Category: SEO

Back in March, Google announced that the current version of Google Analytics Universal (commonly known as Universal Analytics) will be deprecated as of July 1, 2023, in favor of the new version, GA4.

As a part of this transition, Google will be dropping support and tracking for Universal Analytics (UA), which has been the standard reporting tool for millions of websites since 2012. According to Google, historic data from Universal Analytics will be accessible for “at least six months” after the July 2023 retirement date. Keeping it ambiguous, Google adds:

“In the coming months, we’ll provide a future date for when existing Universal Analytics properties will no longer be available. After this future date, you’ll no longer be able to see your Universal Analytics reports in the Analytics interface or access your Universal Analytics data via the API.”

While 2023 may seem like ample time to prepare for this transition, the truth is you need to check a few boxes sooner rather than later, especially if there are important year-over-year (YoY) metrics that need to be tracked without disruption. In short order, capturing data for next year’s YoY metrics means that your business will need to take action before the end of summer 2022 to ensure:

• Seamless tracking

• YoY reporting (including access to historical data) – the full functionality you want/need from your data and analysis toolset

• Your team is prepared to use the new tools (regardless of what new solution you choose)

Though Google “strongly encourages” users to make the transition to GA4 “as soon as possible”, we’d argue that – given the scale of the change and the work/resources it will require to properly transition to GA4 (as outlined in more detail below), now is the right time to pull up and evaluate your data tracking stack.

It’s too easy to make assumptions about needs and requirements being met based on “what we’ve always used,” and end up backed into a corner.

Instead, let’s explore this in detail and consciously select the right platform for your needs.

How is this different from the last GA platform change?

The transition from GA Classic to Universal Analytics was simple. All you needed to do was update the tracking code on your website. Your data was the same. The interface, metrics, etc. – all largely the same. That’s not the case this time around.

How are GA Universal and GA4 different?

Google made some big changes in GA4 that may take time to adjust to. This has many implications, including large differences in:

• the interface for navigating and setting up the reports

• the base skills/knowledge set needed for people using the new platform

• the data set itself (GA Universal data is not compatible with GA4 data)

• your ability to access and use YoY data

• access to certain (well-loved) functionality, and even some metrics. Some will no longer be available OR require a thorough setup to access.

In short, GA4 is quite literally a re-imagining of how to track and measure website interaction. Much like the transition from USB to USB-C, this means changes to systems/processes, tools, skills/training, and potentially your annual budget, to ensure a smooth transition.

1. Reimagined reporting interface

The most glaring difference between Universal Analytics and GA4 is the reporting interface.

Compared to Universal Analytics, GA4’s interface is more simplified and streamlined. This is because some of the metrics, views, and reports you see in Universal have either been removed or replaced.

The updated interface looks much like Google Data Studio in the way analytics are presented. So if you’re familiar with Data Studio, then navigating GA4’s interface may be more intuitive for you.

Still, changing from what’s known and normal always comes with some level of pain and processing. Even for those who are well-trained in the world of Universal Analytics, adjusting to a new reporting interface will come with some confusion – and perhaps some roadblocks and resistance.

2. Evolving terminology

Once you start perusing the new interface, you’ll notice that Google has changed some of the terminology. “Behavior” is now “Engagement”, “Segments” have become “Comparisons”, and “Channels” is now “User Acquisition”. The “All Pages” reports have been renamed as “Pages and Screens”.

Google has also reorganized the “Audience” reports, and the information that used to be in the “Audience” reports are now in other sections, including “User” and “Acquisition” sections.

Navigating GA4 won’t necessarily be a frictionless experience, especially for those who are regularly immersed in Universal Analytics.

3. Updated measurement models

Universal Analytics and GA4 use different measurement models. While UA relies on a session- and pageview-based data model, GA4 stands on an event-based model. With GA4, any interaction can be recorded as an event.

The somewhat confusing thing about this change is that, in UA (and all previous versions of Google Analytics), an event has an action, category, label, and its own hit type. But in GA4, there is no action, category, or label.

ALL hits are events, and events can contain parameters.

…They don’t have to, though.

For example, in GA4, you can have an event called page_view, and this event can contain parameters: page_title, page_referrer (previous page URL), and page_location (current page URL).

Events in GA4 are grouped into four categories:

1. Automatically-collected events: You don’t have to manually activate these events. GA4 automatically tracks them when you install the GA4 base code. Examples include first_visit, session_start, and user_engagement.

2. Enhanced measurement events: GA4 also collects these events automatically, but you’ll need to enable (or disable) enhanced measurement settings in your Data Stream depending on your website functionality. These events include outbound clicks, scrolls, file downloads, and site searches.

3. Recommended events: These events are not implemented in GA4, but Google recommends that you set them up. If you need an event that’s not collected automatically or is not a part of the enhanced measurement events, you can check for it in recommended events. Examples of recommended events include sign_up, login, and purchase.

4. Custom events: These are events that you can create and implement by yourself. You should only use custom events when you need to track an event that you can’t find in the first three categories. You’ll need to write and design custom code to implement the custom event you want to track. Fortunately for the less code-savvy, Google has rolled out a tool to assist in importing custom events from Universal Analytics to GA4.

Overall, this approach actually allows more flexibility and configurability to WHAT is measured on your site.

However, with more flexibility comes more set up and forethought, so having a documented measurement plan is HIGHLY recommended for GA4.

4. New BigQuery functionality

If you use BigQuery, then you’ll be happy to know that GA4 connects natively to it. With Universal Analytics, the only way users can export data from GA is through the enterprise version (GA360). But with GA4, users can export data at no additional cost.

Keep in mind the way data is structured in GA4 is different from how it’s structured in Universal Analytics. So you might need to remap your GA4 data before you’ll be able to move it into BigQuery (we find this GA3 to GA4 tool helpful in formatting historical data to align with GA4.) Once you’ve done that, you’ll be able to run SQL queries more easily.

The BigQuery integration is available, so we definitely recommend setting it up ASAP. Why? Well, GA4 only stores data for a maximum of 14 months (and default settings are only two months), so for accurate YoY comparisons, you’ll need to rely on this year’s BigQuery datasets you gather now or suffer the losses.

5. Removed functionality

Some existing features like views, custom metrics, and content groups will no longer be supported. If your team relies on these existing features, adapting to GA4 will likely involve figuring out how to fill certain measurement gaps. And if the transition becomes too compromising and painful, keep in mind that there are alternatives.

As you’ve likely gathered, moving from GA Universal to GA4 is not a light undertaking. Between adapting to GA4’s new reporting and measurement models and learning its revised labeling and terminology, it’s going to be a heavy transition no matter what your situation entails. Consequently, now is the time to verify that the outcome of all this work will in fact meet your needs.

What does this mean for you and your company?

All users of Universal Analytics (that’s close to… well, everyone, really), will need to start planning for how and where to continue measuring your website performance.

You’ll also need to take action to save your data for 1) posterity and 2) YoY reporting, given that the data set is NOT compatible, nor will be available to you (if you don’t take steps to preserve it). AKA: we also need to plan for when this needs to happen.

In terms of the how and where, ultimately, there are three primary options (four if your team takes a hybrid approach of combining options 2 and 3), each of which is outlined below.

1. Adopt GA4 and update any current measurement programs

The first option is the big one on most people’s minds. That is, opting to use GA4 and taking the proper steps to preserve data integrity and seamless measurement.

If you determine that GA4 is the right fit, the major boxes to check involve identifying measurement gaps and revising KPIs (or measurement protocols) to fill these gaps. You’ll also need to start collecting data (now) for later YoY reporting needs, as well as ensuring your team is up-to-speed on the new GA4 interface.

Given that the interface in GA4 is considerably different from the interface in Universal, any teams currently using the latter will likely require additional time and training to adapt to the new structure.

2. Move to a different hosted analytics platform

Due to some of the identified gaps, we’re exploring options for both free and paid alternatives to GA4 for our own team. Among the free analytics tools worth considering are Clarity, Clicky, and Mixpanel. While the free versions of these tools are great, some offer upgradeable paid options for more robust capacity/capabilities.

Some businesses may find that their requirements are better met by moving to paid tools or premium versions of certain analytics products. Of those worth exploring are Matomo, Adobe Analytics, Heap, Kissmetrics, Heap, and Woopra. The latter two offer free plans but, in our experience, they’re highly limited.

Keep in mind that not all of these analytics tools offer the same level of utility and features, and don’t forget about privacy and security to support GDPR and CCPA regulations, a growing concern for many brands.

While any new tool would require onboarding, many of them offer training as part of the client onboarding process. Most of these analytics options also offer a free trial, so you can vet a platform hands-on before committing to it.

3. Implement an on-premise/first-party data tracking solution (enterprise solution)

On-premise/first-party enterprise solutions can deliver greater utility, privacy, and compliance, depending on how they’re leveraged. Platforms like Matomo and Countly do offer on-premise implementation, meaning that your company would own ALL of the user data, instead of being passed through to Google Analytics (or any other third party).

If you have other owned digital platforms, coupling an on-premise analytics suite with solutions like Looker (owned by Google!) or PowerBI can allow you to access data across different teams and properties easily.

Please note that the implementation of this approach requires fairly heavy dev/engineering collaboration.

How should you evaluate alternative analytics tool sets?

When exploring alternative analytics options, there are many important considerations you’ll want to evaluate. Here are several key factors to help get you started:

• Data ownership: Who actually owns the data? This can be a much larger conversation for companies in regulated industries where more than just marketing stakeholders are involved.

• Privacy concerns: More than data ownership, where is the analytics data being hosted? This means the physical location of the servers where this data is stored. If you require GDPR-compliance, this is essential to know—and get right.

