Looking to improve your SEO strategy?

Learning from the challenges and success stories of other businesses is the quickest way to optimize your marketing efforts and rise to the top of the search engine results.

To give you a head start, we rounded up the best SEO case studies from brands across a wide range of industries so you can refine your strategy and replicate the same techniques (and results) as our experts.

What is an SEO case study?

An SEO case study showcases how a real-world business improved its search engine rankings with specific strategies. It details the problems they faced, the hypothesized solutions, the implementation of those strategies, and the results.

How to use SEO case studies to inform your strategy

Reviewing an SEO case study helps you identify success markers and the strategies used to achieve that success. Use these expert techniques as an outline for your own SEO strategy.

14 SEO case studies for top-ranking inspiration

Here, you’ll find a handpicked roster of 14 inspiring case studies:

1. Moneta Group
2. Escape the Room
3. DesktopReady
4. Honda Motor Co.
5. Zephyr
6. Career Group Companies
7. Happy Ears Hearing Center
8. DILO
9. Easly
10. Wind River
11. Samanage
12. Mommy’s Bliss
13. Forks Over Knives
14. Vimeo

(Image: Adobe Stock)

1. Moneta Group catches local leads with triple-boosted keyword portfolio

Moneta Group has over two decades of experience in the wealth management space. Still, competition increased over time, so we needed to study those competitors and their keywords closely.

While Moneta wanted to improve national keyword rankings overall, their top priority was to stand out in four local markets. If you’re also looking to boost visibility in your area, check out the strategies used in this local SEO case study.

Strategies:

• Local SEO – We built geo-specific web content to capture potential wealth management clients in the four areas Moneta Group was interested in. On top of that, our beefed-up citation profiles for each office helped solidify independent local ranking signals.
• Competitive analysis to fill keyword gaps – Moneta still wanted nationwide keyword rankings, so we had to review their competitors to see what was missing. We identified keywords with the lowest competitive metrics and organized them into a content calendar to rank for each one.
• Content optimization – Moneta had a ton of great content on its website, but it needed a revamp for Google and new audiences. We conducted ongoing, on-page optimization, including backlinking and keyword development.

Results:

• 326% increase in net organic keyword portfolio
• 164% increase in organic keywords in positions 1-3
• Over 23% increase in Google Analytics goal completions

2. Escape the Room makes a real impression — 4 million, to be exact

With locations across 18 cities and 10 years of industry expertise, Escape the Room is a leader in the live game and entertainment industry.

With all those locations to manage, their marketing initiatives fell behind. They had a substantial base but needed strategic input to work with the algorithm and maintain a strong digital footprint.

Strategies:

• Metadata revamp – Escape the Room had 16 different locations, and not every website contained optimized metadata. But crawlers dive into these details, so they deserve some attention. That’s why we added new SEO elements like title tags and meta descriptions to keep Google happy.
• Speedy load time – Slow site speed can send your audience packing after just a few seconds. We dove into each website’s assets to remove anything clunky and decrease load time. This also improved mobile responsiveness.
• Quality content creation – From team-building ideas for company staff to escape room tips and tricks, there was no shortage of relevant content to create for Escape the Room. We paired new pieces of content with fresh, snazzy website designs to attract information-seeking readers, planting the seeds for conversion later on.

Results:

• Achieved an account-wide peak of 62% impression share
• Hit a record number of 4 million monthly impressions
• Reached an all-time-high account-wide ad position of 1.1 for the brand

3. DesktopReady waves hello from the top of the SERPs

A new website launch caused DesktopReady to experience a traffic slump, despite being a leader in their industry with over 1 million users on their desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) solution.

How could they maintain their leading position in this space with endless competition and minimal organic traffic? We knew what we had to do.

Strategies:

• Technical SEO audit – New website launches sometimes miss the mark with SEO. We conducted a full audit to catch all issues affecting the site’s appeal to SERPs.
• Content all around – We optimized old content with new targeted key terms and created new content to target more qualified leads and foster website traffic.
• SEO support for social media profiles and YouTube – Believe it or not, your social profiles matter, too. So, we optimized DesktopReady’s social media to complement its strong web content and backlink profile.

Results:

• Increased users by 409%
• Grew backlinks from 822 to 1,340
• Jumped from 4 to 468 terms in SERP rankings

Keyword revamps, backlink strategies, and content creation are not the simplest tasks to complete on a marketer’s endless to-do list. Luckily, an SEO agency can check all those boxes for you.

4. Honda doubles traffic and reaches 30 million people

Honda Motor Co. wanted to promote their new Civic hatchback and Accord models to South American audiences. The problem? They were competing for keywords with their dealership partners.

On top of that, Honda just wasn’t reaching their target demographic with their existing content.

Strategies:

• New and improved keyword targets – We needed to get Honda and its dealers on the same page. So, we looked at the digital marketing goals for all parties and created new keyword targets for each to follow.
• Audience research – Honda had a target demographic, but SEO campaigns just weren’t reaching them. We sat down to discuss the brand’s unique selling points and linked them to their customers’ needs via tailored SEO content and keyword research.

Results:

• 30% decrease in CPC (cost per conversion)
• 40% increase in dealer inquiries
• 200% increase in traffic

5. Zephyr sees massive gains in lead volume and market share

When leading SaaS company Zephyr came to us, their digital marketing strategy was overly broad and lacked cohesion. With campaigns and goals in place, they needed help reigning everything in to a sharp message and aligned approach.

With so many team members and initiatives at play, everyone was hamster-wheeling and struggling to stay caught up.

This lapse in cohesion created a hodgepodge of mixed messaging, and, not surprisingly, they weren’t bringing in as many qualified leads as they desired.

Strategies:

• Big-picture strategy: The first thing we did was get everyone on board about how to organize each and every initiative to work together cohesively. With an aligned, collaborative vision, we created a more unified strategy for all digital marketing campaigns.
• Landing page redesign and optimization: We tackled creative from the get-go and redesigned a landing page to make it more engaging. Plus, the lead form was long and convoluted. With a dynamic new landing page design and a more efficient lead form, Zephyr saw immediate results — we’re talking double the lead volume than the original page.

Results:

• 100% increase in Zephyr’s lead volume with the new landing page
• $250 decrease in CPA
• 2.5% CTR

(Image: Career Group Companies)

6. Career Group Companies boosts job applications with keyword revamp

Imagine you’re an employer with a ton of job listings, and you aren’t receiving any applications.

Career Group Companies, a staffing agency, faced this problem. The culprit? Less-than-stellar SEO was hiding their listings from prospective candidates.

We got to work with tried-and-true SEO tactics to improve the brand’s connection with its audience, drive more traffic, and improve application volume.

Strategies:

• Keyword portfolio expansion – We needed to understand why people looking for certain jobs weren’t landing on Career Group Companies’ listings. The answer was a few adjustments to their keyword portfolio, including long-tail variations and keyword phrases that included specific job titles and industries.
• Data-driven strategy – Our proprietary tech, ConversionIQ, helps us decrypt all the data to reveal the whole picture of your SEO and content marketing campaigns. We used our platform to gather sophisticated data across multiple channels and identify qualified and unqualified leads to inform a greater SEO strategy.
• New content assets – Career Group Companies wanted to highlight diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts and channel company-wide goals in their content. Naturally, we created new content assets to accommodate these goals and optimized existing content as well.

Results:

• 43% increase in job listing page views from organic traffic
• 71% increase in entrances from organic searches directly to job listing pages
• Significant growth in the candidate pipeline

7. Content, colors, and CTAs bring Happy Ears Hearing Center a nearly 4X traffic increase

Happy Ears Hearing Center is a Phoenix-based audiology office that offers specialized ear healthcare services to clients.

The company had two SEO goals: one, to capture the local audience that would best benefit from their services. And two? Establish their brand as a national industry expert on hearing issues.

We cast a wider net of keywords and implemented user experience improvements to garner more conversions.

Strategies:

• User experience enhancement – Don’t you hate clicking on a web page only to be met with a long, boring block of text? We spiced things up on Happy Ears’ website with colors, digestible headers, and engaging calls to action (CTAs). This led to more local conversions and appointments.
• Expanded keyword targets – Happy Ears wants to be an online go-to for all things hearing. So, we had to research what its audience was plugging into Google and expand that across the whole country.

Results:

• 245% increase in total organic keyword rankings
• 396% increase in organic traffic
• 44% increase in local conversions
• Significant growth in the candidate pipeline

Happy Ears had its audiology services on point. With added focus on the online user experience, readers benefited from their knowledge and expertise.

8. More visuals and updated keywords help DILO recover lost rankings

DILO is a gas-handling product and service provider with decades of experience, but even its longstanding SEO wasn’t immune to a website redesign in 2019.

We’ve seen it before: lost traffic and dropped keyword rankings from a new launch or migration. And in DILO’s case, those lost rankings were high-value keywords that it really needed to get back in order to re-establish its place in the industry.

Strategies:

• On-page optimization – We always conduct a technical SEO audit after a redesign. This time, we fixed a few speed and navigation issues. Next step? Content optimization with updated target keywords and meta tags.
• Visual content – The gas industry isn’t the easiest to grasp, even with an organized, comprehensive article. We introduced more infographics and charts into DILO’s content to improve organic traffic and the user experience.

Results:

• 36% increase in organic clicks within 6 months
• 24% increase in Google clicks for high-value keywords within 3 months
• 46% increase in Google impressions within 3 months

9. Easly hits the SEO ground running with 70 new pieces of optimized content

Easly is a Canada-based platform that provides capital advances on SR&ED grants to innovative new brands.

The company was new to the digital marketing world and came to HawkSEM with a brand-new website. It was our job to get it off the SEO ground with relevant content and authority to appeal to their audiences.

Strategies:

• New content to the max – We had to start from scratch, and 70 new pieces of content did the trick. Of course, we had to ensure the information was flawless and accurate to capture niche audiences for this brand. And we wrote for every potential customer in the funnel, from curious onlookers to conversion-ripe audiences.
• Domain authority – Easly was still fresh to Google’s eyes. They didn’t have enough external or internal links to channel credibility and thought leadership. We focused on creating linkable content that naturally brought backlinks from other reputable industry players.
• Technical tidbits – New websites always have a few snags. We enhanced site speed and adjusted some web elements to improve the mobile experience.

Results:

• 2,500% increase in referring domains
• 40+ featured snippet results on Google
• 1,500% increase in the brand’s keyword portfolio

People love reassurance, especially before making a purchase. A content library brimming with industry knowledge and helpful tips delivers that assurance to both readers and search engine crawlers.

(Image: Adobe Stock)

10. Wind River triples CTR with PPC and SEO management

Wind River is a global SaaS brand that helps companies with digital transformation for vital intelligence systems in the aerospace, medical, automotive, and defense spaces.

They originally came to us for PPC services, but every cohesive marketing strategy leverages SEO, too.

Strategies:

• Internal linking – We improved site navigation and organic rankings by finding relevant placements for internal links across Wind River’s content.
• Content research – Tech niches are abundant with potential content, but you really need to ensure audience relevance before you start writing. We conducted competitive analysis and keyword research to inform our content calendar.
• Technical and on-page SEO – We covered our technical bases by cleaning up metadata and title tags. On top of that, we ensured logical formatting for web content with H1s and H2s, as well as updated all pieces of content with relevant keyword targets.

Results:

• 20% decrease in ad spend
• 294% increase in clickthrough rate (CTR)
• 39% increase in users

11. Samanage reaps organic traffic with a poppin’ content calendar

Asset management and service-desk SaaS brand Samanage operates across 50 different countries. Despite their global presence, they still had trouble ranking in the SERPs.

A custom-coded WordPress template impeded them from making technical SEO changes to appeal to Google’s crawlers. Plus, their blog wasn’t aligned with a cohesive SEO strategy, so they enlisted marketing agency Tinuiti to help them get on track.

Strategies:

• Robust content strategy – Tinuiti published over 65 pieces of content for Samanage across various types. They started with keyword-targeted blog posts and expanded to whitepapers, landing pages, and more evergreen content to improve web visibility.
• Blog redesign – Brainstorming ways to improve conversion rate optimization? Take a page from Tinuiti’s playbook and optimize your blog’s design elements with overall website A/B testing.

Results:

• 42.14% increase in organic traffic YoY
• High rankings for non-branded keywords

12. Mommy’s Bliss builds trust with new audiences via link-building

When you’re a mom-and-pop shop, marketing might be as easy as a Facebook ad or physical sign. But when you start expanding, things get more hectic.

Mommy’s Bliss sells high-quality baby products and experienced immense growth that spurred an entire website redesign. Those two events can seriously throw your SEO strategy off-course.

Luckily, help from HawkSEM made all the difference, as showcased in this ecommerce SEO case study.

Strategies:

• Backlinking for credibility – Mommy’s Bliss expanded its audience, so new visitors might not have been aware of the company’s strong values and credentials. We needed to launch a backlinking strategy to establish E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness).
• Daily SEO management – HawkSEM offers all clients a dedicated manager to oversee progress, strategize improvements, and catch any snags before they develop into bigger problems. We handled all the SEO oversight so Mommy’s Bliss could focus on creating new products for its booming audience.

Results:

• Over 65% increase in organic sessions year over year
• 79% increase in total keyword rankings
• Doubled goal completions

13. Forks Over Knives leverages search data to recover lost traffic during COVID

The pandemic kept people at home and away from the Forks Over Knives website. The health lifestyle brand noticed a slump in organic search traffic, along with a decrease in search volume for their target keywords.

But the problem wasn’t their rankings. They still held top spots for their target keywords, people just weren’t typing them into Google anymore. Search intent had changed, and marketing agency Wpromote knew the keywords needed to change, too.

Strategies:

• Trend research – Wpromote used Google Trends data to understand how people were shifting their search queries and which keywords were replacing the old ones.
• Content strategy shift – When life gives you new keywords, you make new recipes (at least, that’s what Forks Over Knives did during the pandemic). Everyone was looking for recipes, so Wpromote used trend data to predict the most highly searched recipes to create content for.

Results:

• 278,000 organic sessions for their “banana recipes” pages
• 41% increase in total organic sessions month over month (MoM)
• #1 trafficked all-channel landing page since publishing

People adapt with the times, and your SEO strategy should, too.

14. Vimeo takes technical SEO to the next level for better visibility

Even enterprise-level SaaS businesses like Vimeo need to stay sharp on their SEO. With over 260 million users uploading hundreds of thousands of videos daily, it’s not surprising that indexing and structure data issues arose.

Customers struggled to conduct basic SEO tasks to optimize their videos, like indexing APIs, adding structured data to their sites, submitting sitemaps, and beyond. Meaning? They weren’t getting as many eyes on their video content.

The solution? Vimeo got on board with Google’s SEO best practices to improve visibility and searchability for their active customers.

Strategies:

• Allowing customers to index videos at scale – Vimeo streamlined the indexing process to allow embedded videos to show up on Google’s SERPs. By using iframe embeds and noindex in tandem, embedded Vimeo videos from customer websites’ could be indexed and thus, provide more visibility to their own web page without the mess of adding individual markups for each video.
• Making Key Moments searchable – Ever searched for how to boil an egg and had to skip past the first three minutes to get to the instructions? Annoying, right? Fortunately, you won’t have this problem anymore because time-stamped segments of Vimeo’s video content now show up in Google Search. By adding Clip markup to all video pages and rolling out Seek markup (auto-generated Chapters that Google identifies as Key Moments), Vimeo customers can now attract more organic traffic to specific segments within each video.

When it comes to visibility and video content, Google and Vimeo go together like PB&J.

The takeaway

Whether you’re running a small business or a giant ecommerce operation, these case studies demonstrate tactics you can apply to your own SEO efforts.

But building an effective, in-depth strategy takes time. HawkSEM’s SEO experts have over a decade of experience helping clients like you improve conversion rates, boost monthly traffic, and smash any other online marketing goals on your roster.

Our clients enjoy an average of 4.5X ROI after working with us. Ready for SEO success? Book a call today.

This post has been updated and was originally published in August 2023.

The post 14 SEO Case Studies: Challenges, Solutions + Results appeared first on HawkSEM.

YouTube has over 122 million daily active users and over 1 billion hours watched daily. This makes it the most popular video platform and, just this year, it surpassed Facebook as the most-used social network as well.

While you may not think of YouTube as a search engine, it’s actually the second most popular search engine globally, just behind Google.

If you want to appear in the YouTube search results and rank your videos on the Google search engine results page, you must know how to use YouTube SEO to boost your visibility.

