SEO
What Is Topical Authority in SEO & How to Build It
Imagine if your website (or clients) could rank for every single keyword related to a desired niche.
Enter topical authority.
Now imagine that you could even achieve this with no link building.
If some people in the SEO world are to be believed, this is achievable by anyone willing to write content about absolutely everything within a topic.
But realistically, you should still expect to build links and do a lot of other SEO activities. Topical authority is not a silver bullet.
But it’s still worth your time.
In this guide, you will learn everything you need to know about topical authority and how to build it for your sites.
Topical authority is an SEO concept where a website aims to become the go-to authority on one or more topics.
Building topical authority is about helping search engines understand a website’s topic so that it has better potential to rank for topically related keywords.
Let’s say you want to rank articles around the topic of protein powder. Writing just the one article targeting “protein powder” is probably not enough to compete in this niche.
Why? Because it’s a massive topic and you can’t possibly cover everything about it in one article.
To build topical authority, you need to cover everything related to protein, such as:
- “what is protein”
- “what does protein powder do”
- “what is the best protein powder”
- “how to use protein powder”
- “how long does protein powder last”
- “how to use protein powder for weight loss”
Topical authority is achieved when a site fully covers a topic as a whole rather than focusing on just individual keywords.
If you’ve spent any time digging into the SERPs looking for SEO opportunities (and let’s be honest, you have), you’ve probably noticed sites with low Domain Rating (DR) scores ranking well—thanks to topical authority.
For example, check out the SERPs for the keyword “mountain bike gifts”:
At first glance, you’d expect to see a big e-commerce store like Amazon (DR 96) at the top of the search results for a product-focused keyword like this.
However, a DR 23 site is ranked in second place, well above Amazon.
Why is this?
Possibly because twowheeledwanderer.com is a site all about the topic of bikes. Whereas Amazon (although much stronger in terms of SEO metrics) lacks the topical authority for its domain, as it sells more general stuff.
Although it should also be noted that search intent plays a big part here too. Amazon is the only page on these SERPs ranking with a product category page, whereas the rest are articles/gift guides.
This is just one example where a website with topical authority has outranked more established players.
Google, as a search engine, works with semantic associations. This means it has to associate a website with a topic in order to rank it as a relevant resource for keywords that are part of that topic.
If you have a lot of content about a certain topic, this allows for more relevant internal links, which allow Google and users to find your content more easily which, in turn, may land you more natural backlinks.
If you take away nothing else from the concept of building topical authority, take this:
When you create content pieces around the same subject and interlink them, your topical authority in the eyes of Google increases. This helps to show it that you’re knowledgeable, aka an authority on the topic and a trusted source.
Before we go any further, let’s discuss the elephant in the room:
Spoiler for this section: No one really knows.
With the introduction of Google’s Hummingbird algorithm in 2013, topical authority became increasingly important.
It changed the ranking system for content so that it was determined by relevance to a user’s search query.
Prior to Hummingbird, keywords were the main emphasis of Google’s search algorithms. In order for Google to understand what a user was looking for, keywords were used.
However, Google simply couldn’t understand the context behind user searches.
A (very) brief history of Google and authority
Over the years, Google has moved more toward semantic search:
- 2011 – Google announces “Structured Search Engine” for structuring the information on the web.
- 2012 – Google launches Knowledge Graph for better understanding information about real-world entities.
- 2013 – Hummingbird algorithm ranks sites based on inbound links and keywords. Google can now rank content based on relevancy to a query.
- 2018 – Google’s Medic update means YMYL content needs to show expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-A-T) in order to rank.
- 2019 – BERT is launched. It is a model for better understanding relationships between words, concepts, and entities in human language.
You can’t really talk about topical authority without mentioning E-A-T at some point.
E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness)
Google’s emphasis on “expertise” and “reputable websites” can be seen in its Quality Rater Guidelines:
Highest quality pages and websites have a very high level of expertise or are highly authoritative or highly trustworthy.
This suggests that building a reputation for your website as a “subject matter expert” is likely to contribute to the “authority” aspect in E-A-T.
While E-A-T is not a direct ranking factor, the concept helps to inform the ranking algorithms. So when Google views your website as an expert resource on a topic, it’s more likely to rank your content higher.
Learn more: What Is E-A-T? Why It’s Important for SEO
The lack of clarity around the whole concept of topical authority contributes to having no definitive way to measure it.
Sure, more rankings and more traffic may be a good sign. But they just as well may be a result of link building or other SEO activities.
