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Where Are The Advertisers Leaving Twitter Going For The Super Bowl?

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Where Are The Advertisers Leaving Twitter Going For The Super Bowl?

Since Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter last October 27, 2022, things at the social media company have gone from bad to worse.

You probably saw this coming from a mile away – especially if you had read about a study by Media Matters that was published on November 22, 2022, entitled, “In less than a month, Elon Musk has driven away half of Twitter’s top 100 advertisers.”

If you missed that, then you’ve probably read Matt G. Southern’s article in Search Engine Journal, which was entitled, “Twitter’s Revenue Down 40% As 500 Top Advertisers Pull Out.”

This mass exodus creates a challenge for digital advertising executives and their agencies. Where should they go long term?

And what should they do in the short term – with Super Bowl LVII coming up on Sunday, February 12, 2023?

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Ideally, these advertisers would follow their audience. If they knew where Twitter users were going, their ad budgets could follow them.

But it isn’t clear where Twitter users are going – or if they’ve even left yet.

Fake Followers On Twitter And Brand Safety

According to the latest data from Similarweb, a digital intelligence platform, there were 6.9 billion monthly visits to Twitter worldwide during December 2022 – up slightly from 6.8 billion in November, and down slightly from 7.0 billion in October.

So, if a high-profile user like Boston Mayor Michelle Wu has taken a step back from the frequent posts on her Twitter account, @wutrain, which has more than 152,000 followers, then it appears that other users have stepped up their monthly visits.

This includes several accounts that had been banned previously for spreading disinformation, which Musk unbanned.

(Disinformation is defined as “deliberately misleading or biased information,” while misinformation may be spread without the sender having harmful intentions.)

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It’s also worth noting that SparkToro, which provides audience research software, also has a free tool called Fake Follower Audit, which analyzes Twitter accounts.

This tool defines “fake followers” as ones that are unreachable and will not see the account’s tweets either because they’re spam, bots, and propaganda, or because they’re no longer active on Twitter.

On Jan. 24, 2023, I used this tool and found that 70.2% of the 126.5 million followers of the @elonmusk account were fake.

According to the tool, accounts with a similar-sized following to @elonmusk have a median of 41% fake followers. So, Elon Musk’s account has more fake followers than most.

Screenshot from SparkToro, January 2023

By comparison, 20.6% of the followers of the @wutreain account were fake. So, Michelle Wu’s account has fewer fake followers than accounts with a similar-sized following.

Sparktoro results for fake followersScreenshot from SparkToro, January 2023

In fact, most Twitter accounts have significant numbers of fake followers.

This underlines the brand safety concerns that many advertisers and media buyers have, but it doesn’t give them any guidance on where they should move their ad dollars.

Who Are Twitter’s Top Competitors And What Are Their Monthly Visits?

So, I asked Similarweb if they had more data that might help. And they sent me the monthly visits from desktop and mobile devices worldwide for Twitter and its top competitors:

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  • YouTube.com: 34.6 billion in December 2022, down 2.8% from 35.6 billion in December 2021.
  • Facebook.com: 18.1 billion in December 2022, down 14.2% from 21.1 billion in December 2021.
  • Twitter.com: 6.9 billion in December 2022, up 1.5% from 6.8 billion in December 2021.
  • Instagram.com: 6.3 billion in December 2022, down 3.1% from 6.5 billion in December 2021.
  • TikTok.com: 1.9 billion in December 2022, up 26.7% from 1.5 billion in December 2021.
  • Reddit.com: 1.8 billion in December 2022, down 5.3% from 1.9 billion in December 2021.
  • LinkedIn.com: 1.5 billion in December 2022, up 7.1% from 1.4 billion in December 2021.
  • Pinterest.com: 1.0 billion in December 2022, up 11.1% from 0.9 billion in December 2021.

The most significant trends worth noting are monthly visits to TikTok are up 26.7% year over year from a smaller base, while monthly visits to Facebook are down 14.2% from a bigger base.

So, the short-term events at Twitter over the past 90 days may have taken the spotlight off the long-term trends at TikTok and Facebook over the past year for some industry observers.

But based on Southern’s article in Search Engine Journal, “Facebook Shifts Focus To Short-Form Video After Stock Plunge,” which was published on February 6, 2022, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is focused on these trends.

In a call with investors, Zuckerberg said back then:

“People have a lot of choices for how they want to spend their time, and apps like TikTok are growing very quickly. And this is why our focus on Reels is so important over the long term.”

