updates.
Page to edit/set up alert in Ahrefs Alerts

First of all, I recommend making notes during the campaign and right after it ends. Did it go as planned? Is it replicable? Can you use any of the processes in the future? What can you do better next time? You won’t recall all the details weeks or months later when it’s time to finally evaluate the campaign, so jot down what’s important as you go along.

If all the monitoring and tracking have been set up, you may find out that you achieved your campaign objectives sooner than expected. In this case, weekly checks should be fine. Anything more frequent than that isn’t necessary.

But as we all know, SEO can be quite volatile, so don’t celebrate just yet if you encounter better rankings for the first time.

When the rather arbitrary date of your campaign evaluation comes (e.g., rank top three for “seo statistics” within three months), look at the historical performance. If you see somewhat consistent higher rankings or higher sales over a longer period, you can finally wrap things up and tell yourself it’s been a successful campaign.

For example, the SEO stats page I was referring to throughout the article ranks at the top positions consistently. It also got to #1 in two months:

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Organic keywords report results; notably, line graph showing "position history" trends

But if you don’t meet your objectives, don’t take it as a failure.

We do try and set up SMART objectives. But in all honesty, it’s often a guessing game in SEO, especially when it comes to estimating the period of when the effects of the campaign should kick in.

I was once involved in an SEO project where it took two years to achieve an objective that many people thought would be a question of just a few months.

Staying curious, being patient, and learning from mistakes are invaluable SEO skills.

Final thoughts

Properly planning, running, and evaluating big SEO campaigns requires advanced SEO knowledge, experience, and skills. But as we’ve shown in the article, you can also take part in smaller but still impactful campaigns like outreach campaigns or on-page optimization campaigns.

Start small, and you’ll eventually get to work on achieving the most ambitious SEO objectives.

A great benefit of launching SEO campaigns is that you’ll get better at project management and communication, as these campaigns often require the cooperation of many people—sometimes even outside of the marketing team.

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Got any questions? Ping me on Twitter.




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Content Pruning: Why It Works, and How to Do It

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Content Pruning: Why It Works, and How to Do It

Content pruning sounds pretty appealing: delete a ton of content and see your organic traffic improve. But pruning has risks (like deleting useful pages and useful backlinks), and benefits are not guaranteed: So how does pruning actually work? And when

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8 Free SEO Reporting Tools

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8 Free SEO Reporting Tools

There’s no shortage of SEO reporting tools to choose from—but what are the core tools you need to put together an SEO report?

In this article, I’ll share eight of my favorite SEO reporting tools to help you create a comprehensive SEO report for free.

Price: Free

Google Search Console, often called GSC, is one of the most widely used tools to track important SEO metrics from Google Search.

Most common reporting use case

GSC has a ton of data to dive into, but the main performance indicator SEOs look at first in GSC is Clicks on the main Overview dashboard.

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As the data is from Google, SEOs consider it to be a good barometer for tracking organic search performance. As well as clicks data, you can also track the following from the Performance report:

  • Total Impressions
  • Average CTR
  • Average Position
gsc-performance-overviewgsc-performance-overview

Tip

If you’ve signed up for AWT using Google Search Console, you can view your GSC performance data in Ahrefs by clicking “GSC Performance” from the main dashboard.

But for most SEO reporting, GSC clicks data is exported into a spreadsheet and turned into a chart to visualize year-over-year performance.

organic-traffic-graph-showing-clicks-year-over-yearorganic-traffic-graph-showing-clicks-year-over-year

Favorite feature

One of my favorite reports in GSC is the Indexing report. It’s useful for SEO reporting because you can share the indexed to non-indexed pages ratio in your SEO report.

google-search-console-indexed-pages-reportgoogle-search-console-indexed-pages-report

If the website has a lot of non-indexed pages, then it’s worth reviewing the pages to understand why they haven’t been indexed.

Price: Free

Google Looker Studio (GLS), previously known as Google Data Studio (GDS), is a free tool that helps visualize data in shareable dashboards.