As someone who tripled their email marketing list from just one video using YouTube SEO, I’ve experienced first-hand just how powerful search engine optimization can be to generate leads and sales through YouTube video marketing.

In this article, I’m deep-diving into everything about YouTube SEO with expert tips and successful examples to get you started.

What is YouTube SEO?

YouTube SEO is the process of optimizing your YouTube videos to rank higher in the platform’s search results.

Optimizing your videos for YouTube also helps them rank in Google search results, boosting your visibility.

14 expert tips to build a YouTube SEO strategy

Ready to get started with video marketing SEO? Here’s how to prime your YouTube SEO for search engine results page (SERP) success:

1. Optimize your YouTube channel
2. Do keyword research
3. Give videos keyword-rich titles and descriptions
4. Tag the video with relevant keywords
5. Categorize your video
6. Add subtitles and closed captions
7. Add video chapters
8. Use cards and end screens
9. Create custom video thumbnails
10. Build playlists to enhance watch time
11. Create and publish new videos consistently
12. Promote your YouTube content
13. Encourage engagement with your videos
14. Track results and tweak your strategy

1. Optimize your YouTube channel

Start with optimizing your YouTube channel elements so it’s easier to find you in search. Here are the elements to focus on.

Handle

Customizing your YouTube handle makes sharing your page easier while adding legitimacy to your channel. To change your handle, head to YouTube Studio and follow these steps:

• Select Customization from the left menu
• Go to Basic info
• Under Handle, you can view and change your handle
• Click Publish to confirm

Once created, your URL will render as youtube.com/@yourcustomizedname.

Banner and featured image

The YouTube banner image appears at the top of your channel. Much like a banner image on your website, the goal is to give users context about your channel and get them interested in what you offer.

While there’s no right way to create an attractive banner image, here are some best practices:

• Use your branding elements. Use brand colors, fonts, graphic elements, and your logo in the banner image.
• Keep image copy short and sweet. Highlight what your channel is about, feature your brand tagline, include a call to action, or provide details about when you release new videos.
• Add relevant imagery. Add textures, graphics, and photos relevant to your channel content and align with your branding.
• Don’t go overboard. You don’t want the channel banner to distract from your content. Avoid making it cluttered. Leave open space around the text and graphic elements.

The HubSpot Marketing channel keeps these best practices in mind with an attractive, branded banner that’s eye-catching and clarifies what the channel is about.

Don’t forget to update your featured image. If you have a personal brand channel, use a clear image of your smiling face.

And if your channel is for a business, use the logo as your featured image like HubSpot does above.

Featured video

You can feature one of your videos at the top of your profile. This will be the first video people see when they land on your channel.

Choose a video highlighting your channel’s offer. It can be one of your most popular videos or a 30-to 60-second trailer you create for that purpose.

Description and details

Complete the About section of your YouTube profile with a relevant and keyword-rich description of your channel.

When someone clicks on your page description, it’ll expand, showing the full description, links, and channel details.

Links

Don’t forget to include relevant links on your profile. Only one link will appear on your main profile page, so choose the most relevant as your first link.

You can include additional links that viewers will see when they expand the link section on your profile.

2. Do keyword research

YouTube keyword strategy is similar to finding keyword ideas for Google. Use different tools to identify search terms viewers type to find videos like yours on YouTube.

“When conducting keyword research for YouTube SEO, I determine the topic I want to cover and then use a YouTube keyword research tool like TubeBuddy or VidIQ to find relevant, high-performing phrases related to that topic,” says Jamar Diggs, a digital marketing consultant.

“I identify keywords and phrases with high search volume and low competition. Then I choose the best one that aligns with my topic and make it my primary keyword to use in the video title,” Diggs says.

“The other relevant keywords I find during this process become secondary keywords I use as tags.”

I use TubeBuddy to do keyword research for my own YouTube channel. First, I type in a general keyword based on the video topic.

I want to use keywords with a keyword difficulty and search volume that’s in the good range (yellow on TubeBuddy’s scale).

Like Diggs, any related keywords I don’t use as primary keywords become video tags (or future videos).

3. Give videos keyword-rich titles and descriptions

After keyword research, create keyword-rich titles and descriptions for your videos. Add target keywords in your raw file names before uploading the video to the platform.

Title

The title is the first thing your viewer sees when searching for content on YouTube. Like your title tag on Google, your YouTube video title determines whether someone clicks on the video.

So, make your title engaging while including the keyword naturally in the text. Keep your title concise (at 60 characters or less) to prevent it from cutting off in results pages.

Description

Descriptions can be up to 5,000 characters, but only about 100 will display under the video before a “Read more…” option is prompted. So get the main point across at the beginning of the description, along with a call to action (CTA) if applicable.

Here are a few tips to create a successful YouTube video description:

• Use your keywords. Naturally use 1-2 main keywords in the video description.
• Use formatting to your advantage. Bold and italicize font and use emojis to format your description so it’s easy to read.
• Leverage video chapters. Video chapters allow viewers to skip around to important parts of a longer video.
• Link to related videos or playlists. Include links to other relevant video content to keep viewers engaged with your videos.
• Use hashtags when applicable. Use 3-5 relevant hashtags in the description to help people find your content.

Once you find a format that works for you, save time by creating a template to reuse whenever writing YouTube video descriptions.

Pro tip: We recommend keeping descriptions at around 200 words.

4. Tag the video with relevant keywords

Tagging videos with relevant keywords also shows what your content is about. The platform allows you to use as many tags as you want as long as the total character limit across all tags is under 500 characters.

You’ll add these tags during the video upload process. Once you’re in the video editor, go to the “Details” section. Here, you’ll see the Tags box where you can enter your tags.

Here’s an example of the tags used for one of HubSpot’s videos on AI content creation tools:

Unlike the hashtags in your description, the video tags won’t be visible to viewers. It’s more of a back-end feature that helps YouTube understand what the video is about.

5. Categorize your video

Categorize your video under “Advanced Settings” after you upload it. Categorizing your videos groups them with similar content on YouTube.

This can increase showing up in relevant playlists and being recommended by YouTube.

6. Add subtitles and closed captions

Adding subtitles and closed captions to your videos makes them inclusive and accessible to the hearing impaired.

Plus, some viewers may not want to turn on sound because they’re in a quiet place or don’t have headphones.

These days, there are multiple options for creating captions or subtitles. While auto-generated captions might be easier or more cost-effective, they’re more prone to errors since the audio isn’t transcribed by a person.

While it’s important to keep budget in mind, experience tells us it’s worth seeking an affordable paid service (such as Rev) to ensure clarity, especially for complex subjects.

Alternatively, you can read over the transcript and make edits yourself.

7. Add video chapters

Video chapters allow viewers to skip around or rewatch important sections of the video. When you create video chapters, you’ll add a title for each timestamp to describe the contents of each chapter.

Adding video chapters is especially important for longer videos that some viewers may not have the patience or time to watch all the way through.

8. Use cards and end screens

Cards and end screens are two features you can use to increase viewership and watch time on your videos.

Cards

Cards are preformatted notifications to promote your brand or related videos on your channel. You can add up to five cards to a video.

They appear in the top corner of the video with an “i” logo like this:

Here are the types of cards:

• Channel cards directing people to another channel
• Video or playlists cards linking to other YouTube content
• Link cards directing viewers to an external site
• Poll cards asking viewers a question and allowing them to vote in response
• Donation cards encouraging fundraising for non-profit organizations
• Fan funding encouraging viewers to support your video content creation

To add cards to your videos, follow these instructions from YouTube.

End screens

End screens are similar to cards, except they appear at the end of the video.

These are less subtle and more visual than cards, making them a great way to encourage viewers to continue watching relevant videos, which increases your watch time.

Here’s an example from digital product YouTuber, Christina Scalera:

To create your own end screen, follow these steps from YouTube.

9. Create custom video thumbnails

Your video thumbnail is the main thing people see when scrolling through the video results. In combination with the video title, this tells the viewer what your video is about.

Customizing your thumbnails makes videos stand out and your page look more professional and cohesive. Use images that are 1280×720 pixels, 2MB or smaller, and saved as .jpg, .png, .gif, or .bmp files.

Here are a few ways to make your video thumbnails stick out:

• Show a face in your thumbnail. The more emotion the face is showing, the better.
• Use color to your advantage. Choose bright colors that draw the eye to the thumbnail.
• Keep the text concise. Keep it short and focused on the important information the video will provide.

If you don’t upload custom thumbnails, YouTube will randomly select a still from your video, which is likely not as eye-catching as a designed thumbnail.

10. Build playlists to enhance watch time

When someone watches a video from a playlist, the others in queue will auto-play one after the other, rather than the viewer selecting each video individually.

Curating multiple videos on similar subjects into playlists can increase watch time — one of YouTube’s top-ranking factors.

Depending on your videos and industry, you could create playlists for your webinars, client testimonials, how-tos, or frequently asked questions.

For example, HubSpot’s Marketing YouTube channel has playlists for “free tools and templates,” “social media business strategies,” “SEO success strategies,” and “digital marketing for beginners.”

These playlists make it easy for viewers to find the content they want while providing additional relevant content they’ll likely want to watch.

11. Create and publish new videos consistently

Want to grow your subscriber base and keep your target audience engaged? Publish new, high-quality videos consistently.

After a few months of regular publishing, you’ll collect enough data. This will identify the topics your audience engages with most.

“The biggest thing to encourage engagement is well-thought-out storytelling that sparks an emotion in the viewer,” says Gulce Onganer, a YouTube marketing expert. “The moment the viewer is moved, they will engage.”

12. Promote your YouTube content

YouTube marketing isn’t an “if you build it, they will come” situation. Actively promote your YouTube content to grow your channel’s subscriber base and get new views on your videos.

When you publish a new YouTube video, share it with your social media followers and email list. You can embed the video in an email, landing page, or blog post for maximum exposure.

“One of the simplest ways to get more bang for my SEO buck on YouTube is through embedding the videos on a blog post,” says Onganer. “This can increase your domain authority and SEO visibility over time.”

She suggests using your video script or transcripts as the basis for the blog post. Transcribe the video using an AI transcription tool like Rev, then clean it up, add some content, and optimize it before publishing it on your blog.

13. Encourage engagement with your videos

Encouraging viewers to interact with you improves engagement — another metric YouTube uses to rank videos.

You can embed “share” and “like” buttons, incentivize subscriptions, and invite viewers to leave comments. The more positive interactions you have, the better.

“It’s corny, but telling your viewers exactly what to do works,” says Christina Scalera, a digital product coach and YouTuber. “The more precise you can be with your request, the more it will happen.”

“For example, if you say ‘like and follow,’ they probably won’t. But [try saying], ‘See that button below that’s a big thumbs up? Tap on it to help this channel grow so I can create more videos for you.’”

In addition to your verbal requests, use graphics to remind your viewers to like and subscribe to your content.

14. Track results & tweak your strategy

As you publish videos, track your results along the way to tweak your strategy for best results.

“Tracking is an essential part of any SEO campaign, especially when determining the true value of YouTube SEO,” shares Sam Yadegar, CEO and co-founder of HawkSEM.

“Many times, companies don’t continue YouTube SEO efforts because they can’t track things properly, so they believe the channel isn’t viable for them. This is a huge mistake that can lead to missed market share.”

YouTube Studio has its own analytics tools to track metrics like click-through rate and watch time. But other YouTube analytics tools exist to help you get the most out of your data.

“We use ConversionIQ (CIQ), HawkSEM’s proprietary software, to granularly track every single step of the buyer journey so we can understand which of the new MQLs and SQLs were generated as a result of your SEO efforts,” Yadegar adds.

Bonus tips from a new YouTube SEO study

Along with the expert advice above, a recent YouTube SEO techniques study by Adilo revealed these best practices for optimal YouTube SEO this year and in the future.

• Target the same keywords via multiple videos
• Focus on increasing engagement in order to boost video search rankings
• Keep longer, more in-depth videos under 10 minutes
• Video descriptions should include links when applicable
• Use video titles to satisfy search intent
• Take time to get your channel verified to increase trustworthiness

3 examples of successful YouTube SEO campaigns

The best way to understand what YouTube SEO looks like in practice is to look at channels that do it well.

Salesforce

Salesforce is a software company that uses YouTube SEO to grow its visibility and generate leads and sales on the video platform. They consistently publish valuable content to bring in new leads and support customer retention.

Salesforce ranks for keywords like “sales CRM”…

…And “CRM analytics,” which are relevant search terms potential customers may want to learn more about on YouTube. It even has a CRM analytics playlist that ranks underneath its video in the top spot.

Speaking of playlists: Salesforce also develops playlists with a curated selection of videos around a common theme. Here’s an example of its created playlists:

Brian Dean

Brian Dean is an SEO expert and the founder of Backlinko, one of the most popular marketing blogs online. He regularly publishes new video content around SEO, YouTube marketing, and entrepreneurship.

Dean ranks for relevant keywords like “link building,” which can bring more people to his channel from YouTube searches.

He also regularly publishes new YouTube shorts. These videos are often less than 60 seconds and teach businesses to boost visibility and engagement in Google.

These short videos are often repurposed clips from longer videos, giving new viewers a taste of the information presented. But you can also create unique content just for the format.

Lyfe Accounting

Lyfe Accounting is a small business accounting firm that offers bookkeeping, accounting, and tax services.

Its team is active on YouTube, publishing helpful videos on a range of topics surrounding small business finance.

The company’s channel ranks for several broad, yet relevant, YouTube SEO keywords like “small business accounting” and “small business tax write-offs.”

These topics are important for the company’s target audience.

Another thing this channel does well is create scroll-stopping thumbnails that are engaging and on-brand.

The thumbnails all feature emotive faces and eye-catching text, drawing your attention to these videos in search.

All of the thumbnails use the brand’s color palette (green and yellow) and on-brand graphics, offering a cohesive look to the channel.

How the YouTube algorithm works

The YouTube algorithm delivers recommended video content based on the user’s interests and watch history.

YouTube’s goal is not to bring you the most popular or most recent video based on your query. Instead, YouTube wants to deliver the video you specifically will find most useful.

That doesn’t mean you don’t have to create great video content to rank on YouTube. In fact, it’s the opposite. The better and more engaging your video content is, the more likely YouTube will be to recommend it.

Video ranking on YouTube

YouTube doesn’t favor any particular topics or video formats. Instead, it takes its cues from viewers.

YouTube ranking is based on the video’s performance (engagement rates, watch times, etc.) and viewer personalization (a viewer’s watch history and search history).

How YouTube personalizes recommendations

When it comes to recommending videos, YouTube doesn’t take into account the actual content of the video, but rather the ways that viewers respond to it.

In addition to viewer activity like watch history, YouTube also considers the following when recommending videos:

• If people are watching the video
• How long they watch it (duration and average percentage viewed)
• If viewers like it (based on engagement rates)
• Regional context like the time of day and language spoken

Best YouTube SEO tools

From keyword research to SEO tracking, these are some of my favorite tools to use for YouTube video SEO.

YouTube Studio

YouTube Studio is a space on YouTube where you can analyze, edit, schedule, and upload videos. On the dashboard, you’ll see relevant channel analytics, the latest video comments, and other stats on published videos.

The Content tab houses all of your channel content. This is where you’ll upload videos and create titles and descriptions. Plus, you can add chapters, add your video to a playlist, upload your thumbnail, and more.

YouTube Studio also has an Analytics tab that gives you an overview of your channel performance. After you choose the time period, you’ll see statistics like views, watch time, and subscribers.

After choosing a specific video, click on the Reach tab to see impressions, traffic sources, YouTube search terms, and other content that suggests your video.

There’s also a place to view and respond to video comments. You can filter for the comments you haven’t responded to yet, making it easy to engage with your viewers.

YouTube Autocomplete

Another free YouTube tool is autocomplete. Much like Google, YouTube’s autocomplete reveals additional keyword opportunities and content marketing topics.

Start by typing in the keyword you want to rank for, and YouTube will show you additional search terms with that keyword. Use this to find inspiration and see what people are searching for.

TubeBuddy

TubeBuddy is one of my favorite YouTube SEO tools because it makes keyword research easy. TubeBuddy’s Keyword Explorer pulls data from YouTube and provides a score for each keyword, making it easier to choose the best keywords for your videos.

TubeBuddy gives the keyword a score based on:

• Search volume
• Competition
• Optimization strength
• Number of videos in search results
• Number of monthly searchers

It’ll also offer related searches that may give you new ideas for keywords.

Another cool feature TubeBuddy offers is the AI title generator. Sometimes creating an engaging and optimized title is the hardest part of the process.