• Accessibility: Will you have access to raw data? How long is data retained? Some analytics platforms will vary.

• Native reporting: What sort of native reporting capabilities are there, and does the platform integrate into your company’s preferred reporting tools (e.g. Google Data Studio, Tableau, PowerBI, etc.)?

• Attribution modeling: How are certain events like conversions determined and assigned across user touchpoints and channels? Does their model align with your attribution definitions? Think about last touch, first touch, etc., across the entire user journey.

• Event & transactions tracking: What out-of-the-box event tracking is available? How do you add user ID tracking, and is it still secure and compliant? E-commerce stores and affiliate marketers may have unique challenges here, especially when it comes to communicating with your web platform, e.g. Shopify.

• Campaign tracking: How does the system report on custom campaign metrics? These include things like UTMs and tracking URLs you get from the various ad platforms you may use.

• Custom tracking: Is custom tracking an option? Does the platform provide their own tag manager, or can you use the tried-and-true Google Tag Manager (that’s probably already installed on your website)? Are there server-side tracking options?

• Cross-domain tracking: Is the analytics platform capable of tracking user activity across more than one domain that you own?

• Data importing: Can you import your old Google Analytics data, seamlessly or otherwise?

• Cost: More than just ongoing monthly/annual fees to use the platform, what set-up fees, implementation costs, and ongoing maintenance efforts are required of you and your team?

There’s clearly a lot to consider when weighing various analytics alternatives. The thought-starters above offer some of the most important considerations to keep in mind. But deciding which data solutions will check the most pertinent boxes for your business can be a time-consuming undertaking in and of itself. To help make this vetting process a bit easier, you can make a copy of this Google Sheet template: Data Solution Option Vetting, which already lists several alternatives.

When should you make the transition from Universal Analytics to GA4?

In the case that you and your team decide to make the transition to GA4, you’ll need to get your ducks in a row sooner than later. The summer of 2023 may seem like ample time to prepare, but your team should start to take prompt action in:

• deciding on a measurement solution,

• preserving historic data, and

• potentially implementing this solution prior to the end of summer 2022, and certainly prior to year’s end.

“Potentially” because some solutions – #3 from above – will simply require more time to implement.

Your data is safe for now: Google will not be removing/deleting your Universal data until the end of 2023. However, to reiterate, if you want to preserve your ability to do YoY reporting, you should take action sooner versus later.

There are some paid solutions to aid this process, but no one is really leading the pack on this one yet. This tool mentioned above can be helpful, however, a complete data export is still a necessary heavy lift.

For now, you can certainly export any of your favorite Google Analytics reports to Excel or Google Sheets using the Export function within the Google Analytics interface. Currently, only GA 360 users have seamless options for exporting their Google Analytics Universal data.

Moving forward

While many current Universal Analytics users will naturally default to GA4, hopefully by now, you’re well attuned to your options. It’s one thing to follow the herd, but it’s another thing to understand the features and limitations of GA4, as well as other analytics platforms, and how those considerations align with your needs and potentially those of your clients.

It would be hard to overstate the value of the education offered at MozCon. From the impressive accreditation of seasoned speakers to the novel thinking of newcomers, MozCon 2022’s presenters delivered a level of actionable advice and inspiration that resoundingly reaffirmed why this event is one of the best-loved in the SEO world.

As a local SEO, it’s my practice to attend the livestream with ears pricked to catch any takeaway that could be useful to local businesses and their marketers. Local was the core focus of a few presentations, but while the majority of MozCon talks are not local-specific, nearly all of them featured applicable expert advice that we can turn to our advantage. Today, I’ll provide my personal rundown of the best tips I gleaned for local businesses from MozCon 2022, I highly recommend pre-purchasing the video bundle to go beyond my recap to a detailed understanding of how to excel in your marketing.

1. Let’s really talk about landing pages

The SEO industry has zoomed in on the critical role both location and product landing pages are now playing in marketing. The former will come as no surprise to local SEOs, and the latter has become an increasing part of our world as the pandemic has driven local businesses to incorporate shopping into their websites. Some of the brightest ideas shared at MozCon 2022 surrounded what belongs on these landing pages.

Recently, you may have read my column encouraging local businesses to emulate actionable Google Business Profile features on their website homepages, and I was gratified to see this strategy echoed and expanded upon by both Amanda Jordan and Emily Brady in regards to location landing pages.

Ross Simmonds made a very strong point that content does not equal blogs, and Amanda Jordan emphasized that it isn’t copywriting that makes a landing page great — it’s features, like:

• Booking buttons

• Reviews

• Social proofs

• Customer UGC, like photos

• Original stats that are strong enough to earn backlinks

• Polls and surveys

• Awards and recognitions

Emily Brady added to this list by encouraging the inclusion of Google Business Profile attributes on location landing pages. She further urged local SEOs to use the 145 types of local business schema to actually inform content strategy for these pages – a suggestion I don’t believe I’ve ever heard before. She noted that SMBs have few enough landing pages to make it feasible to manually create best-in-market, unique content as a competitive advantage.

Amanda Jordan did a study of the top 10 location landing pages across 50 cities and noted the high percentage of them that emphasized these features:

By focusing on features that customers really want, local businesses can solve the longstanding issues Amanda cited as being associated with location landing pages, namely, duplicate and thin content, low user engagement, and lack of conversions.

On the topic of product landing pages, I’ll quote Areej AbuAli who emphasized that, “Filters can make or break an e-commerce website.” Anyone who has ever shopped online knows the truth of this. Her presentation was a deep dive into the care that must be taken to build a strategy for commerce architecture and indexing that takes details like these and more into account:

Meanwhile, Miracle Inameti-Archibong’s presentation on web accessibility was highly applicable to any business that publishes a shopping website and her talk was filled with moments that honestly shocked me. I’ve never used a screen reader before, and I had no idea what terrible UX websites lacking accessibility best practices provide for the 12 million Internet users who have visual disabilities. I also didn’t know that 80% of what we all learn is done through the medium of vision. These facts should be a wake-up call for all website publishers:

• 1 in 8 Americans have a disability.

• People with vision loss consistently report having advanced internet proficiency.

• Working-age people with disabilities cumulatively possess $490 billion in after-tax disposable income.

• 83% of people with accessibility needs shop on sites with accessibility standards, even if prices are higher.

• 97.4% of homepages have accessibility errors.

• Missing alt text accounts for 61% of all homepage accessibility errors.

Miracle Inameti-Archibong had us sit with her though the terrible experience of trying to use a screen reader in this environment and imagine what it is like to try to shop, manage personal finances, or perform other essential day to day activities online, and I was especially moved by her reminder that all of us have causes we care about, but that implementing accessibility is one SEOs actually have the hands-on opportunity to do something about!

In addition to encouraging everyone to download a screen reader to experience their websites in a new way, she extended this Colab resource to help us all begin tackling alt text issues at scale. With a commitment to supporting the agency of all people, we can ensure that both our product and location landing pages are accessible to everybody.

2. Let’s be part of big trends in thought and tech

Local business owners and marketers will benefit from understanding the evolution of both perceptions and possibilities happening in the wider industry.

On keyword research

Wil Reynolds noted that keyword research is how we gain empathy for our customers and Dr. Peter J. Meyers’ presentation of why we need to stop fixating on the bottom of the sales funnel and embrace the messy middle was, in my opinion, some of the best storytelling of the conference.

Both Dr. Pete and Tom Capper urged us to think not in terms of massive keyword volumes but of groupings by human intent, weaving around and about the complex loops of evaluation and exploration. Indeed, an overall theme at MozCon 2022 was that SEOs are rethinking old views of keywords and reenvisioning them in terms of entities, intent, and topics. If we stop trying to continuously sell and focus, instead, on being there in the messy middle, we will be getting so much closer to real journeys than what we see in familiar funnel structures. Tom Capper further advised us to stop thinking of keyword research as grunt work suitable for junior staff and to employ the skillful art of understanding intent so that we end up actually knowing our customers. He also mentioned that this type of research, done well, can help local businesses discover which of their locations are deserving of the most investment.

On content and content marketing

“Google is capable of recognizing first-person expertise,” was a quote from Lily Ray that underpinned her outstanding presentation on why E-A-T should be moving us all to:

• Write in the first person on our websites

• Provide step-by-step instructions and objective advice without selling

• Offer honest pros and cons

• Use first-hand experience to back up claims

• Publish unique images

• Explain why we are qualified to author our content

In her talk on why E-A-T is the most important ranking factor, Lily Ray shared this persuasive screenshot from one of her clients who had been hit by the Medic update and then re-launched a site that emphasized their expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness:

E-A-T is, in my opinion, a gift to local business owners because so many of them possess the kind of expertise that only comes from a lifetime of working in their field. Our role, as local SEOs, is to capture and promote that expertise in a way Google understands.

Meanwhile, Ross Simmonds reminded us all that the phrase “content marketing” includes the word “marketing”. Hitting “publish” is not the end of the journey. Instead, we’ve got to:

I particularly latched on to his suggestion to give out awards and found myself imagining the local links that could flow in if something like a local grocery store formalized giving out awards for “best of county” foods, or a bookstore did the same for best regional authors, or an environmental organization recognized the greenest local businesses. Take this idea and run with it.

Speaking of earning links and publicity, Amanda Milligan told the story of beleaguered local newspapers who are actively seeking content featuring trends in employment and real estate, ways to avoid scams, and “news you can use” articles. She highlighted how some 2,200 local papers have folded since 2005 and explained how those struggling to keep going could be very interested in your contributions to their sections on lifestyle, money, entertainment, sports and news. Gather some original data and offer it to your local and regional newspapers for some highly-relevant press.