Most common reporting use case

Dashboards are an important part of SEO reporting, and GLS allows you to get a total view of search performance from multiple sources through its integrations.

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Out of the box, GLS allows you to connect to many different data sources.

Such as:

  • Marketing products – Google Ads, Google Analytics, Display & Video 360, Search Ads 360
  • Consumer products – Google Sheets, YouTube, and Google Search Console
  • Databases – BigQuery, MySQL, and PostgreSQL
  • Social media platformsFacebook, Reddit, and Twitter
  • Files – CSV file upload and Google Cloud Storage

Sidenote.

If you don’t have the time to create your own report manually, Ahrefs has three Google Looker Studio connectors that can help you create automated SEO reporting for any website in a few clicks

google-looker-studio-partner-connectorsgoogle-looker-studio-partner-connectors

Here’s what a dashboard in GLS looks like:

ahrefs-seo-audit-dashboardahrefs-seo-audit-dashboard
Ahrefs Google Looker Studio integration

With this type of dashboard, you share reports that are easy to understand with clients or other stakeholders.

Favorite feature

The ability to blend and filter data from different sources, like GA and GSC, means you can get a customized overview of your total search performance, tailored to your website.

Price: Free for 500 URLs

Screaming Frog is a website crawler that helps you audit your website.

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Screaming Frog’s free version of its crawler is perfect if you want to run a quick audit on a bunch of URLs. The free version is limited to 500 URLs—making it ideal for crawling smaller websites.

screaming-frog-user-interface-screenshotscreaming-frog-user-interface-screenshot

Most common reporting use case

When it comes to reporting, the Reports menu in Screaming Frog SEO Spider has a wealth of information you can look over that covers all the technical aspects of your website, such as analyzing, redirects, canonicals, pagination, hreflang, structured data, and more.

Once you’ve crawled your site, it’s just a matter of downloading the reports you need and working out the main issues to summarize in your SEO report.

Favorite feature

Screaming Frog can pull in data from other tools, including Ahrefs, using APIs. 

If you already had access to a few SEO tools’ APIs, you could pull data from all of them directly into Screaming Frog. This is useful if you want to combine crawl data with performance data or other 3rd party tools.

screaming-frog-api-accessscreaming-frog-api-access

Even if you’ve never configured an API, connecting other tools to Screaming Frog is straightforward.

Price: Free

Ahrefs has a large selection of free SEO tools to help you at every stage of your SEO campaign, and many of these can be used to provide insights for your SEO reporting.

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when-to-use-ahrefs-free-tools-across-the-seo-process-illustrationwhen-to-use-ahrefs-free-tools-across-the-seo-process-illustration

For example, you could use our:

Most common reporting use case

One of our most popular free SEO tools is Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT), which you can use for your SEO reporting.

With AWT, you can:

  • Monitor your SEO health over time by setting up scheduled SEO audits
  • See the performance of your website
  • Check all known backlinks for your website
ahrefs-overviewahrefs-overview

Favorite feature

Of all the Ahrefs free tools, my favorite is AWT. Within it, site auditing is my favorite feature—once you’ve set it up, it’s a completely hands-free way to keep track of your website’s technical performance and monitor its health.

If you already have access to Google Search Console, it’s a no-brainer to set up a free AWT account and schedule a technical crawl of your website(s).

Price: Free

Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar is a free Chrome and Firefox extension useful for diagnosing on-page technical issues and performing quick spot checks on your website’s pages.

Most common reporting use case

For SEO reporting, it’s useful to run an on-page check on your website’s top pages to ensure there aren’t any serious on-page issues.

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ahrefs-seo-toolbar-overviewahrefs-seo-toolbar-overview

With the free version, you get the following features:

  • On-page SEO report
  • Redirect tracer with HTTP Headers
  • Outgoing links report with link highlighter and broken link checker
  • SERP positions
  • Country changer for SERP

The SEO toolbar is excellent for spot-checking issues with pages on your website. If you are not confident with inspecting the code, it can also give you valuable pointers on what elements you need to include on your pages to make them search-friendly.