Just pop your topic into the title generator, and it’ll provide many title ideas.

My favorite TubeBuddy feature is the best practices checklist that appears near your video when you upload it into YouTube Studio.

This checklist tells you what you’ve done well and what you can do to further optimize your video.

TubeBuddy also gives you a quick look at analytics when you pull up any YouTube video (yours or someone else’s). The Videolytics feature gives important stats like total views, comments, likes, and an SEO score.

Use this to get highlights on your videos or to spy on your competitors.

vidIQ

vidIQ is another one of my favorite YouTube SEO tools. It has many features similar to TubeBuddy but with its own touch. For example, the Keyword Inspector tool offers a lot of the same data (search volume, competition, overall score), but the user experience (UX) is more like a traditional SEO tool.

One feature I love about vidIQ is the Subscribers data. This shows the other videos and channels viewers engage with on YouTube. It also provides other information, like the best time to post.

Another cool feature is the ideation tool. You type in your keywords, and the AI-powered tool will provide you with new ideas. You can save the ideas you want to use for later.

Like TubeBuddy, vidIQ has a video analytics highlight that shows basic video stats. You’ll find additional information that TubeBuddy doesn’t offer, like subscriptions driven, top devices, and top countries, plus a general engagement rate based on likes and comments.

Rapidtags

Rapidtags is a simple and easy-to-use tool that’ll create tags for your YouTube videos. Not to mention, it’s totally free.

Just type in the video topic or title, and Rapidtags will provide a list of relevant tags. Simply hit the “copy” button and then paste the tags on the backend of your video in YouTube Studio.

Benefits of YouTube SEO services

No part of YouTube marketing is easy, especially SEO. But when it works well, it can drive new leads and sales for your business long after publishing the video.

If you don’t have the time, resources, or desire to do your own YouTube SEO, consider hiring a social media agency that provides YouTube SEO services.

Here are just a few of the benefits of hiring an agency for YouTube SEO services:

• Avoid costly SEO mistakes. A seasoned team of YouTube marketers can help you be strategic with your YouTube SEO strategy. They won’t make costly mistakes someone new to SEO would.
• Get faster results. A YouTube SEO expert already knows best practices and has a history of YouTube SEO campaigns to pull from, helping you get better and faster results than on your own.
• Get support with YouTube ads. SEO isn’t the only way to boost visibility on YouTube. Find an agency that offers YouTube ads, as well as SEO to get the best out of both strategies.

Want support with your YouTube SEO and ads? Contact us today.

YouTube SEO checklist

Here’s a quick checklist to use while optimizing your YouTube channel:

Optimize YouTube channel

• Choose a handle
• Upload banner and featured image
• Choose featured video
• Write a description for the About section
• Include relevant details in the description
• Add relevant links to the description

Do keyword research

• Choose topics for your videos
• Use tools like VidIQ and TubeBuddy to research keywords
• Find keywords with high search volume and low difficulty
• Create a list of primary and secondary keywords for your videos

Optimize YouTube videos

• Give videos keyword-rich titles and descriptions
• Tag the video with relevant keywords
• Categorize your video
• Add subtitles and closed captions
• Add video chapters
• Use cards and end screens
• Create custom video thumbnail

Improve engagement and watch time

• Build playlists to enhance watch time
• Create and publish new videos consistently
• Promote your YouTube content in emails, on your blog, and in social posts

The takeaway

Creating a YouTube channel is a great way to get more visibility, grow your audience, and attract new leads and sales. But creating videos is only half the battle.

By following the YouTube SEO tips above, you can better position your content to appear in the search results on YouTube and Google.

Need support with YouTube SEO? The HawkSEM team is ready to help — book a free consultation today.

This article has been updated and was originally published in February 2022.

The post YouTube SEO: 14 Tips to Improve Rankings and Views (+ Examples) appeared first on HawkSEM.

A functional, lightning-fast website is the gold standard in the eyes of Google and website visitors alike.

That’s why Google created Core Web Vitals: three specific metrics the search engine powerhouse uses to measure the user experience of a webpage.

In this guide, find out what these core metrics are, how you can measure them on your website, and how to optimize for a better user experience and rankings on the search engine results page.

What are Core Web Vitals?

Core Web Vitals are a set of metrics (loading, interactivity, and visual stability) that Google refers to when measuring the quality of a website user’s experience.

These ranking factors are a part of Google’s “Page Experience” signals.

These vitals are graded on a scale of “good,” “needs improvement,” or “poor” and are made up of three specific site speed and user interaction measurements:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), aka Loading

Largest Contentful Paint measures how quickly the largest elements of a webpage load, such as the primary logo, header, or video.

An ideal LCP score should be around 2.5 seconds or less, according to Google (meaning the largest piece of content is loaded within 2.5 seconds).

Because the largest elements of a website are meant to be consumed first, a good LCP score allows the user to engage with the content right away.

Alternatively, a poor LCP score results in a more frustrated user who is likely to bounce.

Interaction to Next Paint (INP)

Interaction to Next Paint measures how quickly a webpage responds when someone interacts with it.

So, when a button is clicked, INP calculates how quickly the page takes to deliver the result or “next step” of that click.

An ideal INP score is 100 milliseconds or less. Much like LCP, this loading time supports a good user experience and prevents people from bouncing off the page too early because of a long wait time.

Note: INP replaced First Input Delay, or FID, back in May 2023. FID also measured responsiveness (how long it took the browser to process the first interaction on a webpage), but it was determined that there were limitations to this metric.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

CLS measures how much the content of a webpage shifts around while loading – in other words, its visual stability.

A good CLS score (0.1 or less) means that everything stays in place while the page is loading.

This impacts user experience, particularly when it comes to trying to click a button that suddenly shifts during loading.

This experience can cause users to land on new, unintended pages or multiple (frustrating) click attempts while the button moves around.

Just like it’s important for your health to check your body’s vitals, the same goes for the health of your website. (Image: Unsplash)

Why Core Web Vitals matter

“Google prioritizes pleasant web experiences for readers,” says CEO of HawkSEM Sam Yadegar.

“Load times are one of the key ranking factors, we’ve seen rank climbs for ourselves and our clients once Core Web Vitals are at a healthy state.”

Aside from an improved user experience, Core Web Vitals offer:

1. Higher rankings on the SERP

Core Web Vitals metrics greatly influence technical SEO. Better CWV? Higher rankings, more traffic, visibility, and reach.

2. More conversions

A well-functioning website is more trustworthy and enjoyable, making people more likely to convert.

3. Increased user retention, lower bounce rates

Slow-loading websites almost guarantee a bounce. A fast, functional website reduces frustration, helps keep people engaged, and encourages them to return.

How to measure your Core Web Vitals

There are a few ways site owners can test their web pages’ Vitals. These include the Chrome User Experience Report, the Core Web Vitals report through Google Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights.

There’s even a Chrome extension that will show you the Web Vitals results for a current page.

The tricky part here is that your score can change as you scroll through a page and can depend on whether you’re accessing it via mobile or desktop.

You also want to determine whether you’re looking at Web Vitals “lab” data or “field” data.

The former is collected and approximated through a browser’s API, while the latter is collected from actual user experiences on your site.

You can address pages with poor scores and work to optimize them through things like upgrading your web host or compressing images. (Image: Unsplash)

Here’s how to measure your Core Web Vitals performance depending on different types of tools:

Google Search Console for performance overview data

Google’s free platform is the ultimate analytics tool to monitor your site’s performance data:

• Go to Google Search Console
• Select your website
• Go to the “Experience” tab
• Go to “Core Web Vitals” report

This is where Google will rank your URLs “Good,” “Needs Improvement,” or “Poor,” according to Core Web Vitals.

Google PageSpeed Insights to measure results

This is another free tool from Google that offers CWV data with both lab and field data included in the reports.

Again, “lab” will provide data from people’s devices across all geos and networks. The “field” section, on the other hand, offers data from simulated devices.

• Go to PageSpeed Insights
• Enter your URL and click “Analyze”
• Review the results and suggestions for improvements

Pro tip: Use the PageSpeed Insights extension from the Chrome Web Store to measure your Vitals in real-time.

Lighthouse for more detailed analysis

Lighthouse is another Google-owned tool that helps provide further analysis of a website’s performance for auditing purposes.

This tool may be helpful for additional insights, but comes with a more steep learning curve for most accurate and helpful use:

• Open Chrome
• Go to the page you want to analyze
• Open Developer Tools (right-click on the page and select “Inspect” or press Ctrl + Shift + I)
• Go to “Lighthouse” tab
• Select the options you want
• Click “Generate Report”
• Review Core Web Vitals scores and suggestions

Chrome User Experience Report (CrUX) for field data

CrUX reports on real-world data and provides a holistic view of your website’s overall Core Web Vitals performance (rather than individual URLs).

• Go to CrUX Dashboard (part of the Chrome Web Vitals and Chrome UX Report tools)
• Enter your URL
• Review your report

(Image: Screenshot)

How to optimize your website for Core Web Vitals

Once you have an idea of how your Core Web Vitals currently rank through the tools listed above, you can dig into some optimizations.

Here are our top tips for leveraging the three Vitals metrics:

How to improve LCP

First, review the LCP data across your entire site. From there, it’s time to address pages with poor scores and work to optimize them through things like upgrading your web host or compressing images:

1. Optimize images and videos

Massive, slow-loading images can cause major issues for your LCP score. Here are some ways to optimize your images and videos:

• Compress images
• Use modern formats
• Serve multiple resized images
• Prioritize loading
• Remove unnecessary image bloat
• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) to cache and deliver images globally
• Set optimal caching headers
• Use a caching plugin

2. Implement lazy loading

Lazy loading refers to the technique of delaying the loading of certain parts of a webpage until necessary, which ultimately speeds up the loading time of the webpage.

But remember, avoid lazy loading any LCP images. These are the primary page content elements we want to load first and fast, and lazy loading is meant to facilitate that goal.

Instead, lazy load images below the fold and prioritize the order in which page elements are downloaded so LCP elements load first.

3. Improve server response time

Easier said than done, here are some ways to optimize your server response time:

• Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
• Optimize application codes
• Use server-side caching
• Upgrade to a server with better CPU capabilities and storage
• Only use system fonts that are already installed on the user’s device, and only include the font weights and styles that your site needs
• Leverage Memcached

How to improve INP

1. Reduce JavaScript execution time

Lighthouse outlines the best ways to achieve this:

• Only send the code that your users need by implementing code splitting
• Minify and compress code
• Remove any unused code
• Reduce network trips by caching your code with the PRPL pattern

2. Minimize main-thread work

The “main thread” handles user interactions, rendering pages, and running JavaScript — all taxing work that can overwhelm and lead to slower page loads.

Some ways to minimize the main-thread work include:

• Optimize third-party scripts
• Use web workers
• Precompile or use server-side rendering (SSR)
• Defer unused JavaScript
• Reduce the complexity of your styles
• Use efficient animations
• Minimize DOM size
• Implement code splitting
• Avoid long-running JavaScript functions

How to improve CLS

To minimize unexpected layout shifts that happen as your website loads (and ultimately improve your CLS score), you can:

• Set size attributes for images and video in your HTML
• Use CSS transformations for animations
• Avoid ads or embeds that cause layout shifts

Pro tip: While Core Web Vitals can be a helpful tool in gauging your site’s effectiveness, our expert team has saved clients a lot of time and money by only using CWV as a diagnostic to point to potential UX problems — not merely a score to be improved.

Additional important web vitals

While not considered Core Web Vitals, there are several “bonus” performance metrics that Google considers while ranking your website’s speed and functionality worth mentioning:

• Time to First Byte (TTFB): How quickly a browser receives the first byte of data from a server after someone requests a file.
• First contentful paint (FCP): How long it takes the first content on a webpage to load (not to be confused with the largest content (LCP).
• Total Blocking Time (TBT): How long a page is blocked from responding to user input while loading.
• Time to Interactive (TTI): How long it takes a webpage to become interactive after it’s loaded.

Other Page Experience signals

We know that Core Web Vitals are one of Google’s primary “Page Experience” signals.

While Google doesn’t provide a complete list of Page Experience Signals, we do know Google also considers these signals while evaluating real-user experience:

• Mobile-friendliness ensures a website functions on mobile devices.
• Safe browsing checks that a website is free from harmful content like phishing or malware.
• HTTPS measures whether a website is served over a secure connection to protect user data.
• No Intrusive Interstitials (NII) makes sure a website doesn’t use intrusive pop-ups that cover the main content on the page.

The takeaway

Achieving good Core Web Vitals not only ensures a positive user experience, it also leads the way to success through organic search.

Understanding what each Vital means, how to measure your current performance, and implementing optimizations will have a massive impact in every aspect of your digital footprint.

But if your team needs a little extra horsepower, we got you.

This post has been updated and was originally published in August 2020.

The post Core Web Vitals: What They Are + Why They Matter appeared first on HawkSEM.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is what puts brand content in front of target audiences.

But it takes more than on-page SEO to appease the great and powerful Google search engine.

If you truly want to rank, you also need technical SEO.

What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the optimization of a website’s foundational elements to enhance its visibility in organic search engine results.

It focuses on improving site structure, page speed, mobile responsiveness, and other technical factors that impact search engine crawling and indexing.

A well-executed technical SEO strategy ensures that search engines can effectively interpret your content, laying the groundwork for your high-quality content to rank well.

Google and other search engines have their own bots (also called “spiders”) that crawl websites via your site’s source code. (Image: Unsplash)

The 6 most common technical SEO issues

There are plenty of mistakes site owners can make when it comes to SEO. But here are the top six high-priority technical issues SEO expert Veronica Baas sees most often:

1. Sitemap.xml crawl errors
2. Duplicate content issues
3. Unintentional temporary redirects
4. Unoptimized images
5. Poorly coded JavaScript & CSS
6. Broken internal and external links

Let’s break it down.

1. Sitemap.xml crawl errors

Sitemaps often have old and outdated pages that are broken or redirect traffic. Removing these is critical if you want Google’s spiders to crawl and index your pages effectively.

Note that larger sites with bigger site maps need to adhere to size limits. Per Google, you need to split up your large sitemap into multiple sitemaps and ensure each sitemap is below the size limit.

After that, you can use a sitemap index file to submit multiple sitemaps at once.

Crawlability affects whether or not the search engines can even find the pages you’d like to rank.

2. Duplicate content issues

Content marketers know duplicate content is a no-no. But sometimes, they’re necessary for site functionality — for example, similar service pages or an ecommerce product category.

These pages can co-exist but don’t need indexing for search, so you can use a robots.txt file to block these pages from being crawled. However, if you want them added to Google, differentiate the content so it passes the non-duplicate test.

Another duplicate content issue is having a www. and non-www. or http: and https: versions of your domain. You only need HTTPS pages with either www. or non-www. pages.

For instance: https://mysite[dot]com or https://www.mysite[dot]com (one or the other, not both). When you have both, it creates two separate domains on Google (if Google fails to detect the duplicate page and index one, which it usually does).

Pro tip: While Google doesn’t technically penalize a site for duplicate content, it can have negative SEO effects such as cannibalizing your web pages and wasting your finite crawl budget.

3. Unintentional temporary redirects

A website redirect, also known as URL forwarding, is a way to send visitors from one URL to another. You might do this if you’re consolidating blog content, changing URL structures, or fixing broken links.

A 302 or 307 redirect is temporary, while 301 redirects are permanent. The difference: a temporary redirect is for taking down a web page you’ll republish one day. For example, a Black Friday sale page.

A permanent redirect, such as a 301, tells Google the page is going down forever and won’t be coming back… ever (hit the road, Jack).

“When using 301 redirects, Google will pass the web page authority of the old page to its new redirect destination, giving the new page a boost,” says Baas. “Temporary redirects don’t have this same effect so can be a big waste of page authority.”

4. Unoptimized images

Images that have large file sizes, are very high-resolution, or that otherwise don’t follow the proper technical SEO best practices can impact site speed and load stability negatively.

Here are some image file mistakes site owners should look to avoid:

• Add very large images to web pages
• Lack proper caching and/or don’t have a “lazy loading” setup
• Use the wrong image file format (next-gen file formats are optimal for speed)
• Don’t have height and width HTML attributes

5. Poorly coded JavaScript & CSS

If you’re a coder or familiar with programming languages, this is for you. (And if not, stick with us.)

When JavaScript and CSS (common languages used to build websites) are coded poorly, site speed can suffer.