Thankfully, there are smart people like Kevin Indig, who devised a way of roughly calculating topical authority using the Traffic share by domains report in Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer:
Here’s how to calculate the proxy to topical authority in Ahrefs:
- Take a head term like “ecommerce” and enter it in Keywords Explorer
- Go to the Matching terms report and filter for a minimum volume of 10
- Export all keywords and reupload them into Keywords Explorer
- Go to Traffic share by domains
- Traffic share = topic share aka “topical authority”
So how do you build topical authority for your site?
First, you need to cover all the obvious SEO basics. Assuming you’ve got the basics covered, building topical research is pretty straightforward.
In very simple terms, you need to:
- Do keyword research to find all the talking points within a topic.
- Organize that data into topic clusters.
- Produce content that meets the search intent of those topic keywords.
- Build relevant internal and external links to your content.
At the risk of becoming an authority on the topic of wasting time by rambling on about things no one really knows other than Google…
Let’s crack on and learn how to build some topical authority.
1. Do topic-based keyword research
It should come as no surprise that the starting point for building topical authority is keyword research.
Identifying queries that users are searching for and topics of interest is the beginning of most SEO projects, and building topical authority is no different.
To be considered a “topical authority” by Google, you need to find and write about all the talking points within a topic.
Sidenote.
Google’s main goal is to give people the most relevant answers to their search queries as quickly as possible. Your focus should be the same. Instead of thinking about an article as focused on a single keyword, think of them in terms of topics and subtopics. You’ll want to try and cover everything in your content that Google expects to see.
Choosing a good seed keyword is the foundation of your topical research.
Identifying a seed term that is relevant to your topic is key. Here’s how to approach picking a good seed keyword for doing topical keyword research:
| Topic | Good seed keywords | Bad seed keywords |
|---|---|---|
| coffee roasting process | coffee roasting coffee roasters |
coffee roasting |
| taking care of dogs | dog care dog health |
animals dogs |
| all kinds of mountain biking | mountain bikes mountain bikers |
bicycles bikes |
| Why are they good/bad? | Clearly focus on the topic | Too vague/specific; potential for lots of irrelevant KWs |
Struggling to think of useful seed terms?
Try and pick seed keywords that represent an entity in Google’s Knowledge Graph. Entities in SEO are a complex subject and far beyond the scope of this article and my soft monkey brain to tackle right now.
So for the purpose of speeding up seed keyword selection, I’ll use entities straight from the horse’s mouth:
- Go to Google Images
- Drop in my broad topic
- Check out the image filters (these are the entities that Google associates with the topic)
Once you have selected a seed keyword, it’s time to expand the list.
For example, let’s say you want to build topical authority around the topic “project management software.”
You’ll want to create content around keywords like:
- “project management software benefits”
- “project management software for students”
- “project management software definition and examples”
- “best project management software”
- “project management software for business”
To get to this point is relatively simple, although it can be time consuming.
Drop a broad seed term in Keywords Explorer. The overview acts as a good starting point for understanding the topic.
Continuing with the topic of “project management,” here’s what you want to pay attention to:
Top-ranking result
As the name suggests, this is the top-ranking page for the target keyword:
This is a great starting point for research. At a glance, you can see how many keywords this single page is ranking for:
Given that this is the top-ranking result, the keywords here are usually key subtopics you’ll want to cover—or at least provide an indication of.
Keyword ideas and questions
Still on the “Overview” panel, you can quickly see the top questions being asked around the topic:
SERPs
One of the best places to get more SEO data is on the SERPs, and topical keyword research is no different.
What I like to do here is expand the list to show the top 100 ranking pages (click Show more) and then cherry-pick low-DR sites that are ranking for a good number of keywords.
This site stood out to me because it is DR 32 with a little over 200 keywords and ranking in a sea of DR 70+ sites.
This is a good sign that this site has a good amount of topical authority for me to leverage in my own research.
Traffic share by domains
It’s also worth hopping over into the Traffic share by domains report. This report shows the domains that get the most organic traffic based on your seed keyword input:
This is useful for seeing who are your major competitors, which you can use as sources of more keywords. Cherry-pick domains and drop them into the Content Gap tool to uncover more keywords.
Here’s how to uncover more terms from competing domains:
- Run your site through Site Explorer
- Go to the Content Gap tool
- Pick suitable domains from the Traffic share by domains report
- Apply some filters (if you want)
- My preference: filter by keyword—in this example, “project management”—and some minimum volume and KD scores
Now that you have a list of keywords for topics (that get searched), it’s time to make sense of the keyword data.
