For reference, here’s the original <title> tag:

You may be feeling confused and more than a little frustrated after Google’s recent title rewrite update, but why is Google rewriting title,s and what can we learn from it? I explored over 50,000 <title> tags to find out.

Title rewrites by the numbers

All of the data was collected from the MozCast 10,000-keyword tracking set on August 25, 2021, and compared to original title tags collected using Screaming Frog (we only attempted one collection, since these were third-party sites). Here’s a brief rundown:

• 85,340 page-one results

• 71,603 unique URLs

• 57,832 <title> tags

• 33,733 rewrites

You might be doing the math right now, realizing that 58% of the <title> tags we tracked were rewritten, and rushing to Twitter to express your outrage. Please don’t — at least not yet.

First, there are bound to be quirks, like cached <title> tags that don’t match the current site, sites that blocked or modified our requests, cloaking, etc. I suspect those cases are relatively rare, but we can’t discount them.

Second, “rewrite” is a tricky word, because it implies a meaningful difference between the original version and rewritten version. Of this data set, over 13,000 <title> tags were over 600 pixels wide, the physical limit of Google’s desktop display title. Over 7,000 showed simple (...) truncation. Google has been doing this for years. Here’s an example from October 2011 (via the Wayback Machine):

Are these really “rewrites” in any meaningful sense? To understand what Google’s doing, and how it differs from the past, we need to dig deep into the unique scenarios at play.

Scenario #1: Simple truncation (...)

Google can only fit so much on one line. That limit has changed over the years, but the basic fact remains. In many cases, <title> tags are just too long, and that’s not always a bad thing or necessarily spammy. Here’s one example and its corresponding search result:

This is a wordy <title> tag and we could certainly argue the merits of academic vs. marketing copy, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with or spammy about it. It simply doesn’t fit the available space, and Google has to account for that.

Scenario #2: Complex truncation (...)

Even prior to the recent update, we saw a less common variant of this scenario, where Google would truncate a title and then append the brand after the “...”:

In this example, Google truncated the tag with “...” but then re-inserted the brand. Note that the original pipe (|) was replaced with a hyphen (-).

Scenario #3: Rewrite truncation

More recently (and possibly beginning with the August 16th update), Google is truncating long titles without displaying ellipses (...) and, in some cases, taking the display title from other elements of the page. For example:

This text actually appears in the middle of the <title> tag, but it’s possible that it was extracted from somewhere else on the target page. I would argue that this is a pretty successful truncation that serves the search query (in this case, “Dodd Frank”).

Scenario #4: Keyword stuffing

This scenario tends to overlap with 1-3 — sometimes titles are too long and have clearly been stuffed with keywords. I can’t speak to anyone’s motivations, but here’s an example that seems pretty egregious:

Mistakes were made, etc. Interestingly, this rewrite seems to be pulled from an <H2> on the page, but an entire paragraph is wrapped in that <H2>.

These are fun. Let’s do another one:

This reminds me of that joke, “An SEO walks into a bar, grill, tavern, pub, public house…”. In this case, it appears that Google is taking the truncated title from the primary <H1> on the page. It’s hard to fault Google for rewriting either of these examples.

These extreme examples can be entertaining, but it appears Google has also made some significant changes around less-extreme situations where phrases are strung together with separators like pipes (|). Here’s one example:

While this <title> tag does appear over-optimized, it’s obviously a far less problematic example than the previous two. Google seems to be taking a dim view of pipes (|) in general with this new update. In our data set, over 10,000 titles with pipes were rewritten, and nearly 6,000 of those were below the pixel-width limit.

In some of these cases, the original <title> tags simply appear to be reflecting the site’s information architecture. Take this example from Zales:

While you could make an argument that echoing the site’s IA isn’t particularly helpful to searchers, there’s nothing spammy or misleading about this <title> tag. It appears Google may be getting too aggressive with rewriting delimited phrases.

Scenario #5: Brand name added

For a while now, Google has been appending brand names to the end of display titles in some cases. Here’s one example:

We don’t know exactly what signals Google uses to make this call. It could be a function of brand authority or based on measuring some kind of SERP engagement signals. In the case of a high-authority brand like WebMD that’s only five letters long, this change may be beneficial.

What about long brand names, though? Consider the example below:

Here, Google has exchanged a naturally-sounding and relevant title for a combination of the <H1> content and the brand name. Unfortunately, the addition of the 27-character brand name severely limits the rest of the display title. Fortunately, across a few hundred brand name addition examples I reviewed, this appears to be a rare occurrence.

Scenario #6: Brand name moved

One surprisingly common occurrence since the August 16th update is when Google takes a <title> tag with the brand name at the end and moves it to the beginning. For example:

Here, Google has moved the brand name to the front, followed by a colon (:), and has also shortened “I.T.” to “IT”. This version (with “IT”) is nowhere to be found in the page source.

On occasion, Google seems to be doing the opposite, and moving a brand name at the beginning of the <title> tag to the end of the display title. Here’s one example:

Unlike the back-to-front move, I believe this example is actually a variant of scenario #3. Google appears to be truncating the <title> tag and appending the brand name to the end of it. The removal of the brand name from the front is probably an accident of truncation.

Scenario #7: <Title> is too short

Channeling a bit of Goldilocks, sometimes your <title> tag is too long for Google and sometimes it’s too short. Here’s an example from a recipe result:

This one’s an odd duck (pun intended) — in addition to appending the brand name, Google has expanded the title, and that exact phrase appears nowhere in any major page elements.

Here’s an example where Google rewrote a brand-only <title> tag:

Again, this was pulled from an <H1> tag on the page. What’s unclear is whether Google is rewriting these titles because they’re too short or because they aren’t particularly relevant to the query space. This brings us to Scenario #8:

Scenario #8: Relevance issues

At this point we don’t really know the exact trigger for a rewrite, but it does seem like some titles are being rewritten because they aren’t a good fit to query intent. Sadly, dozens of pages in this data set still had some variant of “Home” as their <title> tag:

In the majority of these cases, Google is rewriting the display title as the brand name. Of course, “Home” is also potentially just too short. Here’s an example of a longer <title> tag where relevance might have come into play:

Putting aside the odd orphaned pipe (|) at the beginning, I’d argue that this <title> tag is generic marketing copy that doesn’t do much to inform searchers.

Scenario #8.5: Marketing lingo

That last case led me down a bit of a rabbit hole, and I’m not sure if this is a sub-case of #8 or a separate phenomenon. There were about 700 cases in our data set where Google rewrote a <title> tag with the word “Best” in it to remove that word. Here’s another example:

Once again, Google pulled the <H1> from the target page, but the rewrite and the original <title> tag share very similar intent and format. It’s possible that Google is taking a dim view of superlatives like “Best,” but that’s only a theory at this point.

Note that there were over 3,000 <title> tags in our data set where “Best” did not get removed, but some of those were contextually important, like “Best Man Speech” or “Best Buy” (the electronics retailer).

Speaking of superlatives, here’s an amusing one:

I think we can probably all agree that “Must Do Super Fun Things to Do” is pushing the envelope. Again, we can’t really prove what specifically is triggering this rewrite, but the pattern here is interesting.

We saw some similar patterns around marketing terms like “cheap,” “official,” and “2021.” Here’s the kicker, though: in some cases, Google is taking <title> tags without superlatives and adding them back in. For example:

Here, Google took a perfectly nice <title> tag, and chose the <H1> that included both “Best” and “Bespoke” instead. This begs the question — are <title> tags with words like “Best” being rewritten because of specific content, or are they being rewritten because of other factors, like length or keyword-stuffing, that just happen to be correlated with that content?

Scenario #9: Query-based rewrites

We’ve long suspected that Google would rewrite some display titles in real-time based on their relevance (or irrelevance) to the search query. In Google’s explainer about the August 16th update, though, they stated the following:

Last week, we introduced a new system of generating titles for web pages. Before this, titles might change based on the query issued. This generally will no longer happen with our new system.

So, are we seeing any evidence of query-based rewrites after the August 16th update? One way to test this is to look for pages/URLs that rank for multiple keywords and show different display titles (even though, being one URL, they share a <title> tag). For example:

The first result appeared on a search for “department of corrections,” and the second result on a search for “prison inmate search.” While this seems interesting at first glance, these results were collected across two different locations (and probably two different data centers). When I attempted to reproduce this difference from a single location, I only got back a single (rewritten) display title.

In our data set, only 96 URLs showed multiple display titles and only one of those showed more than two variants. In every case I spot-checked from a single location, those variants disappeared. It appears that Google really has removed or dramatically reduced query-based rewriting.

How do you prevent rewrites?

There’s currently no way to tell Google not to rewrite your <title> tag (although this latest update has the industry buzzing for that ability), but we can use the scenarios above to develop a few guidelines.

(*) Take a deep breath

Changing your <title> tags at scale is a time-consuming job and carries risk. Before you overreact, collect the data. Are your display titles even being affected? Are these changes impacting your click-thru rate or organic search traffic? Is that impact negative? Frankly, we also don’t know when and how Google might adjust this update. If you’re seeing serious negative consequences, then definitely take action, but don’t panic.

(1) Mind the length limit

While Moz tools track <title> tags that exceed the length limit, my advice the past couple of years has basically been “Be aware of the limit, but don’t lose sleep over it.” Truncation isn’t the kiss of death, as long as the important bits of the <title> tag appear before the cut-off.

Now, I may have to revise that advice. With truncation, you at least control the pieces that happen before the cut-off. Now that Google is potentially rewriting long titles completely, you could end up with substantially different display titles.

(2) Don’t keyword-stuff titles

I hope that most of the people reading this article aren’t engaging in old-school keyword-stuffing, but we may have to be even more careful now, especially with stringing phrases together using delimiters like pipes (|). I hope Google tones down this particular case, as a lot of non-spammy titles seems to be getting caught up in the mix.

(3) Write for searcher intent

This was good advice long before the recent update. Frankly, no one cares about your marketing copy when they’re trying to find something and scanning results. Write for the average intent of the audience you’re trying to attract. It’ll reduce the chances your display titles get rewritten, but it’ll also drive relevant clicks and engagement.

For now, I think the best thing you can do is be aware of the situation and try to assess how much it impacts your site. If the impact is minimal, there are far better uses of your SEO efforts than rewriting hundreds of <title> tags. One exception to this advice is if your CMS is creating a pattern of problematic titles. In that case, a small tweak (or a few small tweaks) could yield sizable results.

WordStream published a useful, early case study about how they spotted a problematic rewrite and fixed it. I think this approach — consciously focusing on high-impact pages — is a good one with potentially high ROI.

If you'd like to take a crack at the raw data, I've made it available in Google Sheets. These are the 57,832 unique URLs from which were able to extract <title> tags. All data was collected on August 25-26, 2021 on Google.com (en-US) via desktop SERPs. Please note that some <title> tag data may be inaccurate if the sites in question modified or redirected the request. For example, I believe the "Amazon.com" <title> tags with no other text do not properly reflect the original tags.

Users themselves have started to use queries that are longer form, in fact, 29.13% of keywords with 10,001+ monthly searches are made up of three or more words. With the growth of conversational search intent, pillar page strategies have entered the scene to fulfill those queries. By providing umbrella-like content, pillar pages and topic clusters allow for easy categorization and clear indication of authority. 