This can happen when there are:

• Unused JavaScript/CSS files
• Unminified JavaScript/CSS files
• Render-blocking JavaScript
• CSS resources blocking the first paint
• DOM tree size/node count

If you suspect this might be the case, work with your site developer or someone with similar skills on your team to check it out.

6. Broken internal & external links

It happens to the best of us, even those with Trello or Asana boards organized to a T.

You move a page, forget to switch all the links to your site, and now you have a broken link problem. It’s an easy fix if you catch it early and use an SEO tool like Screaming Frog to spot broken links.

Then, there are broken links outside of your realm. External links change, and when they do, it tells Google the site is outdated and can hurt crawling efficiency and the user experience.

In other words, bad news for your core web vitals and page ranking. It’s wise to do a link audit as part of your regular SEO audit to make sure broken links aren’t hindering your success.

The first step to improving your technical SEO strategy is with an SEO audit. (Image: Rawpixel)

How can you improve your technical SEO?

Dealing with poor site performance ends here. It’s time to take the steps necessary to make your site worthy of visitors (and the SERPs).

Here’s a technical SEO checklist you can use now to improve your site today.

1. Audit your current technical SEO efforts

The first step to improving your technical SEO strategy: conduct an SEO audit.

A proper SEO audit is a mix of a manual walk-through of your site coupled with the use of trusted tools, such as Google’s Core Web Vitals report, Semrush, and Screaming Frog, to find common technical issues.

Some issues auditing tools can detect include:

• Duplicate content
• Broken internal links
• Invalid robots.txt format
• Non-secure pages
• Slow page load speed
• Multiple canonical URLs

After the audit, identify what’s broken and address those errors first. Some audits reveal a ton of red flags, which can be overwhelming.

That’s why it’s a good idea to have an SEO expert and a web developer review and help you address the more technical issues and advise which to prioritize.

Pro tip: Register your site with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. These free tools can find technical issues on your website.

2. Understand how search bots crawl and index

Google has billions of pages indexed. Google and other search engines have bots that crawl websites via the source code on your website. But these bots don’t “see” web pages the same way humans do.

It takes more than just producing great content for Google to find it, rank it, and reel in traffic. (Although great content is an important piece of the puzzle.)

Search engine spiders perceive websites through a technical lens, primarily analyzing the HTML code, meta tags, and other elements in a structured manner.

Unlike human visitors, they lack the interpretative skills to understand content nuances, visual aesthetics, or interactive elements.

So, if the major content on your page is visual, you need to make sure you have the correct structured data to go with it so that a spider can also interpret the content.

Despite how powerful search engines are, their bots crawl a finite number of pages across the internet.

Because of this, you want to make sure they’re crawling the most critical, high-quality pages on your site — not wasting time on low-quality pages. This is referred to as “crawl budget.”

A crawl budget is key for larger websites. If you have thousands of pages, but your crawl stats show that Google’s only crawling a portion of them each day, it means they’re missing significant parts of your site. You can improve your crawl budget by excluding crawlers from irrelevant pages.

These could be:

• Admin or login pages
• “Thank you” or confirmation pages
• Paginated pages
• Testing and development pages
• PPC landing pages

Pro tip: Check which pages are indexed in search engines by doing a simple site: [website URL] search in Google. You can click through all the indexed results to see if a chunk of pages might be missing or if there are pages that shouldn’t be indexed.

3. Implement structured data

One way to improve how bots understand your website content is through structured data or schema markup.

This is important for SEO and to prepare for the future of search, as Google and other engines continue to personalize the user experience and answer questions directly on their search engine results pages.

There are hundreds of different schema types, and the best fit for your website depends on your product or service, industry, and the type of content you offer.

Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper is a handy tool if you’re unfamiliar with structured data. It walks you through the steps to add structured data to your site, notes which items need to be marked up, and creates the HTML for you.

Structured data helps you stand out in the organic search results and increases the likelihood of your site appearing in SERP features like Featured Snippets (aka rich snippets) or People Also Ask.

This can be hugely beneficial for your site. If you already have structured data, you can check if it’s working properly by using the Rich Results Test tool.

If you already have structured data on your site, you can check if it’s working properly by using the Rich Results Test tool.

4. Secure your site

The “http” in URLs stands for Hypertext Transfer Protocol, and it allows for information to be passed between web servers and clients. The “S” in “https” stands for secure.

If a website doesn’t have an SSL certificate, it isn’t secure and won’t have the small padlock icon in the URL bar that you see in Google Chrome. This essentially means that any information a user inputs on the page (like their name, address, or credit card details) is not protected and can be stolen.

On a secure website, the code is encrypted. This means any sensitive information cannot be tracked. Having a secure site can give you a small ranking boost.

Plus, web browsers like Chrome are getting more aggressive about letting searchers know if they’re on a non-secure site and could be at risk, with 95% of websites on Google now using https.

Check if your website is secure by looking in your browser. If your site has a padlock next to the URL, it’s secure. Secure domains will also show “https” in the search bar, vs. just “http.”

5. Ensure your site is mobile-friendly

It’s a sign of the times: Nearly half of web traffic comes from mobile users.

Because of this, Google has a mobile-first indexing approach — aka mobile-friendly sites get priority ranking.

Not having a mobile-friendly website is no longer an option if you want to rank in search engines. You can test your mobile-friendliness by using Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool.

But it’s not enough for a site to be simply mobile responsive. Your site should also have a positive overall mobile user experience. Mobile users are very fickle and will bounce quickly if they can’t find what they’re looking for quickly.

By optimizing for mobile users, you can push your site closer to the 1%-20% bounce rate to help your ranking (and user experience). Unfortunately, it’s a step many marketers forget to take since we often work on desktops.

Google Search Console can also alert you to any mobile usability issues, like clickable elements being too small or content being too close to the screen’s edge.

Examples of sites that are mobile-friendly (left) and… not so much (right). (Image: HawkSEM)

But don’t stop here — accessibility extends beyond mobile devices.

“Accessibility is a technical SEO topic that continues to be important,” says Baas.

“While Google says website accessibility is not a direct ranking factor because it’s difficult to quantify, tools such as PageSpeed Insights test have a ton of information, including a section on accessibility, because technical SEO and accessibility go hand in hand.”

Baas recommends that SEOs focus more on the optimization opportunities for accessibility lined out in this test.

6. Review your website architecture

The goal of your site architecture is to make navigating your website easy, clear, and intuitive while making it easier for search engines to crawl your pages.

The main components of website architecture are:

• Navigation
• Internal links
• URL structures
• Metadata

Navigation

Navigation is important for user experience as well as search engines. Google bots crawl links and your XML sitemap, but they also use navigation to determine how important certain pages are on your site.

Because of this, you want to ensure your important pages are linked as “tier 1,” or most important. Ideally, you don’t have more than seven tier 1 items unless you have a large website.

I usually don’t recommend linking tier 4 pages and beyond in the navigation to avoid clutter.

It’s also important to have footer navigation that lives on every page of your site. That way, when bots are crawling, they’re crawling your footer links. It’s common to link your privacy policy, support page, local info, and social media profiles in the footer.

An example of tiered navigation on Zappos.com.

Internal links

When bots are crawling your content, they’re following both internal and external links. Because of that, you want to use internal links to guide them to the important pages on your site.

You usually don’t need to link to your homepage internally since it’s going to be your highest authority page anyway. You should, however, link to internal content, such as product pages and blogs.

Also, be sure to use keywords in your anchor text instead of generic phrases like “learn more” or “click here.” Bots use anchor text to determine the topic of the content you link to.

URL structures

If your website host automatically creates URLs for you when you add new pages to your site, you may not think about URL structures much.

But these structures are yet another signal that explains what your page is about to search engine bots. Check out these two examples:

• https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120338/
• https://hawksem.com/blog/full-funnel-content-strategy/

Not to brag, but it’s clear that one URL structure has a much clearer explanation of what a page is going to be about than another.

Also, you should use keywords in your URLs when possible, and URL structures should follow your navigation’s structure (like how the above blog title comes after “/blog/” root category).

Pro tip: Avoid underscores in your URLs. Bots ignore underscores and will think anything separated by an underscore is one long word, so use hyphens instead.

Metadata

Metadata refers to elements like your site’s page title and meta description, which summarize the page’s content. These elements improve your click-through rate when you follow best practices like:

• Including keywords
• Adding meta tags
• Using pipes or hyphens to separate words
• Keeping titles under 60 characters
• Keeping meta descriptions under 155 characters

The page title may cut off in search results if it goes too long, especially for mobile.

It’s also worth noting that Google outputs the URL above the page title now on the SERP. This is another reason URL structure is important and should be easy to read.

7. Optimize for page speed

Page speed is another ranking factor that can hurt or help search engine page positions of your site.

If it’s too slow, it’ll fall in the ranks — bad news for site owners wanting to create an interactive experience using moving graphics.

This and various other elements can bog down your page load time, including:

• Large videos
• Unoptimized images
• Too many graphics
• Excessive ads
• Clunky or outdated plugins
• Too much Flash content

“[Recent] page speed updates have really made this more important,” says Baas. “Google has improved tools for webmasters to use to improve page speed, such as the Google Search Console page experience report and the PageSpeed Insights test.”

To improve your page load speeds, you must first identify what’s slowing it down. Then, you can either remove, optimize, or reduce them.

For example, resizing images to reduce file size is a way to improve website performance. Or compressing them using PNG files via a tool like TinyPNG.

So, what is the target page load speed? A recent survey of the top 100 websites globally shows the average web page load time is 2.5 seconds for desktop and 8.6 seconds for mobile.

What’s more, as page load time grows from 1 to 5 seconds, the likelihood of a visitor bouncing increases by 90%, according to reports.

8. Check backlink quality

Some things are outside of our control. And the same holds true for your link-building strategy.

You choose which internal and external links to include on your site. But what about the websites that decide to link to yours?

Google and other search engines use backlinks to determine the quality of your site. It used to be the more backlinks, the higher it ranks your site. However, after link farms sprung up, polluting the internet with spammy backlinks, Google had to change its tune.

Today, backlinks only count for your site if the linking site applies to the linked page or blog. Remember, Google is all about helping users find information. So, every link should lead the user to more information that they’ll find helpful.

To check your site’s backlink profile, you can use site audit tools like Ahrefs, Moz, and Google Search Console.

Although you can’t control who links to your site, you can improve your backlink profile by doing things like:

• Writing guest blog posts that link back to your site
• Creating informative posts that other authority sites will want to link to
• Finding mentions of your brand or product and asking for a backlink (if the site is relevant and high-quality)

Once you make improvements to your backlink profile, ask Google to re-crawl your site so it can re-rank it.

Why technical SEO matters

You built a thorough content marketing strategy that includes publishing high-quality, in-depth content every week. Plus, you optimize the on-page elements of each post with SEO best practices.

But your content barely makes it to the second page of Google, even though it’s 10x better than what’s on the first page.

What’s happening?

Diving head-first into your technical SEO will shed some light on the problem.

For instance, maybe your site’s performance is hurting the user experience (UX) — a critical Google ranking factor.

Google states in its SEO fundamentals, “You should build a website to benefit your users and gear any optimization toward making the user experience better.”

If your site takes too long to load or has broken links, people will bounce away. And it’s not only your customers that you lose when they bounce, but also your SERP ranking.

When you create great UX (and equally excellent content) on the front and back end, the odds of people sticking around increase.

A website with a poor user experience is like landing in a new city to find it set out like a maze with confusing pathways. You may enter with curiosity, but the frustration of getting lost or navigating through unclear routes makes you hesitant to explore further.

Just as a well-designed city that hands you a clear map as soon as you step off the plane encourages exploration, an intuitive and user-friendly website design invites users to journey through its pages seamlessly.

But most websites don’t do that.

If you ignore your technical SEO, your on-page optimization efforts won’t be enough to increase your search engine results page (SERP) position, traffic, and retention. Then comes the potential demise of your site’s ranking.

FAQS

On-page SEO vs. technical SEO: What’s the difference?

On-page SEO and technical SEO help your website rank in search engines like Google, Yahoo!, and Bing. But how you use them to improve your site is where the two differ.

On-page SEO is all about content. Starting with keyword research and content creation, on-page SEO requires:

• Incorporating keywords into the URL, page title, H1, H2s, and throughout on-page content
• Writing metadata, such as meta descriptions and meta titles, that include the keywords
• Insert relevant internal links and external links into blog posts and web pages with keywords
• Use canonical tags to identify original content to avoid duplicate content

In contrast, technical SEO involves:

• Improving core web vitals and especially page load speed
• Ensuring the navigation and site structure are correct and intuitive
• Making the site user-friendly for mobile devices with responsive designs
• Optimize images and videos
• Using schema markup
• Adding “author” HTML tags to author bio sections
• Creating an accurate sitemap
• Hreflang tags (for international sites)
• Ensuring the pages you want are indexed and the ones you do not want aren’t
• Using noindex tags when you don’t want search engines to index certain pages

This is a wildly abbreviated overview of the work that goes into both strategies.

In short: one makes site changes you can usually see (on-page SEO), and the other makes background site changes you experience (technical SEO).

Is technical SEO difficult?

Technical SEO is doable when you have the right tools (and the time) to run an audit and make improvements. It’s a tedious task that requires understanding why something is broken and how to fix it.

Unfortunately, most website owners are too busy to audit, analyze, and improve their technical SEO. So even when you have tools like Screaming Frog to run analytics, it still requires you to make decisions and enhancements.

In some cases, this may create a long to-do list of tasks, like resizing thousands of images, redesigning your site for mobile-friendliness, and updating broken links.

Don’t have the time or (mental capacity) to do it all yourself? Most don’t. And it’s a good reason to enlist the help of a full-service digital marketing agency like HawkSEM.

Not only do we offer SEO (and technical SEO) services — we also manage content marketing, PPC, and conversion rate optimization.

But there’s more (wink).

At Hawk, we also have ConversionIQ, a proprietary reporting software that connects all your marketing platforms and reporting data onto one easy-to-navigate dashboard. This allows you to pull data from your performing keywords to influence on-site title tags and H1 content to drive more conversions.

The takeaway

The more technical side of SEO can be intimidating. After all, it’s filled with code, jargon, algorithms, and bots.

But by getting a handle on your technical SEO, you can be confident that your efforts are more thorough, well-rounded, and poised for maximum search engine visibility.

Ready to increase your tech SEO know-how?

Check out this webinar recording, “The Importance of Technical SEO,” for even more insights. Need help with your technical SEO? Get in touch.

This post has been updated and was originally published in November 2022.

The post Technical SEO: An Easy-to-Follow Guide + 6 Improvement Tips appeared first on HawkSEM.

Website architecture is like the blueprint for your website. It helps organize the flow of your site so visitors (and search engines) can navigate easily, resulting in improved SEO performance.

Just how much of an impact can site architecture make?

By integrating proper SEO strategies including website architecture, HawkSEM was able to help Easly increase their brand’s keyword portfolio by 1,500%.

In this article, we’ll cover everything you need to know about site structure, including why it’s important for SEO, how to set it up, and tips from a panel of experts.

What is website architecture?

Website architecture is the way a website organizes its pages and internally links content throughout the site.

It’s also known as site structure since it refers to the way your website is arranged or built.

(Image: HawkSEM)

A key component of technical SEO, website architecture helps search engines understand how each page is connected and improves user experience (UX).

Why site structure is important for SEO

Site structure is important for SEO because it:

1. Provides a better user experience
2. Makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index
3. Improves page authority through internal links
4. Increases value from high-authority backlinks
5. Offers a higher chance of Google sitelinks

1. Provides a better user experience

A site that’s clearly organized is more user-friendly. Better usability means people can find the information or destination they’re looking for, which may make them more likely to complete a conversion.

In contrast, if your site doesn’t match the target audience’s search intent and customers find that your site has limited functionality, they may click away quickly, leading to a higher bounce rate.

Although it isn’t technically a ranking factor, most SEO experts agree that bounce rate is an indicator of a site’s ranking. In other words, a good user experience and low bounce rate can lead to good SEO performance.

2. Makes it easier for search engines to crawl and index

When search engines can understand your site architecture and how web pages relate to one another, they can better grasp the context of your site.

And when search engines like Google correctly understand your site’s content, they can deliver it in response to relevant searches. That means your site is more likely to rank on relevant SERPs.

3. Improves page authority through internal links

Internal linking is the method of hyperlinking one page of your website to another, like this.

Linking relevant information to different pages of your site shows the depth and value of the content you offer, boosting your authority when done right.

That’s why it’s important to be intentional, as internal links tell search engines which pages are related to one another.