2. Create topic clusters
Topic clusters are interlinked pages about the same subject. The purpose of them is to group relevant content together so that it is easier to find by both users and Google.
Armed with your keyword research, you’ll want to organize your list of terms into clusters based on search intent while also considering traffic potential.
Your topics should have good traffic potential and typically be informational in intent, like this:
Pick a topic for your cluster (or pillar page) that is relevant for your site to target and has enough depth that you will have subtopics to explore.
Now, you’ll want to pick the most appropriate content format to create for the cluster:
- Guides – An evergreen content format that fully covers a specific topic.
- What is X – A deep-dive definition or answer to a question.
- How to X – A step-by-step tutorial detailing how to do a specific task.
These pages should be well structured with enough content to be useful as stand-alone articles but also link to more in-depth articles within the topic.
Once you have your topic pillar nailed down, you’ll want to go “more niche.”
Just taking a quick look at the “how to get into project management” example, we can see more potential subtopics to target:
These pages should be fairly comprehensive and link to other topic pages and cluster content.
Linking between your pages is vital for topical authority. Doing so helps build a semantic relationship between those URLs, telling Google that these pages are topically related.
3. Write authority content
Now it’s time to take your keyword research and topic clusters and create some content.
The way to establish topical authority that most people are familiar with is by creating in-depth content.
Start with your main pillar content pieces. Generally, you will want to have a pillar page for every type of product or service you provide or the main area of the subject you want to be seen as an authority on.
These focus topics should be broad enough that they have subcategories to target but also specific enough that a searcher landing on your page will find them relevant.
Ahrefs’ beginner’s guide to SEO does a good job of acting as an overview of the topic, and then directing users to more specific parts of the topic (in the stand-alone chapters):
Next, you’ll need to write supporting content.
Instead of writing about a topic in general, be more specific. Supporting pages should match user intent and are where you can gain more content depth.
You’ll typically find that these pages are the ones where you will target long-tail keywords.
For each piece of content you create to help build your topical authority, you’ll want to:
- Write quality content that aligns with your topic and what your audience actually wants to read.
- Keep E-A-T in mind.
- Cover as many topics and subtopics as you can.
- Match search intent (e.g., write a how-to guide for the [how to X] keywords, a list of benefits for [benefits of X], etc.).
- Internally link to different relevant topics.
- Continually update your content as it ages.
4. Build relevant links
Even the best content sometimes needs links to rank better.
When it comes to link building for topical authority, you need to make sure that the websites that link to you are relevant.
If you run a blog about coffee, getting a link from another bigger coffee website in your niche will be perfect. Whereas getting a link from a finance blog will be less relevant and, therefore, carry less weight. Relevance is the key.
Here are a few topical backlink tactics:
- Guest blogging – Create useful content for topically related websites.
- Skyscraper Technique – Create the go-to resource on the topic.
- Ego bait – Mention key players in your niche and reach out to them.
- HARO – Get “expert quotes” for your article.
Of course, it’s not just links on external sites you should be building but internal links on your own site too. In fact, these are pivotal for building topical authority.
Google uses internal links to help discover new content (source):
Some pages are known because Google has already crawled them before. Other pages are discovered when Google follows a link from a known page to a new page.
Each pillar page should be treated as a hub for that topic. Use internal linking to connect it to every piece of supporting content.
For instance, using the “mountain bike” example again, all your pages on tires, helmets, tools, etc., should link back to your pillar page on mountain bike accessories.
Still have questions about building topical authority? You’ll like the final section.
Here are answers to a few common questions you may have about topical authority:
What is topical relevance?
Topical relevance is the relevance that the content on a website has in relation to a particular topic. Search engines use it to determine how relevant a page is to a user’s search query based on factors like content, backlinks, and keywords.
What is semantic SEO?
Semantic SEO is the process of building more meaning and topical depth with content. This is used by search engines to return the most relevant search results. Semantic search focuses on the meaning behind search queries instead of traditional keyword matching.
Learn more: What Is Semantic Search? How It Impacts SEO
What is website authority?
Website authority is a metric created by SEO tool providers to measure the strength of a site’s backlink profile compared to other sites in their index.
Learn more: How to Increase Website Authority (Domain Rating)
Are there any data-backed topical authority case studies?
I’m glad you asked.
Topical authority is a massive subject. There’s a lot of work out there done by people smarter than me in this field. Here are some case studies you should check out:
Final thoughts
Although it can be a powerful tool for ranking on Google, topical authority is not a magic fix for all of your SEO needs.
It requires a lot of work and can take some time to kick in, but it’s worth pursuing if you want to rank for all the keywords in your niche.