Sounds easy enough, right? Like anything in the SEO space, pillar page strategies take time and a great deal of planning to do correctly. Let’s break down this process.

What is a pillar page?

A pillar page is a piece of long-form content, like a guide or a white paper, that will serve as the basis for topic clusters on a particular topic. It gives basic information on its particular topic, with links out to cluster pages that delve deeper into a specific aspect of said topic.

Pillar pages should be thorough in their explanation and be framed as an early-stage piece of content. The cluster pages that the pillar page links out to should also link back to the pillar page. (Check out this quick Hubspot guide for some great visualizations.)

What is a cluster page?

Now that we understand the structure of a pillar page, we can better comprehend cluster content. When choosing a topic for your pillar page, you’ll decide what specific keywords within that topic you’d like to rank for. Each keyword then gets its own dedicated page. That dedicated page is a “cluster page”.

Cluster pages can be a blog, a white paper, a solution page — really any piece of content can serve as part of the cluster. Since all of the cluster pages are on the same topic, it should be fairly easy to link out to other related cluster pages as well as to the main pillar page. This strategy not only organizes your content library in a cohesive way, it also creates broader search engine authority.

How to choose a pillar page topic

Choosing the right topic for your pillar page is integral in the success of the strategy. Keywords are still essential in SEO, but topic targeting has become increasingly important as search engines have updated their algorithms. Search engines reward content that is organized by topic, not keywords.

Here are the key steps you need to take in order to choose a pillar page topic that will be successful.

1. Choose a relevant solution

This may seem like an obvious one, but it cannot be stressed enough. Some SEOs get so stuck on finding the right keywords, that they forget about the big picture. Similar to how you would conduct keyword research, think about solutions and topics that your product solves for.

This is where the buyer persona comes into play. What is your buyer searching for, and what questions might they have along the way?

Once you have a list of possible options, choose a topic that is broad enough to be able to create “cluster pages” around. A query that only poses a “yes” or “no” answer will not be suitable for this strategy.

For example, “What is communication?” is too broad of a topic, and “communication between a coworker and boss” is too specific. However, the query “What is effective communication in the workplace?” is broad enough to write a long piece of content on, but also presents opportunities to link out to other areas of workplace communication that are more specific.

2. Analyze the SERP

Oftentimes, we can forget how helpful the SERP can be in identifying related queries. Enter your pillar page topic into the search bar and examine the results.

What sort of questions are being asked in the People Also Ask? Is there a featured snippet? Are there targeted ads on related topics? These are all great indicators that you’ve chosen the right topic. If your pillar page topic brings up none of these, perhaps it is better served as a cluster page, or maybe it isn’t the right topic for you at all.

People Also Ask queries can be great for your pillar page structure as well. Would these questions make sense to answer in your pillar page as H2s or H3s? Are you answering this question in any of your cluster pages? Search engines often give us the answer to our own questions, especially when it comes to related topics.

3. Evaluate your content

Auditing your content can seem like a daunting task, but it’s crucial in the pillar page strategy process. It’s difficult to start writing new content without knowing what content you already have — you wouldn’t want to end up with duplicate content competing against yourself.

Sort your existing content into topics. From there, you can identify pages that are similar. Can you re-prioritize any of the existing content to fit this strategy? Can you combine two pieces of content together? By the end of your content audit, you should be able to identify where your content gaps are.

This is where new content will come in. This process will also eradicate any duplicate content, so the reorganization of your content library will be primed for the best results. A Google Sheet with your library is a safe and easy way to map out this content.

For the pillar page strategy itself, I recommend a Google Sheet with tabs for existing content that needs to be optimized, new content that needs to be written, the structure of the pillar page, as well as current rankings.

Here is an example of how I sort out my overview tab for content regarding a particular pillar page topic:

What are the benefits of a pillar page strategy?

This may seem like a lot of work, which poses the question, is a pillar page strategy actually worth it? The short answer is: yes.

Pillar page strategies force you to take a look at the buyer personas in your industry. If you combine those with topic clusters, you’re going to be answering top of funnel queries, like “what is?”, mid-funnel queries like “benefits of”, and bottom funnel queries like “the best of”. Not only are you creating content that search engines find relevant — you’re creating content for every stage of your buyer’s journey.

This allows your users to easily make their way through the sales funnel and bridge any gap you may have had in your sales process. This strategy can tie content creation to revenue, which is becoming increasingly important in B2B.

Besides the clean-up that you get from the content audit, your website should also experience legitimate SEO benefits. When I implemented my strategy, there was a clear indication that it was working. This strategy was implemented in the middle of February 2021. Both impressions and clicks drastically increased, and continued to climb through the spring: 

Conclusion

Creating a pillar page strategy does not have to be difficult if you follow these easy steps:

1. Use your buyer persona to identify solutions you can easily write diverse content about.

2. Analyze the SERP to understand what sort of questions are being asked and what content is being written around your chosen topic.

3. Audit your content for gaps and optimization opportunities so your team can easily cluster related content together and identify duplicate content.

Pillar pages are crucial to your content strategy as a whole. By identifying the topics for which your company provides solutions, you’ll be able to create long-form content that is posed to answer all questions in the buyer's journey, while improving keyword rankings and domain authority.

It's true that copywriting and content marketing fall under the umbrella of SEO, but if you want to get the most out of your efforts, you need to look at content creation as a department all its own. While it can aid SEO, PPC, and social media strategies, content has its own set of roles and goals to accomplish. Therefore, a content audit and a content SEO audit are two very different things, in my professional opinion.

I’ve been working in digital marketing for six years, helped to build an SEO department from scratch, and have probably written more content than Marcel Proust. My current role is 100% content focused, and while I do incorporate SEO techniques to give my work the best chance of success, my focus is first and foremost on the quality of what I write.

With that in mind, most of this piece revolves around the importance of, and how to carry out, content audits. However, I’ve also included a few ways these can be used to help your SEO team.

Why are content audits useful?

A content audit done once to highlight current issues with a website as part of the pitching process, and then consumed by a wider strategy, will have a short shelf-life of usefulness. However, a content audit that is continuously updated and used to guide next steps has multiple uses, including:

1. An insight into the past

When you take on the management of a website, you might not have the opportunity to speak with the person who managed it before you. You may be able to gain some insights from the site owner, but it is extremely rare that you get the full picture.

A content audit can help you piece together some additional information. The call-to-action on the page, for example, will show what the previous content manager was hoping to achieve.

Where the content is placed on the site will also give you some information:

• Top-level pages will rarely be end-funnel pieces

• Product pages will often be sales-orientated

• Blog posts with internal links will show what pages your predecessor was trying to strengthen.

Etc.

Reviewing historic content topic concentration can also guide you on which product type or services were the most important to either the previous manager or the business owner. This can help you ascertain whether it’s a focus worth continued investment, or if you should move on to something else entirely.

2. Ascertaining at which point content is picked up and becomes successful

It’s easy to write-off (see what I did there?) a content project as failed if you don’t see success in the first few weeks or months of publication. However, as with PR, you may find that a piece that wasn’t considered successful at the time of publishing gets picked up later down the line. Understanding how long pieces take to become “successful” by your standard of measurement will help guide future strategies and prevent current frustrations growing.

3. Guiding current/future strategies

Understanding what worked well previously offers a fantastic insight into what your target audience is looking for. Are there specific trends that you can glean and utilize within your current strategy? Does your target audience respond more to a particular structure or topic?

From the analysis, you will be able to gauge quick wins, whether it's reworking pieces that you believe can perform better, utilizing other marketing methods to promote certain pieces, or scrapping something entirely and starting again. Likewise, you can determine topics to stay away from if necessary.

You can also highlight topic gaps in the current content and discuss these with your client. Perhaps there are certain angles they don't want you to take but forgot to mention. Or your client may give you the go-ahead to create new content to fill these gaps and measure the impact.

It's worth mentioning that you should carefully consider the metrics you’re using to evaluate content performance. There is no point in measuring a top-level informational or educational page against ROI alone, as it will always fail when compared to pages that focus on bookings or purchases. For higher-funnel pages, measuring engagement metrics and assisted conversions will give you better insight into how the page is actually performing.

4. A tool for reporting

While the initial creation of a content audit can be a time-consuming task, maintaining it takes minutes. With that said, we all know that minutes are valuable, and they stack up. Additionally, some clients will always prefer hands-on tasks to be completed and will struggle to see the value in these “admin” types of projects.

Using the audits as part of your reporting will save you time at the beginning of the month (or whenever you send out your reports), particularly if you add an analysis and next steps to your audits ahead of reporting week. That's what I call a winner-winner, vegan chicken dinner situation.

Current content audit recommendations from the SERPs

I reviewed the top-ranking content for the topic "How to do a content audit". I wanted to see what they had in common. While they all made their own points, there were some common recommendations:

This chart essentially works as a step-by-step guide on carrying out an effective content audit already, however, these were largely focused on analyzing content for SEO purposes.

The following audit recommendations can have some applications to SEO (and I do add a few suggestions of my own at the end), but the main aim is to provide insights into your content's quality concerning the reader's experience, and the SEO implications of those, rather than concentrating on ranking or backlinks, for example.

How to start a content audit

Before you even think about exporting and diving into a pool of data, you should first speak with your client. I mentioned earlier that content audits can be time-consuming and that some clients may not be keen on you spending a bulk of your time on this type of analysis.

To get your client on board, I suggest discussing the following:

1. The reason behind the audit

There are multiple reasons you may want to carry out an audit. Are you trying to:

• Guide your content strategy?

• Remove outdated content or update it to boost performance as a quick win?

• Learn what type of content your audience responds best to?

Understanding what your client will find most valuable and acting on that will reduce the time you spend on your audit and increase the likelihood of getting the go-ahead.

2. The type of content you’re going to audit

This is an excellent route to take if the site you’re working on is extensive, as you'll no doubt want to carry out tasks that will move the needle as well as conduct your audit. Speak with the client and decide together whether you should start by analyzing blog posts, e-books and guides, service pages, category or product pages, and create a schedule to work from.

Breaking up your audit by content type will allow you to tackle chunks of the analysis and reporting while still having time to undertake other tasks and add to your content strategy month-over-month.

3. Important goals, CTAs, and metrics

Ask your client what the main website goals are and dig deeper than merely "more sales". In addition to content that targets end-users, there will — or should be — pieces that target every stage of the marketing funnel to either guide a website user to a desired action, or solve their problem or question both pre- and post-sale.

Additionally, understanding what metrics your client cares about most will help hone your audit and any strategies that stem from it.

4. How far back the audit should go

You may want to focus on content published up to a year ago, or you may want to go back as far as possible, but what does your client want? How much budget are they willing to allocate to this project? These are essential questions to ask before you do any audit work.

How to conduct the initial audit

Remember that this audit is for content purposes only. While the SEO team can add their own columns to the spreadsheet afterwards so that all of the information is in one place, you won't necessarily be looking at metrics like backlinks, page speed, or rankings.

1. Export a list of all URLs

Using whichever tools you prefer to find content published during your pre-agreed time-scale.

2. Assign a function to each URL

This could be any function from the marketing sales funnel and will give you insight into what other departments to approach when it comes to content improvements.