And, finally, Crystal Carter’s presentation on visual search re-emphasized the message that content does not equal text. As she noted, “Visual search makes the camera a primary tool for understanding the world.” Crystal is a Level 6 Google Guide and, reminding us that Google can definitely parse images, she encouraged businesses to strategize for solid, consistent, well-lit, unobscured real-world branding, like this:

She also proffered an excellent tip of auditing the photos your customers have uploaded to Instagram and Yelp. Is your branding on the dinner plates of your restaurant? On the uniforms of your staff? On banners at events you sponsor? What is the “that pic” for your business, where customers pose to photograph themselves? Are you uploading great owner photos to your citations so that customers are encouraged not just to shop with you, but to photograph your aesthetics themselves? All of it belongs on your website and Google Business Profile as we enter a multisearch reality and find new opportunities in an environment in which photos have become, not just great content, but queries.

3. Let’s be aware of trends on our periphery

Pretty much anything SEO-related is also part of our local SEO playbook, but sometimes the things SEOs prioritize for remote businesses may exist on the edges of our strategy, rather than at the center, and yet can still be important for us to consider.

A prime example of this is link building. Most truly small local SMBs will not likely have to invest heavily in earning links because our markets are typically finite with a limited number of direct nearby competitors. Nevertheless, more competitive local brands should pay attention to Paddy Moogan’s mention of the fact that 21 of 35 link building tips he presented at MozCon 10 years ago are still good-to-go in 2022, but that he’s observed four trends that have him worried:

1. Asking for links isn’t sustainable — more than half of SEOs spend 1-5 hours trying to build a single link

2. Questionable link relevance — who believes that Google wants to reward a business that builds up a massive, but irrelevant, volume of links?

3. Too much reliance on campaigns — it’s a mistake to focus on big, shiny link building campaigns instead of on actual business impact

4. Unintegrated link building — for agency and in-house link builders, if your work is happening independently of other departments, you face the risk of being squeezed out in times of economic downturns.

Paddy called on SEOs to solve these problems by reframing links as the outcome of an effective content strategy, using the actual and very messy customer journey to spot link building ideas, focusing on evergreen projects instead of one-off campaigns, and being integrated in multi-department work from the get-go. All of this advice is applicable even to small local businesses and their marketers who want to get the most out of smaller budgets of time and money.

Wrapping up, there was one other talk given by Ruth Burr Reedy on remote workplace culture which might not have seemed laser-focused on local SEOs and their clients, but which really stood out to me as having universal wisdom. Whether your local business staff is still fully in-office or has become a hybrid or fully-remote workplace due to the pandemic, the development of an atmosphere of “psychological safety” is valuable for every kind of team.

I’ve been a strong advocate for many years here in my column of the reputational benefits that result from employers trusting employees enough to use their own initiative to support and delight customers. Ruth’s presentation depicting a working environment that encourages staff to be able to ask anything without risk made me think more deeply about the hard work local business owners need to put into developing a full and healthy culture behind the scenes that is felt by every customer who walks in the door.

MozCon 2022 was absolutely replete with deeply technical, practical, and cultural tips that I’ve only been able to touch on briefly today. For the full experience, you’ll need to watch the videos, with their speaker enthusiasm, beautiful decks, and bountiful guidance. Pre-purchase today!

For many of us, there is no greater feeling than winning a new client. It might help you to grow your team, earn yourself a bonus, or achieve a promotion. All of which are great motivators and things to celebrate.

But for me, the reason why winning new business is so enjoyable, is because you’ve just earned the trust of someone else. You’ve connected with them. They’ve bought into your ideas, and now they’re relying on you to help them grow their business.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll be excited to get started. You’ll have poured your heart and soul into winning the new account. And you can now get to work putting into practice all the things you presented so well in the pitch.

For content writers, this might start with an in-depth keyword research piece. Taking your initial pitch data and expanding on it to form a content strategy.

But before you start, have you thought about inviting your new client to a working session to help with your keyword research?

It’s the kind of thing that might make you run for the hills — I would have, not so long ago — but it can be incredibly useful. We often forget that in our excitement to get started, our clients are excited, too. They often want to help, and you can use a working session as an opportunity to tap into their industry knowledge. After all, it’s the subject matter that they live every hour of every day.

In this blog, I’m going to show you why you should do a keyword research working session with your clients, and how it has helped us deliver 65% organic traffic growth for one of our clients with low Domain Authority.

Tried and tested keyword research

Let’s start with what keyword research usually looks like. This will be a great way to prepare for a working session with your new client, which we’ll come to next.

Now, there is already a library of fantastic resources available on Moz to help you with keyword research, each of which go into much more detail than I’m going to:

I would urge you to devour as much of this as possible. For the purposes of this blog, we’re going to assume that keyword research boils down to three simple things:

1. Keywords you want to rank for

2. Keywords you already rank for

3. Keywords your competitors rank for

To compile this information, we’ll use Moz’s Keyword Explorer (you can use whichever keyword research tool you’re most familiar with, but I find Moz’s tool particularly good for this process).

The example we’re going to use is a real-world example from a keyword research session I had with a client who sells packaging supplies. One of their most important products is cardboard boxes. So we’ll start with that as our initial keyword.

1. Keywords you want to rank for

So, with cardboard boxes as our initial seed keyword, what other relevant keywords can we uncover? Using Keyword Explorer’s keyword suggestions, we can instantly get a good idea of some of the highly relevant and well searched for related keywords.

At this stage, you’re ideally looking to pick out related themes as you scroll through. For example, we can instantly see that several keywords are related to moving. Perhaps that’s something we should investigate further. Secondarily, there are also a few references to size too (small and large), which we’re also going to make a note of.

Within just a few seconds we already have a couple of ideas we can use to help inform our content strategy. And you can keep going, picking out as many interesting keywords or topics as you can.

You can then use these keywords to start building out lists within Keyword Explorer, or export the data and work in spreadsheets if that’s your preferred method.

Remember, at this stage, we’re just looking to prepare for our working session with the client, not create a fully kitted out content strategy.

2. Keywords you already rank for

Unless you’re working with a client in a very unique position of launching a brand new website, you should be able to uncover lots of keyword opportunities simply by researching the keywords the website already ranks for. These are often some of your biggest opportunities to improve and grow traffic from.

A search for your website in Keyword Explorer will return a list of keywords with your ranking position included. You can then export this to excel and filter on keywords you would like to target. In our case, let’s take a look at how our client’s website ranks for terms related to cardboard boxes.

Now that’s interesting. While some of the keywords with the highest search volume were related to moving house, we can see that our client’s website predominantly ranks well for postage boxes. And the search intent behind those two topics is very different. So, we’ll be earmarking this as one to discuss with the client.

3. Keywords your competitors rank for

Possibly the most important part of keyword research is to check what your competitors are ranking well for, but you’re not. You can do this in Keyword Explorer simply by adding one or two domains to your search when searching by website:

And when we do this, we uncover another opportunity:

While there are lots of keywords related to cardboard boxes that are of interest to us, it is double walled cardboard boxes that stand out here. There are several variations and a good number of searches per month, so, that’s definitely one to discuss during the keyword research working session.

After some very quick keyword research, we’ve uncovered four potential topics we could discuss from our initial cardboard boxes seed keyword:

• Boxes for moving

• Boxes by size

• Postal boxes

• Double walled boxes

If we were doing this for real, we would have uncovered plenty more opportunities, too. And if you stop here, you can still have great success building out a content strategy and creating highly relevant, optimized content to target these keywords.

But as great as our SEO tools are for keyword research, they don’t always tell the full story. That’s where a working session with your client can help.

Keyword research working sessions

Working alongside your clients at this stage can feel a little daunting, and it can be hard to relinquish control. It’s your job, and you have the expertise and the instincts to be successful. You might be thinking that the last thing you need is the client demanding something you know will be near impossible to achieve before you’ve even got started.

But as mentioned above, we also need to appreciate that as good as keyword research tools are, they don’t show the full picture. Even cross-referencing against Search Console can leave us skeptical. And so, tapping into the knowledge your clients have might just lead to you discovering some great content ideas and keywords to target.

How to approach a keyword research working session

So, how do you go about approaching a keyword research working session yourself? Start by asking yourself a few simple questions:

Who should be involved?

Depending on the size of your client, you might have multiple contacts on their side. Think about who would be best placed to discuss the products in detail. The MD or CEO won’t need to come along. But someone like the Head of Marketing, along with a senior buyer would have all the knowledge you need.

And in your own team, do you need to invite several people or keep it small? It might depend on how big the client is, but to get the most out of your session, it might be best to keep the attendees at a minimum. This will be a decision for you, your circumstances and how best you work as a team.

How many sessions do you need?

Again, this depends on the specifics of your client and your scope of work. If you’re working on a small retainer, just one session will be enough. But if this is a big client with a sizeable retainer, perhaps you’re going to need a handful of sessions to cover various topics that you’ll be hoping to rank for.

What does your client need to prepare?

The best thing your clients can do is come prepared with detailed knowledge of their products and which products are most important for them. Which products provide the greatest profit margin? Which products are they struggling to get hold of due to issues in the supply chain? Which products are stacked up in the warehouse that they need to shift? As much information as possible.

What do you need to prepare?

You should prepare well, either by following the recommendations in this blog or by going through your own keyword research process. But beyond that, you also need to have an open mind. Let your client contribute their own thoughts and take it from there.

What happened at our own keyword research session?

In our example, we got talking about the different sizes of cardboard boxes available. The client explained it was a hugely important factor for their customers. No business wants to be shipping empty space in boxes that are too big for their products. And no business wants to be cramming products into boxes that aren’t big enough.

So we took a closer look at boxes by size and discovered there were plenty of low volume searches related to box dimensions. These are great keywords for us to be targeting, either on product pages or within facet navigation.