Just keep this in mind and you can’t go wrong:
Write about everything your audience wants to know—even better if the keywords align with your product/service.
Got a question on topical authority? Tweet me.
SEO
7 Strategies to Lower Cost-Per-Lead
SEO for personal injury law firms is notorious for how expensive and competitive it can be. Even with paid ads, it’s common for every click from the ad to your website to cost hundreds of dollars:
When spending this kind of money per click, the cost of gaining new cases can quickly skyrocket. Since SEO focuses on improving your visibility in the unpaid areas of search engines, you can cut costs and get more leads if you’re savvy enough.
Here are the strategies I’ve used to help new and boutique injury and accident law firms compete with the big guns for a fraction of the cost.
Recommendation
Unlike many other local service businesses, personal injury law firms need to work harder to earn trust and credibility online.
This applies to earning trust from humans and search engines alike. Google has a 170-page document called the Search Quality Rater Guidelines. This document contains two frameworks law firms can use to help Google and website visitors trust them more.
The first is “your money or your life,” or YMYL. Google uses this term to describe topics that may present a high risk of harm to searchers. Generally, any health, finances, safety, or welfare information falls into this category. Legal information is also a YMYL topic since acting on the wrong information could cause serious damage or harm to searchers.
The second framework is EEAT, which stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness.
This framework applies more broadly to all industries and is about sharing genuine information written by experts and authorities for a given topic. Both YMYL and EEAT consider the extent to which content is accurate, honest, safe, and reliable, with the ultimate goal of delivering trustworthy information.
Here are the things I implement for my personal injury clients as a priority to improve the trustworthiness of their online presence:
- Prominently display star ratings from third-party platforms, like Google or FaceBook reviews.
- Show your accreditations, certifications, awards, and the stats on cases you’ve won.
- If government-issued ratings or licenses apply to your practice areas, show those too.
- Add contact information like your phone number and address in the footer of every page.
- Share details of every member of your firm, highlighting their expertise and cases they’ve won.
- Add links to your professional profiles online, including social media and law-related listings.
- Include photos of your team and offices, results, case studies, and success stories.
Generally speaking, your Google Business listing can account for over 50% of the leads you get from search engines. That’s because it can display prominently in the maps pack, like so: 
Without a Google Business listing, your firm will not show up here or within Google Maps since it is managed completely separately from your website. Think of your Google listing like a social profile, but optimize it like a website. Make sure you create one of these for each location where you have an on-the-ground presence, ideally an established office.
Take the time to fill out all the details it asks for, especially:
- Your firm’s name, address, and phone number
- Your services with a description of each
- Images of your premises, inside and outside the office
And anything else you see in these sections: 
Also, make it a regular habit to ask your clients for reviews.
Reviews are crucial for law firms. They are the number one deciding factor when someone is ready to choose a law firm to work with. While you can send automated text messages with a link to your Google profile, you’ll likely have a higher success rate if you ask clients in person while they’re in your office or by calling them.
I’ve also seen success when adding a request for a review on thank you pages.
For instance, if you ever send an electronic contract or invoice out to clients, once they’ve signed or paid, you can send them to a thank you page that also asks for a review. Here’s my favorite example of this from a local accountant. You can emulate this concept for your own website too:
Recommendation
The most common way that people search for legal services is by searching for things like “personal injury lawyer near me” or “car accident lawyer new york”.
For instance, take a look at the monthly search volume on these “near me” keywords for an injury and accident lawyer:
People also commonly search at a state, city, and even suburb level for many legal services, especially if it’s an area of law that differs based on someone’s location. To optimize your website architecture for location keywords like these, it’s best practice to create dedicated pages for each location and then add sub-pages for each of your practice areas in that location.
For example, here’s what that would look like:
The corresponding URL structure would look like this:
- /new-york
- /new-york/car-accident-lawyer
- /new-york/personal-injury-lawyer
- /new-york/work-injury-lawyer
Pro Tip:
Check out my guide on franchise SEO for local and national growth strategies if you have many offices nationwide.
A topic hub is a way to organize and link between related articles on a website. It’s sometimes referred to as a topic cluster because it groups together pages that are related to the same subject matter.
If you run a small firm or your marketing budget is tight, I recommend focusing on a single area of law and turning your website into a topical hub. You can do this by publishing different types of content, such as how-to guides, answering common questions, and creating landing pages for each of your services.
For example, if you currently offer services for immigration law, criminal defense, and personal injury compensation, each appeals to very different audience segments. They’re also very competitive when it comes to marketing, so focusing your efforts on one of these is ideal to make your budget go further.