For example, pages targeting people in the exposure phase of the funnel that already have quality and engaging content but aren't performing could benefit from optimization from the SEO team. In contrast, you could reach out to the CRO team for pages targeting the conversion phase.

3. Assign a goal and call-to-action

Assign each of these to every page based on the conversation you had with your client. If you struggle to assign a function or a goal, then this is content that can immediately be labelled "to be improved".

4. Make things colorful

Color is an excellent visual aid to understand each page’s health based on your assigned metrics. If, for example, a page doesn't target the call-to-action you set, that cell would be colored red. Once the issue has been resolved, you can change the cell to green. Make sure you download the original so that you have quick evidence of the work you’ve done.

5. Include additional information

You'll want to include the usual metrics based on the assigned page function so that you can analyze how the pieces are performing. These metrics can be traffic, conversions, new or returning users, etc., and color code these, too, based on how well they’re doing.

You may want to implement a sliding color scale and organize it from best-performing to worst-performing, to better show whether a specific topic outperforms or underperforms.

It's also a good idea to include information such as publish dates and authors to find any trends that you can replicate. For example, if one author seems to produce continually high-performing content, perhaps you could speak to them about their process to see if your writers can replicate it.

6. Next steps

Your initial content audit could look something like this, and you should be able to pluck out some next steps to incorporate into your content strategy.

This is my favorite part of the audit, where you give your overall opinion of each page. You can be as detailed or succinct as you like. Here are a couple of examples to give you an idea of what you could look for:

You may find that a product page has very clinical information and could be improved by adding in some emotive content.

Or perhaps a blog post has some really great content, but it is clunky and hard to read; which could easily and quickly be resolved with some restructuring.

A service page may be improved by incorporating content that targets People Also Ask Boxes; answering questions you know a searcher is seeking.

These notes will also give you an idea of the time-frame required to improve these pages. I like to color code the notes in red, amber and green:

• Green means the page is fine (or great) as is, or could be a quick win to target.
• Amber refers to pages that could be improved, but would require more time. It’s not so much a quick win, but the optimizations are worthwhile.
• Red represents pages that should be removed entirely.

Initial content audits should be extremely flexible. The amount of information you include is entirely up to you and can change from client to client. Notice that I don’t focus on performance metrics. I do look into performance metrics and use these to guide my notes, but as we are dealing with such a large volume of pages with an eclectic variety of goals; I don’t include them in the actual audit to prevent unnecessary comparisons and overcomplications.

How to carry out monthly content audits

Initial audits are perhaps the most time-consuming, as you’re working with unfamiliar pages, but they’re incredibly valuable and well worth the time and effort.

Maintaining monthly audits — whether in the same spreadsheet or a stand-alone document — is a fantastic (and quick) way to measure the success of any content you create or adapt moving forward.

They can also work as a checklist to ensure your team is producing consistent content if you want. You could include checks in your monthly audit such as:

• Whether images were used

• What alt tags were used (remember they have functions other than communicating with Google)

• What internal links were added

• Specifying what CTA was included

Another great thing about monthly content audits is that they can be used as part of your monthly reporting; killing two birds with one stone. Here’s how I experimented with monthly content audits:

1. Set a deadline for reporting

If you’re only producing one piece of content per month, you’ll most likely be able to report on the success of each piece every month for a year. But the chances of that are unlikely. Therefore, it's good to agree with your team and client on how long you’ll measure your content's success.

Perhaps, after some research, you’ve discovered that most blog posts in this particular audit take three months to reach their peak. If that's the case, you’ll want to look at success metrics once the piece has been live for three months. This cuts out unnecessary time spent updating the audit and will also prevent awkward conversations with clients about why the content isn’t performing yet.

Alternatively, you may have created evergreen content and want to monitor this piece every month.

Whatever avenue you choose to go down, ensure that your client is clear on the plan to set expectations.

2. Add in essential information

Later down the line, whether your client, a team member from another department, or even you are viewing the monthly audit, you should be able to see key information within the first few seconds such as:

• The title of the piece

• Type of content: a how-to guide, listicle, case study, etc.

• Function

• Goal

• The author of the piece

• The department the page is assisting: content marketing, SEO, social media, etc.

• How long the content took to produce: this will help your client understand how much of their budget was allocated to each task.

• Date published: this is particularly important if you aren’t responsible for uploading the content to the site.

• Performance metrics: based on the function and goal of the page. This should help you establish whether or not a piece of content succeeded or requires additional investment.

3. Next steps

If a piece performs exceptionally well, you can analyze what made it so successful and try to duplicate the results. For example, if you notice that your how-to guides were the highest performers, include more of these in your content strategy moving forward, or perhaps update an underperforming piece into this format to see if things improve.

Likewise, if a piece doesn't perform how you hoped it would, you should consider whether it’s worth improving it. Should you try re-structuring it? Perhaps you could advertise it via social media or PPC? Or maybe it's best to leave it behind and adapt your strategy to ensure similar pieces aren’t created?

All together, your monthly content audit could look something like this:

How to do annual content audits

Finally, the annual audit. These make yearly reporting a snap as you already have a lot of the information in your monthly audit. Once you've copied and pasted the initial information, all that's left is to update it with the latest performance data and write an in-depth analysis to be included in your report. This can consist of showcasing the best performing pieces and highlighting any patterns.

You can also highlight what was learned from the worst-performing pieces, as these will also offer valuable insights.

Complete the audit with ideas of how you can use the data to increase performance next year and set some benchmarks.

Let’s talk about SEO

Many of us wear both SEO and content hats as part of our role, and I appreciate that merging the two audits is both a time-saver and helps form a holistic strategy. But I do urge you to look at your content as more than just a means to an SEO end, and I hope this post has highlighted the value of doing so.

Right, let’s talk about how you can use your content audits for SEO purposes:

1. Search term cannibalization identification

When gathering data for historic content, use your favorite tools to identify what search terms the pieces are ranking for. You can then (temporarily) reorder the spreadsheet from A-Z by search term and see if any URLs are competing for the same terms.

You can then incorporate resolving these issues into your SEO strategy. There’s a fantastic piece that goes into this in much more depth here.

Additionally, once you know which search terms you want to target for any pieces moving forward, a quick check of your records will tell you whether you or a predecessor has already tried this. If so, you can decide whether to create a fresh piece and redirect the original which will hopefully bring with it some backlinks, or update the old piece (which will take a lot less time and effort).

2. Potential quick wins

By tracking how the search terms for each piece are ranking, you’ll be able to identify any content that is teetering at the top of page two, or on the lower side of page one.

From here, you can identify if the problem is content- or SEO-related. Do you need more backlinks to strengthen it, some schema markup added, or does it need to be updated word-wise? Perhaps you’re better off targeting a featured snippet or people also ask boxes to get you up where you want to be?

When I carry out a content audit, I read every single page. Time-consuming? Yes. Pointless? Far from it. You see, by reading through older posts, I learn so much about the products and services the client offers. I also learn about the history of the industry and any questions that pop into my head as I read, I jot down and use them in my content strategies. If I’m asking the question, chances are someone else is too.

This not only puts me ahead of the game when it comes to content strategy creation, it cuts down on research time when I'm tackling a writing task and improves the way I interact with my clients.

And I also know from experience what will take the piece up another notch. Perhaps the headers aren’t optimized or the piece has excellent bones but the copy is just a bit cringy — we all remember adding .gifs into our content whenever possible to make ourselves look “cool” and “with it” (and the fact that I just said “cool” and “with it” shows I'm not). But the point is, I get a good sense of how to make things perform better by reading everything.

Add any quick wins to your strategy and grab that low-hanging fruit.

3. Internal linking optimization

I love internal links. I love internal links more than I love backlinks. And while I agree that not every piece should be linking to an end-of-the-funnel page, I do think that content audits are an excellent opportunity to connect newer pieces with older pieces for better overall synergy. It also improves the user experience.

Summary

I know exactly what you’re thinking. That's a lot of work to do for every single client. But I truly believe that it’s worth the effort. Not only will you be able to ensure your content stays fresh, relevant, and has more chance of performing well, but you will be saving time (and your client’s money) by not creating content that your audience isn’t interested in.

Just three examples of how really getting to know your web content can fuel your performance before I wrap up:

1. During one client audit, I noticed that there was a lot of similar content but from a slightly different angle each time. By merging these pieces, the pages were fighting for ranking less and the overall quality was improved.
2. One client of mine seemed very bonded to their previous content, and felt hesitant about us merging or reworking any of their blog posts. Because I’d carried out an initial content audit, I knew the topics and angles already covered, and so instead recommended implementing a hub-style page on one of their main category pages as a means to gain more visibility for the content. We kept the original content (only slightly optimized for search terms) and ensured that a visitor wouldn’t have to jump from page to page trying to piece together a full picture before investing.
3. Finally, when UK gyms were reopening post lockdown, we wanted to do everything we could to give our fitness client a boost. Rather than spend hours and hours producing fresh content, we tweaked old posts and built a "welcome back pack". Before publishing this, there was a post that had been the top-performer since it was published about a year ago. This new pack pushed the piece off the pedestal and brought with it a good chunk of assisted and direct conversions.

When done well, content audits are a fantastic tool to have in your belt. They will not only help guide your strategies and get results, but they will also help you bond with your client too, which is a more than welcome side-effect if you ask me.

On-page SEO is when you blend the art of writing with the science of SEO to rank individual pages for specific keywords. On-page SEO includes everything from meta tags, content format, and keyword optimization to get your content found by search engines and move your audience to convert with you.

While it’s only one part of the equation, on-page SEO guides your content to match customer intent, user engagement, and tactics to increase conversions.

You need to have a map on you before you head out to the forest if you don't want to get lost. Just like hiking, you need to have a good idea of where you're going if you want to stay on track to your destination.

The same line of thinking can be applied to content production, because you should know how to structure content on your site to help sculpt search results and meet the needs of your customers to drive more conversions.

It’s not easy to write content that ranks in Google and drives conversions, but if you follow a few simple steps, you’ll be on your way to ranking, driving more clicks, and appealing to customers on all types of devices. Let’s take a look at three on-page optimization tactics that you can use to get the right message to the right people at the right time.

1. Format content for readers & robots

An SEO strategy has to be built around the needs of your customers to hit ranking factors and get your readers to engage with your content.

It’s tough to serve these two goals, but you can get the best of both worlds by formatting your content in a way that helps robots and readers scan content and focus on information on different devices.

While you can spend time with “SEO hacks,” the best way to improve your online visibility and increase conversions is to format content for readers and robots. Let’s take a look at how breaking up text, keeping paragraphs short, and bullet lists will make your content easier to read and boost rankings today!

Break up text with H2 tags

One of the first things you can do to improve on-page SEO is to break up text with H2 subheaders. These headers allow you to insert keywords to fuel the technical side of SEO, and these headers also help your readers scan through your content when they first reach your site.

Here are a few quick notes to make the most out of your subheadings:

• I like to add H2 subheadings every 300 words or so.

• Insert H3 headers with an additional 50 words of content for each section when appropriate.

• Use target keywords and exact-match questions in subheadings whenever possible.