You might suggest the search volume is too low to care too much about. But you’re missing a big opportunity if you take that approach.

Remember, our client has a low Domain Authority. Competing for some of the top generic keywords is not going to happen overnight, so we’ll need to be clever in our keyword targeting. And as Adriana Stein notes in her brilliant blog on low search volume keywords:

“[For] low authority sites in competitive niches, it takes months (or maybe even years) to rank for a [highly competitive] keyword.

[…]

“Specific and niched keywords are exactly what accelerate your organic traffic growth and business revenue – even when you don’t have the domain authority, brand awareness, or resources of your more established competitors.”

So, with that advice in mind, in this example I was not concerned about seeing low search volume at this stage. Rather, I was quite excited about it. And then, as we were looking at these low volume dimensions, the client picked out an odd-looking keyword to me and noted: “Oh, that’s interesting.”

Interesting? I have to be honest, if I was browsing these keywords by myself, I’m really not sure I’d have picked this one out. To my untrained eye, it’s just a few unidentifiable numbers with low relevancy.

“That’s a FEFCO code.” My client told me.

A what?

“A FEFCO code. It’s what our customers ask us for every day. When you’re selling cardboard boxes, you’re talking in FEFCO codes.”

Bingo:

All of a sudden, we have a whole new bunch of incredibly relevant keywords for us to target. And not just relevant from an SEO perspective, but also in the language our client’s customers would understand.

I’m happy to admit that getting to this point would have been impossible on my own. I needed my client’s insight and knowledge of the industry to find these keywords.

So what about you? Have a think. Are you missing some hidden gem keywords?

Results

Working this way has resulted in an organic traffic increase of 65% year-on-year:

Beyond traffic acquisition, organic revenue has also increased significantly. Not only that, but our client also regularly updates us that they’re receiving inbound calls from potential new customers who have found them online.

The success in keyword targeting is perhaps best visualized with a look at their historical keyword rankings:

We started working with this client in 2020. And really, before 2021, there were only a handful of keywords in the top 10 according to Ahrefs data. That is now over 1,000. And best of all, because we’ve been working so closely with the client, we know we’re targeting the right keywords.

Additional benefits of working sessions with your clients

If you’re still not convinced, consider the additional benefits that this working session will bring:

• You’ll be able to build on the connection you’ve made during the pitch, to help you build a long-lasting working relationship for years.

• Your clients will be highly engaged and excited to work with you. And they’ll appreciate the time you’re taking to hear from them in detail.

• They’ll also get a front row seat to see how much hard work goes into your content strategy and planning from minute one, appreciating your expertise with the SEO tools you use.

• All of which helps to facilitate a team spirit and culture of working together, rather than lapsing into a confrontational client vs agency relationship should things go wrong (and we know with SEO, sometimes we can’t guarantee results!)

With all of the above in mind, by making a little extra effort to schedule a keyword research working session, you’re far more likely to retain clients over the long term.

Conclusion

The additional benefits alone should be reason enough to undertake a keyword research working session with your clients. And when it comes to optimizing low Domain Authority websites in competitive niches, any help you can get is valuable.

But more than that, you might just uncover a few hidden gems for content ideas. And that’s something that’s incredibly valuable whatever the budget you’re working with.

These sessions don’t replace your traditional keyword research. You should still do that, too. But this is a great way to supplement that research with evidence from those at the coalface.

And if you get just one great content idea that you hadn’t otherwise considered, it will be worth it.

There once was a time when searching for a hotel would begin by browsing the internet, clicking through comparison websites, or maybe even seeking recommendations from print or television adverts.

Not anymore.

Plenty of customers nowadays look to social media when it comes to picking a place to stay.

Whether customers are seeking suggestions from trusted influencers, following travel accounts that share wanderlust-inducing content, or just looking for a brand name they’ve seen before – platforms like Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, and even Pinterest are popular sources of inspiration.

Establishing a presence on social media is crucial for hotels that want to remain relevant and attract younger customer demographics, especially those in locations where competition is fierce.

A hotel’s online presence is a significant part of what makes it a desirable place to stay, so developing an effective social media strategy should be a priority for brands that want to grow their customer base and gain recognition in the industry.

Whether you’re just starting out with social media marketing or looking for new ways to expand your approach, here are the ten best ideas to include in your strategy.

1. Show Your Face(s)

One of the biggest benefits of social media is that it allows you to show a much more personal side of your brand. It’s even more impactful if you put a face, or multiple faces, to the name of your hotel.

Instead of a very business-oriented online presence, showing real people in your photos and videos will help your followers to develop what feels like a human connection, strengthening their relationship with your brand.

Featuring content with your employees speaking directly to the audience (or the camera) will enhance the effect and provide engaging content to watch.

By featuring employees on your social media channels, your hotel instantly appears more “human.”

Potential customers get an idea of who they will be interacting with and the hotel’s atmosphere if they visit, which can help to plant the idea of making a booking more firmly in their mind by allowing them to imagine a stay.

2. Utilize Short Form Video

Social media users have short attention spans.

Given the vast amount of content available – from all kinds of brands – your hotel needs to ensure that what you’re sharing gets noticed.

Short-form video is perhaps the most popular content format at the moment, particularly with the rise of social media platforms like TikTok.

You can create and share videos on Instagram as “Reels” as well, or even put short clips on Facebook, your website, or in email marketing material to reach a wider audience with this incredibly engaging content.

You can do a lot with short-form video, from hopping on viral trends to conducting mico interviews with staff and customers.

This format works particularly well if you’re hoping to inspire potential customers to visit your hotel or the destination where you’re based. Creating short montages with music that captures a mood or an experience can tap into your audience’s desire to travel or book a night away.

3. Partner With Influencers

Influencer marketing is a fantastic approach for hotels looking to improve their social media marketing strategy.

Not only can it help generate new content, but it also widens your reach to potential new customers and can help improve your brand image by association.

Hotels have many options to choose from when developing an influencer marketing strategy.

For example, you could:

• Offer paid trips to travel or lifestyle influencers and encourage them to share their experiences with their followers.
• Offer the hotel as a venue for an influencer’s event. That way, it can appear in their content and event guests’ content.
• Develop a partnership where an influencer shares several pieces of content directly promoting your hotel and the experience on offer.
• Set up a loyalty program with influencers offering discounted stays when they promote your hotel or create an exclusive discount for their followers.
• Work with an influencer to create and star in an advertising campaign.

While choosing a travel influencer to work with is the most straightforward option, don’t allow your industry to limit you.

Think about your hotel’s target audience, and then find influencers whose followers overlap with this demographic and consider creative ways in which you can work together.

4. Offer Exclusivity

Sharing consistent content across all channels is important on social media, but so is offering something exclusive on every platform.

That way, your followers are encouraged to engage with your hotel’s profiles on different platforms, which boosts engagement and helps to establish your brand reputation.

Exclusivity on social media looks like sharing unique content and offering your followers insight that they won’t get on any other social media platform, which might involve:

• Running competitions.
• Giving sneak peeks into new rooms or facilities.
• Offering discounts.
• Letting followers get involved in designing or picking features of new services.

Not only will you encourage engagement across all of your accounts, but this also creates a greater sense of an “exclusive community” among your followers, which helps to strengthen customer loyalty.

5. Consider Seasonality

Seasonality is something that all hotels tend to consider when it comes to sales, but it’s also definitely something you should factor into your social media strategy.

You’ll likely have different goals based on whether it’s the high or low season for your hotel, so firstly, make sure that the social posts you’re sharing align with these goals and seek to capitalize on peak season interest.

On the flip side, you should also tailor your social content to retain followers or boost engagement at quieter times of the year by offering promotions or spotlighting different experiences to encourage bookings.

Seasonality also refers to the different holidays or annual events that take place throughout the year, which you can also theme your social media content around.

Content themed around holidays or events is more likely to get shared during the celebration and has more potential to go viral, making it a great way to boost your posts’ reach.

6. Be Swift With Replies

Whether you’re active on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or even LinkedIn, quickly replying to comments or mentions is very important.

Things move fast in the digital world, and most social media users expect instant gratification or responses.

Replying or interacting with comments on social media might seem tedious, but it benefits your brand in several ways.

First, it helps your audience to feel heard and acknowledged.

Whether you’re handling a complaint or simply offering thanks for a review, replying to your customers will help develop relationships, make your customer service feel more personal, and encourage more reviews.

Replying and engaging in conversations with your followers also improves your brand image in the eyes of other followers that are simply watching these interactions.

If your hotel becomes known as a business that cares about and listens to its customers, you’ll gain a positive reputation and again encourage more interaction. That helps improve your content’s performance on social media.

Finally, being quick to respond to comments or mentions of your brand online helps control the response it gets.

In positive cases, this might mean sharing and making the most of a glowing review from a customer or influencer to boost its reach, but in negative contexts, it also means swiftly solving customer problems and preventing any complaints from blowing up and damaging your reputation.

7. Take Action From Comments

Leading on from that last point, make sure you incorporate a feedback loop into your social media strategy.

Recognizing and responding to feedback is one thing, but taking action is another.

Platforms like Facebook and Instagram give your customers a direct way of letting you know what they think about your hotel and the services you provide, offering an incredibly straightforward process for you to identify what your brand needs to improve.

If you want to grow your following and maintain a positive brand image, you should take action based on what your followers are telling you they want to see.

For example, you might share a behind-the-scenes tour of an area of your hotel, which generates lots of interest and gets plenty of comments sharing approval.

As well as sharing this successful post across your channels, consider making a series of similar pieces of content to capitalize on the interest it generated.

Alternatively, perhaps you’ve received multiple reviews or comments stating that your booking system is complicated or that contacting customer services is unnecessarily difficult.

