We’re living in the AI era. From software and healthcare to data and other industries, AI is fueling technological disruption on a level unseen since the arrival of the personal computer. But beyond the business applications of AI, another revolution is unfolding in the realm of consumer behavior—specifically, search behavior. 

In late 2024, Google’s share of the search industry market fell below 90% for the first time in nearly a decade. AI is the culprit. Now, for the first time, users have free access to AI answer engines that not only crawl the open web, but provide custom responses to their queries in real time. Suddenly, the company that invented the modern search engine is now locked in a battle to win eyeballs from LLM tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, X’s Grok, and many others. 

SEO isn’t dead. But search itself — the way we find, vet, and interact with digital information — is being turned on its head. And in the middle of it all? Your brand, which still needs to reach, educate, and persuade potential customers and users in organic-ish ways.

That’s where Generative Engine Optimization comes in — a discipline both similar and unlike SEO in fundamental ways. In this guide, we’ll unpack GEO, explain how it differs from Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and traditional SEO, and share what smart brands are doing to future-proof their visibility in a post-keyword world.

What is GEO?

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is the practice of improving your brand’s visibility in AI engines. 

Unlike traditional SEO, where the goal is to rank a website highly on search engine results pages, GEO is about ensuring your brand and its content is referenced in the responses generated by tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Bing Copilot, Google’s AI Overviews, and others.

These tools don’t just fetch and display a link to your website. They synthesize and construct responses in real time based on a blend of training data, live web content, and contextual interpretation of your query.

For brand leaders and marketing teams responsible for converting unaware audiences into qualified prospects, the question is no longer just, “Are we ranking?” It’s “Are we a part of the answer?”

An example of GEO (missing) in action

Now, I personally think it’s defensible — albeit misguided — to read all of the above and think, “so what?” After all, marketing is a field dominated by cycles of hype and decompression. We’re obsessive about the latest thing. And Google’s been around for 20+ years, so maybe all that staying power means users will just stick with it.

So to illustrate the point, let’s define GEO by its opposite and share what a lack of LLM visibility actually means for your brand: 

• A user asks ChatGPT, “What’s the best B2B CRM for startups?” The answer includes two competitors and a product roundup, but your brand isn’t mentioned.
• A prospective customer types a question into Perplexity instead of Google. The AI cites three articles — none of which are yours — as the foundation of its recommendation.
• A decision-maker using Google SGE gets an AI-generated answer at the top of the page summarizing key takeaways from five sites. Yours isn’t one of them.
  

In each case the user gets what they need, but your brand is nowhere in sight.

That’s the challenge GEO is designed to solve. It’s not about optimizing for search results but about optimizing for inclusion in AI-generated narratives.

GEO vs. AEO vs. SEO — What’s the Difference?

To understand where GEO fits into the broader picture, it helps to zoom out.

Over the past two decades, SEO has evolved from keyword-stuffing and backlink chases to a more nuanced, intent-driven discipline. But now, AI is accelerating that evolution, splintering search into multiple surfaces: Ranked results, featured answers, and full-blown generated responses.

Let’s break down the distinctions:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Traditional SEO is about ranking web pages in search engine results to drive organic traffic.

• Goal: Earn clicks from high-ranking links on Google or Bing
• Tactics: Keyword targeting, backlinks, technical site health, content quality
• Success Metric: Organic traffic and page rankings
  

Many brands should still do SEO — but SERPs are increasingly crowded and click-starved as search engines add AIOs, paid results, and more dynamic content. 

Answer Engine Optimization (AEO)

AEO is about structuring your content to be surfaced as the direct answer to a query — whether in a featured snippet, knowledge panel, or voice assistant response.

• Goal: Be the answer, not just a result
• Tactics: Clear formatting (Q&A, bullets, tables), schema markup, concise definitions
• Success Metric: Featured snippet placement, voice response inclusion, zero-click visibility
  

AEO emerged alongside voice search and smart assistants. It’s about incorporating tiny bits of information that engines can extract instantly.

Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)

GEO focuses on getting your brand included in AI-generated answers; i.e., the synthesized, conversational outputs produced by tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google SGE.

• Goal: Be referenced, cited, or paraphrased in AI-generated responses
• Tactics: Authoritative content, semantic depth, entity, schema markup, presence in trustworthy sources, systematic content freshness
• Success Metric: LLM visibility, brand citations in AI tools, brand sentiment in AI tools
  

Similar to AEO, GEO is about formatting for extraction. But it’s also about building enough context and credibility that AI tools pull you into the conversation even if the user never visits your site.