Meanwhile, there were 91% more monthly visits to YouTube in December 2022 than there were to Facebook. And that only counts the visits that Similarweb tracks from mobile and desktop devices.

Similarweb doesn’t track visits from connected TVs (CTVs).

Measuring Data From Connected TVs (CTVs) And Co-Viewing

Why would I wish to draw your attention to CTVs?

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First, global viewers watched a daily average of over 700 million hours of YouTube content on TV devices, according to YouTube internal data from January 2022.

And Insider Intelligence reported in 2022 that 36.4% of the U.S. share of average time spent per day with YouTube came from connected devices, including Apple TV, Google Chromecast, Roku, and Xfinity Flex, while 49.3% came from mobile devices, and 14.3% came from desktops or laptops.

Second, when people watch YouTube on a connected TV, they often watch it together with their friends, family, and colleagues – just like they did at Super Bowl parties before the pandemic.

There’s even a term for this behavior: Co-viewing.

And advertisers can now measure their total YouTube CTV audience using real-time and census-level surveys in over 100 countries and 70 languages.

This means Heineken and Marvel Studios can measure the co-viewing of their Super Bowl ad in more than 100 markets around the globe where Heineken 0.0 non-alcoholic beer is sold, and/or 26 countries where “Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania” is scheduled to be released three to five days after the Big Game.

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It also enables Apple Music to measure the co-viewing of their Super Bowl LVII Halftime Show during Big Game parties worldwide (except Mainland China, Iran, North Korea, and Turkmenistan, where access to YouTube is currently blocked).

And, if FanDuel has already migrated to Google Analytics 4 (GA4), then the innovative sports-tech entertainment company can not only measure the co-viewing of their Big Game teasers on YouTube AdBlitz in 16 states where sports betting is legal, but also measure engaged-view conversions (EVCs) from YouTube within 3 days of viewing Rob Gronkowski’s attempt to kick a live field goal.

 

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Advertisers couldn’t do that in 2022. But they could in a couple of weeks.

If advertisers want to follow their audience, then they should be moving some of their ad budgets out of Facebook, testing new tactics, and experimenting with new initiatives on YouTube in 2023.

Where should the advertisers leaving Twitter shift their budgets long term? And how will that change their Super Bowl strategies in the short term?

According to Similarweb, monthly visits to ads.twitter.com, the platform’s ad-buying portal dropped 15% worldwide from 2.5 million in December 2021 to 2.1 million in December 2022.

So, advertisers were heading for the exit weeks before they learned that 500 top advertisers had left the platform.

Where Did Their Ad Budgets Go?

Well, it’s hard to track YouTube advertising, which is buried in Google’s sprawling ad business.

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And we can’t use business.facebook.com as a proxy for interest in advertising on that platform because it’s used by businesses for other purposes, such as managing organic content on their Facebook pages.

But monthly visits to ads.snapchat.com, that platform’s ad-buying portal, jumped 88.3% from 1.6 million in December 2021 to 3.0 million in December 2022.

Monthly visits to ads.tiktok.com are up 36.6% from 5.1 million in December 2021 to 7.0 million in December 2022.

Monthly visits to ads.pinterest.com are up 23.3% from 1.1 million in December 2021 to 1.4 million in December 2022.

And monthly visits to business.linkedin.com are up 14.6% from 5.7 million in December 2021 to 6.5 million in December 2022.

It appears that lots of advertisers are hedging their bets by spreading their money around.

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Now, most of them should probably continue to move their ad budgets into Snapchat, TikTok, Pinterest, and LinkedIn – unless the “Chief Twit” can find a way to keep his microblogging service from becoming “a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences!

How will advertisers leaving Twitter change their Super Bowl plan this year?

To double-check my analysis, I interviewed Joaquim Salguerio, who is the Paid Media Director at LINK Agency. He’s managed media budgets of over eight figures at multiple advertising agencies.

Below are my questions and his answers.

Greg Jarboe: “Which brands feel that Twitter has broken their trust since Musk bought the platform?”

Joaquim Salguerio: “I would say that several brands will have different reasonings for this break of trust.

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First, if you’re an automaker, there’s suddenly a very tight relationship between Twitter and one of your competitors.

Second, advertisers that are quite averse to taking risks with their communications because of brand safety concerns might feel that they still need to be addressed.

Most of all, in a year where we’re seeing mass layoffs from several corporations, the Twitter troubles have given marketing teams a reason to re-evaluate its effectiveness during a time of budget cuts. That would be a more important factor than trust for most brands.