Instead of just resolving these problems on a case-by-case basis, learn from your followers and change the systems causing issues.

In cases where customer comments have prompted action, it can be useful to publicly announce your changes as a result of feedback, as this demonstrates that you listen to your followers and are committed to improving their experience.

8. Learn From Top-Performing Content

Speaking of taking action, you can also adapt and hone your social media strategy based on which of your posts are most successful.

Analyzing engagement and popularity is the best way to identify what your followers want when it comes to content, looking at metrics such as:

• Likes.
• Shares.
• Comments.
• Engagement in the first few hours of posting.
• Reactions of followers in the comments or replies.

Once you’ve identified successful social media content, pull out specific components that may have contributed to this, such as topic, format, length, or tone.

Then, replicate these components across other content in different combinations to get an even clearer idea of what is helping it perform better and develop an approach to social media posts with a high chance of success every time.

9. Invest In Paid Ads On Facebook And Instagram

When creating creative and dynamic social media content, Facebook may not be the obvious choice. Still, it is one of the best channels to invest in if you want to use paid advertising as part of your hotel’s social media marketing strategy.

Paid Facebook ads get your hotel marketing material in front of users that aren’t engaging with your content but belong to a demographic that is part of your target audience.

It’s a great way to grow your following and improve brand recognition, and can also be a fantastic method of increasing conversions if you decide to use retargeting as part of your approach.

Since the same company owns Facebook and Instagram, you can also use the same marketing tools to create paid ads on Instagram.

The audiences you’re targeting and the style of ads you create will likely be different, but Instagram is another great platform to invest in if you want to increase visibility and drive more traffic to your hotel’s website.

This approach to social media marketing can be expensive if not properly monitored, so consider starting with a small budget and testing different strategies until you find one that brings repeated results.

Facebook is a great platform to do this on because it gives you a lot of data on how well your ads are performing, which helps you to drill down into what needs tweaking and what is working well about each approach.

10. Encourage Trip Advisor Reviews

While it might not seem like a typical social media channel, TripAdvisor is a platform with a vast community of followers that can significantly influence your hotel’s image.

As a hotel, you can claim your listing on the website and then update the details to ensure that you have a profile that aligns with your brand image and looks appealing to users browsing the site.

You can also get analytics for your hotel based on TripAdvisor data, which is very useful if you’re using the site as a key part of your marketing strategy.

Another benefit of being active on TripAdvisor is that it allows you to engage with and respond to the reviews that customers leave.

I’ve already spoken above about the benefits that engaging with comments can bring to your image. That idea is particularly relevant on TripAdvisor, where potential customers will be reading reviews and seeing how your brand responds to feedback and praise.

Final Thoughts

Social media marketing in the travel industry used to mean posting on one or two different platforms. Now, it’s a huge aspect of almost every hotel’s advertising strategy.

The key to success is definitely using multiple channels to share content and start conversations, but also choosing these channels carefully based on your target audience, the kind of content they enjoy, and the resources you have available.

Providing relevant and valuable content to potential customers will prevent you from wasting time on approaches that won’t have an impact, and maximize efficiency as you develop a successful strategy.

More resources:

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Featured Image: ASTA Concept/Shutterstock

Google is moving all Google Analytics to GA 4 in July 2023 and wants companies to run on GA 4 by July 2022 to have year-over-year data once the 2023 switchover begins.

Charles Farina of AdSwerve joined me on the SEJ show to discuss Google Analytics 4 and the implementations and customizations which can be used with this newer analytics solution from Google.

You’ll gain insight into what you can expect from GA4, how the two differ, and what you need to do to start setting up for the move.

There are two critical deadlines. For most of you, it will be July 1, when the accessible version of universal processing deprecates, so you can still access your data. Still, you can’t send new data to it. For 360 or the paid customers, it’s going to be, I believe, October 1 of next year, which is when that version deprecates. –Charles Farina, 3:23

If you’re not using GA4 currently, it will be a big potential challenge for you in the future because when you switch over, you won’t be able to do a year-over-year analysis in it. –Charles Farina, 5:42

The thing with Google Analytics was it would seem it should never be used as the record source. You shouldn’t use it to report to your boss how many purchases your business had because that should come from your purchase database like Shopify or wherever that source is. –Charles Farina, 31:11

[00:00] – A background on Charles & why he loves analytics.
[04:58] – Will data be lost if you don’t transition in time?
[06:14] – Will you lose the data you track before July 1?
[09:09] – Is there an easy way to migrate the GA Universal Analytics to GA4?
[11:15] – Recommendation for migrating in mass?
[14:02] – Pros and cons of GA4 as compared to Universal Analytics.
[18:39] – Will bounce rate be eliminated?
[22:50] – Differences in what’s seen on Google Console vs. Analytics?
[27:02] – Will there be more explanation on direct traffic?
[31:04] – What is directionality?
[33:07] – Ways to integrate Google My Business into GA4.
[35:17] – Is dual tagging recommended?
[39:01] – Three concepts of attribution in GA4.
[42:05] – Will Data Studio be recalibrated?
[43:21] – State of UTMs.

Resources mentioned:
Measure Slack – https://www.measure.chat/

It’s a crucial time that we’re having this conversation now because to your question, GA4 uses an entirely new data model, requiring a new implementation to get data into that product. So, in short, it doesn’t carry forward any of the data you’ve collected in the past on the old version.–Charles Farina, 5:06

The best practice has been until now is that you should try and run both versions side by side so that you can have 13 months of data in the new platform and eventually make it very easy to switch over now.–Charles Farina, 5:29

Take a little time out of your day just to learn a little bit more and a little bit more about how to utilize reporting and everything else. –Loren Baker, 8:00

For more content like this, subscribe to our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/searchenginejournal

Connect with Charles Farina:

Charles is an innovative consultant with extensive experience in helping clients, analysts and marketers unlock the full potential of their business on Google’s marketing platform & Cloud.

With more than a decade of experience, he has helped organizations worldwide understand their online presence through Google Analytics. He’s done this by implementing hundreds of training sessions for enterprises, including GoPro, Starbucks & Glassdoor, among others!

His contributions to the Google Analytics partner community earned him an excellence award. In addition to being a leading contributor on Measure Slack and Twitter, Charles can also be found at an ice rink playing hockey.

Connect with Charles on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charlesfarina/
Follow him on Twitter: https://twitter.com/charlesfarina

Connect with Loren Baker, Founder of Search Engine Journal:

Follow him on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/lorenbaker
Connect with him on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lorenbaker

Crawling enterprise sites has all the complexities of any normal crawl plus several additional factors that need to be considered before beginning the crawl.

The following approaches show how to accomplish a large-scale crawl and achieve the given objectives, whether it’s part of an ongoing checkup or a site audit.

1. Make The Site Ready For Crawling

An important thing to consider before crawling is the website itself.

It’s helpful to fix issues that may slow down a crawl before starting the crawl.

That may sound counterintuitive to fix something before fixing it but when it comes to really big sites, a small problem multiplied by five million becomes a significant problem.

Adam Humphreys, the founder of Making 8 Inc. digital marketing agency, shared a clever solution he uses for identifying what is causing a slow TTFB (time to first byte), a metric that measures how responsive a web server is.

A byte is a unit of data. So the TTFB is the measurement of how long it takes for a single byte of data to be delivered to the browser.

TTFB measures the amount of time between a server receiving a request for a file to the time that the first byte is delivered to the browser, thus providing a measurement of how fast the server is.

A way to measure TTFB is to enter a URL in Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool, which is powered by Google’s Lighthouse measurement technology.

Adam shared: “So a lot of times, Core Web Vitals will flag a slow TTFB for pages that are being audited. To get a truly accurate TTFB reading one can compare the raw text file, just a simple text file with no html, loading up on the server to the actual website.

Throw some Lorem ipsum or something on a text file and upload it then measure the TTFB. The idea is to see server response times in TTFB and then isolate what resources on the site are causing the latency.

More often than not it’s excessive plugins that people love. I refresh both Lighthouse in incognito and web.dev/measure to average out measurements. When I see 30–50 plugins or tons of JavaScript in the source code, it’s almost an immediate problem before even starting any crawling.”

When Adam says he’s refreshing the Lighthouse scores, what he means is that he’s testing the URL multiple times because every test yields a slightly different score (which is due to the fact that the speed at which data is routed through the Internet is constantly changing, just like how the speed of traffic is constantly changing).

So what Adam does is collect multiple TTFB scores and average them to come up with a final score that then tells him how responsive a web server is.

If the server is not responsive, the PageSpeed Insights tool can provide an idea of why the server is not responsive and what needs to be fixed.

2. Ensure Full Access To Server: Whitelist Crawler IP

Firewalls and CDNs (Content Delivery Networks) can block or slow down an IP from crawling a website.

So it’s important to identify all security plugins, server-level intrusion prevention software, and CDNs that may impede a site crawl.

Typical WordPress plugins to add an IP to the whitelist are Sucuri Web Application Firewall (WAF) and Wordfence.

3. Crawl During Off-Peak Hours

Crawling a site should ideally be unintrusive.

Under the best-case scenario, a server should be able to handle being aggressively crawled while also serving web pages to actual site visitors.

But on the other hand, it could be useful to test how well the server responds under load.

This is where real-time analytics or server log access will be useful because you can immediately see how the server crawl may be affecting site visitors, although the pace of crawling and 503  server responses are also a clue that the server is under strain.

If it’s indeed the case that the server is straining to keep up then make note of that response and crawl the site during off-peak hours.

A CDN should in any case mitigate the effects of an aggressive crawl.

4. Are There Server Errors?

The Google Search Console Crawl Stats report should be the first place to research if the server is having trouble serving pages to Googlebot.