Most areas of law are naturally suited to building out topic clusters. Every practice area tends to follow a similar pattern in how people search at different stages in their journey.
- Top-of-funnel: When people are very early in their journey, and unaware of what type of lawyer they need, they ask a lot of high-level questions like “what is a car accident attorney”.
- Mid-funnel: When people are in the middle of their journey, they tend to ask more nuanced questions or look for more detailed information, like “average settlement for neck injury”.
- Bottom-of-funnel: When people are ready to hire an attorney, they search for the practice area + “attorney” or “lawyer”. Sometimes they include a location but nothing else. For example, “personal injury lawyer”.
This pattern applies to most areas of law. To apply it to your website, enter your main practice area and a few variations into Keywords Explorer:
Make sure to include a few different variations like how I’ve added different ways people search for lawyers (lawyer, attorney, solicitor) and also for other related terms (compensation, personal injury, settlement).
If you check the Matching terms report, you’ll generally get a big list that you’ll need to filter to make it more manageable when turning it into a content plan.
For example, there are 164,636 different keyword variations of how people search for personal injury lawyers. These generate over 2.4 million searches per month in the US.
You can make the list more manageable by removing keywords with no search volume. Just set the minimum volume to 1:
You can also use the include filter to only see keywords containing your location for your location landing pages:
There are also a number of distinct sub-themes relevant to your area of law. To isolate these, you can use the Cluster by Terms side panel. For instance, looking at our list of injury-related keywords, you can easily spot specific body parts that emerge as sub-themes:
Other sub-themes include:
- How the accident happened (at work, in a car)
- How much compensation someone can get (compensation, average, settlement)
- How severe the injury was (traumatic)
Each of these sub-themes can be turned into a cluster. Here’s what it might look like for the topic of neck injuries:
People tend to ask a lot of questions related to most areas of law. As you go through the exercise of planning out your topic clusters, you should also consider building out a knowledge hub where people can more easily navigate your FAQs and find the answers they’re looking for.
Use the knowledge base exclusively for question-related content. You can find the most popular questions people ask after an accident or injury in the Matching terms > Questions tab:
You can also easily see clusters of keywords for the top-of-funnel and mid-funnel questions people ask by checking the Clusters by Parent Topic report. It groups these keywords into similar themes and each group can likely be covered in a single article.
Here’s an example of how Smith’s Lawyers has created a knowledge base with a search feature and broad categories to allow people to find answers to all their questions more easily.
The easier you make it for people to find answers on your website, the less inclined they are to go back to Google and potentially visit a competitor’s website instead. It also increases their interaction time with your brand, giving you a higher chance of being front-of-mind when they are ready to speak to a lawyer about their case.
Some areas of law lend themselves to certain types of interactive content. An obvious example is a compensation calculator for injury and accident claims. Doing a very quick search, there are over 1,500 keywords on this topic searched over 44,000 times a month in the US.
The best part is how insanely low the competition is on these keywords:
Keyword difficulty is graded on a 100-point scale, so single-digit figures mean there’s virtually no competition to contend with. It’s not all that hard to create a calculator either.
There are many low-cost, no-code tools on the market, like Outgrow, that allow you to create a simple calculator in no time. Other types of interactive content you could consider are:
- Quiz-style questionnaires: great for helping people decide if they need a lawyer for their case.
- Chatbots: to answer people’s questions in real-time.
- Assessments: to pre-qualify leads before they book a meeting with you.
- Calendar or countdown clock: to help people keep track of imminent deadlines.
Backlinks are like the internet’s version of citations. They are typically dark blue, underlined text that connects you to a different page on the internet. In SEO, links play a very important role for a few different reasons:
- Links are how search engines discover new content. Your content may not be discovered if you have no links pointing to it.
- Links are like votes in a popularity contest. The more you have from authoritative websites in your industry, the more they elevate your brand.
- Links also help search engines understand what different websites are about. Getting links from other law-related websites will help build relevancy to your brand.
Think of link building as a scaled-down version of PR. It’s often easier and cheaper to implement. However, it is very time-intensive in most cases. If you’re doing your own SEO, hats off to you!
However, I’d recommend you consider partnering with an agency that specializes in law firm SEO and can handle link building for you. Typically, agencies like these will have existing relationships with law-related websites where they can feature your brand, which will be completely hands-off for you.
For instance, Webris has a database of thousands of legal websites on which they have been able to feature their clients. If you don’t have an existing database to work with and you’re doing SEO yourself, here are some alternative tactics to consider.