Obviously, there are some famous cases, such as the Lou Paskalis case, but it’s difficult to pinpoint a brand list that would have trust as their only concern.”

GJ: “Do you think it will be hard for Twitter to regain their trust before this year’s Super Bowl?”

JS: “It’s highly unlikely that any brand that has lost trust in Twitter will change its mind in the near future, and definitely not in time for the Super Bowl. Most marketing plans for the event will be finalized by now and recent communications by Twitter leadership haven’t signaled any change in direction.

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If anything, from industry comments within my own network, I can say that comments from Musk recently (“Ads are too frequent on Twitter and too big. Taking steps to address both in coming weeks.”) were quite badly received. For any marketers that believe Twitter advertising isn’t sufficiently effective, this pushes them further away.

Brand communications should still occur on Twitter during Super Bowl though – it will have a peak in usage. And advertising verticals that should dominate the advertising space on Twitter are not the ones crossing the platform from their plans.”

GJ: “How do you think advertisers will change their Super Bowl plans around Twitter this year?”

JS: “The main change for advertising plans will likely be for brand comms amplification. As an example, the betting industry will likely be heavily present on Twitter during the game and I would expect little to no change in plans.”

In the FCMG category, though, time sensitivity won’t be as important, which means that social media teams will likely be making an attempt at virality without relying as much on paid dollars.

If budgets are to diverge, they will likely be moved within the social space and toward platforms that will have user discussion/engagement from the Super Bowl (TikTok, Reddit, etc.)”

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GJ: “What trends will we see in advertising budget allocation for this year’s Super Bowl?”

Joaquim Salguerio: “We should see budget planning much in line with previous years in all honesty. TV is still the most important media channel on Super Bowl day.

Digital spend will likely go towards social platforms, we predict a growth in TikTok and Reddit advertising around the big day for most brands.

Twitter should still have a strong advertising budget allocated to the platform by the verticals aiming to get actions from users during the game (food delivery/betting/etc.).”

GJ: “Which platforms will benefit from this shift?”

JS: “Likely, we will see TikTok as the biggest winner from a shift in advertising dollars, as the growth numbers are making it harder to ignore the platform as a placement that needs to be in the plan.

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Reddit can also capture some of this budget as it has the right characteristics marketers are looking for around the Super Bowl – it’s relevant to what’s happening at the moment and similar demographics.”

GJ: “Do you think advertisers that step away from Twitter for this year’s Big Game will stay away long term?”

JS: “That is impossible to know, as it’s completely dependent on how the platform evolves and the advertising solutions it will provide. Twitter’s proposition was always centered around brand marketing (their performance offering was always known to be sub-par).

Unless brand safety concerns are addressed by brands that decided to step away, it’s hard to foresee a change.

I would say that overall, Super Bowl ad spend on Twitter should not be as affected as it’s been portrayed – it makes sense to reach audiences where audiences are.

Especially if you know the mindset. The bigger issue is what happens when there isn’t a Super Bowl or a World Cup.”

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Featured Image: Brocreative/Shutterstock



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How to Avoid Ruining SEO During a Website Redesign

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How to Avoid Ruining SEO During a Website Redesign

It’s too easy to break your SEO during a website redesign. Here’s a foretaste of what can go wrong:

  • Loss of rankings and traffic.
  • Loses of link equity.
  • Broken pages.
  • Sluggish page loading.
  • Bad mobile experience.
  • Broken internal links.
  • Duplicate content.

For example, this site deleted about 15% of organic pages (yellow line) during the redesign, which resulted in an almost 50% organic traffic loss (orange line). Interestingly, even the growth of referring domains (blue line) afterward didn’t help it recover the traffic.

Fortunately, it’s not that hard to avoid these and other common issues – just six simple rules to follow.

Easily overlooked but could save the day. A backup ensures you can restore the original site if anything goes wrong.

Ask the site’s developer to be prepared for this fallback strategy. All they will need to do then is redirect the domain to the folder with the old site, and the changes will take effect almost instantly. Make sure they don’t overwrite any current databases, too.

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It won’t hurt to make a backup yourself, too. See if your hosting provider has a backup tool or use a plugin like Updraft if you’re using WordPress or a similar CMS.

Testing your site for Core Web Vitals (CWV) and mobile friendliness before it goes live is the best way to ensure that your new site will comply with Google’s page experience guidelines.