Any issues in the Crawl Stats report should have the cause identified and fixed before crawling an enterprise-level website.

Server error logs are a gold mine of data that can reveal a wide range of errors that may affect how well a site is crawled. Of particular importance is being able to debug otherwise invisible PHP errors.

5. Server Memory

Perhaps something that’s not routinely considered for SEO is the amount of RAM (random access memory) that a server has.

RAM is like short-term memory, a place where a server stores information that it’s using in order to serve web pages to site visitors.

A server with insufficient RAM will become slow.

So if a server becomes slow during a crawl or doesn’t seem to be able to cope with a crawling then this could be an SEO problem that affects how well Google is able to crawl and index web pages.

Take a look at how much RAM the server has.

A VPS (virtual private server) may need a minimum of 1GB of RAM.

However, 2GB to 4GB of RAM may be recommended if the website is an online store with high traffic.

More RAM is generally better.

If the server has a sufficient amount of RAM but the server slows down then the problem might be something else, like the software (or a plugin) that’s inefficient and causing excessive memory requirements.

6. Periodically Verify The Crawl Data

Keep an eye out for crawl anomalies as the website is crawled.

Sometimes the crawler may report that the server was unable to respond to a request for a web page, generating something like a 503 Service Unavailable server response message.

So it’s useful to pause the crawl and check out what’s going on that might need fixing in order to proceed with a crawl that provides more useful information.

Sometimes it’s not getting to the end of the crawl that’s the goal.

The crawl itself is an important data point, so don’t feel frustrated that the crawl needs to be paused in order to fix something because the discovery is a good thing.

7. Configure Your Crawler For Scale

Out of the box, a crawler like Screaming Frog may be set up for speed which is probably great for the majority of users. But it’ll need to be adjusted in order for it to crawl a large website with millions of pages.

Screaming Frog uses RAM for its crawl which is great for a normal site but becomes less great for an enterprise-sized website.

Overcoming this shortcoming is easy by adjusting the Storage Setting in Screaming Frog.

This is the menu path for adjusting the storage settings:

Configuration > System > Storage > Database Storage

If possible, it’s highly recommended (but not absolutely required) to use an internal SSD (solid-state drive) hard drive.

Most computers use a standard hard drive with moving parts inside.

An SSD is the most advanced form of hard drive that can transfer data at speeds from 10 to 100 times faster than a regular hard drive.

Using a computer with SSD results will help in achieving an amazingly fast crawl which will be necessary for efficiently downloading millions of web pages.

To ensure an optimal crawl it’s necessary to allocate 4 GB of RAM and no more than 4 GB for a crawl of up to 2 million URLs.

For crawls of up to 5 million URLs, it is recommended that 8 GB of RAM are allocated.

Adam Humphreys shared: “Crawling sites is incredibly resource intensive and requires a lot of memory. A dedicated desktop or renting a server is a much faster method than a laptop.

I once spent almost two weeks waiting for a crawl to complete. I learned from that and got partners to build remote software so I can perform audits anywhere at any time.”

8. Connect To A Fast Internet

If you are crawling from your office then it’s paramount to use the fastest Internet connection possible.

Using the fastest available Internet can mean the difference between a crawl that takes hours to complete to a crawl that takes days.

In general, the fastest available Internet is over an ethernet connection and not over a Wi-Fi connection.

If your Internet access is over Wi-Fi, it’s still possible to get an ethernet connection by moving a laptop or desktop closer to the Wi-Fi router, which contains ethernet connections in the rear.

This seems like one of those “it goes without saying” pieces of advice but it’s easy to overlook because most people use Wi-Fi by default, without really thinking about how much faster it would be to connect the computer straight to the router with an ethernet cord.

9. Cloud Crawling

Another option, particularly for extraordinarily large and complex site crawls of over 5 million web pages, crawling from a server can be the best option.

All normal constraints from a desktop crawl are off when using a cloud server.

Ash Nallawalla, an Enterprise SEO specialist and author, has over 20 years of experience working with some of the world’s biggest enterprise technology firms.

So I asked him about crawling millions of pages.

He responded that he recommends crawling from the cloud for sites with over 5 million URLs.

Ash shared: “Crawling huge websites is best done in the cloud. I do up to 5 million URIs with Screaming Frog on my laptop in database storage mode, but our sites have far more pages, so we run virtual machines in the cloud to crawl them.

Our content is popular with scrapers for competitive data intelligence reasons, more so than copying the articles for their textual content.

We use firewall technology to stop anyone from collecting too many pages at high speed. It is good enough to detect scrapers acting in so-called “human emulation mode.” Therefore, we can only crawl from whitelisted IP addresses and a further layer of authentication.”

Adam Humphreys agreed with the advice to crawl from the cloud.

He said: “Crawling sites is incredibly resource intensive and requires a lot of memory. A dedicated desktop or renting a server is a much faster method than a laptop. I once spent almost two weeks waiting for a crawl to complete.

I learned from that and got partners to build remote software so I can perform audits anywhere at any time from the cloud.”

10. Partial Crawls

A technique for crawling large websites is to divide the site into parts and crawl each part according to sequence so that the result is a sectional view of the website.

Another way to do a partial crawl is to divide the site into parts and crawl on a continual basis so that the snapshot of each section is not only kept up to date but any changes made to the site can be instantly viewed.

So rather than doing a rolling update crawl of the entire site, do a partial crawl of the entire site based on time.

This is an approach that Ash strongly recommends.

Ash explained: “I have a crawl going on all the time. I am running one right now on one product brand. It is configured to stop crawling at the default limit of 5 million URLs.”

When I asked him the reason for a continual crawl he said it was because of issues beyond his control which can happen with businesses of this size where many stakeholders are involved.

Ash said: “For my situation, I have an ongoing crawl to address known issues in a specific area.”

11. Overall Snapshot: Limited Crawls

A way to get a high-level view of what a website looks like is to limit the crawl to just a sample of the site.

This is also useful for competitive intelligence crawls.

For example, on a Your Money Or Your Life project I worked on I crawled about 50,000 pages from a competitor’s website to see what kinds of sites they were linking out to.

I used that data to convince the client that their outbound linking patterns were poor and showed them the high-quality sites their top-ranked competitors were linking to.

So sometimes, a limited crawl can yield enough of a certain kind of data to get an overall idea of the health of the overall site.

12. Crawl For Site Structure Overview

Sometimes one only needs to understand the site structure.

In order to do this faster one can set the crawler to not crawl external links and internal images.

There are other crawler settings that can be un-ticked in order to produce a faster crawl so that the only thing the crawler is focusing on is downloading the URL and the link structure.

13. How To Handle Duplicate Pages And Canonicals

Unless there’s a reason for indexing duplicate pages, it can be useful to set the crawler to ignore URL parameters and other URLs that are duplicates of a canonical URL.

It’s possible to set a crawler to only crawl canonical pages.  But if someone set paginated pages to canonicalize to the first page in the sequence then you’ll never discover this error.

For a similar reason, at least on the initial crawl, one might want to disobey noindex tags in order to identify instances of the noindex directive on pages that should be indexed.

14. See What Google Sees

As you’ve no doubt noticed, there are many different ways to crawl a website consisting of millions of web pages.

A crawl budget is how much resources Google devotes to crawling a website for indexing.

The more webpages are successfully indexed the more pages have the opportunity to rank.

Small sites don’t really have to worry about Google’s crawl budget.

But maximizing Google’s crawl budget is a priority for enterprise websites.

In the previous scenario illustrated above, I advised against respecting noindex tags.

Well for this kind of crawl you will actually want to obey noindex directives because the goal for this kind of crawl is to get a snapshot of the website that tells you how Google sees the entire website itself.

Google Search Console provides lots of information but crawling a website yourself with a user agent disguised as Google may yield useful information that can help improve getting more of the right pages indexed while discovering which pages Google might be wasting the crawl budget on.

For that kind of crawl, it’s important to set the crawler user agent to Googlebot, set the crawler to obey robots.txt, and set the crawler to obey the noindex directive.

That way, if the site is set to not show certain page elements to Googlebot you’ll be able to see a map of the site as Google sees it.

This is a great way to diagnose potential issues such as discovering pages that should be crawled but are getting missed.

For other sites, Google might be finding its way to pages that are useful to users but might be perceived as low quality by Google, like pages with sign-up forms.

Crawling with the Google user agent is useful to understand how Google sees the site and help to maximize the crawl budget.

Beating The Learning Curve

One can crawl enterprise websites and learn how to crawl them the hard way. These fourteen tips should hopefully shave some time off the learning curve and make you more prepared to take on those enterprise-level clients with gigantic websites.

More resources:

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As digital marketers, it can feel like we’re chasing metrics that continuously move.

While arduous to some, it’s a passion for others. Either way, we’re always looking for the next genre of optimization that can get us closer to our goals.

While chasing bright and shiny marketing trends, obsessing over coveted SEO keyword rankings, creating content, or modifying paid search ads for better CTR, we need to stop and slow down to “see the forest for the trees.”

The core experience of your website that is shared between a user and a search engine is not solely your content; it is your main navigation.

Your main navigation is a vehicle to help a user get to your content and for a search engine to understand the hierarchy of your pages.

More importantly, it helps a user and a search engine understand what is important to your brand and what should be important to them. This is an elemental “salesperson” that is often overlooked.

So often, we traverse websites with way too much information presented in the main navigation which causes confusion.

On the other hand, as many sites have simplified for mobile-first consideration, the main navigation doesn’t provide enough guidance.

As we move forward, you will see several different considerations that should be made in optimizing the website’s main navigation.