I have found a lot of success with Google Search Console (GSC) when optimizing existing on-page content. You can open up a page in GSC to find first-party data on what Google is ranking your content for and then add keywords in the H2 and H3 sections of your site to see a good boost in rankings.

Make your content easier to read for humans and search engines by breaking up your content with H2 and H3 subheadings. Don’t forget to get the most out of this on-page SEO tactic by including keywords and exact-match questions in the section headings for maximum results!

Keep paragraphs short

If you want to engage your readers and drive more conversions, then you have to optimize every inch of your content based on the needs of your target audience. Large blocks of text are difficult to read, and this is especially true on a phone or tablet.

I like to limit paragraphs to only 2-3 sentences each to ensure content looks good on mobile devices and does not overwhelm a reader as they read through my content.

Use bullet points

Bullet points are a powerful copywriting tool because they allow you to summarize information in a concise manner while also drawing attention to important data in a punchy format. Here are a few reasons to use bullet points in your content to boost on-page SEO:

• Break content up and make blocks of text easier to read on mobile devices.

• Highlight valuable points to increase conversions on service web pages and product pages.

• Add internal links to bullet points to help guide customers through the buyer's journey.

• Try to keep bullet point lists between 3-7 bullets each. Shorter lists look goofy, and long lists are difficult to read.

I like to include a bullet list in the first paragraph of each blog post to help readers understand my content, plus this bullet list can help secure a featured snippet (more on tha later). I also like to add a bullet list near CTAs to draw the attention of readers to drive more conversions.

Bullet points are just one example of how you can format content to help your readers and search engines- they are the perfect balance between content marketing and technical SEO tactics.

2. Optimize for featured snippets

As online search changes, Google is constantly updating its algorithms to provide the right information to searchers as quickly as possible. A featured snippet is a bite-sized snippet of information that Google places above organic listings based on specific search queries.

Featured snippets are your best friend if you want to establish your brand's authority and drive more organic traffic to your site. Here are a few reasons to format new content and optimize existing content to trigger featured snippets:

• Dominate "position zero" above paid ads and other organic search results.

• Build your brand authority by ranking at the top of the Search Engine Results page for target keywords.

• Drive more qualified traffic to your site.

• Build more backlinks as more people click on and link to your content.

• Push your competitor's online listings down in SERPs.

There are several types of featured snippets that Google can display based on search intent, search query, and search history. Let’s take a look at how you can format your content in specific ways to help secure the three major types of featured images.

Paragraph featured snippet

Paragraph featured snippets show 40-50 word explanations based on a search query with a link to the source content. This type of featured snippets can be secured with proper on-page SEO and content formatting.

I like to summarize the answer and main point of my content in the first paragraph of my blog posts and online content to secure more paragraph featured snippets. I also like to create a concise summary of different sections to help trigger more featured snippets throughout my content.

List featured snippet

You will notice that most types of “how-to” search queries will trigger a list featured snippet. This information is presented in either a numbered list or a bulleted list, and is a powerful way to generate more traffic for recipe sites or process-oriented content.

I like to add a bullet list or numbered list before I list out detailed sections to secure more featured snippets.

Table featured snippet

Google may include a table at the top of SERPs for search queries about pricing options, comparisons, and data. Most table featured snippets are 3-4 columns wide and 6-7 rows long.

I like to add a HTML table to my blog posts to summarize a process, show price comparisons, or just to provide a summary of different types of data. I’ve noticed that Google prefers HTML tables compared to tables made in CSS or other languages.

3. Add an FAQ section & FAQ schema

Structured data are bits of code that you can add to your blog posts and web pages to help Google understand your content. You can format your content along with markup language to spoon-feed search engines information about your content and shape your appearance in SERPs.

Once you add an FAQ section to the bottom of your content, you can get even more bang for your buck by adding FAQ schema to the backend of the content. FAQ schema offers a number of benefits for your SEO strategy like:

• Boost impressions: FAQ schema will help drive more organic impressions, which can lead to a higher Click Through Rate (CTR).

• More website clicks: As your pages get more impressions you will start to see more clicks to your web pages and blog posts.

• Interlinking: You can add a link to each answer in your FAQ schema. Only point internal linking to non-sales content (like a blog post) to help drive more engagement.

• Improve online visibility: FAQ schema makes your content more visible because it pushes your competitors lower on SERPs.

I like adding 3-4 common questions and answers at the bottom of each blog post and web page to help customers and search engines. I’ve found that FAQ sections at the end of my content helps with keyword rankings and allows me to implement FAQ schema to get found in search engines.

Supercharge your on-page SEO game today!

A winning SEO strategy is rooted in getting your message to the right people at the right time, and on-page SEO tactics can help you get found online and drive more conversions.

Use the tips in the above sections to make your content easier to read, easier to scan, and even sculpt your content in SERPs today!

However, if we look beyond their inherent functionality, facets can offer us considerable potential. By centering your secondary navigation on long-tail keyword opportunities, you’ll be able to strategically utilize consumer intent, secure additional web conversions, and boost revenue levels.

Match consumer intent with long-tail search queries

Having an established brand and a solid domain backlink profile won’t guarantee success. This is great news for smaller brands, as industry giants aren’t necessarily going to win at this game.

If we search for “long sleeve wedding dresses”, we can see how David’s Bridal’s optimized facet page (Domain Authority: 67/100, Page Authority: 47 / 100) has obtained the top ranking position, while Nordstrom’s result (Domain Authority: 87/100, Page Authority: 39/100) appears in the third position for this particular query. We’ll take a look at what makes this page so effective later.

When looking at how we can optimize faceted navigations, it’s important to recognize that product attributes convey consumer needs and aspirations. If, for example, I’m looking for a wedding dress, then I may tailor my search by the color, fabric, neckline shape, and the sleeve length.

According to the search demand curve, long-tail queries account for up to 70% of all organic searches. They are highly targeted queries that offer big traffic-driving opportunities.

In the last few years, we’ve seen a big shift in the industry towards capitalizing this intent with long-form content. Blog articles and style guides have become the go-to methods for many to capture these visitors, as we can see from the examples taken from Marks & Spencers’ "Inspire Me" section:

People often look for inspiration when they’re shopping, and these pages provide an effective way to add more internal links to category and product pages. But relying on this approach is one-dimensional, given that these deeper content pages tend to have lower PageRank. An extensive amount of time and effort will, therefore, be required to achieve the desired result.

In comparison, Product Listing Pages usually target broader search terms, and faceted navigations typically exist as passive functions. This is because they’re often blocked from crawlers, making them devoid of any SEO value. Waterstones (a well-known British bookstore) is one retailer that applies this rule for their on-page filters:

In this particular example, I’ve applied a filter to only show me books for 5 – 8 year olds, but the appended URL (https://www.waterstones.com/category/childrens-teenage/facet/498) is blocked in the robots.txt file. This is going to prevent such pages from being served in the SERPs despite them having the potential to meet specific customer needs. This shows that there can be a fundamental disconnect in matching customer intent to the pages we’re providing them in the organic results.

From the diagram below, we can see how editorial content typically focuses on the “awareness” and “interest” stages, whilst Product Listing Pages tend to be more in line with the “consideration” and “purchase” phases:

Serving the right content to users throughout their buying journey is pivotal to success. For many retailers, competitors are continuing to prioritize broader, high-volume keywords in saturated markets. They’re targeting the same terms to secure a proportion of the same search traffic. This is a very challenging prospect to face, and without carving out a gap in the marketplace, they won’t necessarily deliver the results they seek to secure. Likewise, relying on informational guides to target long-tail keywords means that you’re missing a large percentage of users who have very specific buying requirements. Yes, they’re ready to make a purchase!

By shifting your focus to address your customer’s real needs and expectations, you’ll be able to deliver a satisfying, frictionless experience at every interaction and all the way through to that final purchase.

The solution

Step 1: Conduct long-tail keyword research

Build a really comprehensive view of your potential customers by harnessing data from a variety of sources, including:

a) Keyword research tools like Moz, Google Keyword Planner, and Answer The Public.

b) The SERPs — get inspiration from the auto-suggest results, People Also Ask, and the related search links at the bottom of the page.

c) Competitor activity — aside from using SEO monitoring software, you can use a data mining extension tool like Scraper, which will extract faceted options directly from competitor Product Listing Pages. These tools are often free to download and allow you to quickly transfer product categories.

d) Your Google Search Console, Analytics, and PPC accounts to determine which keywords and URLs are securing the highest number of visits and web conversions. Internal search data can also give you great consumer insights.

e) Speak to your merchandising team to understand product demands and fulfillment capabilities.

Step 2: Group into meaningful sub-topics

Once you’ve collated all this information into a spreadsheet, you’ll be able to discover long-tail, consideration-orientated keywords. While individually they may not boast huge monthly search estimates, they can collectively highlight where purchase intentions can be better fulfilled.

To help illustrate this point, we can look at a small subset of lingerie keywords and the facets the searches represent:

From the table above we can quickly see a pattern emerging with color and material variations appearing across the search terms. We can then substantiate this information with session and revenue estimates with the use of a recognized CTR model. This enables us to help forecast the potential organic uplift and quantify the size of the prize for a number of different scenarios that are on offer from each new facet combination. This may include estimations for securing position 10, 7, 5, 3 and 1 in Google.

One thing to note here is that it’s worth excluding synonyms, as they will falsely inflate your calculations. An example here would be to exclude “storage drawers” (22.2k monthly searchers) when reviewing the performance for “chest of drawers” (201k m/s). Including both variants will cause a false positive result and will lead you to draw incorrect conclusions.

Step 3: Dig deeper into broader terms around offers, ratings, and price

These product filters are found in the “Sort” dropdown box and, from my experience, these are set to “noindex” from the outset as they simply allow users to re-order page results. Certainly, content management systems like Shopify and Shopware have this as a default.

This makes sense since their purpose is to allow visitors to simply sort or narrow page content rather than offering alternative results and additional value (which is offered through faceted navigation). As such, filter typically produce duplicate results which should not be discoverable beyond the immediate moment. But this hard-and-fast rule doesn’t always apply perfectly in the real world. This is why we need to look at our individual industries and understand what’s important to our unique set of customers.

If we look at the world of gifting, we often see people shopping with a particular budget in mind. Therefore, terms like “birthday gift under £20” (40 m/s) or “Secret Santa gift under £10” (2.9k m/s) are reasonably common, and opening up relevant listing pages could be useful for shoppers.

Step 4: The technical steps

Facet taxonomies are hugely complex and the number of attributes that can be strung together increases with the size of the domain. We, therefore, need to carefully manage the flood gates and mitigate against any potential risks including crawl inefficiencies and link equity dilution.

We can do this by:

1. Avoiding thin/doorway pages by regularly re-assessing your product offering. For instance, you may consider there to be little value in creating a new listings page if you’re selling a very small range of low price point products. In this case, you may decide against opening up an additional Product Listing Page when you sell as few as 10 eligible products. However, this is not a fixed rule, so it’s quite possible that your criteria may be lower for particular product lines. Either way, these numbers will change over time. Consider seasonal trends, when new collections are launched, and when they become discontinued. Setting up a product retirement strategy to manage expired products and categories at scale in parallel with this step is also highly recommended.

