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

Your CEO wants to know how important your SEO team is in the company’s big picture.

The CFO wants to make sure you’re staying within your tight marketing budget.

Meanwhile, shareholders want to see a higher return on investment (ROI) with limited cost.

So, how do you transform your SEO team into an ROI powerhouse without breaking your budget?

We’ll show you how to improve your ROI through an updated keyword ranking strategy and some untapped SEO strategies for enterprise SEO teams.

And some of these SEO strategies only cost money when they work.

We’ll teach you how to work more efficiently with a smaller in-house marketing budget.

1. Get More Qualified Visitors: Add Mid-Volume Keywords To Your SEO Strategy

You know the drill. Your CEO wants to see millions of visitors pouring into your site with a minimum spend.

Enter SEO.

Your SEO team focuses on high-volume keywords and branded keywords to make sure traffic flow improves.

However, once website traffic begins to increase, shareholders seem to start focusing on the next key metric – return on investment (ROI).

Suddenly, your CEO starts asking to see conversion data and asking how many hours went into each conversion:

• How many hours went into nurturing each visitor?
• How many of those nurtured visitors converted into a sale?
• How many fell out of a long marketing funnel?
• How many of those visitors are converting into true profit?
• Is all of this work financially paying off?

Then, you realize that high-volume keywords and branded keywords only attract top-of-the-funnel visitors, a.k.a people who are the farthest away from making a purchase.

The excitement begins to fade – your marketing team has spent hundreds of hours nurturing those top-funnel visitors to the consideration stage, only for 4.31% of visitors to convert.

Each hour spent nurturing reduces the ROI of SEO.

It’s time to make sure that the leads entering your website are closer to the conversion phase of your marketing funnel.

After all, less work to transform a visitor into profit means higher ROI.

The key: pivot your SEO team’s focus towards adding more mid-volume and low-volume keywords to your SEO strategy.

Why Should I Allocate SEO Bandwidth To Mid- & Low-Volume Keywords?

To make sure that your website leads are closer to conversion, allocate SEO bandwidth toward mid- and low-volume keywords.

What’s The ROI Difference Between High-Volume & Mid-/Low-Volume Keywords?

High-volume keywords, such as the short-tail keywords [iPhone 14] or [Android], are great for awareness and traffic. But because visitors who enter your site through high-volume, short-tail keywords are in the awareness stage of the marketing funnel, only 3% of these visitors may convert.

Mid-volume and low-volume keywords, such as the long-tail keywords [buy 256GB iPhone 14 pro max], have a 23% chance of converting with less work.

How To Increase ROI With Mid- & Low-Volume Keywords

To add mid-volume and low-volume keywords (a.k.a long-tail keywords) to your SEO strategy, simply repeat your in-house keyword research strategy to focus on search intent.

Re-performing your initial keyword research with search intent will naturally help you uncover the long-tail keywords you need to get more qualified leads and search visibility.

The Easy Way

Don’t have the budget to repeat keyword research for more qualified search terms?

Look into:

1. Hands-on pay-for-performance SEO agencies that combine your current keyword strategy with a well-balanced mix of short-tail and long-tail keywords. Bonus, you only pay for results; there are no budget-wasting retainers.
2. Automated SEO tools, which will still require bandwidth for configuration and quality control.

2. Audit The True ROI Of Your SEO Strategy: Reduce Unnecessary Marketing Spend

Being wise about how you allocate your resources is the second key to higher ROI.

Ask yourself:

1. Are your marketing teams aligned with your SEO goals?
2. Are you streamlining and automating simple SEO tasks to improve bandwidth and innovative output from your key players?
3. If you’re outsourcing parts of your SEO strategy, is their success resulting in net profit?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, you may be accidentally lowering the ROI of your SEO results.

Focus on these key areas to solve the largest unnecessary drains on your marketing budget.