If you link to a certain page many times from other pages across your site, you can convey its importance to search engines. This strategy is helpful for establishing pillar pages and topic clusters.

Here’s a real-world example:

Further reading: How Does Internal Linking Help SEO?

4. Increases value from high-authority backlinks

Do you have backlinks from sites with high domain authority?

The most effective way to pass that authority throughout your site is to link from the most important pages with the best backlinks to other related pages.

Further reading: What is Backlinking?

5. Offers a higher chance of Google sitelinks

Not all organic search results are created equal. While most SERPs list a title, description, and URL, some include multiple additional links with relevant context.

For example, a search for Notion lists the workspace tool at the very top of the SERP. But in addition to a link to the tool’s homepage, this listing includes sitelinks leading to a login page, a pricing page, and more.

As a result, the Notion listing takes up much more real estate on the SERP. Since the listing has so many links, it’s more likely that users will see one that reflects what they want to find — leading to more clicks.

It’s important to note that SEO experts can’t set up these sitelinks manually. At least, not exactly. With proper website structure, SEO perks like Google sitelinks appear automatically.

6 website architecture best practices

The optimal SEO structure for websites follows a few key principles. Follow the steps below to map out a site structure that works for your visitors and for search engines.

1. Start with a well-organized navigation menu

A great navigation menu is simple, offering a clear and intuitive way to find the most important pages.

Product or service categories should be prominent in the menu structure, along with your website’s pages that feature elements like your company overview and contact information.

For example, Chewy uses an easy navigation menu to help visitors find what they need efficiently. The “Shop” tab is divided by pet type, while the “Pharmacy” tab lists both pet type and condition.

Although site navigation tends to be relatively static, Chewy also places timely links in the site’s main menu. The “Early Black Friday Deals” link can help shoppers explore deals faster, potentially leading to more sales.

When done well, the navigation menu:

• Improves user experience. With a well-organized navigation menu, they can see how your site is structured and find where to click.
• Reduces crawl depth. Visitors shouldn’t have to click through dozens of service, product, or other landing pages to find what they want. A good menu can save time and reduce clicks.
• Highlights pillar pages. Your navigation bar shouldn’t include every page on your site. Instead, it should link to high-authority pages that act as hubs leading to other important content.

Further reading: Why Website Header and Footer Navigations Matter

2. Set up breadcrumbs

On a website, breadcrumbs display the page path using text links with category-focused anchor text. Visitors can click these links to navigate website categories and see the hierarchical structure of your site.

Breadcrumbs invite visitors to explore other paths through your site and help with your internal linking structure.

For example, Harry & David is a large ecommerce store with countless categories, sub-categories, and products. Breadcrumbs appear throughout the site, making it easier for visitors to find their way.

3. Aim for shallow crawl depth

Crawl depth is the number of clicks it takes to access a piece of content from the homepage.

Website visitors tend to have better experiences when they can access content faster. To set the stage for a better user experience and create a more streamlined site structure, aim for shallow crawl depth.

How many clicks is ideal? As a general rule, requiring visitors to click more than three or four times can lead to a bad experience. You can achieve a shallower crawl depth with a strong internal linking strategy.

4. Develop an internal linking framework

Most high-ranking websites organize pages around content pillars and topic clusters. Think of content pillars as the overviews or authoritative pages on a topic that’s important to your business.

For example, HubSpot’s Instagram marketing pillar page is a comprehensive introduction to the topic that’s packed with valuable content like statistics, step-by-step guides, examples, and walkthroughs.

This content pillar also serves as a hub for the company’s Instagram marketing topic cluster. It has countless internal links to other pages about Instagram and related digital marketing topics.

This setup makes it easier for users to discover useful resources and take the next step toward meeting their goals for visiting the site. It also shows search engines how the site is organized, which can help rankings.

As you map out internal links, avoid creating what’s known as orphan pages. These pages don’t have any internal links directed to them. That makes their role hard to decipher and can limit their ability to rank.

5. Build an optimized URL structure

URL structure is the unique address to each page on your website, which includes a protocol, domain name, and path.

Your URL structure helps search engines understand and rank your website. For the best results consistency is crucial and simpler is almost always better.

In addition to the domain, most URLs include two components:

• A category, which appears directly after the domain
• A slug, which details the topic and reflects keyword research

For example, the URL for the Hubspot Instagram stories guide uses “/marketing/” as the parent page. The slug is “instagram-stories-guide” which concisely captures the topic and includes an SEO keyword.

Depending on the nature of your business, your URL structure may look a little different. For example, Semrush organizes the platform’s features under the “/features/” category.

All blog content displays under the “/blog/” category. Any new pages the site publishes can easily fit into this site hierarchy.

6. Create and upload sitemaps

Once you’ve mapped out clear site architecture and established URL structures across the site, the final step is generating a sitemap. Sitemaps are the list of pages within your website’s domain. There are two types:

• HTML sitemaps are designed for users to navigate.
• XML sitemaps are designed for search engine crawlers to crawl and index.

Use Google’s sitemap best practices to guide the process. Then upload the sitemap to Google Search Console to give the search engine the information it needs to crawl and process your site.

Further reading: Sitemaps: What You Need to Know

Website architecture examples

All sites follow the same basic principles for SEO website structure, no matter the industry. Let’s look at a few examples of good architecture for SEO for different types of businesses.

Roto-Rooter: Local service provider

As an established local service provider with a long list of offerings and a deep catalog of content, Roto-Rooter has a lot of information to organize. Because its site structure is so clear, it’s easy to navigate.

The site’s navigation menu makes common destinations like “Locations” and “Schedule Service” easy to find. It also organizes service pages under pillars like “Plumbing & Drains” and “Water Damage Restoration.”

While many sites use a heading like “Resources” for links to blogs, Roto-Rooter uses the heading “Plumbing How-To.” Here, users can find the company’s blog as well as libraries of videos and infographics.

Moz: Software company

As a software company, Moz takes a slightly different approach. The “Product” heading in the main menu makes it easy for visitors to learn about the company’s software products and assess capabilities quickly.

Although they’re technically also products, the site lists “Free SEO Tools” as a separate menu item. This organization can help site visitors find these popular resources faster, limiting crawl depth.

All Moz product pages use a “moz.com/products/” URL structure. The company’s educational hub uses a “moz.com/learn/” URL structure, and each page has breadcrumbs for easier navigation.

Ulta Beauty: Ecommerce site

As an ecommerce website, Ulta Beauty uses a navigation menu that invites visitors to click “Shop” to see product categories, “Brands” to browse labels, and “Beauty Services” to book appointments.

Although the site’s navigation features hundreds of options, it allows visitors to find what they need with few clicks. Each page includes a logical URL structure and breadcrumbs for better search and user experience.

Search Engine Journal: Media site

As an industry media site, Search Engine Journal organizes news content into pillars or main categories like “SEO” and “Content.” The website also has a “Latest” category page to help visitors find recent news faster.

3 expert tips for SEO site structure

Using the site structure walkthrough and real-life examples above, you can implement website architecture best practices. For more advanced tips and in-depth recommendations, follow this expert advice.

1. Prioritize site structure for larger sites

In an ideal world, all websites would have logical site architecture from the very beginning. If you’re building a new site, using best practices can set the property up for success, both now and as it grows.

If your site is growing rapidly, it’s even more important to check technical SEO factors like site architecture.

“Architecture becomes more important as the overall size and number of pages of the website becomes greater,” says technical SEO expert Joe Robinson.

“For a small site with less than, say, 150-200 pages, it doesn’t have a huge impact…Site architecture becomes increasingly important as the number of pages reaches the thousands or more.”

2. Align SEO tactics with user experience

When mapping out website architecture, avoid optimizing solely for search engines or website visitors. Instead, make sure your SEO efforts create a good user experience.

For best results, focus on functionality. “Website navigation and usability are stricter now with search engine optimization,” says digital marketer and SEO expert Nat Miletec.

“After all, it’s the difference between interacting with the site further and closing a poorly built one, which dictates its ranking on search engines.”

“There’s no shortage of websites that provide the users’ needs online,” Miletec continues. “And nobody wants to waste their time on a site where they don’t know what to do next.”

As such, “navigation and user experience are crucial to search engine optimization. Your site’s internal linking must be logical. It should have keyword-rich anchors that search engines can find with ease.”

3. Maximize findability

Above all, SEO experts recommend ensuring that the structure of your website makes content as easy as possible for visitors to find. In other words, maximize findability across your website to improve organic search rankings.

“The most important factor to consider is how likely it is that someone will find the page when starting from any other page,” says Robinson.

How can you make content easier to find? A well-organized navigation bar with logical sub-topics is certainly a start. A hierarchical link structure with content pillars and topic clusters is also essential.

“No matter how many pages your website has, clicks should lead users to where they expect or want without difficulties, improving user experience and your SEO efforts,” explains Miletec.

“All these affect click-through rates, time spent on the website, and bounce rates that search engine algorithms consider for search engine results pages.”

The takeaway

As a key element of technical SEO, website architecture is critical for both user experience and search engines.

From structuring content and planning internal linking to building URLs and improving navigation, implementing site architecture best practices can have a major impact on your SEO performance.

Curious about next steps? Contact us for a free consultation. Our search marketing experts are here to help you get maximum value from your SEO budget.

This article has been updated and was originally published in August 2021.

The post Website Architecture: What It Is + Best Practices appeared first on HawkSEM.

When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), the success of your marketing efforts hinges on the tools you use.

But with so many platforms at your disposal, how do you know which ones to use?

We tapped HawkSEM SEO manager Mackenzie Doyle for her expert insights on the top SEO tools she recommends so you can rise to the top of the search engine results page (SERP).

What is an SEO tool?

SEO tools are online platforms that help businesses and marketers optimize websites to improve their ranking on the search results page.

While there are different types of SEO tools, they all offer insightful data to support more strategic SEO decisions.

Types of SEO tools

While there are many all-in-one platforms, SEO tools can be split into these categories:

• Keyword research tools
• Rank tracking tools
• Site audit tools
• On-page SEO tools
• Backlink analysis tools
• Competitor analysis tools
• Local SEO tools
• Analytics and reporting tools

What to look for in an SEO tool

Every business and marketer is unique. When looking for the right SEO tool for you, consider the following:

• Features: Do you need to cover all your SEO bases with one comprehensive platform? Or are you looking for more specialized tools?
• Intuitive interface: The tool should be simple and easy to navigate.
• Integration options: Compatibility with Google Analytics, Search Console, and other marketing tools improves efficiency.
• Reporting: Customizable reports, data visualization, and actionable insights are crucial for decision-making.
• Pricing: Make sure your tool is within your budget
• Customer support and training: Reliable customer support and helpful resources maximize the tool’s value.

Top 6 SEO tools

1. Semrush
2. Google Search Console
3. Screaming Frog
4. SEO Minion
5. Clearscope
6. ConversionIQ

1. Semrush

Semrush is a powerhouse platform in the digital marketing space, offering tools for SEO, content marketing, market research, advertising, and social media.

“This tool is one that I find myself using most every day,” says Doyle. “It offers a ton of helpful tools from technical auditing to keyword research, keyword position tracking, and competitor auditing.”

With their Keyword Magic Tool for discovering high-ranking keywords, Site Audit feature for identifying technical SEO issues, and Position Tracking to monitor keyword performance over time, Semrush is a comprehensive platform for optimizing search performance and staying ahead of competitors.

“I use it most heavily for keyword and topic research,” says Doyle.

But Semrush offers a suite of SEO tools, including:

• Backlink analytics
• Backlink audit tool
• Backlink gap
• Bulk analysis
• Domain overview
• Google Looker Studio connectors
• Keyword gap
• Keyword magic tool
• Keyword overview
• Keyword strategy builder
• Link building tool
• Listing management
• Log file analyzer
• Reports
• On-page SEO checker
• Organic research
• Organic traffic insights
• Position tracking
• Ranks
• Sensor
• Site audit

• Overview: A versatile all-in-one SEO software
• Why Mackenzie loves it:
  • Most frequently used tool for keyword research and topic discovery
  • Offers technical auditing, keyword position tracking, and competitor auditing
• Key features:
  • Rank tracker
  • Technical audits for site health
  • Keyword research tools
  • Competitor analysis
  • Backlink tracking and analysis
• Best for:
  • Comprehensive keyword and topic research
  • Research, analyzing site performance, and improving technical SEO
• Pricing: Starting at $139.95/month

2. Google Search Console

A free SEO tool, Google Search Console helps businesses monitor and improve their site’s performance on Google Search.

Providing real-time insights into keyword rankings, search traffic, and indexing status, GSC allows users to pinpoint and fix technical issues that may affect visibility.

“I use this platform a ton for reporting — generally for reporting on the period over period performance of a specific page or query,” says Doyle.

GSC offers reports that help improve the website experience, including:

• Mobile usability
• Core Web Vitals
• Structured data errors

“It’s also very helpful for investigating traffic swings,” says Doyle. “I find the interface simple, straightforward and easy to use.”

• Overview: A free diagnostic tool by Google for monitoring site performance
• Why Mackenzie loves it:
  • Excellent for tracking period-over-period performance of specific pages or queries
  • Simplified interface makes it accessible for all skill levels
  • Great for investigating traffic swings and potential issues
• Key features:
  • Performance tracking
  • Easy-to-understand reporting
  • Investigation tools for identifying fluctuations in traffic
• Best for:
  • Reporting and analyzing traffic changes
  • Gaining insights into how Google views your site
• Pricing: Free

3. Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog’s SEO Spider is a crawler tool that identifies technical issues on your website, such as broken links, duplicate content, missing meta tags, and improper redirects.

With detailed SEO reports for website structure, page speed, and internal links, Screaming Frog integrates with Google’s platforms like Search Console and Google Analytics.

If you’re looking to optimize website performance, this auditing tool offers insights to help enhance visibility in the search engine results and improve user experience.

• Overview: A tool designed for deep-dive technical SEO audits
• Why Mackenzie loves it:
  • Perfect for conducting in-depth technical crawls
• Key features:
  • Comprehensive site crawl reports
  • Advanced filtering and customization options
  • Integration with Google Analytics and Search Console
• Best for:
  • Detailed technical audits for large websites
  • Diagnosing and fixing on-page SEO issues
• Pricing: Free or $259/year

4. SEO Minion

SEO minion is a free browser extension for Chrome that analyzes on-page SEO elements, checks for broken links, highlights internal and external links, and offers a SERP preview.

The analysis tool helps you with SEO tasks such as:

• On-page SEO analysis
• Highlighting all links (internal and external) for any webpage
• Checking for broken links
• Hreflang checker
• SERP preview
• Google search location simulator
• SERP utilities
• HTML vs. DOM
• Structured data analysis

A “small but mighty” tool, according to Doyle, “I use this plugin for a quick analysis of on-page SEO.”

• Overview: A lightweight, browser-based plugin for quick SEO analysis
• Why Mackenzie loves it:
  • Ideal for fast, on-page SEO analysis
  • Small but mighty for everyday checks
• Key features:
  • On-page SEO analysis and audit
  • Check for missing tags, header issues, and broken links
  • Quick review of keyword density and page structure
• Best for:
  • Quick checks of individual pages
  • Simple audits for small-to-medium websites
• Pricing: Free

5. Clearscope

An AI-powered content optimization tool, Clearscope offers recommendations for content creation based on targeted keywords and top performing content.

Clearscope helps with planning new content by suggesting relevant terms to include (organized by importance and headings), content structure, and providing a readability score to better optimize content.

Clearscope integrates with Google Docs and WordPress, which makes it simple to refine content during the writing process. This tool helps produce top-performing SEO content that Google’s algorithm will like.

• Overview: A tool focused on content creation and topic research
• Why Mackenzie loves it:
  • Excellent for content outline generation and improving relevance
  • Helps identify important topics and keywords
• Key features:
  • Content research to identify related terms
  • Outlines based on top-ranking pages
  • Optimize content for search visibility
• Best for:
  • Developing content outlines
  • Competitor content research
  • Ensuring content is comprehensive and optimized for search
• Pricing:
  • Starting at $189/month

Further reading: Content Marketing and SEO: How They Work Together

6. ConversionIQ

ConversionIQ is HawkSEM’s proprietary technology that connects all your marketing data in one place to drive actionable insights and full-funnel attribution.

A hybrid software that is part reporting tool, part marketing tool, ConversionIQ offers an in-depth view into your SEO performance. Keep track of the changes in website traffic, interesting user patterns, and progress of your combined marketing efforts.