Expert quotes
Many journalists and writers benefit from quoting subject-matter experts in their content. You could be such an expert, and every time someone quotes you, ask for a link back to your website. Check out platforms like Muck Rack or SourceBottle, where reporters post callouts for specific experts they’re looking to get quotes from or feature in their articles.
Guest posting
If you like writing content, you can alternatively create content for other people’s websites and include links back to your site. This approach is more time intensive. To make the effort worth it, reach out to websites with an established audience so you get some additional brand exposure too.
Updating outdated content
If you’re checking out other people’s legal content and you ever notice a mistake or outdated information, you could reach out and offer to help them correct it in exchange for a link to your website.
Naturally, you’ll need to recommend updates for sections of content that relate to your practice areas for this to work and for the link to make sense in the context of the content.
Final thoughts
SEO for personal injury lawyers is one of the most competitive niches. High advertising costs and high competition levels make it difficult for new or small firms to compete against industry giants.
As a new or emerging firm, you can take a more nimble approach and outrank the big firms for low competition keywords they haven’t optimized their websites for. It’s all about doing thorough research to uncover these opportunities in your practice area.
Want to know more? Reach out on LinkedIn.
SEO
Google Ads To Phase Out Enhanced CPC Bidding Strategy
Google has announced plans to discontinue its Enhanced Cost-Per-Click (eCPC) bidding strategy for search and display ad campaigns.
This change, set to roll out in stages over the coming months, marks the end of an era for one of Google’s earliest smart bidding options.
Dates & Changes
Starting October 2024, new search and display ad campaigns will no longer be able to select Enhanced CPC as a bidding strategy.
However, existing eCPC campaigns will continue to function normally until March 2025.
From March 2025, all remaining search and display ad campaigns using Enhanced CPC will be automatically migrated to manual CPC bidding.
Advertisers who prefer not to change their campaigns before this date will see their bidding strategy default to manual CPC.
Impact On Display Campaigns
No immediate action is required for advertisers running display campaigns with the Maximize Clicks strategy and Enhanced CPC enabled.
These campaigns will automatically transition to the Maximize Clicks bidding strategy in March 2025.
Rationale Behind The Change
Google introduced Enhanced CPC over a decade ago as its first Smart Bidding strategy. The company has since developed more advanced machine learning-driven bidding options, such as Maximize Conversions with an optional target CPA and Maximize Conversion Value with an optional target ROAS.
In an email to affected advertisers, Google stated:
“These strategies have the potential to deliver comparable or superior outcomes. As we transition to these improved strategies, search and display ads campaigns will phase out Enhanced CPC.”
What This Means for Advertisers
This update signals Google’s continued push towards more sophisticated, AI-driven bidding strategies.
In the coming months, advertisers currently relying on Enhanced CPC will need to evaluate their options and potentially adapt their campaign management approaches.
While the change may require some initial adjustments, it also allows advertisers to explore and leverage Google’s more advanced bidding strategies, potentially improving campaign performance and efficiency.
FAQ
What change is Google implementing for Enhanced CPC bidding?
Google will discontinue the Enhanced Cost-Per-Click (eCPC) bidding strategy for search and display ad campaigns.
- New search and display ad campaigns can’t select eCPC starting October 2024.
- Existing campaigns will function with eCPC until March 2025.
- From March 2025, remaining eCPC campaigns will switch to manual CPC bidding.
How will this update impact existing campaigns using Enhanced CPC?
Campaigns using Enhanced CPC will continue as usual until March 2025. After that:
- Search and display ad campaigns employing eCPC will automatically migrate to manual CPC bidding.
- Display campaigns with Maximize Clicks and eCPC enabled will transition to the Maximize Clicks strategy in March 2025.
What are the recommended alternatives to Enhanced CPC?
Google suggests using its more advanced, AI-driven bidding strategies:
- Maximize Conversions – Can include an optional target CPA (Cost Per Acquisition).
- Maximize Conversion Value – Can include an optional target ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).
These strategies are expected to deliver comparable or superior outcomes compared to Enhanced CPC.
What should advertisers do in preparation for this change?
Advertisers need to evaluate their current reliance on Enhanced CPC and explore alternatives:
- Assess how newer AI-driven bidding strategies can be integrated into their campaigns.
- Consider transitioning some campaigns earlier to adapt to the new strategies gradually.
- Leverage tools and resources provided by Google to maximize performance and efficiency.
This proactive approach will help manage changes smoothly and explore potential performance improvements.