We should note that some brands and search thought leaders still use different terminology for the practice of optimizing content for AI visibility; e.g., it’s not unheard of to read “LLM SEO” out in the wild. At Tuff, we prefer GEO. 

Rethinking SEO Strategy in the Age of LLMs

Until recently, SEOs have followed a tried-and-true formula: Publish high-quality content, earn links, rank well, and capture clicks. The idea that every business is a publisher was huge for its time.

But in 2025, that playbook is fraying.

According to SparkToro’s 2024 zero-click search study, nearly 60% of all Google searches now end without a single click — a number that’s been steadily rising year over year. 

Why? Because Google has long invested in keeping searchers on its platform rather than referring them to sites directly. Before the AI boom, they did this by answering more queries directly — through featured snippets, maps, and carousels — often satisfying the user’s intent without requiring them to visit a site. 

Now, that dynamic is expanding both in Google Search and beyond. Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Bing Copilot are starting to function as end destinations themselves by delivering synthesized, citation-lite answers to complex questions. Users don’t need to click through to get the gist. And thanks to LLMs’ ability to summarize, contextualize, and personalize, the barrier to finding information is trending toward zero — and so is the barrier to creating content.

Generative content tools are flooding the internet with basic, surface-level explainers. As a result, top-of-funnel, Wikipedia-style content is rapidly becoming commoditized, and brands that keep churning it out are seeing diminishing returns. 

So, where does that leave marketers?

It doesn’t mean you should stop publishing content. But it does mean your content strategy needs to shift from “publish more” to “publish smarter.”

What brands should do instead:

• Double down on differentiation. Move away from generic explainers and lean into content only you can produce: Product deep-dives, original data, founder insights, customer stories, and technical how-tos.
• Refresh content consistently. According to data from AirOps, 95% of all pages cited by ChatGPT were either published or refreshed in the past 10 months.
• Shift down the funnel. Instead of chasing top-of-funnel traffic, use content to nurture evaluation-stage prospects, educate on key pain points, and reinforce product value. SEO is no longer just an awareness channel. It’s a trust-building tool.
• Structure content for AI surfaces. Write content in a way that’s easily extractable and reference-worthy for GEO. That means structuring answers clearly, using schema, and building semantic authority around your niche.

The bottom line? Brands still need to publish. But they need to be strategic about what, where, and why. In an environment where AI answers dominate and clicks are harder to earn, content must do more than fill space. It must anchor your presence across a fragmented, answer-first internet.

Your Next Move: How to Future-Proof Your SEO Strategy

The rules of search are changing, but the goal remains the same — show up where your audience is looking for answers.

In the era of LLMs, that means expanding your SEO strategy beyond ranking pages to earning presence across traditional search, answer engines, and AI-driven interfaces. Here’s how to get started:

1. Conduct a GEO audit and test your visibility  

You can’t be the answer if you’re not formatting for answers.

• Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Bing Copilot industry-specific questions. Is your brand, product, or POV mentioned?
• Check which sources are being cited, and reverse-engineer what they’re doing right.
• Use platforms like Profound to monitor and benchmark your presence across generative engines — even when you’re not getting the click.
• Add schema markup, internal linking, and modular Q&A formatting to make your content snippet- and voice-ready.

2. Build an Answer-First Content Library

Think beyond blog posts. Create layered content assets built for human and machine consumption.

• Modular formats (e.g. quick definitions, comparisons, data tables) make it easier for AI crawlers to pull and summarize information.
• Product marketing content — e.g., feature breakdowns, use case pages, competitor comparisons — is more defensible and harder to replicate.
• Integrate content with your brand voice, narrative, and hard-to-replicate trust signals. 

3. Redefine Your KPIs

Rankings and organic traffic still matter. But they’re no longer the whole story.

• Track AI citation mentions and content visibility across AI platforms.
• Monitor your “answer share” across key question categories in your space.
• Consider SEO performance alongside downstream metrics like demo requests, sales velocity, and pipeline quality.
• Think about visibility as the new ranking. 

Build a GEO Strategy in 2025

Search is changing. We’re here to help. Whether you’re looking to expand your content efforts this year, future-proof your existing content library, or figure out a strategy that does a little bit of both, we can help. 

Reach out today to kickoff your free GEO strategy call with one of our content strategy experts.

The post GEO, AEO, and LLM SEO: How AI Is Reshaping Search (And What Brands Should Do About It) appeared first on Tuff.