The thing is, a website redesign can seriously affect site speed, stability, responsiveness, and mobile experience. Some design flaws will be quite easy to spot, such as excessive use of animations or layout not scaling properly on mobile devices, but not others, like unoptimized code.

Ask your site developer to run mobile friendliness and CWV tests on template pages as soon as they are ready (no need to test every single page) and ask for the report. For example, they should be able to run Google Lighthouse on a password-protected website.

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An SEO audit uncovers SEO issues on your site. And if you do it pre-and post-launch, you will easily spot any potential new problems caused by the redesign, especially those that really matter, such as:

  • Unwanted noindex pages.
  • Sites accessible both as http and https.
  • Broken pages.

So before the new site goes, click on New crawl in Site Audit and then again right after it goes live.

Starting a new crawl in Site Audit.Starting a new crawl in Site Audit.

Then after the crawl, go to the All issues report and look at the Change column – new errors found between crawls will be colored red (fixed errors will be green) .

Change column in All issues report. Change column in All issues report.

You might want to give some issues higher priority than others. See our take on the most impactful technical SEO issues.

Tip

You can access the history of site audits by clicking on the project’s name in Site Audit.

How to access crawl history in Site Audit (1).How to access crawl history in Site Audit (1).
How to access crawl history in Site Audit (2).How to access crawl history in Site Audit (2).

By URL structure, I mean the way web addresses are organized and formatted. For example, these would be considered URL structure changes:

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  • ahrefs.com/blog to ahrefs.com/blog/
  • ahrefs.com/blog to ahrefs.com/resources/blog
  • ahrefs.com/blog to blog.ahrefs.com
  • ahrefs.com/site-audit to ahrefs.com/site-audit-tool

Altering that structure in an uncontrolled process can lead to:

  • Broken redirects: redirects leading to non-existing or inaccessible pages.
  • Broken backlinks: external links pointing to deleted or moved pages on your site.
  • Broken internal links: internal site links that don’t work, hindering site navigation and content discoverability.
  • Orphan pages: pages not linked from your site, making them hard for users and search engines to find.

Naturally, you should keep the old URL structure unless you’re absolutely sure you know what you’re doing. In this case, you will need to put some redirects in place. On top of that, make sure to submit a sitemap via Google Search Console to help Google reflect changes on your site faster.

Tip

Google also advises submitting a new sitemap if you’re adding many pages in one go. You may want to do that if that’s the case in your redesign project.

Redesigns often include some kind of content pruning or simply arbitrary deleting of older content. But whatever you do, it’s crucial that you keep the pages that are already ranking high.

Traffic is one reason, but since these pages are already ranking, chances are they’ve got some backlinks you risk losing.

To make sure you’re not cutting out the good stuff, use two reports in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer: Top pages and Best by links.

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Top pages report is a list of all the pages on your site ranking in the top 100, appended with SEO data and sorted by traffic by default. So, just one click on your left-hand side, and you’ll see a list of your best “traffic generators”.

Top pages report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer.Top pages report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer.

The Best by links report follows the same logic, but the focus is on links (both external and internal) and it shows all crawled pages on your site (not only the ones ranking in top 100).

Best by links report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer.Best by links report in Ahrefs' Site Explorer.

You can also plug in any page in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and see whether it can be cut without any damage to the site’s organic performance.

Looking up single page organic performance in Site Explorer. Looking up single page organic performance in Site Explorer.

Recommendation

If part of the redesign is an inventory cleanup, you can still get traffic to products you don’t offer anymore if you create an “archive” page and link to a place where visitors can find more similar products. E-commerce sites and hardware brands do that regularly.

Example of an archive page. Example of an archive page.

This way, you can still rank for related terms, and the user experience is better than simply redirecting old products to new products.

Lastly, if you find yourself in a situation where the new design imposes significant changes to your top-ranking pages, take extra caution when altering these elements:

Final thoughts

While an overall site redesign might sound like a good moment to introduce some SEO, you need to think about the traffic and backlink equity the site has already earned. If you change too much in one go, you won’t know what worked and why, and maybe more importantly, what didn’t work and how to fix it.

Truth is, SEO is always about experimentation. You can have a well-educated guess, but you can never really know what will happen.

Want to share your SEO story here? Let me know on X or LinkedIn.

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

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

I often post my favorite new Ahrefs features on X. And last time I announced our newest addition to Keywords Explorer, someone replied with this:

Which was not the first time I saw us being criticized for the accuracy of our search volume metric.