Cost Reduction Tip 1: Ensure Content Marketing, PPC & SEO Are Aligned For Higher Success

Sharing strategies and data between marketing teams can help your organization save bandwidth costs while improving how you optimize and manage campaigns.

Siloed enterprise marketing teams can quickly become one of the largest sources of budget drain.

In fact, 13.9% of marketing managers and department heads cited alignment with other departments as a major hurdle to SEO success in 2022.

However, when broader interdepartmental collaboration is implemented, you can quickly see the ROI of SEO strategies increase.

The Problem

ROI is severely lowered when PPC teams, content marketing teams, and SEO teams are not communicating with each other, content can quickly overlap, causing cannibalization, repeat work, and more.

The cost of duplicate work, educational meetings, and strategy repairs cause unnecessary additional costs toward a conversion.

The Solution

Reduce repetitive work and raise ROI by:

• Using proven data from recently completed campaigns. Save time on SEO research by leveraging successful PPC ad copy as a starting point for SERP titles and meta descriptions.
• Combining and sharing PPC and SEO keyword research.
• Sharing Google Ads and Search Console data between teams to save time on experimenting and help avoid mistakes.
• Discovering SERP ownership and allocating ad spend to SERPs that have higher competition.
• Locating and combining content pages that directly compete with SEO-focused pages, then working together to focus those content creation resources on new, high-ROI targets.

By reducing repeat work for the same conversion, you can quickly raise ROI.

Cost Reduction Tip 2: Safely Streamline & Automate SEO Tasks

In 2022, the majority of marketing managers and department heads cited a lack of resources as their largest hurdle toward SEO success.

The Problem

ROI drops when your team is stretched thin; high-quality output decreases and mistakes are made.

Mistakes take time to correct, and to your CEO, time is money that’s taken away from ROI.

The Solution

Raise ROI by investing in AI and machine learning tools that save time and help allow the output of higher-quality work from your teams.

Time saved = lower conversion costs = higher ROI.

AI and machine learning can reduce conversion costs by up to 20%, with up to 70% of the cost reduction resulting from higher productivity.

To get started, uncover which simple SEO tasks can be automated and taken off of your team’s plate.

AI can safely automate time-consuming tasks and augment SEO performance through:

• SERP anomaly detection.
• Ranking and traffic report updates.
• Backlink profile creation.
• Gathering manual SEO data.
• Backlink sourcing.
• Initial keyword research reports.
• Topic research and article structure.

By allowing tools and AI to perform those tasks, you’ll find:

• Fewer costly mistakes and correction periods, because your team has more time to focus on quality instead of racing to complete their tasks.
• Less time-spend on time-consuming work, allowing your team to focus on needle-moving strategy and collaboration.
• Faster paths to scalability and growth within your SEO team structure.

Each of these elements directly influences the ROI of SEO.

Cost Reduction Tip 3: Audit The ROI Of Outsourced SEO

Your CFO and CEO are highly focused on costs to operate versus profit.

You should be, too.

Outsourcing SEO tasks solves any bandwidth problems your marketing team has, but how do you know if the cost of the retainer is worth the ROI?

The Problem

ROI drops when retainers enter the picture.

When there is an expense simply because your company signed the contract or because the agency requires three months of setup time, it can be hard to prove that your agency choice was a good idea.

The Solution

Learning how retainers impact your ROI can help you paint a better picture of success.

Calculating your SEO strategy’s ROI and including retainer costs plus the time it takes to get to page 1 is key.

• When is your outsourced SEO agency expecting results to begin?
• How many months of the retainer will you be paying before that?
• How much money could you save paying only for results?

In this scenario, the first SEO results are seen around month four.

With traditional SEO billing, you’ve already spent $4,000 for the first conversions.

With pay-for-performance SEO billing, you’ve only paid $450 for the first conversions.

After discovering the cost impact of your current retainers, try exploring other types of SEO agencies.