Renogy approached Tuff to handle all of their SEO needs for their US and international websites. Tuff had previously been creating blog content for Renogy’s US website but was not managing technical SEO or anything else.

We analyzed all of their existing websites and put together a comprehensive SEO strategy to increase organic traffic and revenue. This is how we did it.

Technical SEO

When we first took over SEO implementation for all of Renogy’s international sites nobody had previously been maintaining their technical SEO. With that being said, it’s no surprise that there were quite a few errors that needed to be addressed.

This isn’t to say that the websites were in bad shape, they just weren’t SEO-optimized and there’s a big difference. So our first step was to make sure that all the international websites were SEO-optimized. This is how we did it…

International SEO (hreflang tags)

The first issue to tackle was the hreflang tags, and Renogy had about 16,000 of them. 

If you have multiple versions of a page for different languages or regions, hreflang tags are a way to tell Google about these variations. 

For instance, you may have a US and UK website and they’re both in English but one is in US English and one is in British English. Aside from having two different URLs – either uk.domain, domain.uk, or domain.com/uk – we need to specifically tell Google about the language differences.

The same goes for international versions with completely different languages such as German, French, or Chinese, etc.,

Some of the most common hreflang tag errors are:

1. Not having any hreflang tags
2. Having incorrect hreflang tags (Ex. having your French tags on your German site)
3. Hreflang tags being incorrectly coded
4. No self-referencing hreflang tags

The most common issue is not having any self-referencing hreflang tags, and that’s the issue that we were dealing with on Renogy’s websites. Fortunately, this can be solved programmatically so it’s not extremely time-consuming to fix all 16,000+ errors.

Meta Descriptions

Once the hreflang tags were fixed, one of the most common technical SEO errors across all websites has to do with meta descriptions. Whether it be missing or duplicate meta descriptions, this is something that commonly goes unnoticed.

Sometimes these fixes can be done programmatically by pulling the first sentence on the page and setting it as the meta description but for a variety of reasons, this wasn’t possible for Renogy. One of those reasons is that their website is hosted on Big Commerce and this makes it more difficult. Another reason is that the first sentence wasn’t ideal for a meta description.

So long story short, I began manually fixing and creating hundreds of meta descriptions so that there weren’t duplicate or missing meta descriptions across all of their international websites. 

Internal Linking & Broken Internal Links

Internal links are a very important part of technical SEO, whether it be improving the internal linking throughout the website or fixing the broken links. We did both, starting with the broken links. 

Having broken internal links on your website is another common SEO issue that can not only harm your organic performance but also your user experience and revenue. 

When fixing the broken links, my initial focus was on top-performing product pages to make sure we weren’t losing revenue due to users not being able to purchase the product. 

This is another manual fix so some of it was done in unison with the meta description fixes since I was already going through the pages manually.

No-indexing Pages

It’s important to remove low-quality pages from Google’s search engine. 

Most of us have a habit of wanting all pages to be indexed in Google and I understand it. But when we think about how Google ranks a website, it doesn’t make sense to have our blog tag archives, author archive pages, and other similar pages indexed in Google, for a few reasons. 

1. When you search for something in Google, you are presented with its search engine results page (SERP) and for that reason, Google doesn’t like to direct traffic to another SERP, even if it’s your own website’s SERP. 
2. This typically isn’t a good user experience. If someone is searching for 
3. For these reasons, Google won’t rank these pages very well and if you have a lot of low-quality pages, it will eventually harm your whole website.

For these reasons, we no-indexed any low-quality archive pages that were on the Renogy website. 

Content Creation

Now that the technical SEO is all done, let’s talk about the SEO content strategy and content creation that we executed. 

We began by creating a few pillar pieces of content that we could build a cluster strategy around. We defined a few high-traffic keywords that were essential to the business and created high-quality content around those topics. These pieces of content live at the top of the Renogy blog. 

We then created 3 to 4 pieces of related content that we used to link to these hub pages as well as internally linked dozens of existing content.

Aside from the hub pages, we consistently produce one new blog post each week for each of Renogy’s website properties. 

The other main piece of content that we created was what we refer to as customer service content.

E-commerce Customer Service Content

E-commerce Customer Service Content is essentially FAQ data that is specific to the page that it is on. Not only is it helpful for SEO, but it’s also helpful for the user experience. 

You can find this content on all the major ecommerce websites. 

Ex. Amazon

Ex. Best Buy

Renogy was missing this content on their core category solar panel listing pages, including their solar panel kits listing page, and by adding it, it helped us increase organic rankings of these pages and in return, drive more sales.