• Overview: A proprietary tool focused on streamlining your marketing data for better visibility
• Why Mackenzie loves it:
  • Makes SEO optimizations easily identifiable
  • Provides the big picture of your campaigns
• Key features:
  • Predictive analytics
  • Robust reporting dashboard
• Best for:
  • Creating a holistic marketing approach
  • More effective optimizations
• Pricing:
  • Free for HawkSEM clients

Honorable mentions

While the tools we mentioned above are our top picks, there are a few others worth mentioning as well:

Moz

Up there with Semrush, Moz is a comprehensive SEO platform that provides essential data and tools to enhance your SEO strategy, including:

• Keyword research
• Site audits
• Backlink analysis
• Rank tracking

With free features like their Domain Authority (DA) checker and Keyword Explorer, Moz offers plenty of value for small businesses that perhaps can’t afford a Moz Pro membership commitment.

(And for beginners, Moz Academy offers excellent SEO tutorials and courses.)

Ahrefs

Another all-in-one SEO tool, Ahrefs is particularly known for its extensive backlink analysis, keyword research, and competitive insights. Use Ahrefs to:

• Uncover key SEO metrics by analyzing organic search traffic and backlink profiles
• Discover keywords based on search volume, difficulty scores, and click potential
• Leverage a site audit tool that provides actionable data for optimizations

Ahrefs is a top choice for SEO professionals looking to improve rankings and outpace competitors.

Google Keyword Planner

When it comes to SEO essentials, Google Keyword Planner can’t be forgotten.

A tool for discovering keywords and researching search query statistics, the Keyword Planner was created for Google Ads but offers valuable insights for pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and SEO alike.

SE Ranking

Local SEO comes with its own set of rules and best practices, so it’s no surprise that it deserves a more specialized tool.

While SE Ranking is another all-in-one option that provides features like keyword tracking, site audits, and backlink analysis, it also offers helpful tools for local SEO specifically, including:

• Location-based tracking
• Google Maps rankings
• Local keyword insights

All of these features are available with an intuitive interface that makes it easy for smaller businesses and beginners to use.

Further reading: Local SEO Guide: Cost, Case Studies + Expert Tips

SEO resources for beginners

Are you at the beginning of your SEO journey? While finding the right SEO tool is a good starting point, here are some resources to help you along the way:

• How Much Does SEO Cost?
• How to Conduct an SEO Audit
• SEO Best Practices
• How to Use AI for SEO
• A Guide to Local SEO
• How to Develop an SEO Content Strategy
• Technical SEO: Why It Matters
• What is Off-Site SEO?
• How to Conduct a Competitor Analysis
• Keyword Mapping
• What is an SEO Consultant?
• How to Hire an SEO Expert

The takeaway

With the right SEO platforms tools, you can significantly increase your website’s visibility and search rankings.

Whether you’re focusing on technical SEO, keyword research, or content optimization, these tools provide the essential features to refine your strategy and improve search performance.

But if you need a little extra help, we’ve got you covered. HawkSEM’s team of SEO experts is familiar with big results.

Reach out to learn more.

The post 6 Best SEO Tools and Platforms to Boost Your Ranking appeared first on HawkSEM.

Entity SEO is one of those terms that’s been around for more than a decade – but don’t feel left out if this is the first time you’re hearing it.

That’s because this term represents a nebulous and somewhat technical SEO concept. However, we think it’s important enough to highlight here — what’s more, we think it will become increasingly relevant in the near future as machine learning evolves.

To break it all down, and offer some helpful advice for leveraging entity search engine optimization in your own digital marketing plan, we chatted with Joe Leija, one of HawkSEM’s esteemed lead strategists and senior SEO account managers.

Read on for his expert insights, tips to conduct entity research, and much more.

 Entity SEO is about optimizing for what your business or product represents, not just specific keywords. (Image: Nuttapong punna/Adobe)

What is entity SEO?

In SEO terms, an entity is a concept (like a person, place, thing, or even a feeling) that a search engine can recognize and “understand” with enough context and understanding of natural language processing (NLP) to deliver relevant search results.

Put another way, “entity SEO is about optimizing for what your business or product represents, not just specific keywords,” Leija explains.

“Think of it as helping search engines understand the who, what, and why of your brand and how it connects to related topics as well as the user intent of those topics.”

For example, if you’re a medical equipment supplier, then entity SEO ensures search engines recognize your business as tied to terms like surgical instruments, hospitals, and medical certifications.

“It’s about giving search engines the full picture so they can connect the dots and present you as a trusted resource to users,” he adds.

How does Google view entity SEO?

As Search Engine Land reports, the most common types of entities you’ll see on the Google search engine results page (SERP) are related to locations, people, or businesses.

As you can see below, a search for “types of bikes for toddlers” yields relevant entities and filter options including price, ship time, wheel count and more.

That’s because Google’s large language models or LLMs (neural networks trained by tens of gigabytes of data to improve search results and better understand search queries) are constantly being tweaked and improved to create a search engine algorithm that understands nuance, semantics, and context.

A search for “types of bikes for toddlers” yields relevant entities and filter options including price, ship time, wheel count and more. (Image: Google screenshot)

Here’s another example of entities: If someone searches for a brand like “Old Navy,” then the algorithm uses machine learning to understand that the searcher’s search intent is for the clothing brand as a single entity as surface that for the Google Knowledge Graph, not just web pages that frequently feature the two terms separately.

What are the benefits?

One of the main benefits of entity SEO is how it can help increase opportunities for semantic searches to be recognized by LLMs, or large language models like AI.

“LLMs rely on context and connections between entities to deliver accurate responses,” says Leija. “They’re piecing together information from schema markup, trusted link sources, and the relationships your brand has built online.”

Think of entity SEO as a way to make sure your business is part of the foundation these AI bots pull from when answering questions.

“The better defined and more connected your entity is,” he adds, “the more likely LLMs are to recognize and understand you as a reliable source.”

Along with that, by giving search engines more structured data and clear connections about who you are and what you do, you’re putting yourself in a position to show up in answers, compete with others in your space, and become a go-to resource.

“It’s about helping search engines understand your story so they can share it with your audience,” says Leija. “The more work you put into defining and connecting your brand, the more you set yourself up for long-term success.”

“Optimizing for entities can lead to more prominent placements in search results, such as Knowledge Panels and rich snippets,” according to a post from Clearscope.

They add that these enhanced SERP features often rely on entity data, pulling from sources like Wikipedia pages and Wikidata, which often contain multiple data points on a larger topic (similar to a topic cluster hub-and-spoke content marketing model). The results: better visibility on the SERP and more organic traffic.

 SEO isn’t just about ranking for keywords anymore — it’s about tailoring strategies to your specific audience and goals. (Image: Summit Art Creations/Adobe)

Entity SEO examples

Here are some examples of entity-based SEO at work.

If someone simply searches “salsa classes,” Google will use location information to supply results nearby the person searching. This helps narrow down the information and provides more accurate results – showing classes in New York wouldn’t be as relevant, for example.

A search for “bob dylan movie” surfaces information about the most recent biopic starring Timothée Chalamet, as well as past movies based on the musician and in which he has appeared.

Rather than assuming this search is only referencing the most recent film, Google offers several options, along with contextual info about pricing and other related artists (like Joan Baez).

In this search for “spanx founder,” the algorithm knows the searcher is looking for information on Sara Blakely, despite not entering her name as part of the query.

Entity SEO: 5 tips from the experts

Now that we’ve covered the importance of entities and what entity-based SEO is, use these expert tips to put that knowledge into practice.

1. Create a cohesive online presence

Leija recommends starting by ensuring your brand information is consistent across all platforms.

This includes:

• Your website
• Google Business Profile
• Social profiles

Make sure all contact, NAP (name, address, phone number), and service info is correct, updated, and included on all applicable platforms both on your website and on third-party platforms like directories. Tracking metrics with tools that monitor performance can help pinpoint inconsistencies.

2. Implement Schema markup

Once you’ve got your brand info updated, you can implement schema markup (which can be found at schema.org) specific to your page types to help Google search engines understand key details about your business, like your products, services, and even FAQs.

Further reading: Why Schema Belongs in Your SEO Plan

3. Publish the right content

When you’re working on building SEO for entities, create content that highlights how your business connects to related topics or industries.

“For example, if you’re in ecommerce, write about how your products solve specific problems,” he says. “If you sell bikes, you should consider how a user might transport your bike and produce content like ‘How to Travel With Your Bike’.”

4. Connect your content internally

Some marketers put a heavy focus on backlinks (links that go from an external website to yours). While those are a great off-page SEO element, we’re seeing more and more positive results from inlinks or internal linking practices.

As such, you can help search engine bots better understand your content by knitting relevant pieces of content together through internal links. If you’re an automobile company, for example, you could create and link together content about car maintenance, specific parts, and the latest models. This entity-based approach creates a holistic picture and illustrates how all of these entities relate to your brand.

5. Know what elements to focus on

In Ahrefs’ marketing glossary, they recommend marketers interested in entity SEO focus on:

• Entity identification (Explicitly mentioning relevant entities within content)
• Contextual relevance: Ensuring that the content surrounding an entity is relevant and provides clear context. This might involve discussing related entities, historical information, or other data that helps define the primary entity.
• Structured data: (Another word for Schema markup as mentioned above)
• Authority and expertise (Two aspects of the E-E-A-T and formerly E-A-T SEO best practices acronym that stands for expertise, experience, authoritative and trustworthy)

Entities and the future of SEO

Moving forward, it’s important to realize SEO is becoming less of a one-size-fits-all approach. As such, Google and other search engines will become smarter and more sophisticated, meaning they won’t have to rely as heavily on keyword-based search terms to rank content.

Rather, they’ll be able to understand user queries and leverage synonyms, related topics, and other ranking factors to deliver the most high-quality user experience in search results.

Leija agrees: “SEO isn’t just about ranking for keywords anymore — it’s about tailoring strategies to your specific audience and goals.”

For instance, what works for a local law firm won’t work for an ecommerce brand selling globally. Search engines are getting better at understanding intent, which means your approach needs to not only align with what your customers are searching for but also with why they’re searching for it.

“It’s becoming more about building a customized SEO strategy that addresses the intent behind your users’ unique needs,” he adds.

The takeaway

As competition grows and the search algorithm evolves, it can be tempting to put all of your efforts into the latest and greatest marketing trends. The problem: This move can be as risky as it is overwhelming.

The better solution? Fold these newer practices into your existing, tried-and-true SEO plans and see what results come from a multi-pronged approach.

“Honestly, I think entity SEO is becoming one of those things you can’t ignore,” says Leija, “but it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. It’s about making sure search engines and AI tools actually understand who you are, what you do, and how you fit into the bigger picture in your industry.”

Of course, keyword research for your specific entity still matters. But so does building out your content strategy to include every element possible to help solidify your place in search results and as a thought leader in your space.

This includes more traditional tactics like link building, on-page SEO, and case studies along with newer methods like semantic SEO, voice search, and different entities.

In fact, Leija recommends focusing on the basics first — like using structured data and internal linking — in 2025 and beyond, because those are the tactics that help both users and search engines make sense of your site.

Ready to take your SEO game to the next level? Contact us to learn how we can help you get there.

The post Entity SEO Explained (+ Examples and Expert Tips) appeared first on HawkSEM.

The Google search results page is separated into two different categories: organic results and sponsored results.

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your website to rank higher in the organic results for relevant keywords.

Search engine marketing (SEM), on the other hand, leverages SEO as well as pay-per-click (PPC) marketing techniques to appear in the sponsored and organic results.

So which is best: A targeted organic strategy or a hybrid approach?

Here, SEO expert Matt Smith shines a light on the key differences between the two — and when to focus on SEO or use SEM in your marketing strategy.

(Image: HawkSEM)

What are the differences between SEM and SEO?

The primary difference between SEO and SEM is that SEO focuses on earning traffic through organic search optimization, while SEM uses paid and organic strategies together.

Search engine optimization (SEO)

SEO is the practice of optimizing the content, layout, speed, and backend organization of a website to rank higher in the search engine results.

The goal is to rank highly in the organic search results for relevant search queries.

SEO marketing can be broken into three categories:

1. On-page SEO

On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing elements on your website, including:

• Keyword research
• Website content
• Meta descriptions
• Title tags
• URLs
• Images
• Internal linking structure

2. Off-page SEO

Off-page SEO is the promotion, outreach, link building, and other efforts you take to promote your content on other sites.

This allows your brand to build a reputation, establish authority, and optimize factors like high-quality backlinks, which involves content and information about your business on third-party websites.

The main focus is to build high-quality backlinks from other reputable websites.

3. Technical SEO

Technical SEO techniques improve the backend components of a website so it performs optimally, is easier for search engines to crawl and index, and provides a better user experience.

This involves:

• Optimizing site speed
• implementing structured data markup
• Ensuring proper XML sitemaps
• Optimizing for mobile devices
• Addressing issues like duplicate content, broken links, and server errors

Together, these elements are the bulk of what we consider SEO, which is a significant component of SEM.

Search engine marketing (SEM)

SEM is the practice of using paid search ads and SEO together to make a brand’s website more visible on the search engine results page (SERP).

The goal is to rank at the top of the organic search results and appear in the sponsored section above the organic results for maximum visibility.

Aside from the SEO techniques mentioned above, SEM incorporates PPC advertising strategies, including:

• Keyword research and targeting
• Ad creation
• Landing page optimization
• Bid management
• Audience targeting
• Remarketing

(Image: Unsplash)

The similarities between SEO and SEM

SEO is often part of an SEM strategy. Therefore, SEO is a subcategory of SEM, alongside PPC.

“SEO and SEM are digital marketing strategies aimed at increasing website visibility and driving traffic from search engines,” says Smith.

He adds that SEO focuses on optimizing a website’s content and structure to improve organic search rankings, while SEM involves paid advertising to appear in search engine results.

“SEO is a long-term strategy with no direct cost,” Smith explains, “while SEM requires a budget for keyword bidding and offers more immediate visibility through paid ads.”

SEO vs. SEM vs. PPC

If SEM is a Venn diagram, then SEO is one circle, PPC is on the other.

SEM is where the two overlap.

(Image: HawkSEM)

The key differences between SEO and PPC come down to four factors:

1. Cost
2. Time
3. Longevity
4. Keywords

Let’s break them down.

1. Cost

PPC involves paying the search engine for a spot in the search results.

SEO, on the other hand, only requires paying for the people, agencies, and tools that assist in your marketing efforts to rank higher — rather than giving money to Google, Bing, or Yahoo directly.

How much do SEO and PPC cost?

You can expect to pay anywhere from $2,500 to $10,000 and up per month. SEO can be performed for “free” or cheap, though the results you get may not be effective.

And while you can run PPC ads cheaply by setting a low cost-per-click (CPC) bid and maintaining a high Quality Score, the paid results may be as small as the investment.

Large brands have large budgets, befitting the number of digits on all the numbers they use. Therefore, small businesses may have a harder time with high competition keywords.

2. Time

SEO is considered a long game, while PPC offers nearly instant results in comparison:

• SEO takes roughly 3-6 months to show results, because the search engine needs to index your content and rank it appropriately, which can take
• six months or more.
• PPC takes roughly 2-3 months to see results. You create an ad, the ad network (usually Google Ads) approves it, and it starts running immediately.

3. Longevity

In terms of longevity, the same dichotomy holds:

• SEO can last nearly indefinitely. Some of the best content on the internet is many years old. While organic content can “age out” and fall out of favor, it can also be refurbished and kept relevant. With the proper maintenance, SEO basically lasts forever.
• PPC, meanwhile, lasts precisely as long as you have the money to pay for it and keep your ad campaigns active. If your budget runs out, the PPC campaigns stop until you put more money into the system. And, of course, if you decide you don’t like the ad’s performance, you can pause them at any time.

This phenomenon is primarily why both SEO and PPC advertising complement each other well. SEO starts slow and takes a long time to build up, while PPC begins almost immediately.

Further, you’re less likely to have PPC success without strong SEO. If your ad directs a prospect to a poorly written landing page, you’ll probably miss out on a conversion.

High-quality web pages mean higher conversion rates.

4. Keywords

Keywords are at the core of both SEO and PPC. However, the types of keywords that work best and the metrics that you’re looking at will vary.

When performing keyword research, you’ll find specific keywords have different intents behind them. These intents are:

• Navigational: the user knows where they want to go and wants a link
• Informational: the user has a question and wants an answer
• Tutorial: the user has a problem to solve and wants to know how to solve it themselves
• Commercial: the user has a problem to solve and wants to research solutions they can buy
• Transactional: the user wants to make a purchase and is looking for where to do it

Informational and tutorial keywords tend to perform best for SEO and are less effective for PPC.