If anything is wrong with the page, the toolbar highlights it, with red indicating a critical issue.

severity-highlight-ahrefs-seo-toolbarseverity-highlight-ahrefs-seo-toolbar

Favorite feature

The section I use the most frequently in the SEO toolbar is the Indexability tab. In this section, you can see whether the page can be crawled and indexed by Google.

indexability-tab-ahrefs-seo-toolbarindexability-tab-ahrefs-seo-toolbar

Although you can do this by inspecting the code manually, using the toolbar is much faster.

Price: Free

Like GSC, Google Analytics is another tool you can use to track the performance of your website, tracking sessions and conversions and much more on your website.

google-analytics-screenshotgoogle-analytics-screenshot

Most common reporting use case

GA gives you a total view of website traffic from several different sources, such as direct, social, organic, paid traffic, and more.

Favorite feature

You can create and track up to 300 events and 30 conversions with GA4. Previously, with universal analytics, you could only track 20 conversions. This makes conversion and event tracking easier within GA4.

Price: Free

Google Slides is Google’s version of Microsoft PowerPoint. If you don’t have a dashboard set up to report on your SEO performance, the next best thing is to assemble a slide deck.

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Many SEO agencies present their report through dashboard insights and PowerPoint presentations. However, if you don’t have access to PowerPoint, then Google Slides is an excellent (free) alternative.

google-slides-screenshotgoogle-slides-screenshot

Most common reporting use cases

The most common use of Google Slides is to create a monthly SEO report. If you don’t know what to include in a monthly report, use our SEO report template.

Favorite feature

One of my favorite features is the ability to share your presentation on a video chat directly from Google Slides. You can do this by clicking the camera icon in the top right.

share-video-chat-google-slidesshare-video-chat-google-slides

This is useful if you are working with remote clients and makes sharing your reports easy.

Price: Free

Google Trends allows you to view a keyword’s popularity over time in any country. The data shown is the relative popularity ratio scaled from 0-100, not the direct volume of search queries.

Most common reporting use cases

Google Trends is useful for showing how the popularity of certain searches can increase or decrease over time. If you work with a website that often has trending products, services, or news, it can be useful to illustrate this visually in your SEO report.

Google Trends makes it easy to spot seasonal trends for product categories. For example, people want to buy BBQs when the weather is sunny.

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Using Google Trends, we can see that peak demand for BBQs usually happens in June-July every year.

bbq-google-trends-graphbbq-google-trends-graph

Using this data across the last five years, we could be fairly sure when the BBQ season would start and end.

Favorite feature

Comparing two or more search terms against each other over time is one of my favorite uses of Google Trends, as it can be used to tell its own story.

google-trends-comparison-examplegoogle-trends-comparison-example

Embellishing your report with trends data allows you to gain further insights into market trends.

You can even dig into trends at a regional level if you need to.

regional-trends-via-google-trendsregional-trends-via-google-trends

Final thoughts

These free tools will help you put together the foundations for a well-rounded SEO report.

The tools you use for SEO reporting don’t always have to be expensive—even large companies use many of the free tools mentioned to create insights for their client’s SEO reports.

Got more questions? Ping me on X 🙂

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Study Reveals Potential Disruption For Brands & SEO

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Study Reveals Potential Disruption For Brands & SEO

A new study by Authoritas suggests that Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE), currently being tested with a limited group of users, could adversely impact brand visibility and organic search traffic.

These findings include:

  • When an SGE box is expanded, the top organic result drops by over 1,200 pixels on average, significantly reducing visibility.
  • 62% of SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results.
  • Ecommerce, electronics, and fashion-related searches saw the greatest disruption, though all verticals were somewhat impacted.

Adapting to generative search may require a shift in SEO strategies, focusing more on long-form content, expert insights, and multimedia formats.

As Google continues to invest in AI-powered search, the Authoritas study provides an early look at the potential challenges and opportunities ahead.

High Penetration Rate & Industry-Wide Effects

The study analyzed 2,900 brand and product-related keywords across 15 industry verticals and found that Google displays SGE results for 91.4% of all search queries.

The prevalence of SGE results indicates they impact a majority of websites across various industries.