Also, it bears mentioning that this process is not a one-person job. While data will tell us key factors in what users want, it takes the participation of multiple parties to exact the best navigational decisions. These include:

• Leadership that can detail the future direction of the organization and what will become important in the future.
• Sales support that can detail what prospects and customers continually ask for.
• SEO providers can detail what is already heavily linked to on the website and what is not.

These seven tips can help you understand how users move through your website, where your navigation is insufficient, and how to improve it.

1. Analyze Google Analytics User Flow

Our first stop in the pursuit of the perfect main navigation is a review of how our current human audience is using our top link structure.

We want to make search engines happy, as well as show our content preference, but user experience trumps all of that.

Within your Google Analytics profile, navigate to Users Flow within the Audience segment. Initially, we want to see what the common user pathways are on the site.

Do you see defined movement behavior?

It is important here to review where someone landing on the homepage will do next as well as those that land on an internal page.

Are there any commonalities in second-page visit preference?

Next, as we have initially reviewed the Users Flow from an All Users view, create an advanced segment to view those visits that resulted in a conversion or transaction.

Again, do you see defined movement behavior or similar to the common user?

Not to entice “rabbit-holing” in this style of review, but you have the ability to utilize other predefined advanced segments, as well as myriad options to choose from in creating custom advanced segments. You can view the journeys of:

• New versus returning users.
• Specific geographies and languages.
• By referred traffic channels.
• Even those that visited a specific section of the website during their visit.

2. Investigate Internal Site Search

We’ve investigated which navigational links web users traverse through to find content that they are interested in.

Let’s take a moment though to review the content they expect to see but are not finding.

Content that is not readily available or understood in the main navigation. You can do this by analyzing Site Search in Google Analytics.

Take a look at specific search terms the users type in, whether they refine their searches, and their exit rates.

This helps you understand what links and content they expect from your site, and what content they didn’t find in your main navigation.

Digging deeper,  you can also move past overall site search results to analyze data by the user’s respective starting pages. This can provide insight into additional navigational needs that may persist outside of the main navigation.

3. Visualize User Interaction With A Heat Map

In a previous analysis, we took more of a data-driven/numbers approach to understanding user behavior with main navigation.

Now, we step away from such granular behavior data to gain a visual feel of how users react to the main navigation.

To perform this exercise you will need a heat mapping data provider (I prefer Lucky Orange).

Pay close attention not only to the main navigation click movement of the homepage users but also to internal page user actions.

Most importantly, it is critical to review how behaviors change between desktop and mobile users.

Desktop and mobile examples:

You may notice in your application that desktop and mobile behavior may look very different as the example shows.

The presentations between desktop and mobile are often vastly different.

In a compressed display, you have to consider how easy or expandable the main navigation may be. Small font links do not get links.

It is worth mentioning that in your next website redesign, consider desktop navigation mimicking the above example.

This experience allows your desktop users a similar presentation to mobile users, beginning their website journey from only a few foundational points. This is becoming a common design presentation of simplicity.

You’ve done your due diligence in understanding user behavior. This is beginning to show important insight on what links or main navigational elements we must keep.

4. Teach Users What To Expect With Anchor Text

A phrase I have continuously told myself for two decades is to “get out of your head and into your customers.”

For example, your prospective customer doesn’t know what the “XL Custom Suite” is for “Preferred Users.” They are simply trying to understand what kind of services you offer.

Before you capitalize on promoting your branded offering in your main navigation, teach those entering your website what industry, product family, and product genre you serve.

What you should name your main navigational anchors relies heavily on a few areas.

First, enlist your sales, product, and service teams to understand how your customers and prospects refer to product or service offerings. Take on your customers’ mindset and your navigation will be all the better.

Second, keyword research means the world in this overall exercise. You can use Google Ads Keyword Planner or a third-party tool to research keyword demand and volume.

This research can tell you how users that reach your website search for and name your products and services. This information is vital when updating your main navigation anchor text.

Within the SEO realm, this keyword research also helps search engines to understand what product or service sectors you serve.

5. Find Your Top Linked Pages

To this point, we have been focused on user-specific data but let’s now put our attention on SEO.

Those well versed in SEO know that the more you link to content internally, the more it shows precedence on your website. This does not mean that you should spam links throughout your site.

But it’s important to link your pages to one another in the main navigation, footer navigation, supporting internal navigation, as well as cross-linking done in resource content.

However, today we are here to make sure important content is placed in the main navigation.

In Google Search Console within the Links section, specifically Internal Links, you will see Google’s report on the frequency of how you link to your internal site pages.

You obviously can see what internal pages you are linking to in your main navigation, but this report gives you a feel for instances when you may already be linking heavily in other supporting navigation instances.

Remember, we do not want to go too heavy on specific website internal linking but you may find out where you are greatly misrepresented.

If you see an abundance of internal links for pages that you deem less important, you want to investigate why and remove some of the links. Or, move them from primary to secondary navigation.

6. Mind Your SEO Basics

While anchor text does cover the on-page keyword relevancy needs of SEO, the primary main navigation SEO must-haves are rooted in technical considerations.

Think of this as the factor that surrounds the “efficiency of the crawl.”

Google and Bing have made great strides over the years in crawling and indexing JavaScript, but I still would steer clear of this style of navigation.

If you are accidentally robots.txt-excluding JavaScript on-site or not using preferred deployment such as Progressive Enhancement, you run the risk of possessing a main navigation that is difficult for a search engine to crawl.

The best practice is to ensure that your main navigation is constructed in an HTML format or what is commonly referred to as “a href” referenced links.

There is one mistake in the main navigation that occurs all too often.

Over the course of the life of a website, you redirect URLs. It’s easy to forget to update the main navigation to link to current page URLs. So, the main navigation link goes to a redirect.

Forcing a crawling search engine to endure a redirect will slow down crawl speed and give a less than efficient crawl for search engines.

To assess this potential issue in your main navigation’s current state, use the Chrome extension Check My Links. This tool will highlight any redirecting (and broken) links that may exist in your main navigation.

As a best practice, this exercise should be executed each time the website is redesigned, both in redesign coding, Q/A, and post deployment.

7. Check What’s Ranking And What’s Not

By reviewing all of your top organic search rankings, you can get a feel for where you likely have sectional or hierarchical gaps.

Linking more so to these internal sections can convey importance to a search engine.

Example:

You may find that your homepage ranks well as well as product sub-category pages, but not the product parent category pages.

This can be caused by drop-down navigation which does a good job of linking to deeper site content, but the parent category is not linked to at all.

This causes a massive disproportion in the amount of linking and perceived importance at deeper site levels vs. parent level category pages.

A good first step is to create keyword buckets based on what composes your main navigation as well as your entire family of offerings.

Assess keyword research just as we did above but also take a look at competitor rankings to understand gaps that may exist.

To Link Or Not To Link

The steps that I have detailed are ultimately a deep dive into understanding what topics your audience has an interest in, what topics they want or expect us to have, as well as what content we need to portray importance to search engines.

As you hopefully take this main navigation audit to heart, pay attention in future months to improvements not only in conversion metrics and SEO rankings but in website user behavior metrics. These include bounce rate, time-on-site, and pages viewed per session.

Ultimately, these touchpoints will be the end-user and search engine’s way of thanking you for your hard work.

More Resources:

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In an open letter released on July 5, 2022, the three search engine chief executives outlined 10 principles to enable internet users to change their default search engine effectively.

The release, entitled “10 Principles for Fair Choice Screens and Effective Switching Mechanisms,” comes on the same day the European Parliament adopts the Digital Services Act (DSA).

This groundbreaking political agreement aims to protect consumers by establishing a new standard to hold dominant online platforms, or gatekeepers, liable for illegal and harmful content. Companies designated as gatekeepers include Google, Meta, and Twitter.

Fair Choice Seeks to Break Away from Gatekeeper Defaults

The letter, signed by Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of DuckDuckGo, Christian Kroll, CEO of Ecosia, and Corinne Lejbowicz, president of Qwant, calls for a set of 10 “common-sense” principles that will improve online user experience.

The executives state in the letter:

“Choice screens and effective switching mechanisms are crucial tools that empower users and enable competition in the search engine and browser markets. Without strict adherence to both clear rules and principles for fair choice screens and effective switching mechanisms, gatekeeping firms could choose to circumvent their legal obligations.”

The principles outlined suggest that users should have a choice screen for search engines, web browsers, and virtual assistants upon initial platform use. They also call for these screens to be offered periodically, at any time when “users are in the mindset to change core services, and major software updates can reset or affect gatekeeper-controlled search and browser default settings.”

It also stressed switching services should be applied across access points, be prominently displayed as top-level settings, and be free of charge.

Adoption Could Cut into Google’s Market Share

Should these principles be adopted, it could lead to the signatory companies and other search engines claiming a more significant piece of the search engine market. Google currently accounts for more than 90% of all internet searches worldwide.

This could have rippling effects through the search engine optimization and digital marketing industries, as optimization tactics would have to be adjusted for these other algorithms.

However, one of the conditions of the DSA is to enforce increased transparency measures on online platforms, including revealing how algorithms work for recommendations. The goal is to create a more level playing field between gatekeepers and smaller companies.

Additionally, as the three signatories, along with other smaller search engines, do not collect personal data about users, digital marketers would be required to find other means of targeting display ads, PPC, and other campaigns that rely on Google data.

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Source: DuckDuckGo

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If you want to increase traffic to your WordPress site, boost your SEO, or bring in more sales from your WooCommerce products, you will benefit from installing a WordPress review plugin on your website.

By having reviews for your services or products and increasing social proof, you’re more likely to draw new customers to your business and retain existing ones.

Reviews are one of the most powerful sources of marketing and the best part is, they’re also free!

Collecting reviews from your customers and clients is also a great source of feedback.

This will allow you to make changes and improvements to your products and customer experience as well as form a relationship with your customers.