But here’s the kicker…

There’s NO SUCH THING as an accurate search volume:

  • The volumes in Google Keyword Planner aren’t accurate.
  • The “Impressions” in GSC aren’t accurate either.
  • And the metric itself is just an average of the past data.

I already published a pretty detailed article about the search volume metric back in 2021. But I don’t think too many people have read it.

“Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again.”

André Gide

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So let me address this topic from a whole new angle.

First of all, what do SEOs even mean when they ask for search volumes to be “accurate?”

Well, the less experienced folks just want the metrics in third-party tools to match what they see in Google Keyword Planner (GKP).

But the more experienced ones already know all Google Keyword Planner’s Dirty Secrets:

  • The numbers are rounded annual averages.
  • Those averages are then assigned to “volume buckets.”
  • Keywords with similar meaning are often grouped together and their search volume summed up.

In other words, the search volume numbers that you see in GKP are very imprecise. And once SEOs learn that, they no longer use GKP as their baseline of accuracy.

They use GSC.

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Ok. So the numbers in GKP are rounded and bucketed and clustered together and all that. But Google Search Console (GSC) shows you the actual impressions for a given keyword, right?

Well, did you know that a simple rank-tracking tool can easily pollute your GSC impressions?

Think of how many different “robots” might be scraping the search results for a given keyword, and therefore giving you a fairly inaccurate impression of its real (human-driven) search volume.

And besides, in order to see the actual monthly search volume your page has to be ranking at the top 10 for thirty days straight. And it should rank nationwide, just in case the search results might differ based on the location.

On top of that, I’m sure GSC is no different from any other analytics tool in the sense that it might have certain discrepancies in “counting” those impressions. I mean, go compare the “Clicks” you see reported by GSC with your server log files. I bet the numbers won’t match.

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How much time do you think would pass between you selecting a certain keyword to rank for and actually having your page rank at the top of Google for it?

According to our old research, it could be anywhere from two months to a year for a newly published page to get to the top. Don’t you think the monthly search volume of a given keyword will change by then?

That’s actually the exact reason why we’ve added search volume forecasting to our Keywords Explorer tool. It uses past data to project what would likely happen to search volume in the next 12 months:

Is it accurate? No.

But does it help to streamline your keyword research and make better decisions? Absolutely.

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Let’s do a thought experiment and imagine that there was an SEO tool which would give you a highly precise search volume for any keyword. What would you use it for? Would you be able to accurately predict your search traffic from that keyword?

No!

You can’t know for sure at which position your page will end up ranking. Today it’s #3, tomorrow it’s #5, the day after is #1. Rankings are volatile and you rarely retain a given position for a long enough period of time.

And even if you did: you can’t get precise data on the click-through rate (CTR) of each position in Google. Each SERP is unique, and Google keeps rolling out more and more SERP features that steal clicks away. So even if you knew precisely the search volume of a keyword and the exact position where your page would sit… you still would not be able to calculate the accurate amount of search traffic that you’ll get.

And finally…

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Pages don’t rank for a single keyword! Seven years ago we published a study showing that a typical page that ranks at the top of Google for some keyword would actually rank for about a thousand more related keywords.

So what’s the point of trying to gauge your clicks from a single keyword, when you’ll end up ranking for a thousand of them all at the same time?

And the takeaway from all this is…

Here at Ahrefs we spend a tremendous amount of time, effort and resources to make sure our keyword database is in good shape, both in terms of its coverage of existing search queries, and the SEO metrics we give you for each of these keywords.

None of our SEO metrics are “accurate” though. Not search volume, nor keyword difficulty, nor traffic potential, you name it.

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But none of them can be.

They’re designed to be “directionally accurate.” They give you an overall idea of the search demand of a given keyword and if it’s a lot higher (or lower) compared to some other keywords which you are considering.

You can’t use those metrics for doing any precise calculations.

But hundreds of thousands of SEO professionals around the world are using these exact metrics to guide their SEO strategies and they get precisely the results that they expect to get.



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5 Key Enterprise SEO Trends For 2024

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5 Key Enterprise SEO Trends For 2024

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

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

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

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

What Is Enterprise SEO?

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

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

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

How Enterprise SEO Has Changed

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 Essential Enterprise SEO Trends To Watch In 2024

1. Understanding Market Shift And Ever-Evolving Consumer Preferences

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Always remember the risks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Key Takeaways For Enterprise SEO Success In 2024

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

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

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

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

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

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

More resources:

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Featured Image: Sutthiphong Chandaeng/Shutterstock

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