3. Hire Specific Top Skills: Scale Your SEO Team Into A High-Impact Powerhouse

Like searching for the perfect SEO agency, hiring new SEO professionals can be an ROI-draining gamble.

So, in order to positively impact your ROI, the key is to look for specific traits for the perfect enterprise SEO professional.

Look For These Traits In Your Next Enterprise SEO Hire

In addition to critical thinking, great speaking and writing ability, technical and programming skills, and analytics knowledge, you should also look for these key enterprise SEO traits:

• Inherent knowledge of your business and its vertical(s).
• A multidisciplinary mindset with a collaborative nature.
• SEO reporting mastery and the ability to communicate results in ways that matter to your CEO.
• A solid foundational understanding of how search engines crawl, index, and rank content.
• Experience creating and maintaining technical documentation.
• Deep experience with AI-assisted SEO tools and platforms.

By crafting your enterprise SEO team around these skillsets, you automatically attune your team towards high-quality, high-ROI results.

Scale Your SEO Department Effortlessly With No Recruitment Costs

This year, many marketing and SEO budgets are lower than usual.

If hiring is not included in your budget for this year, it’s still possible to scale your SEO program.

You can avoid hiring expensive SEO teams in-house and work with a pay-for-performance agency like ResultFirst to affordably scale your SEO program.

4. Implement Pay-Per-Performance SEO Into Your SEO Strategy

As you know, the startup costs of onboarding a new SEO agency can cause your ROI to plummet as you wait for results.

In some cases, the first true SEO results from a retainer SEO contract can take up to six months, effectively causing your conversion value to be much lower than your CPC.

A great alternative to traditional SEO agency models is the pay-for-performance (PFP) SEO model.

While you work with your PPC team for immediate visibility on SERPs, a PFP agency can begin working on your search visibility for free.

What Is Pay-For-Performance SEO?

Pay-For-Performance (PFP) SEO is a performance-based service model in which you are only charged when your SEO campaign is successful and your SEO goals are achieved.

So, once you reach the desired ranking for your top keywords, then, and only then, will you be charged.

PFP SEO works primarily to boost rankings, increase web traffic, and drive more revenue through:

• Industry Analysis.
• Competitor Analysis.
• Complete Website Audit.
• Keyword Research.
• Complete On-Page SEO Suggestions.
• Backlink Acquisitions.

Outperform Your Competition & Grow Your Digital Marketing Initiatives With ResultFirst

Pay-For-Performance SEO is here to address your economic challenges by allowing your company to achieve greater results with less marketing spend.

Ready to increase organic traffic, improve rankings, and boost conversions for your business – all while saving money and getting the most return on your investment? Start marketing with ResultFirst today!

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Image Credits

Featured Image: Used with permission.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Labs experienced an outage today. Mobile users report receiving the dreaded “ChatGPT is at capacity right now” message and its outage limerick. ChatGPT Plus subscribers can receive a subscriber login link, which would typically bypass any capacity issues. That option also appears to be broken.

Desktop users receive a link to the incident page for this outage, which shows OpenAI began investigating the issue at 9:41 a.m. PDT. They discovered the root cause of the issue and are working on a resolution.

The OpenAI Status page shows that in addition to ChatGPT, Labs is having an outage related to an underlying capacity failure. OpenAI is adding extra capacity to resolve this issue. Paid labs traffic has been restored, and they are working towards restoring free traffic.

DownDetector also has received thousands of reports from ChatGPT users about the outage, which began several hours ago.

ChatGPT Plus users are particularly frustrated because the premium pricing plan includes “General access to ChatGPT, even during peak times.”

Some users are turning to the OpenAI Playground while OpenAI resolves the issues with ChatGPT. It offers a chat mode (currently in beta) that can use your choice of GPT-3 or CODEX models.

New accounts receive an initial $18 credit for the OpenAI Playground. Once you reach your usage limits, you must pay for additional credits. Prices are per 1,000 tokens, where 1,000 tokens are equal to about 750 words. Pricing varies based on the language model and context needed.