2. Prevent content cannibalization by arranging selected facets according to their value and significance. “Size” is very important for some electrical goods like TVs, laptops, and cameras, but is less so for beauty accessories or vacuum cleaners. You must also make sure page content is distinctive and reflects the focus of your chosen facet(s). Refer to step 5 for more details.

3. Follow the sequence in which adjectives and facets are typically selected by your customers. This can vary depending on where your audience lives. So, whilst products generally have five or more distinguishable features, English vernacular determines that we use more than four adjectives (e.g. size + color + material + shape) to describe something.

4. Control the controllables by dealing with overlapping variations. This typically occurs when multiples co-exist and each exhibits good search metrics. For instance, it’s reasonable for someone to simultaneously look for several color and/or fabric combinations in the different ways below.

When this situation occurs, we should follow the same linguistic rules as above and choose a preferred sequence. In this case, it would be color + material + product type.

In comparison to the noindex tag suggested for on-page filters you should canonicalize unnecessary facets to their parent page (remembering that this is merely a hint and not a directive). This will enable you to control how crawlers deal with highly comparable result pages and will, therefore, help to prevent your site from being demoted in the SERPs. Dynamic search parameters should continue to be defined with a “noindex, nofollow” meta robots tag, disallowed in the robots.txt file, and configured through Google’s URL parameter tool (within your Search Console account) to tell crawlers the purpose of your parameters and how you would like them to be treated. This is a helpful guide on parameter handling for Googlebots, but bear in mind that this last tip won’t influence how Bing or Yahoo user-agents interpret these pages.

5. Open your facets in phases and cultivate it into a test-and-learn process. This will enable you to identify issues a lot sooner and implement facet-wide solutions in a timely manner. Without having to unravel these additional layers of complexity, problems such as crawl inefficiencies, PageRank dilution, or excessive indexation can be swiftly resolved.

To show you what this could look like, I’ve provided a phasing plan that was created for one of our e-commerce clients. Our research showed a significant SEO opportunity for opening up some of the facets and filters: potential +£263Kpcm for the “colour + type” facet (UK):

What’s more, when we extended our forecast to include other facet combinations, we calculated an additional revenue opportunity of up to +£207K/pcm (before filtering out combinations with no products offering).

Step 5: Optimize your facet URLs

Optimize your new facet category URLs to establish relevancy for your selected search terms. The key on-page elements to focus on include:

• URL

• Page title

• Breadcrumb anchor texts

• H tags

• Content snippets (e.g. introductory text and FAQ copy)

• Image ALT texts

• Product names

• Link out to similar facet category pages (i.e. via a “You May Also Like” feature box)

David’s Bridal is a good example of a retailer that has done this well. Looking back at the ‘Long Sleeve Wedding Dress’ Product Listing Page, we can see that they’ve curated unique content and followed fundamental optimization tactics on the landing page in a way that feels helpful to the user.

URL: davidsbridal.com/long-sleeve-wedding-dresses

Page Title: Long Sleeve Wedding Dresses & Gowns | David's Bridal

Meta Description: Do you dream of wearing a long sleeve wedding dress on your big day? Shop David's Bridal wide variety of wedding gowns with sleeves in lace & other designs!

6. Provide accessibility and build page authority

Once you’ve opened up your new facet Product Listing Pages, you need to begin cultivating link equity towards them. This will ensure that they don’t exist as orphan URLs with no PageRank:

1. Ensure they’re referenced in your product XML sitemap.

2. If you have one feature per facet URL, then add them to your faceted navigation across CLP and Product Listing Page pages.

3. If you have two or more features per facet URL, then create a “Popular Searches” or “Related Searches” option within your CLPs.

4. Utilize your mega menu to showcase your new category landing pages. This will not only allow you to direct a large proportion of link equity, but it will also secure the highest click-through rate amongst your visitors.

5. Integrate your editorial strategy by creating engaging content with in-copy links. Think about how you can use descriptive long-tail anchor text about the Product Listing Page you want to link to rather than relying on “click here” or “see more”.

6. Connect to them via href links so you’re not solely relying on links from the main navigation or content hyperlinks. As this is difficult to do at scale, it can be done through modules such as “related categories”, “other subcategories”, “related products”, etc.

7. Devise strategic outreach campaigns that will secure quality, external backlinks to them.

Implementing this holistic and robust strategy will help you to secure exponential growth from your new commercial landing pages.

Conclusion

There is a great deal of organic opportunity that exists within your faceted navigation if you begin to leverage mid- and long-tail search terms.

Seek out the opportunity from extended keyword research and competitor analysis before deciding which variants fulfill consumer demands and deliver optimal organic sessions and onsite conversions. Configure a single faceted URL for each opportunity and open them up for crawl and indexation. Ensure PageRank is distributed to them (both internally and externally) and develop your landing page content in line with quality optimization practices. This approach will help you to avoid having crawl inefficiencies, over indexation, cannibalization, or having thin doorway pages. In turn, your website will be better suited to attract highly-targeted users and guide them down the purchase funnel.

Maximizing UX and reducing reliance on other marketing channels means that your faceted navigation can truly deliver organic ROI. We have seen this work for our clients.

A great way for B2B companies to fill this gap is by creating pillar pages. To help get you started, in today's Whiteboard Friday, guest host Carly Schoonhoven of Obility walks you through a simple strategy for employing pillar pages on your website. Enjoy! 

Video Transcription

Hello and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. My name is Carly Schoonhoven, and I'm a senior SEO manager here at Obility. We're a digital marketing agency focused on B2B in beautiful Portland, Oregon.

Now one of the biggest struggles I find that B2B companies have, when working on a content strategy, is how to create content that's able to effectively rank for those top-of-funnel, higher search volume, more conversational queries. A lot of times B2B companies are really focused on mid-funnel. They've got great e-books, lots of good data content, but they tend to neglect the top-of-the-funnel content.

However, that type of content is so important because it allows for your potential customers to perform self-discovery and really learn more about your brand, learn more about the industry you're in before they're ready to take a more meaningful step, like filling out a form or requesting a demo. So one great content strategy for a B2B company is creating a pillar page.

What are pillar pages? 

Pillar pages, you might have heard them referred to as hub and spoke content or umbrella content, but whatever you want to call it, it's essentially the same thing. So the idea is that you start with your pillar page. So this is one large piece of content that's really optimized for one very broad topic that's really relevant to your business.

Then it internally links out to your cluster pages, which are targeted at those longer tail, secondary keywords and really well-optimized to answer the questions that your customers may have. It's so important that you're linking back from the cluster pages to the pillar page and from the pillar page out to your clusters.

Again, this has multiple benefits. One that your customers are able to navigate to this content and get their questions answered themselves. Then, at the same time, it's great for SEO because it's so easy for Google to tell what this content is about since it's all internally linked to each other and it's all focused on one specific topic. So if this sounds like something for you, I'm going to walk you through step by step how to go about creating a pillar content strategy.

1. Pick a topic

So Step 1, of course, is you have to pick a topic. So there are a couple things you want to keep in mind when you're doing this, one of which is that you want it to be broad but not too broad. So obviously it has to be somewhat broad because you need to be able to find enough secondary keywords that also have search volume that it's worth your time putting the work in.

But if it's too broad, it's going to be really difficult to create one piece of content that covers everything you need to cover in this content. So, for example, a pillar page about SEO as a whole, that might be a little bit too broad. There's a lot of stuff you're going to have to cover, and it's going to be really difficult to rank for a lot of those keywords. But something like SEO content strategy, that's a little bit more focused, there's still a lot of potential there.

You can talk about ideating content for B2B. You can talk about on-site optimization. So something that is definitely broad, has lots of keywords, but not so broad you're biting off more than you can chew. 

2. Keyword research

So speaking of keywords, obviously you have to do keyword research. This is SEO.

It's so important. So you can start with that one topic, but then you really need to expand your list of keywords to find all of those secondary keywords that you want to include. Moz's Keyword Explorer is a great tool for this because you're able to put in your topic and then it will generate all of those related keywords for you, along with things like search volume and keyword difficulty. I also love that you can filter down to just the keywords that are questions, because again it's so important to make sure that you're answering your potential customers' questions in your content. 

3. Look at your existing content

So you've got your list, you've got your keywords, but don't forget to look at your existing content as well. So you're going to be putting a lot of work in. Find ways you can save yourself time. Maybe you'll have some content buried in your blog or buried in your resource section that you can repurpose and include as part of this strategy. Definitely make sure you're not neglecting content that you already have. 

4. Plan URL structure

Up next, planning your structure. So you're going to be creating a great new piece of content. You need to know where you're going to put it. You can just link to it in your top navigation, or maybe you just want to feature it on your resources section. But one thing to keep in mind is that you want to make sure that your cluster pages are in a subfolder of your pillar page.

5. Start writing (clusters first)

All right, Step 5, start writing. You actually get to start putting these pieces together. So ultimately, what do you want them to look like? Now ideally, for your main pillar page, what you want is to have sort of just an introductory section talking about the topic area as a whole, but really this page serves as that hub that links out to all of your other secondary pages.

So you want to make it really easy to navigate. You want to make sure you're including lots of mid-funnel CTAs within that content, because ultimately this is that hub piece of content where everyone is going to navigate to from those cluster pages. So start with your intro and then have a nice table of contents and then a little header for each of your cluster pages with a little bit of a summary, but then that ultimately links out to those cluster pages so that someone can visit that page if they really want to learn more and get more in depth into that topic.

As far as your cluster pages, this is where you really want to get in depth, spend a lot of time putting your content together and make sure you're covering it. I think that the question-and-answer format is a really good approach for this type of content because it really helps you optimize for featured snippets or for the people also ask feature. So you want to make sure that you're putting your question in the header, and then summarize the answer to that question in about 40 to 50 words if you're optimizing for a snippet.

6. Promotion

All right. Number 6 is promotion. So you've created your content. You've figured out where to put it. You've published it. You did all of this work. You want to make sure people see it.

So promote it internally. Make sure you're sharing it on your social media. Share it with your team. But then also flex your link building skills and reach out to anyone in your industry who you think would benefit from this content or be willing to share it as well. 

7. Measure everything

Number 7 is measure. So, of course, you put all this work in and you want to see how does it do. Did it perform well?

So you have your list of keywords, so use Moz to track your keyword rankings. Take a look to see if there are new keywords you weren't expecting to rank for. Obviously, keywords are super important. Also, look at Google Analytics. Check out your landing page report. Are you getting organic traffic? Are people actually converting?

See what you can learn from that, if you need to make tweaks, swap out your CTAs. Just make sure you're measuring and you don't let this content go to waste. You're bringing in this new traffic. Make sure you're converting those people. 

8. Repeat

Step 8, repeat. So once you have the process down, do it again. Find other topics that are really relevant to your industry you can create a pillar page about.

When you do, tell me about it. I really hope that this was helpful for you, and I hope you go out there and create some pillar content. So thank you so much.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

 Tweet your questions and comments about pillar pages using #MozBlog!

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hey, Moz fans. Welcome to the latest edition of Whiteboard Friday. I'm Cooper Hollmaier. I started doing SEO in 2016, and today I worked at a large outdoor specialty retailer helping make our strategies for technical SEO come alive. Thank you for attending this Session 2 of 3 of our SEO and accessibility series. 