Not only does this increase the chance that they will become a repeat customer but they will also be more willing to recommend you and your services or products to others.

Choosing A WordPress Review Plugin

As with choosing any plugin, you want to make sure the review plugin you install on your WordPress site is going to be reliable and safe.

Before installing a review plugin, first, make sure that it has good reviews and ratings.

When browsing plugins, you will see a star rating and in brackets will be the number of reviews.

The higher the star rating and the number of reviews, the better.

You also want to check how many active installations the plugin has.

Again, the higher the number of active installations, the better, as this means that more people are using the plugin on their website.

And lastly, make sure the plugin has been tested with the latest version of WordPress.

Here are my top six WordPress plugin recommendations. These will provide an attractive and easy-to-use review process for your website.

All of the listed review plugins have been tested with WordPress 6.0 and have excellent ratings among over 20,000 users.

1. WP Review Pro

If you are looking for a truly comprehensive review plugin, you cannot go wrong with WP Review Pro.

WP Review Free includes all of the basic features, but it is well worth the $67 to upgrade to the pro version for unlimited sites to unlock the full feature set.

With WP Review Pro, you get unlimited color selections, and a variety of rating options, such as stars, percentages, thumbs up/down, points, or a circle rating.

The plugin supports 19 rich snippets and works seamlessly with Facebook, Google, and Yelp reviews in order to extend your reach.

Highly customizable pre-defined designs make it easy to match your branding or other popular review platforms.

2. Site Reviews

Site Reviews is a simple review plugin that allows users to leave a review through a customized form.

Reviews use a 1 to 5-star system and are filterable.

You can also pin favorable reviews to the top so that they are the first reviews that customers see.

Site Reviews can also be used with WooCommerce via a free add-on to replace the WooCommerce Reviews with Site Reviews for the products in your WooCommerce store.

The plugin can be used as a shortcode, custom Gutenberg block, or widget and it supports native Elementor widgets to accommodate various theme and builder types and is free.

3. Plugin For Google Reviews

Plugin for Google Reviews specifically displays ratings and reviews from Google, using a public Google API.

The free version will limit you to displaying five Google reviews while the Business version, which runs $85/year for a single site, uses an API for your Google Business account, allowing unlimited Google Reviews.

The upgrade will also give you unlimited Yelp and Facebook reviews and will sync your accounts for automatic updates.

You can also mix and match reviews and customers can leave a review through your website for the other platforms.

Want to put your best reviews at the top?

Use the filter feature to display reviews in the order you want.

Five themes are available and reviews can be displayed using a widget, shortcode, or Universal HTML/JavaScript.

4. Customer Reviews For WooCommerce

The Customer Reviews for WooCommerce plugin allows customers who have shopped in your store to leave written reviews and photos to increase your social proof and bring in more customers.

You can have an email automatically sent when a customer makes a purchase asking them to leave a review. You can even send coupons to those that do leave a review.

The plugin also integrates with a service to verify the authenticity of reviews.

Customer Reviews for WooCommerce uses ratings and voting review types, as well as customer-submitted photos. Reviews can also be filtered.

There is a free Basic version but for more customization and professional features, you will want to consider the Professional version for $49.99/year.

5. Starfish Reviews

The Starfish Reviews plugin uses a funnel system to sort positive and negative reviews.

The plugin is set up in the WordPress dashboard and can link to Google, Yelp, Facebook, and a number of other third-party review platforms.

In the first step of the review, a positive or negative review choice is shown.

If the positive review is chosen, you give the customer single or multiple options of where they can leave their review.

If a negative review is chosen, the feedback will be sent back to you and they can be prompted for more information.

Depending on the restrictions of the review platform(s) you are using, you can choose not to allow them to post a negative review or allow it.

A very limited version of the plugin is available for free on wordpress.org and Starfish Reviews also has multiple paid tiers starting at $37 per month.

6. Taqyeem

The Taqyeem WordPress Review Plugin creates beautiful custom reviews that can be added to pages, posts, and custom post types.

You have unlimited color and review criteria customizations with a choice of over 500 Google Fonts to match a variety of branding.

Rating styles are points, percentages, and stars and multiple options are available for the rating image. Reviews can be displayed by Best, Recent, and Random.

The Taqyeem plugin uses Google Rich Snippets for optimal viewing through search engines.

The plugin has a one-time purchase price of $29 through CodeCanyon, which includes six months of support. Additional support can be purchased.

Choosing The Best WordPress Review Plugin In 2022

With over 1,000 WordPress review plugins available to choose from, it can be hard to know where to begin.

When choosing any plugin for your WordPress site, be mindful of the star rating, reviews, active installations, and compatibility with the latest version of WordPress.

There are plenty of free review plugins for WordPress that are reputable and reliable, but paid review plugins may offer the additional features that you require.

Displaying reviews from customers and clients on your website is great for marketing and establishing trust with your audience so it’s worth taking the time to choose a review plugin that is going to work seamlessly on your WordPress website.

More resources: 

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If you’re managing SEO for clients, then you know how important it is to deliver accurate and insightful reports. You’ve done the work, now you have to show it.

Your clients rely on you to give them the relevant information they need to make informed decisions about their marketing efforts going forward. The SEO report is their (and your) roadmap.

Getting it right every time is a matter of creating a system you can consistently mimic for each client.

So, what goes into making perfect SEO reports? These are the seven essential elements.

1. Traffic: Sources

Is increasing organic traffic to their website your client’s main goal? Start your SEO reports with traffic.

If using Google Analytics, you’ll also want to utilize the Source/Medium section of the traffic report for this part of the report. It will provide you with more information on where your visitors are coming from, helping your client determine where they should spend their time and money.

Ensure that mobile sources are also included in this part of the report since mobile phones made up about 63% of organic search engine visits in 2021.

This part of the report will look something like the image below. To get there quickly, go to Acquisition > All Traffic > Channels.

2. Conversion Rate & Progress On Goals

Massive flows of site traffic are great, but if you don’t know what your visitors want or how they want to be engaged with your content, then even all the traffic in the world won’t help you get very far.

In other words, if you can’t convert your visitors into customers, no amount of traffic will help you.

Conversion rate is probably one of the most important key performance indicators (KPIs) to your clients, so tuck this near the front of your report for easy access.

Once you’ve discovered the conversion rate, you’ll be more equipped to explain what comes next in the report and describe why they’re seeing certain insights and data points.

To demonstrate conversion rate to a customer, select certain goals that you want to track as “conversions.”

In this example, one non-profit client used landings on their “Thanks for the donation!” page to track completed donations.

Google Analytics will count each landing as a donation, helping to complete the goals on the Goal Completion portion.

To get to Goal Completion, go to Conversions > Goals > Overview.

For example:

3. Top Performing Pages

You probably know where your visitors are coming from, but it’s vital to learn where they’re heading on your site.

If someone arrives at your site organically via Google, that’s awesome; however, if you know they clicked on your most recent blog post, that is way more valuable.

You always want to include top-performing pages so your client knows what’s working and what isn’t. There are usually lessons they can learn from pages that are doing well and apply them to pages that could use help to attract (and keep!) traffic.

One way to pull data from Google Analytics to illustrate this is via the Landing Pages section.

To get there, first, go to Behavior, then Site Content, and Landing Pages. You’ll see which URLs are hot and which ones aren’t quite.

4. Page Speed Insights

Take a quick break from Google Analytics for this part and head over to a tool called PageSpeed Insights from Google. It’s a completely free tool that will show your clients how fast their pages are loading and any performance issues they may be able to fix to improve their results.

Sometimes, it’s something as small as a video with a file size that’s too large. This simple quick fix can get your pages up quickly.

Page speed hasn’t always been a high priority, but as user expectations are becoming more and more demanding with their online experiences, getting your pages to load quickly is paramount to keeping visitors on your site.

Google even tells us that the probability of someone bouncing off a website increases by 32% if load time goes from a one-second load to a three-second load.

5. Bounce Rate And Dwell Time

Knowing that visitors have come to your site, clicked on certain pages, and in some cases, converted is incredibly helpful.

But to complete the full picture, your client needs to know how long people are staying on their site and how many of them are clicking away after the first landing page.

Dwell time is the time someone spends on a website page when they come from an organic search. Are they exploring other pages from there, or looking for a quick answer?

A high bounce rate isn’t always a bad thing, though.

If their landing page was one chock full of internal links to other pages on your site and they bounced quickly, it probably means they’ve moved on to exploring these outbound links.

In this section, focus on bounce rate for core site pages with rich content like videos. They should be staying for a while to consume the content.

6. Rankings And Backlinks

Backlinks can be powerful tools for websites struggling to make progress in their SEO rankings.

You can find many tools to track links you have, which is helpful because it can identify potential SEO opportunities.

If you’ve helped your client get backlinks as part of your SEO strategy, this section of the report is where you’ll show their impact.

As for rankings, you should include where the site ranks for keywords that you’ve determined are most valuable to the client.

Just keep in mind that rankings are no longer the end-all and be-all of SEO – we now know that countless factors, such as history, user geographic location, and personalization can all impact rankings.

7. Recommendations And Next Steps

Recommendations may not be the first thing that springs to mind when underneath a mountain of data, but recommendations and next steps are ultimately what the client is looking for at the end of this report.

Your next steps and recommendations will use all of the data you’ve pulled and apply them to the strategy moving forward so there’s an actionable plan to improve the shortcomings and maximize success.

A Final Note

The best way to show your progress through your SEO reports is to compare results from previous report periods.

Choose whichever frequency works for you and your client – quarter over quarter, year over year, etc. – and use it consistently to show growth.

Put all of these aspects together, and you’ll nail the perfect SEO report every time.

More Resources:

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