Featured Image: Vladimka production/Shutterstock
SEO
The 25 Biggest Traffic Losers in SaaS
We analyzed the organic traffic growth of 1,600 SaaS companies to discover the SEO strategies that work best in 2024…
…and those that work the worst.
In this article, we’re looking at the companies that lost the greatest amount of estimated organic traffic, year over year.
- We analyzed 1,600 SaaS companies and used the Ahrefs API to pull estimated monthly organic traffic data for August 2023 and August 2024.
- Companies were ranked by estimated monthly organic traffic loss as a percentage of their starting traffic.
- We’ve filtered out traffic loss caused by website migrations and URL redirects and set a minimum starting traffic threshold of 10,000 monthly organic pageviews.
This is a list of the SaaS companies that had the greatest estimated monthly organic traffic loss from August 2023 to August 2024.
Sidenote.
Our organic traffic metrics are estimates, and not necessarily reflective of the company’s actual traffic (only they know that). Traffic loss is not always bad, and there are plenty of reasons why companies may choose to delete pages and sacrifice keyword rankings.
| Rank | Company | Change | Monthly Organic Traffic 2023 | Monthly Organic Traffic 2024 | Traffic Loss |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Causal | -99.52% | 307,158 | 1,485 | -305,673 |
| 2 | Contently | -97.16% | 276,885 | 7,866 | -269,019 |
| 3 | Datanyze | -95.46% | 486,626 | 22,077 | -464,549 |
| 4 | BetterCloud | -94.14% | 42,468 | 2,489 | -39,979 |
| 5 | Ricotta Trivia | -91.46% | 193,713 | 16,551 | -177,162 |
| 6 | Colourbox | -85.43% | 67,883 | 9,888 | -57,995 |
| 7 | Tabnine | -84.32% | 160,328 | 25,142 | -135,186 |
| 8 | AppFollow | -83.72% | 35,329 | 5,753 | -29,576 |
| 9 | Serverless | -80.61% | 37,896 | 7,348 | -30,548 |
| 10 | UserGuiding | -80.50% | 115,067 | 22,435 | -92,632 |
| 11 | Hopin | -79.25% | 19,581 | 4,064 | -15,517 |
| 12 | Writer | -78.32% | 2,460,359 | 533,288 | -1,927,071 |
| 13 | NeverBounce by ZoomInfo | -77.91% | 552,780 | 122,082 | -430,698 |
| 14 | ZoomInfo | -76.11% | 5,192,624 | 1,240,481 | -3,952,143 |
| 15 | Sakari | -73.76% | 27,084 | 7,106 | -19,978 |
| 16 | Frase | -71.39% | 83,569 | 23,907 | -59,662 |
| 17 | LiveAgent | -70.03% | 322,613 | 96,700 | -225,913 |
| 18 | Scoro | -70.01% | 51,701 | 15,505 | -36,196 |
| 19 | accessiBe | -69.45% | 111,877 | 34,177 | -77,700 |
| 20 | Olist | -67.51% | 204,298 | 66,386 | -137,912 |
| 21 | Hevo Data | -66.96% | 235,427 | 77,781 | -157,646 |
| 22 | TextGears | -66.68% | 19,679 | 6,558 | -13,121 |
| 23 | Unbabel | -66.40% | 45,987 | 15,450 | -30,537 |
| 24 | Courier | -66.03% | 35,300 | 11,992 | -23,308 |
| 25 | G2 | -65.74% | 4,397,226 | 1,506,545 | -2,890,681 |
For each of the top five companies, I ran a five-minute analysis using Ahrefs Site Explorer to understand what may have caused their traffic decline.
Possible explanations include Google penalties, programmatic SEO, and AI content.
| Causal | 2023 | 2024 | Absolute change | Percent change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | 307,158 | 1,485 | -305,673 | -99.52% |
| Organic pages | 5,868 | 547 | -5,321 | -90.68% |
| Organic keywords | 222,777 | 4,023 | -218,754 | -98.19% |
| Keywords in top 3 | 8,969 | 26 | -8943 | -99.71% |
Causal is a finance platform for startups. They lost an estimated 99.52% of their organic traffic as a result of a Google manual penalty:
This story might sound familiar. Causal became internet-famous for an “SEO heist” that saw them clone a competitor’s sitemap and use generative AI to publish 1,800 low-quality articles like this:
Google caught wind and promptly issued a manual penalty. Causal lost hundreds of rankings and hundreds of thousands of pageviews, virtually overnight:
As the Ahrefs SEO Toolbar shows, the offending blog posts are now 301 redirected to the company’s (now much better, much more human-looking) blog homepage:
| Contently | 2023 | 2024 | Absolute change | Percent change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | 276,885 | 7,866 | -269,019 | -97.16% |
| Organic pages | 32,752 | 1,121 | -31,631 | -96.58% |
| Organic keywords | 94,706 | 12,000 | -82,706 | -87.33% |
| Keywords in top 3 | 1,874 | 68 | -1,806 | -96.37% |
Contently is a content marketing platform. They lost 97% of their estimated organic traffic by removing thousands of user-generated pages.