ChatGPT users can subscribe to updates from the incidents page to be notified when OpenAI has resolved the issue.

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Featured Image: Vitor Miranda/Shutterstock

Google’s Lizzi Sassman answered a question in a Google SEO Office hours session about whether it’s okay to combine different structured data types.

The answer illuminated an important point about how Google interprets structured data and whether it’s better to combine structured data or two separate them out.

Combining multiple structured data is called nesting.

What is Nesting?

Structured data is basically about high level data types (called Types) and the attributes of those Types (called Properties).

It’s kind of like with HTML where the main HTML building blocks of a webpage are called Elements and every element has properties that modify them that are called “attributes.”

The HTML of a webpage begins by communicating that it’s an HTML webpage like this:

<HTML>

Similarly, a structured data script begins by saying what the main structured data for the webpage is.

A recipe structured data on a webpage that is about a recipe looks like this:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org/",
"@type": "Recipe",

Nesting is the addition of other structured data types within the main structured data.

So if the page is about Reviews, then the main structured data should begin like this:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org/",
"@type": "Review",

But what about when the page is about a recipe and it has a review?

Do you create two structured data scripts?

Or do you combine the two structured data types?

Lizzi Sassman shares that there is a right and a wrong way to do it.

Is Combining Structured Data Allowed?

Structured data follows a logical set of rules. Once the rules are learned it’s easy to make sense of structured data.

This question is about the organization of structured data and how that impacts how Google interprets it.

This is the question that was asked:

“Is it allowed to add one structured data inside another type of structure data? For example, adding carousel structured data inside Q & A structured data.”

Lizzi Sassman answered:

“Yep. Nesting your structure data can help us understand what the main focus of the page is.

For example, if you put recipe and review at the same level, it’s not as clear as telling us that the page is a recipe with a nested review.

This means that the primary purpose of the page would be a recipe and that the review is a smaller component of that.

As a tip, always check the specific feature documentation to see if there’s any more notes about combining various structure data types.

Right now, the only supported carousel features are course, movie, recipe, and restaurant.”

Structured Data Tells Google What a Page is About

This is really interesting because what Lizzi is saying is that the structured data helps Google understand what a webpage is about.

But if you have two separate structured data scripts on the same webpage it makes it harder for Google to understand what the “focus” of the webpage is about.

She advises that it’s best to combine them so that the first part says what the webpage is about.

So if the webpage is about recipes, the structured data should start like this:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org/",
"@type": "Recipe",

Google’s Search Central documentation about JSON-LD structured data discusses nesting:

“JSON-LD* (Recommended)
A JavaScript notation embedded in a <script> tag in the <head> and <body> elements of an HTML page.

The markup is not interleaved with the user-visible text, which makes nested data items easier to express, such as the Country of a PostalAddress of a MusicVenue of an Event.

Also, Google can read JSON-LD data when it is dynamically injected into the page’s contents, such as by JavaScript code or embedded widgets in your content management system.”

What the above quoted section from Google’s documentation means, in plain English, is that a webpage that is about a musical event (using the Event) structured data type, can also include additional data types for the music venue and the postal address.

The webpage in the above example is about an Event, not the venue of the event.

So the JSON-LD script that contains the Event structured data would begin like this:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "Event",

Event is a structured data type:

And the Postal Address for where the event takes place is also a structured data type:

Communicate the Focus of the Webpage

Sometimes it can feel like the “O” in SEO means optimizing a webpage for better rankings. But that’s not what search optimization is.

The “O” in SEO stands for means optimizing a webpage so that it’s easy for search engines to crawl and to understand what the webpage is about.

A webpage can’t rank without accomplishing those two optimizations.

Nesting structured data fits into that paradigm of “optimization” because it helps to make it clear what the focus of the webpage is.

Listen to the Google SEO Office Hours session at the 14:58 minute mark.

Featured image by Shutterstock/Asier Romero