It all starts with accessibility

If you've taken the intro to SEO course here at Moz, you're probably familiar with the concept called Mozlow's hierarchy of SEO needs. If you're not, the basic idea is that we have to have some foundational elements that are needed to make us rank in search engine results, and then we can layer some things on top to make us more competitive in those results.

But it all starts with crawl accessibility, and in the same way it starts with basic human accessibility as well. Our goal when we're creating content is to provide equitable access. So this means my content is not only available to search engines but people of all abilities as well. Let's look at an example.

Making assumptions about your audience

Let's say I'm a restaurant. Commonly you'll see restaurants post their menu in the windows of their stores or shops. Well, the problem with this idea, while it seems easy because anyone can walk by, they don't have to look at my Facebook or my website, and they can look at the menu, see what they like or don't like, and then choose to engage with my business and enjoy my food.

What's bad about this is that we've made some assumptions about our ideal audience. We've assumed that they're the average height and that they're tall enough to be able to see the menu that I posted in my window. We've assumed that they have great vision, that they on a rainy day can see the menu items and still make the decision to come inside. We've also assumed that by not including any pictures on our menu people know what we're talking about.

They're familiar with the cuisine that I'm making or the flowery culinary, eloquent culinary language that I'm using to describe my dishes. But I think what you'll find is that these assumptions are exclusive versus inclusive, and we want to be inclusive of all of our audience members. So for example, assume maybe my person is not an average height. How do I account for that?

If they're not the average height, seeing the menu might be impossible. Assume that maybe they have low vision or blindness and ask yourself, "Is this available digitally or in a Braille compatible format that they can access, too?" Or maybe add some pictures, add some different language to your menu to help people understand the culinary language that you're using, because without that they might not understand and they might choose to avoid your restaurant versus come in and see it.

Ask "What if?"

So these are things you can do to assume the best and provide a diverse group of people a better experience. 

Let's do some math. If you have 1,000 people in your restaurant every month, we know from last time that 1 in 5 people on average have a disability in the United States. That means 200 of those 1,000 people have a disability, and you're excluding them by not including some information or other mediums to consume your menu.

That compounded as 200 people times let's say an average of $15 a meal, that's $3,000 a month you're leaving on the table quite literally. So think about that. It's not just about providing equitable access, but it will cost your business money too, and $3,000 a month is very expensive, especially for a small business. I'm sure you're saying, "Cooper, what if I'm not a small business? What if I want people to buy my product or give me a lead or come sign up for my service?"

That's okay. These rules apply to you too. It's the mindset. If you have a podcast, an email newsletter, a blog, a website, I would implore you to ask the question, "As a person with __________, can I __________?" Fill in that first blank with things like as a person with colorblindness, ADHD, dyslexia, hard of hearing, Down syndrome, can I and fill in that second blank with whatever you want people to do at your business.

Can I buy a product? Can I read this newsletter? Can I enjoy this podcast? If the answer to that question, that string of questioning, is no, you have a little bit of a problem. You have some work to do, right? 

Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

What I'm talking about is following the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and these are commonly called WCAG or "Wikag." These guidelines are set up to make sure that our content on the web is accessible.

I think you'll find that as you make your content accessible for people of diverse abilities, you're going to have your content accessible for search engines of diverse abilities too. So following the four principles of Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, they are POUR or "Pour": Perceivable, Operable, Understandable, or Robust, I think you'll find that your content resonates better with your audience, you exclude less audience members, and your search engine optimization will ultimately only be that much better.

Perceivable

So what do I mean by perceivable? What I mean by perceivable is we all don't want to look at a brick of text. I think that's pretty clear. We tend to include things like images, video, and audio on our pages. What I want you to do is consider any time you're using those rich media elements to include a text alternative. So this means images, include alt text. Videos, include captions and transcripts.

Audio, same thing, include the transcript so if I can't hear that audio with my speakers, I'm able to either convert it into something I can use or I'm able to enjoy it in some other way. Then when we're talking about video, including an ASL interpreter or converting your presentation into American Sign Language can also be a little bit more inclusive for the audience you're trying to reach and save you a little bit of that money we talked about earlier.

Operable

Operable, what I mean by this is: Are your links saying "Click Here" or "Learn More," or are they really telling me where I'm going as a user? Think about your users here. We know we love anchor text. We know that search engines love to see where we're going too. So "Click Here" and "Learn More" aren't as descriptive as they could be. They're not as operable. It's hard for me as a user to operate your website or your email newsletter or your podcast.

Understandable

Is my content understandable? So this is something I have a hard time doing too sometimes, but considering is the content that I'm writing at a reading level that my audience is going to enjoy that. Have I described it in a language that my customers understand? Oftentimes I think we get stuck in SEO and we start to use a lot of SEO language, especially if you're working at like an agency with clients.

Taking the time to break it down into language that's more understandable will allow you to resonate with a larger set of audience members, but also it will allow you generally to capture those search terms too, right? People aren't looking up PhD level things in Google search. They're looking up language that we can all understand, so consider that. 

Robust

Then robust, this kind of touches things like: Is my website mobile friendly? Is it responsive? Are the things that I'm producing compatible with a lot of technologies and these technologies include assistive technologies? So POUR, remember those things when producing web content. You shouldn't need a monocle to read what you're producing. You shouldn't need a PhD to read what you're producing. It should be really, really easy for a diverse group of people to access the stuff that you produce.

If you want some more information about WCAG, there's a link right here, and it will be linked in the bottom of this post as well. 

What can content SEOs do?

So what can you do as a content SEO? 

1. You can write informative and unique page titles. Those page titles matter for not just search engines but people as well and assistive technologies. 
2. You can use headings correctly. Commonly I'll see people use those H tags. You're probably familiar with the H1, but H2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 matter too to style the page in a certain way and make the text bolder or brighter or larger, and that will be great. But as someone who's using assistive technology or someone who's trying to understand the parent-child relationships between things on a page, it's going to be a lot harder for me to do that if I'm not using those headings correctly.
3. Links are for users. One thing I always ask myself is, "Is this link on the page for SEO, or is it for my customer?" If the answer is it's just on the page for SEO, come back to the table, figure out a way to make an SEO friendly approach to a customer problem, and put a link on the page that's going to resonate with customers and also help your SEO. Not just one or the other.
4. Plan for a text alternative. No matter what you're building, I'm sure it's going to involve some rich media. Plan to include captions, transcripts, ASL interpretation in your presentation from day one. 
5. Over-describe what's happening. We know that descriptions are going to help pick up additional synonyms and additional talking points for search engines as well. We know that being more comprehensive and honest and ethical will ultimately lead to a better SEO outcome. It also helps people, normal people with diverse abilities get that same outcome as well. Let them enjoy it. Make this about customers and not just search engines, and I think you'll find that both parties win. 
6. Provide clear instructions, so what you want people to do. Don't make it hard to convert. 
7. Number 7 is write content that you want to read.

I would ask you to close your eyes and listen to the content that you've written on the page and ask yourself, "Is this SEO optimized, or is this built in a way that a customer would want to engage with it?" What I want you to try to do is try to figure out, "How can I write this piece of content in a way that is just seamless? It's invisible, and I've even optimized this for SEO. It just feels like it's a normal piece of content that resonates with me."

That's what you're looking for. The best SEO is invisible. Help people and bots. Not just bots or not just people. So focus on the Web Accessibility Guidelines. If you want some more information about WCAG, it's right there. Next time, we're going to talk about technical SEO and some behind-the-scenes code that will make your website more accessible for all.

Thanks for watching.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

Even though the ADA was created before most organizations had an online presence, recent legal precedent shows that the act applies to the accessibility of websites and mobile apps just as much as it does to physical locations, such as stores, restaurants, and movie theaters.

The ADA itself doesn’t set out any specific criteria for web and mobile accessibility. Instead, many web developers and legal professionals turn to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), widely accepted as the benchmark for digital accessibility today.

In this blog, we’ll take a closer look at WCAG, and outline the steps you can take to meet its standards. We’ll also briefly explain why accessible websites typically rank higher in search engines — making accessibility the right choice all around!

What’s the link between SEO and accessibility?

Ensuring that your website is accessible to all users already brings huge benefits to your company — if more people visit your website, you’re likely to see an uptick in business. It’s that simple.

Considering the fact that one in four Americans are living with a disability, and that globally, the disposable income of people with disabilities is $1.2 trillion, making your website and mobile applications accessible to everyone opens up your products and services to a new consumer base, and can also lead to significant enhancements in the SEO of your website.

Consider this example: Search engines aim to promote pages with content that is clear and correctly ordered. This means that you need to follow WCAG guidelines on things like headings. If you don’t include the heading ranks in the right order — for instance, by placing text with a fourth-level (<h4>) heading after a second-level (<h2>) heading — you can cause accessibility issues for people using assistive technologies.

Equally, if you don’t provide appropriate alternative text for images, or if you mix up captions with alternative image text, you’ll create issues for users with disabilities and also damage the image SEO on your website. 

These are just a couple examples of how improving website accessibility can boost SEO, but for more, be sure to watch Cooper Hollmaier's new Whiteboard Friday series on the relationship between accessibility and SEO. 

Indeed, any investment you make in digital accessibility will also be reflected in your search rankings. In its mission statement, Google says that its purpose is “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.” “Universally accessible” is the key phrase here. It suggests that as Google continues to evolve its search engine and align it with the principles of accessible design, websites with strong accessibility features will be bumped up higher and higher in its search rankings.

What is WCAG and how can you achieve compliance?

WCAG offers a set of rules for web developers who are looking to create accessible websites. It was created by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), a global community of public and member organizations that are committed to making the internet open to everyone.

Websites and mobile applications are constantly changing as new technologies and innovations become available. To keep WCAG guidelines up to date, W3C also works to provide fresh advice to web developers on an ongoing basis.

If you review recent digital accessibility lawsuits, you’ll see that WCAG 2.0 is the most widely cited version. However, you should note that this version is already out of date. WCAG 2.1 is now available and provides further guidance on mobile accessibility — and WCAG 2.2 is hot on its heels.

It’s also crucial to note that while “WCAG compliance” is a widely used term, it’s actually a misnomer. Technically, it’s more accurate to think about successfully meeting WCAG standards. The term “WCAG compliance” implies a regulatory body, and W3C is not an industry regulator, nor is it a part of federal legislation. That said, WCAG compliance is the accepted phrasing at both web development conferences and law seminars, so we’ll use the term in this article.

Does my website need to meet WCAG standards?

If you’re in the US, yes, it does. Every website that is used by a US citizen, or owned by a US company, is required by law to comply with the ADA. And because WCAG is often cited as a standard for digital accessibility during litigation, following its guidance can help your organization avoid costly and damaging lawsuits. The notion that any company is exempt from ADA compliance is a myth, too. 

How can I make my website WCAG compliant?

WCAG sets out four main principles. These offer a solid foundation that web developers can follow to build websites that are accessible to everyone. Let’s take a closer look at each one:

1. Perceivable

To be perceivable, all the information contained on a website and all the features in its user interface — such as links, text boxes, and buttons — must be presented in ways so that all users can perceive them by at least one of their senses. If any content is hidden to any user, then the website cannot be considered perceivable.