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The research analyzed the typical composition of SGE results. On average, each SGE element contained between 10-11 links sourced from an average of four different domains.

This indicates brands may need to earn multiple links and listings within these AI-curated results to maintain visibility and traffic.

The research also suggests that larger, well-established websites like Quora and Reddit will likely perform better in SGE results than smaller websites and lesser-known brands.

Shifting Dynamics In Organic Search Results

With SGE results occupying the entire first page, websites that currently hold the top positions may experience a significant decrease in traffic and click-through rates.

When a user clicks to expand the SGE element, the study found that, on average, the #1 ranked organic result drops a sizeable 1,255 pixels down the page.

Even if a website ranks number one in organic search, it may effectively be pushed down to the second page due to the prominence of SGE results.

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New Competition From Unexpected Sources

The study revealed that SGE frequently surfaces links and content from websites that didn’t appear in the top organic rankings.

On average, only 20.1% of SGE links exactly matched a URL from the first page of Google search results.

An additional 17.9% of SGE links were from the same domains as page one results but linked to different pages. The remaining 62% of SGE links came from sources outside the top organic results.

Challenges For Brand Term Optimization & Local Search

The study reveals that SGE results for branded terms may include competitors’ websites alongside the brand’s own site, potentially leading to increased competition for brand visibility.

Laurence O’Toole, CEO and founder of Authoritas, states:

“Brands are not immune. These new types of generative results introduce more opportunities for third-party sites and even competitors to rank for your brand terms and related brand and product terms that you care about.”

Additionally, local businesses may face similar challenges, as SGE results could feature competing local brands even when users search for a specific brand in a regional context.

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Methodology & Limitations

To arrive at these insights, Authoritas analyzed a robust dataset of 2,900 search keywords across a spectrum of query types, including specific brand names, brand + generic terms, brand + product names, generic terms, and specific product names. The keywords were distributed across 15 industry verticals.

The study utilized a consistent desktop browser viewport to quantify pixel-based changes in the search results. Authoritas also developed proprietary “alignment scores” to measure the degree of overlap between traditional organic search results and the new SGE links.

While acknowledging some limitations, such as the keyword set needing to be fully representative of each vertical and the still-evolving nature of SGE, Authoritas maintains that the insights hold value in preparing brands for the new realities of an AI-powered search ecosystem.

Why We Care

The findings of the Authoritas study have implications for businesses, marketers, and SEO professionals. As Google’s SGE becomes more prevalent, it could disrupt traditional organic search rankings and traffic patterns.

Brands that have invested heavily in SEO and have achieved top rankings for key terms may find their visibility and click-through rates diminished by the prominence of SGE results.

SGE introduces new competition from unexpected sources, as most SGE links come from domains outside the top 10 organic results. This means businesses may need to compete not only with their traditional rivals but also with a broader range of websites that gain visibility through SGE.

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As Google is a primary source of traffic and leads for many businesses, any changes to its search results can impact visibility, brand awareness, and revenue.

How This Could Help You

While the rise of SGE presents challenges, it also offers opportunities.

Taking into account what we’ve learned from the Authoritas study, here are some actionable takeaways:

  • As SGE favors in-depth, informative content, businesses may benefit from investing in comprehensive, well-researched articles and guides that provide value to users.
  • Incorporating expert quotes, interviews, and authoritative sources within your content could increase the likelihood of being featured in SGE results.
  • Enriching your content with images, videos, and other multimedia elements may help capture the attention of both users and the SGE algorithm.
  • Building a strong brand presence across multiple channels, including social media, industry forums, and relevant websites, can increase your chances of appearing in SGE.
  • Creating a trustworthy brand and managing your online reputation will be crucial, as SGE may feature competitors alongside your website.

Looking Ahead

While the long-term impact of SGE will depend on user adoption and the perceived usefulness of results, this study’s findings serve as a valuable starting point for businesses and SEO professionals.

By proactively addressing the challenges and opportunities SGE presents, you can increase your chances of success in the new search environment.


Featured Image: BestForBest/Shutterstock

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