If your goal is to get your target audience to download a checklist, for example, PPC ads can probably get some downloads and provide value.

However, you may want to let SEO handle these early-stage inquiries and focus on more purchase-ready keywords for your PPC campaigns.

Commercial and transactional keywords tend to perform best with PPC, though properly formulated high-quality content can also work well for SEO.

PPC tends to be most relevant when it has a tangible offer for the user and a concrete, easy-to-calculate return on investment.

A massive part of effective SEM is understanding the intent behind a search term and sculpting the marketing campaign you use to reach that intent most effectively.

When should you use SEO?

When it comes to choosing between SEO and PPC, there’s no one-size-fits-all answer. Both strategies have their place in a successful digital marketing strategy. However, for some campaigns and businesses, SEO is the better option.

If your goal is to get on the first page of the SERPs and stay there, investing in a good SEO campaign will be essential. Although Google Ads can get you onto the first page quickly, being on the organic side of SERPs is more reliable and longer lasting.

With a smart SEO campaign and consistent efforts over time, you can achieve a higher click-through rate (CTR) than with paid ads because searchers trust organic results more than they do ads.

Another instance where SEO may be preferable over PPC is when you’re targeting keywords with high competition.

If your budget isn’t high enough to compete with other advertisers for those keywords, then you’ll need to focus on organic search engine optimization instead of PPC.

This involves creating content that targets those keywords and optimizing it for search engines to appear near the top of SERPs when people search for those terms.

If your goal is to secure long-term visibility in the SERPs while also building trust with potential customers, then investing in an effective SEO campaign should be part of your digital marketing strategy.

A real-world example of SEO results

MileIQ, a mileage logging mobile app, needed to enhance its SEO and bring in more high-quality organic traffic to its app. To achieve this, it needed to get more rankings in Google, especially on the first page, by leveraging higher volume search terms.

So it partnered with HawkSEM and our teams zoned in on featured snippets, answering common search questions, and building in-depth content to enhance their authority.

The results:

• Growth in year-over-year organic site traffic by 125%
• Nearly 4,000 new first-page keyword rankings
• Increased organic sessions by 207%

When should you use PPC?

While SEO is focused on improving organic rankings in search engines, search marketing is a paid strategy that uses advertisements like Google Ads or Bing Ads.

Depending on your goals and budget, one of these strategies might better suit your needs.

For instance, if you want a short-term solution with guaranteed visibility, a paid search campaign can deliver fast results.

And because you’re only paying for ads when people click on them, it can be more cost-effective than SEO if budgeted correctly.

Additionally, PPC offers greater flexibility than SEO by allowing you to adjust and test different components of your ad copy when certain keywords aren’t driving enough clicks or conversions.

“SEM requires constant maintenance and refinement, so it’s imperative to consistently test, monitor and execute changes based on keyword-level performance,” says Smith.

In a nutshell, PPC is a great choice if you need quick visibility into SERPs and a way to measure the success of your campaigns in real-time.

But even though it might be tempting to rely solely on paid advertising campaigns instead of SEO strategies, using the two together offers the maximum ROI.

A real-world example of PPC results

Columbia Virtual Academy, a public education program in Washington State, understood the importance of digital marketing, but lacked the in-house expertise to effectively build and execute a strategy.

So it came to HawkSEM to restructure its PPC account with new campaigns, ad groups, keywords, ad copy, and ad extensions.

The results were phenomenal:

• Increased Google Ads conversions by 134% year over year
• Decreased cost per acquisition (CPA) by 51%
• Increased search clickthrough rate (CTR) by 45%

Why a holistic approach (SEM) is best

Using both SEO and PPC maximizes visibility and ensures your message reaches the widest possible audience.

For example, an organic SEO campaign can help boost your website’s rankings while also building trust with potential customers over time.

On the other hand, a PPC campaign can help you get quick visibility into SERPs and also measure the success of different ad variations in real time.

All you need is the right strategy to make your SEM campaign succeed.

The takeaway

“SEM” covers the bulk of your online advertising, while “SEO” is just one of the tools at your disposal, alongside PPC.

Your digital marketing strategy will depend on your goals, targeted keywords, budget, the quality of your site, your competition, and more.

Whether you’re a beginner or a seasoned marketer, finding the right balance between SEO and PPC is essential in SEM.

That’s why powerful tools like ConversionIQ exist. We created this platform to help you easily monitor and optimize your campaigns — from paid search to SEO to social media, resulting in better performance and higher ROI.

The question is, where do you put your budget? Can you write more content for organic traffic and SEO results, pay for high-quality tools to improve your overall marketing, or give Google money directly to give you more exposure and website traffic?

The choice is yours.

This article has been updated and was originally published in September 2022.

The post SEO vs SEM: What’s the Difference? Costs, Strategies + Timelines appeared first on HawkSEM.

You know your local business is legitimate. So do your customers. But to prove it to search engines like Google, you have to create and manage local SEO citations: online mentions of your business information across third-party websites, directories, and social media profiles.

By prioritizing citations, you give your business more power to rank in local search results. Over time, you can increase the visibility of your business listing and drive more traffic.

In this guide to local citation building and management, we’ll cover everything you need to know about creating, auditing, and optimizing listings to improve local search rankings — with expert insights from Sam Yadegar, co-founder and CEO of HawkSEM.

What are local SEO citations?

Local citations are mentions of your name, address, and phone number (NAP) on third-party websites. They signal to Google that your business is relevant and legitimate, improving your ranking with Google’s local algorithm.

Common citations include:

• Facebook business pages
• Local chamber of commerce
• Reputable online directories
• Yellow Pages websites
• Yelp
• Apple Maps
• Foursquare

Here’s an example of a local search citation for HawkSEM on Yellow Pages:

Often referred to as local listings, citations can include more than basic NAP information. Like in the example above, some citations also include details like your:

• Website
• Business category
• Business description
• Hours of operation
• Industries served
• Social media links
• User ratings
• User-provided photos
• Years in business

Google local citations confirm your business information matches your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business).

Citations vs. backlinks

Both citations and backlinks are important to SEO. And while the two may seem similar, they have key differences:

Backlinks focus on link building for the sake of establishing authority. As your site acquires more backlinks from relevant sites with high domain authority, the more authoritative it appears to search engines.

Citations focus on creating mentions of your business that include consistent, accurate NAP data. As your site acquires more citations from relevant sources, the more likely it is to appear in local search results.

What is local citation building?

Building local citations is the process of submitting, claiming, completing, and updating business profiles across online directories, social media pages, and relevant websites (including your own).

This is also referred to as local listings management.

The process generally involves:

1. Identifying directories and websites to list your business information
2. Submitting business information to those relevant directories
3. Claiming existing listings to manage your information
4. Ensuring your business information is consistent across listings
5. Making any updates as necessary and monitoring online listings for accuracy

Why are local SEO citations so important?

Local citations are important for SEO because they confirm that your business information is accurate across the web. This makes Google more likely to see your business as relevant, leading to:

1. Improved search rankings
2. Increased visibility
3. Trust and credibility

1. Improved search rankings

The Google algorithm uses citations as a key ranking factor for local search and Google’s Local Packs. These search engine results page (SERP) features appear at the top of results pages for local searches, above organic search results.

In the example above, Local Packs display more than NAP citations. They also show ratings and details like open hours and number of years in business.

However, a single business citation won’t majorly impact your Local Pack visibility or potential to rank in organic search results. Google typically cross-references multiple citations across various online directories and other sites.

2. Increased visibility

Typically, business directories and review sites take up most of the real estate on the first page of the SERP for local searches. That makes ranking at the top of search results for local queries difficult, even if your website checks all the local SEO boxes.

Many of the most established local citation sites would be impossible to outrank due to their high domain authority. So rather than compete with them, join them.

Adding your business to top-ranking local directories gives your business added visibility on the SERP. Since customers already trust these sites, they can help increase brand awareness, drive traffic, or even generate business.

3. Trust and credibility

For prospective customers and Google alike, readily available and consistent business information across the internet improves trustworthiness.

The more digital locations where your business information is listed, the more opportunities to reach a wider audience — and increase conversions.

Here’s proof:

HawkSEM worked with Happy Ears Hearing Center to attract more local search traffic. Using a local SEO strategy incorporating citation building and management, our team grew the Phoenix-based business’s estimated search traffic by 396% and increased local conversions by 44%.

Essential types of local citations

There is a long list of citation sites to choose from. However, most fall into a few common categories:
There is a long list of citation sites to choose from. However, most fall into a few common categories:

1. Owned sites
2. Search engines
3. Review sites
4. Data aggregators
5. Industry-specific business directories
6. Geo-specific listings
7. Unstructured citations

1. Owned sites

Technically, local citations reside on websites you don’t own. Yet it’s critical to list your business correctly on your own website, which should always reflect accurate, up-to-date business information.

For a single-location business, you can list this information in your site’s footer or on a contact page, as HawkSEM does. For a multi-location business, local SEO landing pages are better.

2. Search engines

Major search engines are the ideal places to begin creating local business citations.

• Google: Complete a Google Business Profile, which includes a Google Maps listing
• Bing: Create a Bing Places for Business, which includes a Bing Maps listing
• Apple Maps: Fill out an Apple Business Connect profile

Above is an example of a Google local SEO citation for HawkSEM. The listing includes NAP business data, ratings, reviews, and a category.

Further reading: 11 Expert Google Business Profile Optimization Tips

3. Review sites

For most local businesses, major review sites and directories are also important for citations.

• Better Business Bureau: Get accredited by Better Business Bureau
• Facebook: Build a Facebook page
• Yelp: Set up a Yelp profile

Above is an example of HawkSEM’s local listing on Facebook. The listing includes basic business information, a category, an email address, and ratings and reviews.

Note, the list above is far from complete. Depending on your business type, sites like LinkedIn or White Pages may also be worthwhile places for building citations.

4. Data aggregators

The structured citations above are mainly one-off listings. In other words, creating a listing on Facebook won’t lead to additional citations in other directories.

Data aggregators work a little differently. When you submit information to a data aggregator, it distributes your business data to a wide variety of sites.

These sites may not generate as much traffic as Facebook or Google Maps. But they can create more citation opportunities for your business, which helps with local rankings.

The most popular data aggregators include:

• BrightLocal: Create a BrightLocal Citation Builder account
• Foursquare: Claim your Foursquare for Business listing
• Neustar Localeze: Set up your Localeze profile
• Yext: Build a Yext listing

Many structured citations are free to set up and manage. However, data aggregators often require a one-time fee or an annual subscription to create and monitor citation sources.

5. Industry-specific business directories

While the citations above apply to most local businesses, there are more options that are industry-specific.

For industry-specific directories, relevance matters much more than domain authority. That means you should focus on finding the right listing sites for local businesses in your industry.

You shouldn’t create citations in directories that don’t apply to your business. For example, dentists shouldn’t create citations on sites like Tripadvisor, which is geared toward tourism and hospitality.

For a complete list, reference this Moz resource, citations by category. Search for your business’s industry and make your way through the top 10 citation sources.

Above is an example of HawkSEM’s listing on Clutch, a site for professional service providers. Along with NAP data and reviews, this listing also features social media links and founding dates.

6. Geo-specific listings

Some types of citations only apply to businesses in specific areas. For example, a chamber of commerce listing can get your business in front of potential customers and boost local SEO ranking.

7. Unstructured citations

Everything we’ve covered so far is a type of structured citation, meaning the business owner creates or submits it directly.

Third parties like journalists, bloggers, and customers create unstructured citations. They may appear in:

• News features
• Blog posts
• Social media posts
• Apps

Unstructured citations are more challenging to control. Yet you can still influence these citations.

“We’re invested in connecting with local news stations. Just last year, our interview on FOX29Philly generated immense publicity for our brand around the heat of the basketball season,” says Michael Nemeroff, CEO and co-founder of Rush Order Tees.

“Local appearances are major for us because we get to repurpose the news on our social media to maximize our reach and exposure.”

How to build local citations

As a local business owner, you have two options for submitting and managing local citations. Let’s walk through both.

Automated citations

The fastest and easiest way to manage local SEO citations is to partner with a data aggregator — a company that compiles your business details to distribute to online directories and listing sites.

Make sure to choose your data aggregator wisely. Services like BrightLocal or Whitespark, give you ownership over your listing, allowing you to update as necessary. Other services use a rental model, which can become expensive over time.

Manual submissions

For the most control over your local citations, submit and manage them manually in-house, or hire an experienced agency to oversee the process for you.

The main downside of this approach is that it’s more time-consuming. But because you can review each listing manually, you get much more control over the process. You can also ensure that every citation is correct.

Best practices for local SEO citations

If you go the manual submission route, you’ll need to factor citation review and optimization into your workflow. Use the steps below as a guide.

1. Start with the biggest opportunities
2. Review and update existing citations
3. Check for duplicate listings
4. Identify new citation opportunities
5. Track SEO conversions

1. Start with the biggest opportunities

First, focus on creating citations on the sites with the highest search volume and the biggest brand recognition.

“The most effective tactic for securing authoritative local citations is to focus on securing listings on prominent review platforms like Yelp, Foursquare, and industry-relevant sites first,” explains Edlyn Collanto, B2B marketing research specialist at UpCity.

“These establish a foundation before expanding to citation aggregators. Particularly for reviews, providing good experiences that convert single interactions into enthusiastic advocates willing to publicly share experiences drives high-impact community promotion.”

2. Review and update existing citations

Take time to review your existing citations periodically. If your business information changes or if a third party suggests a change to your listing, you may need to review it for accuracy.

You may also find opportunities to add more detail to your existing listings. The listing management tools below can make this process faster and easier.

3. Check for duplicate listings

Ideally, you’ll have one listing for each business location on each relevant site or directory. More listings aren’t better. In fact, they can compromise your local SEO efforts.

A key part of providing search engines with accurate NAP information is addressing duplicate listings. Most of the tools below can alert you to these listings automatically.

4. Identify new citation opportunities

To continue to improve visibility for your local business, stay ahead of local competitors. That means performing competitive research and finding new listing opportunities.

With many of the tools below, you can automatically detect competitor listings. Then create new citations for your own business in the same directories.

5. Track SEO conversions

Securing the right listings is just the first step in managing local citations. It’s just as important to monitor conversions, especially for measuring the value of your SEO efforts.

“I worked with an RV rental business with multiple locations across the U.S.,” shares content strategy director, Melissa Popp. “Obtaining local citations boosted their visibility in local search results, particularly in Google’s map pack.”

After listing on travel directories and local tourism sites, she says there was an increase in online bookings and inquiries, indicating a more visible local presence tracked through UTM codes from where those citations were placed.

At HawkSEM, we take conversion tracking a step further.

“Once you have a set plan for your local citations strategy, you want to make sure you have proper tracking in place so you can accurately measure the return on investment (ROI) from specific campaigns,” says Yadegar. “We use ConversionIQ to help with tracking these campaigns.”

Further reading: How to Track SEO Conversions (+ Tools and Expert Tips)

Best tools to check local SEO citations

When you manage local citations manually, you need a dedicated tool. Standard SEO tools won’t work for citations. Instead, use one of the listing management tools below.

1. BrightLocal Citation Tracker
2. Moz Local Listing Checker
3. Semrush Listing Management
4. Whitespark

1. BrightLocal Citation Tracker

The BrightLocal Citation Tracker rates your local citations, giving you a score out of 100. The platform considers the number of found, not found, correct, and incorrect citations.

With this platform, you can track existing citations and locate and address duplicate listings. It also has a project tracker that makes it easier to create and follow through on to-do lists.

BrightLocal’s competitor tracker helps you stay ahead of other sites in your industry. It automatically monitors your top five competitors to help you avoid missing opportunities.

The BrightLocal Citation Tracker starts at $29 per month per business location. All plans have a 14-day free trial to test out the platform.

2. Moz Local Listing Checker

With the Moz Local Listing Checker, you can look up your local business for free and see your score. Moz grades local businesses based on correct, incorrect, and missing NAP data.

This free tool provides a complete list of your local citations, including the NAP data that each lists. It also tracks whether the directory lists hours or includes photos of your business.

With Moz, you can create a DIY to-do list and begin checking off the citations manually. But to manage listings, you’ll need a paid subscription.

With Moz Local, you can manage business listings, monitor reviews, and post offers and updates for local customers. Plans start at $16 per month per location. This tool doesn’t require a subscription to the full Moz Pro platform.