2. Operable

A website is considered to be operable when all users can interact with it and successfully navigate it. If a website has any interactive features, all users need to be able to operate those components.

3. Understandable

All users must be able to understand the information and interface of a website. Web pages should appear and operate in predictable ways, and users should be protected against making input errors on pages that cause legal commitments or financial transactions to occur.

4. Robust

The content on a website must be open to interpretation by a broad variety of user agents. For instance, standard web browsers and assistive technologies such as screen readers must be able to access a website, and the content on a website must continue to be accessible as assistive technologies evolve.

How can I start my compliance journey?

On paper, the four principles of accessibility set out in WCAG sound simple enough. But how can you apply them? To help answer this question, WCAG offers more detailed guidelines for each of the four topics and breaks down each recommendation into a set of success criteria. WCAG also outlines several “sufficient techniques” that provide examples of how developers can achieve them in practice. Think of it as a checklist for compliance.

Each success criterion is also classified according to three levels: A, AA, and AAA. A indicates the most basic level of accessibility, and AAA denotes the most comprehensive. Currently, courts are interpreting the middle level, AA, as the benchmark.

While this article aims to provide you with a better understanding of WCAG criteria, it doesn’t list all the guidelines in full. If you want to find out more about each criterion, check out the “How to Meet WCAG” quick reference guide on the W3C website. This offers a definitive guide for each aspect of WCAG with suggestions on how developers can satisfy them.

1. A: Your website is accessible to some users

The level A success criteria details the steps you can take to avoid some of the most serious violations of accessibility principles. For instance, guideline 1.4 focuses on distinguishability, which simply means making it easy for users to perceive content.

Section 1.4.1 Use of Color is a level A success criterion. It explains that websites shouldn’t only use color as the primary way to convey information that indicates action, prompts a response, or is a distinguishing visual element.

If a website included a passage of red-colored text and the hyperlinks in that text were highlighted in green, it would be impossible for a user with red/green color blindness to distinguish links from the text. One way to improve accessibility would be to add another visual cue to the links, such as underlining them or using a different font.

2. AA: Your website is accessible to almost all users

To meet level AA, you first need to satisfy all the level A success criteria. Level AA guidelines naturally build on top of the level A criteria, providing additional requirements.

In Guideline 1.4, for instance, the 1.4.3 Contrast (Minimum) level AA success criterion augments the guidance of 1.4.1 Use of Color. It outlines that text on any page must have a color contrast ratio of 4.5:1 or higher. There are some exceptions if text is large, or if the images of text are entirely decorative or part of a brand or logo.

You can learn more about how to achieve the correct color contrast in our full article on the topic. For the purposes of this blog, it’s sufficient to imagine the difference between a website where the main text is presented as black text on a white background, versus one where the text is pale yellow on a white background. Black-on-white has a high contrast ratio, while yellow-on-white has a very low contrast ratio. Users with visual impairments often struggle to see small differences in color contrast, which makes it all the more important for websites to ensure that the color contrast ratio of text is high enough to make it readable for all.

The AA level success criteria also include 1.4.4 Resize Text, which recommends that users should be able to enlarge text by up to 200 percent of the standard size without the need for assistive technologies.

3. AAA: Your website is accessible to the most users possible

As with the two previous levels, level AAA compliance requires meeting all the level A and level AA success criteria first. To achieve level AAA, websites must meet even more detailed standards. For instance, in Guideline 1.4, we find 1.4.6 Contrast (Enhanced), which lifts the required color contrast ratio from 4.5:1 to 7:1.

Criterion 1.4.8 Visual Presentation adds to 1.4.4 Resize Text by requiring that text can be resized up to 200 percent, while ensuring that the user can still read each full line of text without having to scroll their browser window horizontally. This criterion also makes additional suggestions, such as allowing users to select foreground and background colors themselves, and specifying settings for line spacing and justification that make text easier to read for people with visual or cognitive disabilities, such as dyslexia.

Start improving the accessibility of your website

By following the principles of accessible design, you’ll also make it easier for search engines to parse and rank your site.

Of course, digital accessibility is a huge topic, so you may be feeling in need of direction! Happily, there are numerous resources to help, not least of which is the W3C’s complete Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG), which should become your touchstone for all things accessibility. You can also potentially use their quick reference guide as a checklist for major accessibility topics.

There are also many automated tools available to help you find and fix accessibility issues, including those created by my company, AudioEye, and you can try them out free of charge. We also provide managed services led by a team of accredited experts, so feel free to contact us for advice and recommendations as you take the next step.

One of the best ways to achieve this is to develop a unique brand voice for your company – one that will appeal to customers and get noticed via SEO.

What exactly is a “brand voice”? It’s simply the way your organization expresses its messaging in terms of style and tone. Your voice should demonstrate your core values and appeal to your target customers.

It’s vital that this voice is consistent across all aspects of your communications, from blogs to adverts to signage. If your content doesn’t stay on-brand, your audience won’t make the association between your latest product or service and the ones they’ve enjoyed before, and the crucial loyalty factor is gone.

This article will show you a few tricks to help develop a unique voice, structure your content, and turn Google’s algorithms to your advantage at the same time.

Developing your brand voice

This isn’t quite as easy as you might think. Your brand voice has to reflect who you are as a business, and ensure it “speaks” to potential customers on the right level, whether they’re already familiar with your brand or they’ve just found you in a Google search.

This means really getting to know your customers – find out what they need and how they want it presented to them. Consider the demographics: age, gender, profession, financial situation, lifestyle. It’s also helpful to carry out a competitor analysis for companies in a similar industry and see how their brand voice works for them.

When you know who you’re talking to, you can tailor your brand voice to the people who are (hopefully) going to listen to it, and target them through clever SEO techniques.

For instance, if you’re targeting a youthful audience, you might use a chatty and friendly style with a few emojis thrown in. If your content is aimed at older professionals, it’s probably better to keep things a bit more formal.

Content should always be informative and helpful. You might use jargon if your audience is familiar with a subject, but simple language is often best for explaining something technical. Make sure you always back it up with trustworthy sources.

The key to creating engaging content that gets top rankings on search engines is to inject some personality. Some marketers like to push the boundaries with wacky ideas and irreverent humor, but only if it’s appropriate for the audience and the brand. Consider creating a tone and voice “style guide” to be used by everyone in your organization, ensuring consistency across all content. 

Optimizing your brand voice

So, you’ve developed your unique brand voice, now how do you let people hear it? Well, you need to optimize your content to pick up the most traffic from search engines.

The trick here is to respond to keyword trends without compromising your brand voice. Your SEO and marketing teams will need to work together on this. SEO will boost your website’s performance on search engines in order to reach the top positions on Google. Most people don’t read beyond the first SERP, so getting into the top ten is crucial for your company’s success.

We’ll show you some tips on how to get there by optimizing your content structure, title tags, and meta description copy.

#1 Define your keywords

Usually, it’s pretty easy to identify your own keywords: they'll include the name of your brand, its identity, and the things it sells or provides. Keywords are the major descriptors of your brand and its USP – and the hooks that will draw in your target customers. But if you’re not sure how to pick a primary keyword, you can use an online tool such as Moz Pro’s Keyword Explorer.

Keyword research is an important part of your SEO strategy – identify popular words and phrases that people search for, and structure your content around those topics while keeping your message on-brand.

#2 Create catchy title tags

A title tag is an HTML element that specifies the title of a web page (not to be confused with the H1-tag, which is the displayed “title” on the actual page). Its main function is to tell visitors what they’ll find if they visit that web page.

The title tag is the first thing a potential visitor will see when your site pops up in an online search, so this is your chance to make a great first impression! You’re aiming to tempt the searcher to click through to the appealing content in your post.

Ideally, a title tag should:

• Include your primary keyword

• Use the keyword at or near the start

• Stick to 50 to 60 characters (or the search engine may truncate it!)

If you’re already a well-known business, make sure your brand name is included in the title tag. List posts are always popular, so using numbers in the tag is an enticing hook. For example, if you were writing about an alternative to Zoom, your title could be “8 powerful Zoom alternatives for video conferencing”.

People don’t want to read old information, so add a date to your tag – or at least say when it was last updated. They do like thorough and authoritative articles, though. Think "The Ultimate/Complete Guide To...".

Make sure all title tags are unique to avoid confusion, and ensure every page on your website has its own title tag. Finally, be aware that Google may rewrite your title tags if it doesn’t think they’re up to scratch!

Tip: Test your tags. A/B testing and measuring the traffic generated from new keywords will help you work out what you’re doing right or wrong.

#3 Write an enticing meta description

A meta description is the text block or “snippet” that appears underneath the title tag in the search results. This is where you have a bit more room (150 to 160 characters) to describe and summarize the contents of your page – and encourage the reader to click on your post.

Keywords are just as important here, as search engines will highlight those words in the SERP. But you can also optimize your meta descriptions to reflect your brand voice and appeal to visitors.

The more inviting the copy is, the more it will motivate people to click, thus increasing your SERP ranking over time. You can set up your meta descriptions to include your logo, an image, or a review – all things that will draw the reader’s eye.

Tip:If you don’t write a meta description, the search engine will probably create one for you – and it may not be what you want to say!

#4 Use the headline as a hook

Great, you’ve successfully enticed a visitor to click through to your site. Now you just have to keep them engaged, as highly optimized landing pages are essential to increasing conversions.

The reader is already interested in your organization, so pull them in further with an attention-grabbing headline. It’s a good idea to include a variation of your keyword, but you can add other wording to make the reader keen to learn more.

Most people will take a quick scan through the article before deciding whether or not to read the whole thing. Using catchy H2s and H3s with variations of the primary keyword will confirm that this is the article they were looking for – as well as breaking up the text and making it easier to read.

#5 Let your brand voice sing

The main article copy is where your brand voice really comes into its own. Great copy can make your brand memorable, so inject plenty of personality to keep the reader entertained as well as informed.

Scatter some keywords throughout the copy, but there’s no need to shoehorn in the exact phrasing if it’s grammatically clunky. It’s more important to meet the search intent and answer the questions that led the visitor to your door.

Choosing the right topic to write about is an important aspect of your brand communication. It should respond to your target customers’ needs as well as fitting with your marketing strategy. People enjoy reading hands-on, actionable content that will actually add value to their lives. If you can attract the right customers, you can help them build a long-term association with your company.

#6 Be picture perfect

Images are almost as important as words when it comes to promoting your brand. Posts with images get 94% more views, so it's vital to deliver appealing visual content.

Images improve the user experience by making your content more appealing and memorable, and providing a break from the body text. You can also use graphics to explain complex ideas in a visual way.

Pictorial content will give you a big SEO boost by increasing the time people spend on your site, and ensuring you also appear in the image search results.

For brand consistency, make sure your corporate colors and company logo appear across all channels. If these elements help to show off your brand personality, so much the better.

#7 Find a good influencer

Partnering with industry influencers is a good way to attract more traffic to your site, as their followers will be encouraged to connect with you. It’s best to build links with influencers who match your own brand voice and values, to make those connections more obvious.

Even if you don’t go as far as forging a partnership, you can still take inspiration from influencers by following and subscribing to their content. Remember, you’re not looking to copy someone else’s style – just learn from people who do it well.