Almost all of the website’s traffic loss seems to stem from deindexing the subdomains used to host their members’ writing portfolios:
A quick Google search for “contently writer portfolios” suggests that the company made the deliberate decision to deindex all writer portfolios by default, and only relist them once they’ve been manually vetted and approved:
We can see that these portfolio subdomains are now 302 redirected back to Contently’s homepage:
And looking at the keyword rankings Contently lost in the process, it’s easy to guess why this change was necessary. It looks like the free portfolio subdomains were being abused to promote CBD gummies and pirated movies:
| Datanyze | 2023 | 2024 | Absolute change | Percent change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | 486,626 | 22,077 | -464,549 | -95.46% |
| Organic pages | 1,168,889 | 377,142 | -791,747 | -67.74% |
| Organic keywords | 2,565,527 | 712,270 | -1,853,257 | -72.24% |
| Keywords in top 3 | 7,475 | 177 | -7,298 | -97.63% |
Datanyze provides contact data for sales prospecting. They lost 96% of their estimated organic traffic, possibly as a result of programmatic content that Google has since deemed too low quality to rank.
Looking at the Site Structure report in Ahrefs, we can see over 80% of the website’s organic traffic loss is isolated to the /companies and /people subfolders:
Looking at some of the pages in these subfolders, it looks like Datanyze built thousands of programmatic landing pages to help promote the people and companies the company offers data for:
As a result, the majority of Datanyze’s dropped keyword rankings are names of people and companies:
Many of these pages still return 200 HTTP status codes, and a Google site search still shows hundreds of indexed pages:
In this case, not all of the programmatic pages have been deleted—instead, it’s possible that Google has decided to rerank these pages into much lower positions and drop them from most SERPs.
| BetterCloud | 2023 | 2024 | Absolute change | Percent change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | 42,468 | 2,489 | -39,979 | -94.14% |
| Organic pages | 1,643 | 504 | -1,139 | -69.32% |
| Organic keywords | 107,817 | 5,806 | -102,011 | -94.61% |
| Keywords in top 3 | 1,550 | 32 | -1,518 | -97.94% |
Bettercloud is a SaaS spend management platform. They lost 94% of their estimated organic traffic around the time of Google’s November Core Update:
Looking at the Top Pages report for BetterCloud, most of the traffic loss can be traced back to a now-deleted /academy subfolder:
The pages in the subfolder are now deleted, but by using Ahrefs’ Page Inspect feature, it’s possible to look at a snapshot of some of the pages’ HTML content.
This short, extremely generic article on “How to Delete an Unwanted Page in Google Docs” looks a lot like basic AI-generated content:
This is the type of content that Google has been keen to demote from the SERPs.
Given the timing of the website’s traffic drop (a small decline after the October core update, and a precipitous decline after the November core update), it’s possible that Google demoted the site after an AI content generation experiment.
| Ricotta Trivia | 2023 | 2024 | Absolute change | Percent change |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | 193,713 | 16,551 | -177,162 | -91.46% |
| Organic pages | 218 | 231 | 13 | 5.96% |
| Organic keywords | 83,988 | 37,640 | -46,348 | -55.18% |
| Keywords in top 3 | 3,124 | 275 | -2,849 | -91.20% |
Ricotta Trivia is a Slack add-on that offers icebreakers and team-building games. They lost an estimated 91% of their monthly organic traffic, possibly because of thin content and poor on-page experience on their blog.
Looking at the Site Structure report, 99.7% of the company’s traffic loss is isolated to the /blog subfolder:
Digging into the Organic keywords report, we can see that the website has lost hundreds of first-page rankings for high-volume keywords like get to know you questions, funny team names, and question of the day:
While these keywords seem strongly related to the company’s core business, the article content itself seems very thin—and the page is covered with intrusive advertising banners and pop-ups (a common hypothesis for why some sites were negatively impacted by recent Google updates):
The site seems to show a small recovery on the back of the August 2024 core update—so there may be hope yet.
Final thoughts
All of the data for this article comes from Ahrefs. Want to research your competitors in the same way? Check out Site Explorer.
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