3. Semrush Listing Management

With Semrush Listing Management, you can look up your local business and see an overview of its online presence. The free version of the tool grades your online presence and shows the number of listings that need work.

It also provides an abridged list of the listings that are missing NAP data or that have incorrect information. To get the full list and start addressing the issues, you need a paid subscription.

Semrush Listing Management is part of Semrush Local, which is the SEO platform’s local toolset. In addition to local citations, this tool offers online review management.

Semrush Local is available as an add-on to a base Semrush subscription. Base subscriptions start at $139 per month plus $50 per month per location for Semrush Local.

4. Whitespark

The Whitespark Local Citation Finder is an all-in-one platform for checking, reviewing, and optimizing local SEO citations. The free version of the platform gives you a glimpse of your existing citations.

With a paid subscription, you can track progress over time, create to-do lists, and find competitive opportunities. Whitespark makes it easy to find relevant directories, check domain authority, and verify that your listing is submittable.

Whitespark has a free plan that you can use to run three searches per day and see limited search results. Paid plans start at $33 per month for up to five campaigns with 20 searches per day and unlimited search results.

The takeaway

Local citations can certainly be straightforward, especially with a checklist like the one below. But if you run a multi-location business or if you’re just getting started with local SEO, it’s often better to work with a trusted partner.

At HawkSEM, our local SEO experts can handle every step of the citation management process, including conversion tracking. Reach out for a free consultation with our SEO team.

Checklist for creating local SEO citations

Download The Checklist Now

Download Checklist

The post What Are Local Citations? + Pro Tips on How to Build Them appeared first on HawkSEM.

Those in the B2B world know selling products and services to businesses is a totally different ball game than selling directly to consumers.

Not only do you need content that appeals to multiple decision-makers and personas, but you also need a funnel that’ll close deals months down the road.

That takes some serious planning.

However, building an effective strategy takes time, skill, and a lot of research.

And did we say time? Something many B2B business owners lack.

Fortunately, you can sidestep all this by working with a business-to-business content marketing agency.

If you’re in the market for one or simply want to determine if partnering with one is right for you, here’s our list of the top options to choose from.

 1. HawkSEM

At HawkSEM, we know that driving B2B traffic, qualified leads, and conversions isn’t as simple as publishing a piece of content and then sitting back hoping your prospects find it.

You need a well-thought-out strategy that includes all the right marketing channels working together.

This means having a holistic approach that spans paid marketing, social media, email, and search engine optimization (SEO).

Sure, you can do it all yourself, but why work harder when you can work with a B2B content marketing agency that builds and executes for you?

HawkSEM uses all-encompassing methods to amplify your B2B marketing efforts. We cover your B2B marketing on all fronts by offering:

• Conversion rate optimization
• PPC (pay-per-click) ad management
• Paid social media marketing
• SEO
• Performance Display
• Remarketing
• Email marketing
• Ecommerce marketing

But we don’t just build content campaigns and throw them into the wind. We use our proprietary software, ConversionIQ, to analyze your campaign metrics and ensure we’re attracting your best prospects (aka those that are most likely to pay).

Our marketing team even builds custom landing pages to ensure you convert as many quality leads as possible. If they’re not ready to buy, we’ll have email nurture campaigns ready to engage and move them down the funnel.

HawkSEM by the numbers

The results of our campaigns are consistent across industries and business sizes. For example:

• Easly, a funding solutions platform, came to us to build their SEO strategy.
  • The result: we increased their referring domains by 2500%, captured over 40 featured snippets, and increased their brand’s keyword portfolio by 1,500%.
• Dilo, a full-service emission-free gas-handling product and service provider, partnered with us to reestablish their brand and build rankings for high-value keywords.
  • The result: 36% increase in organic clicks, 24% increase in Google clicks, and 46% increase in Google impressions — all within 3-6 months.
• Honda Motor Co., the acclaimed Japanese automobile company, even enlisted our help to build awareness and sales for its new Civic hatchback and Accord models in South America.
  • The result: our campaigns reached 30 million people, improved organic traffic by 200%, and increased dealer inquiries by 40% — all the while reducing their cost-per-click (CPC) by 30%.

But if we’re not the right fit for you (or vice versa) for whatever reason, we happily recommend the following B2B content marketing agencies (in no particular order).

 2. Siege Media

Siege Media is an SEO agency that works with brands to build their presence on Google, Bing, and other popular search engines.

However, its services extend beyond SEO and content marketing. The agency also offers link building to increase your site’s authority and ranking in Google.

Plus, it offers graphic design services (think: infographics and other visual downloads) to make your branded content stand apart. Some companies they’ve worked with include:

• Zillow
• Asana
• Airbnb
• Tripadvisor
• Shutterfly

The agency’s approach to success: poring through data to find lucrative ranking opportunities to get your brand noticed.

Siege Media focuses on building content that’s unmatched by competitors, so your company stands out in a good way.

According to their site, their content marketing services generate nearly $150 million in annual client traffic value. (This is what you might otherwise spend on pay-per-click ads to generate the same amount of traffic.)

The team achieves all this with a roster of over 100 pros who offer the following content marketing services:

• Content strategy
• Blog design
• Link building
• Graphic design
• Video production
• Copywriting
• SEO consulting
• Content creation

If you’re looking for a customer-driven SEO agency, then allow these experts to lay siege to your next campaign. (Sorry, we couldn’t resist.)

 3. SmartBug

Want to grow your business revenue? SmartBug helps companies build the right strategy without overspending. After all, who doesn’t want to do more with less?

This agency has worked with notable companies like HubSpot, Klaviyo, and Salesforce. And it doesn’t discriminate — it works with companies of all sizes and across industries, like:

• Finance
• SaaS
• Senior Care
• Healthcare
• Education
• Manufacturing

SmartBug’s well-recognized for its game-changing content marketing campaigns. For instance, it’s received over 250 awards from the likes of HubSpot, Marcom, and AVA Digital Awards.

The services behind these awards include:

• Paid media
• Public relations
• HubSpot implementation
• CRM integration
• SEO
• Ecommerce marketing
• Inbound marketing
• Sales enablement
• Creative and branding
• Web design

So if you’re feeling bugged by designing and implementing your B2B content marketing campaigns, then get the pros at SmartBug to do it for you.

 4. Verblio

Verblio is where brands go to get a complete concierge experience for their content marketing campaigns.

Not only can you get a complete content strategy drawn up for you, but you also get a team of vetted industry writers to execute it.

And the best part: If you don’t like the content, you don’t pay for it.

There’s also Verblio Valet, a fully managed service at the agency’s highest level without the monthly platform fees. And because they don’t do contracts, you can switch plans whenever you like.

It has over 3,000 writers holding MBAs, JDs, and PhDs, and who have experience in fields like automotive, health, beauty, legal, marketing, tech, and real estate. Their robust entourage can develop high-quality content in various formats, including:

• Blog posts
• Newsletters
• Ebooks
• Podcast summaries
• Website content
• Video
• Press releases

So whether you have a small monthly cadence or a large bulk order of 1,000 articles, Verblio’s team can manage it for you.

5. ClearVoice

ClearVoice is another content production agency that works with thousands of vetted writers across more than 200 industries. The difference with them is that you work with writers through its platform, which you pay for monthly.

It has a marketplace you can browse through to find writers yourself, or you can leave it up to your account manager to do it for you. But that’s not all the agency can handle.

Your dedicated ClearVoice team can also plan your content, hire writers, edit, and pre-approve content, so all you have to do is sign it off for publishing.

Here’s a look at the services they offer:

• Organic keyword reporting
• Competitive content analysis
• In-depth backlink analysis
• Suggested keywords
• Prioritized topic and theme suggestions
• SEO content briefs
• Audience and competitor research
• Industry analysis

To date, this B2B content marketing agency has helped brands and even other agencies rank content and successfully convert target audiences.

Its team has produced more than 100,000 content pieces for over 500 brands. If you’re looking for an agency that can match your brand’s voice, messaging, and vision, ClearVoice is a great option.

 6. Omniscient Digital

Omniscient Digital is a B2B content marketing agency that practices what it preaches. Its co-founders are thought leaders in content strategy and have even produced a course on the topic ‌DIYers.
This agency is all about over-sharing knowledge to demonstrate its expertise and win the trust of brands.

Their client rap sheet is profound, featuring work with notable brands like Hotjar, Jasper, GatherContent, and Shipyard.

And the case studies are quite impressive. For instance, it helped Jasper grow organic sessions by 415% and product signups by 121x in one year.

When you partner with Omniscient Digital, its strategists will build a plan that matches your audience and business needs. Its most popular marketing methods are SEO and thought leadership content.

Plus, it has a team of writers to execute the content plans it builds.

 7. Wpromote

Wpromote is another award-winning marketing agency that’s recognized by prestigious organizations like Adweek, Campaign US, US Agency Awards, and The Drum.

It also has an impressive client list, which includes brands like:

• Zenni
• Frontier Airlines
• Whirlpool
• Transunion
• Adobe

As you can see, the agency works with companies of various sizes and backgrounds. This makes them an ideal partner if you’re looking for an agency that’s not restricted to a handful of industries.

The services offered at Wpromote include:

• Content Marketing
• PPC
• Paid media (social, search, programmatic, Amazon, and more)
• Influencer marketing
• SEO and voice search
• Content marketing
• Email marketing
• Video
• Performance creative

What makes it unique from other traditional digital marketing agencies is that it uses a mix of marketing experts and proprietary technology that aids in delivering stellar results for clients.

So if you’re serious about getting your brand in front of buyers at B2B companies, then team up with Wpromote.

 8. Tinuiti

Tinuiti is a brand performance agency that excels at promoting businesses across various mediums.

Unlike most digital marketing agencies, Tinuiti extends beyond search and social to get your brand noticed. For example, it helps companies get placements on Streaming TV.

This agency prioritizes audience-centric and performance-focused strategies while respecting its clients’ privacy.

And this has earned the agency partnerships with a long list of notable companies, including Converse, Olly, Rite Aid, Terminix, Etsy, and Nestle.

Today, it manages over $3 billion in annual media spend for its clients.

How do they do it? Using its proprietary tech called Mobius. This monitors various data points in client campaigns, unifies them, and offers a clear picture of what’s happening across touchpoints.

With this intel, Tinuiti’s team can make data-driven decisions to deliver results for client campaigns.

The services offered by Tinuiti include:

• Content marketing
• Shopping media
• Paid search
• Lifetime marketing
• Paid social
• SEO
• Amazon Ads
• Affiliate marketing
• Shoppable media
• Mobile app marketing

This agency is perfect for Amazon FBA sellers, B2B buyers at SaaS platforms, mobile app developers, and any business that’s looking to improve its performance.

 9. Power Digital Marketing

Content marketing isn’t something you can build and benefit from overnight, especially in the B2B space. It’s all about playing the long game and executing the right strategy.

Power Digital is a marketing agency that proves this time and time again. What’s more, it boasts that brands that work with them for at least six months see an average of 71% revenue growth year-over-year (YoY). That’s 2.4x quicker than standard market rates.

Plus, it’s doing this for brands of all sizes, including Dropbox, Spanx, P&G, Casper, and Pacifica.

One of its most notable results is with Shipware’s campaign, which saw traffic increase by 728% and over $300,000 in new business within 10 months.

Power Digital’s impressive outcomes stem from its range of marketing services, which include:

• Content marketing
• Affiliate marketing
• Paid search
• Paid social prospecting
• Branded Amazon search
• Email marketing
• Conversion rate optimization (CRO)
• Web development
• Social media marketing
• Influencer marketing

This company is the B2B content agency you hire when you want to build a digital marketing arm without hiring in-house personnel.

It provides a dedicated team of experts, an account manager, and a veteran content marketing officer (CMO) to build a holistic marketing approach that drives revenue growth for your business.

 10. Jellyfish

Jellyfish is a content marketing agency that helps brands create an online presence through various strategies, such as digital marketing, conversion optimization, paid media, video production, and email marketing.

It offers a range of services, including:

• Strategy building
• Market intelligence
• Data gathering
• Training and development opportunities
• PPC services

This agency has an impressive client list that includes well-known companies, such as eBay, The Walt Disney Company, Spotify, Slack, Samsung, Uber, and Booking.com.

It also partners with industry leaders such as Google, Meta, Salesforce, and Amazon.

Jellyfish can keep up with the demand by employing a team of over 2,000 employees across more than 40 offices.

Actual jellyfish are flexible and adaptable, and Jellyfish the agency can surely relate.

 11. Foundation

If you’re active on LinkedIn, then you might have seen thought leadership posts from Foundation’s founder, Ross Simonds.

He’s been featured at several conferences and now has a podcast where he continues to share his content marketing knowledge.

Foundation is an agency that prides itself on building powerful strategies that not only focus on content creation but distribution as well.

After all, what good is that pillar page you invested thousands in if no one knows it exists?

Unfortunately, content promotion is something both brands and agencies forget all the time.

When you build your “foundation” right, everything falls into place. So by partnering with this agency, you get all the content services necessary to make that happen, including:

• Strategy
• Creation
• Distribution
• Content marketing & SEO auditing
• Marketing intelligence

Foundation caters to B2B, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and manufacturing companies. If this sounds intriguing, we say get this team to architect your next campaign.

 12. RYNO Strategic Solutions

Service-based businesses will find RYNO Strategic Solutions to be the perfect choice.

In fall 2024, Blue Corona merged with RYNO Strategic Solutions and unified under the RYNO brand.

This agency works with local service businesses, particularly home service companies, in fields like:

• HVAC
• Landscaping
• Pest control
• Roofing
• Plumbing
• Electrical installations and repair
• Home building and remodeling

It helps businesses drive more website traffic and conversions (such as phone calls and bookings).

These professionals have been in the digital marketing industry for over 15 years and have a proven track record of success.

Here’s a look at the services it offers:

• Content strategy development
• Campaign optimization and adjustment
• Content audience deep-dive
• Website development
• Content creation
• Pay-per-click advertising
• Content distribution
• Measurement and analytics reporting

When you team up with RYNO, you’ll get an inbound web marketing strategy designed specifically for your business.

They’ll track the results, optimize for improvements, and lead your business to success.

Moreover, if your goals are to generate more leads and sales from the internet for your local business, then contact this B2B content marketing agency today.

 13. Animalz

Animalz is yet another thought leader in the space of content marketing. If you haven’t already checked out their blog, you’re in for a treat.

They’ve gained the respect of countless digital marketing agencies (including yours truly) by consistently creating high-quality content that informs and positions the brands they work with as knowledgeable industry thought leaders.

Plus, it promotes movement-first content, which is just as it sounds — content that incites reactions and discussions. If done right, it can even create demand generation for a new product or category.

The good news is this agency works with a diverse range of clients — from startups and enterprises to VC firms and everything else in between.

So odds are, you’re a good match if your budget is right. Their client rap sheet includes notable brands like Amazon, Google, Intercom, and Airtable.

Services Animalz provides to its impressive client base include:

• SEO consulting
• Brand awareness
• Lead generation
• Product marketing
• Promotion and distribution

If you’re looking to push borders and get a little wild with your content marketing, then connect with Animalz today.

 14. Vital Design

Vital Design is an agency that can breathe life into your content marketing strategy (get it?).

It has a large team of more than 100 members who are ready to build or revamp your content so that it drives traffic and conversions for your business.

They do this by using brand development and digital marketing services like:

• Blog design/WordPress
• WordPress training
• Blogging
• Landing page design
• Copywriting
• Social media marketing

Plus, they can produce content in all forms, including:

• Ebooks
• White papers
• Press release
• Emails/newsletters

It’s done wonders for reputable companies in the fashion, tech, finance, and education sectors, such as Reebok, Visa, HubSpot, and the University of San Diego.

Today, it caters mostly to businesses in higher education, B2B manufacturing, and Fintech.

This agency was voted as one of the best places to work by Inc. 5000 with a 99% happy team.

Why is this important? Because when you have an agency with satisfied workers, their performance is likely to yield happy customers (that’s you).

The takeaway

We’ve provided a list of the leading B2B content marketing agencies around the block that we personally vouch for.

HawkSEM finds their reputations and work ethic unsurpassed, and worth looking into.

However, if you find HawkSEM to be a good potential fit for your upcoming branded content initiatives, then we’d be stoked to work with you.

Don’t hesitate to reach out to us today to get started and see if we’re the perfect marketing match for you.

This article has been updated and was originally published in May 2024.

The post 14 B2B Content Marketing Agencies That Get Results appeared first on HawkSEM.