Looking to the future

Once you’ve calibrated your brand voice for SEO and your business is reaping the rewards, don’t stop there! There are a few more strategies to consider for future content campaigns.

Monitor social media

As social media continues to grow in popularity, it pays to monitor other companies’ channels and identify which social media posts get the best engagement. You can then use these insights to structure the tags and descriptions of your own pages, to increase the chances of traffic. 

Get ready for voice search

You should also ensure that your organization is optimized for voice search, which is set to take off over the next few years. Thanks to “digital assistants” such as Alexa, Siri, and Cortana, potential customers are conducting searches in a different way.

Because people tend to use complete questions in a voice search (rather than typing a few words into Google), search engine algorithms will focus on analyzing overall intent instead of exact keywords. This means long-tail keywords will become standard for all search rankings.

Think global

If your company wants to attract international customers, you should consider a multilingual marketing strategy. This will help your brand voice appeal to people around the world by making your content accessible across different languages and cultures.

SEO is the key to getting your brand voice heard

Your brand voice is one of your most important assets when it comes to attracting potential customers in a highly competitive world.

If you make the effort to understand those customers and their needs, you’ll be able to speak their language and work out the best ways to entice them in. When people buy into the values demonstrated by a consistent brand voice, visitors will be converted into loyal followers.

Optimize your title tags, meta descriptions, and web content successfully, and you’ll see an increase in site traffic – helping you rise up those all-important SERP rankings.

With so many pages to manage, things can quickly go awry. Bad links can go unnoticed, website structure gets messy, and content can quickly become de-optimized. All of this can affect the experience of your visitors and have tangible consequences like increased bounce and browse abandonment rates.

That’s why periodical site clean-ups are crucial to maintaining website coherence, relevance, and usability.

In this article, we’ll explain how to successfully execute an SEO clean-up strategy to ensure your site aligns with your business goals, keeps you in Google’s good books, and yields an excellent user experience for visitors and customers. Let’s get started!

6 steps to execute your SEO clean-up strategy

Before you get started with your SEO clean-up, you’ll need to get an overview of your website. How? Inspect your site with a site audit. This will enable you to evaluate how your website looks through the eyes of a search engine.

You’ll get a better understanding of how search engines discover, crawl, and index your site. A site audit will provide you with a starting point for your clean-up.

There are plenty of things a comprehensive site audit might unearth and identify. From repeated meta descriptions to broken links, a site audit will reveal the good, the bad, and the ugly when it comes to your website SEO.

With Moz Pro, you can conduct site audits to identify technical SEO issues and crawl issues, as well as recommend ways to improve and fix any issues. This is a good starting place, and once you know where to start, you can follow these six actionable steps to cleaning up your website.

1. Clean up your site structure

The structure of your site can make a huge difference in search engine ranking and the way customers interact with your site.

Site menu

The first structural element visitors are likely to interact with is your site menu. Ideally, your site menu should feature a limited number of top-level items to keep it focused and easy to navigate. You don’t want to overwhelm first-time visitors with a complicated and cluttered site menu!

Content

Another important thing to consider is your content. Does it currently align with your business or website goals? Is your website exhibiting the content that’s most important to your mission? Is it easy to find?

Create an overview of the content you do have, so you can get a comprehensive birds-eye view of your website’s content. You can likely split your pages into categories like your blog, services, contact, and product pages. Splitting your web pages into relevant categories enables visitors to easily find the content they’re seeking, and adds some organization to your site, making it easier to crawl — which is great for SEO!

Another idea is to connect with other relevant stakeholders or departments in your company. Ask for their feedback on current content. Ask for their opinions and suggestions for improvement. You’d be surprised at the valuable insights that can crop up, especially from those viewing your site from an outsider’s perspective.

What does the data reveal?

As with all things marketing, ensure your site structure clean-up is data-driven. Dig into your performance data to gather revealing insights about your website. Look at how much traffic pages are getting, where this traffic is coming from, and how that traffic is behaving when the visitors access your website.

Consider where people are likely to be in their journey when they land on your homepage and curate it accordingly. Also be sure to analyze how people interact with your homepage by tracking key metrics like time on page, bounce rate, and scroll depth, to see if visitors are actually reaching your most important content in the first place.

Now start cleaning up that content!

Armed with these insights and information, you can start breathing new life into your site structure. A good idea is to sort your web pages and content into categories and organize them based on relevance, importance, and performance. Ensure that the webpages at the top of the hierarchy are accessible via your homepage, so visitors don’t have to look hard to find them.

Decide what your website is missing, what existing content can be improved, and what can be deleted altogether. Understanding how visitors are navigating your homepage and interacting with individual web pages provides insight into how you can better serve visitors and — hopefully — customers. Not to mention, Google!

Remember that in today’s world, when many organizations are transforming digitally, customers have an unlimited amount of resources at their fingertips. You need to ensure your website stands out from the crowd. This means effective content should be valuable, relevant, and as optimized as possible.

2. Identify and remove bad links

What are bad links?

Before we delve into how to remove them, let’s understand what exactly makes a link “bad”.

The “link schemes” section of Google’s Quality Guidelines states:

“Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.”

Put simply, a bad link is one that violates Google’s guidelines. There are some things that Google just doesn’t like, and bad links to your site is one of them. A bad link can result in penalties from Google that’ll affect your rankings in the search engine results pages (SERPs) and, consequently, your entire website performance.

When link building, it’s important to stay on top of sites that are linking to yours, and understand what signifies whether or not a link is good. Some kinds of links will get you into trouble, including those from press releases, private blog networks, link farms, etc.

A good link, on the other hand, will do wonders for your SEO and website authority. Examples of good links include links from high-ranking sites, links from sites in your industry, and non-spammy links that aren’t solicited.

Sure, there are good links and bad links. But it’s important to remember that links aren’t all about SEO. They should — first and foremost — be about providing your website visitors with valuable information to improve their user experience.

How to remove bad links

Once you’ve identified the bad links that are harming your website, there are a few steps you’ll need to take to get rid of them.

First, try searching for the websites that are hosting those links to find their contact information. You can then ask for the links to be removed directly. If you don’t receive a reply agreeing to remove a link or see that the link remains active, it’s time to take further action.

If you’ve done everything in your power to remove the links to no avail, you can disavow the URLs of the pages or domains that are linking to your site. Disavow? Sounds complicated, right? Don’t worry, we’ll take you through it.

When you disavow links, you are essentially making a request for Google to ignore those links to your website domain. If your request is successful, these links won’t be counted against you. Remember: Google’s pretty savvy when it comes to third-party actions affecting websites, so disavowing links should be a last resort. 

If you determine you do need to disavow bad links, head on over to the Google Disavow Tool to get started. The process is as follows:

1. Define the links you want to disavow.

2. Create your disavow list and ensure entries are separated by URL or domain.

3. Upload the list as a .txt file to Google’s disavow tool.

3. Remove or redirect broken links

A broken link refers to a link on your website that leads to a page that doesn’t exist. Linked pages could lead to non-existent or out of date pages on your own or external websites. Clicking on them results in a 404 error message, like this one:

If you’ve done a site audit, it’s likely revealed some broken links on your site. It happens! You can easily find these broken links with the Crawl Errors report in Google Search Console or the site crawl feature of Moz Pro. These tools will tell you which links are returning 404 messages.

Broken links can occur for several reasons:

• The URL of the link you entered was incorrect

• The linked page has been deleted

• The external website that was linked to has been deleted

• A firewall is restricting access to the linked website or page

Whatever the reason, broken links don’t do your site any favors. Broken links can detract from your website authority, frustrate visitors, and thus affect your search engine ranking.

Luckily, fixing them is simple. There are a few things you can do:

• Un-link the text

• Correct the link if there was a mistake when entering it

• Replace the link if the destination still exists but has been changed

• Create a redirect for recurring broken links to pages on your site (eg. you changed the URL of your contact page, and now all links to that page are broken)

4. Optimize images

To appeal to visitors, your website needs images. The visual aspect of a website is sometimes just as important as the information being shared, so your images must be displayed properly. Images are also a great way to further boost the SEO of your site!

First of all, compress the images on your pages to improve the load speed. Load speed can make a huge difference in how people interact with your site. When page load time increases from one second to three seconds, the bounce probability increases by a whopping 32%!

Pages that take longer to load result in a higher bounce rate, especially for people browsing on mobile devices. So, ensuring your website loads as quickly as possible is crucial to attracting and maintaining visitors.

There are several plug-ins for WordPress that allow you to compress images in various file types. If you’re using an external compressor tool, you might need to download, compress, and re-upload the images.

Once you’ve successfully done this, you should also take some time to update the image alt text. Alt text is a great way to incorporate keywords into the page and improve your website’s SEO.

If you use a website like Shopify for product management, you can easily add alt text to your product images or other media. This means that if the image can’t load for any reason, the alt text is shown instead. It’s also a tool used to improve the experience of visually impaired people.

5. Eliminate duplicate metadata

Each title tag and meta description should be unique, as these are what appear in the search engine results. As you add more and more pages to your website, it’s easy to end up repeating metadata. You might have the same title tags, or too-similar meta descriptions affecting your site quality, without you even realizing it.

When cleaning up your website SEO, eliminating any duplicate metadata will help to boost your rankings and get you on Google’s good side. If you’ve audited your site, your crawl data will reveal which pages feature duplicate metadata.

Set up a spreadsheet with all of these duplicates, and find some time to come up with unique title tags and meta descriptions. It might be a tedious job for whoever lands it, but the SEO rewards will make it all worth it!

Title tags are arguably the most important element of on-page SEO, so pay careful attention to them! Each title tag should be original, using up to 65 characters. It should also begin with your keyword themes (to reflect search intent), and end with your website or brand name.

Meta descriptions don’t necessarily affect your ranking, but they do affect the click-through rates to your site — which is just as important in our books! After all, if people aren’t actually clicking through to your site, what does it matter if you’re on the first page? Meta descriptions should feature your keyword themes and provide a succinct overview of the page in about 155 characters.

6. Check that it all works

Okay, this one may seem obvious, but you’d be surprised at just how often we assume everything works. Ensuring each element of your website is fully functional is vital to ensuring your visitors have a good (great!) experience when they land on your site.

If parts of your website aren’t working as effectively as they should, it could result in increased bounce rates as visitors become frustrated and leave before taking a desired action. This won’t go down well with Google, and your rankings will suffer as a result.

Go through each page to ensure it works. Use a cobrowsing tool with a colleague or friend to understand how customers experience your site. Test the functionality of contact forms, signups, e-commerce shopping carts, checkouts, etc. Doing this will allow you to identify elements that aren’t working, or could use improvement.

Make your SEO clean-up strategy a regular occurrence

Think of your website as your home. You wouldn’t just clean it once a year, would you? We hope not! Your website requires constant maintenance to stay on top of updates to the algorithm, shifting consumer demands, and developments in your business goals.

Make site cleanups a regular occurrence. Schedule monthly clean-ups (project scheduling tools can help!), so your marketing team can stay on top of the dynamic practice of SEO and keep your website at peak performance. Tools like Google Analytics and Moz provide accurate data that reflects site performance, and can be used to inform future strategies.

If you make this a part of your routine, you’ll see the benefits of SEO through quality links, increased organic traffic, and a more satisfied audience. Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?