We’ve seen the most significant organic improvements to the pages that we added this customer service content to.

Results

After all of these improvements and about 6 months’ time, we are ranking #1 in Google for ‘solar panel kits’ – outranking Amazon and Home Depot when we previously weren’t ranking in the top 100. We also rank #4 for ‘solar kit’ when we previously weren’t ranking in the top 100.

In addition to that, we increased our ranking for ‘solar panels for sale’ from position 12 to position 5.

We’ve also seen significant improvements in tons of other organic keywords that are essential to Renogy’s business and bottom line. 

As I write this, organic traffic is up over 32% from when we finished our implementations and organic revenue is steadily increasing and growing about 37% quarter over quarter.

Derek Coleman

Derek is a digital marketer based in Boston, Massachusetts with almost a decade of hands-on SEO experience. He finds it meaningful, challenging, and exciting to develop, test, and implement new SEO strategies. When he’s not auditing websites and optimizing content he’s usually backpacking and exploring new cultures.

The post How We Outranked Home Depot for the #1 Position appeared first on Tuff.

Welcome to our AMA featuring Derek Coleman, our Head of SEO at Tuff.

As one of our original team members at Tuff, Derek has not only collaborated with every one of our clients over the years on their SEO endeavors, but he’s also played a pivotal role in shaping our entire SEO and content team, as well as our perspective on organic growth. From handling technical SEO to crafting content strategies and executing digital PR campaigns, Derek has successfully navigated the evolving search landscape for companies across nearly every industry.

Ready to dive in? Derek answers SEO-specific topics like: 

1. How brands should adapt to the shift in search engines providing direct answers on the SERP, resulting in decreased website traffic.
2. Thoughts on the recent March 2024 core algorithm update targeting AI-generated content and how brands should adjust their content strategies accordingly.
3. Effective methods or metrics for measuring ROI in organic efforts.
4. Predictions about the future of SEO for brands and tips on how they should prepare for potential changes or advancements in the SEO landscape. 

We’ve transcribed Derek’s answers to these questions below. If you’d rather hear directly from him, check out this video:

With search engines providing direct answers on the SERP, resulting in decreased website traffic, how should brands adapt to this shift?

Focusing on long-tail keywords and bottom-of-the-funnel content is crucial. While AI excels at generic top-of-the-funnel content, diving into specific pain points of your audience is key. Conduct interviews, understand their needs, and tailor your content accordingly. This targeted approach, coupled with long-tail keywords, can help maintain traffic despite evolving search experiences.

Additionally, prioritize online customer service by building a comprehensive knowledge base. Utilize AI to ensure 24/7 support, providing quick and accurate responses to user queries. Leveraging thought leadership and user-generated content further strengthens your brand and content quality, contributing to sustained traffic levels amidst industry shifts.

What are your thoughts on the recent March 2024 core algorithm update that targets AI-generated content? How should brands adjust their content strategies accordingly?

So, Google’s been busy with updates lately. They rolled out a core algorithm update and a spam update. These changes are aimed at cracking down on mass-produced, low-quality content. Google’s keeping an eye on how often content is churned out. If you suddenly go from publishing once a week to a hundred times a week, it raises a red flag and could lead to penalties.

For most brands, sticking to best practices and focusing on top-notch content should keep you in Google’s good graces. Following Google’s guidelines is key here. And if you’re dabbling in AI-generated content, consider keeping it separate from your main domain, like on a micro-site. This way, if there are any penalties, they won’t drag down your main domain’s reputation. Google’s paying close attention to high-volume content publishers, so it’s wise to tread carefully.

When it comes to organic efforts, what methods or metrics do you use to measure ROI effectively?

There are several approaches you can take, depending on your business goals and key performance indicators. 

For most of our partners, we typically set up goals or integrate directly in Google Analytics and ensure tracking is configured properly, whether it’s in Google Analytics or Mixpanel. For example, if lead generation is a priority, we establish a benchmark for how many leads are generated from organic traffic, specifically non-branded organic traffic. This ensures that any activities on the branded side don’t skew the results. We assess the current performance in generating non-branded organic traffic, set projections and goals for the next six months, and outline the associated costs, such as fees for content creation or CRO efforts to enhance pages and landing pages for a successful strategy.

Then, we track progress over three to six months to see the impact. We measure how many more leads we’re generating and evaluate the value of those leads to the client’s bottom line. This helps us understand the effectiveness of our organic efforts and make any necessary adjustments. 

On a related note, though not directly about ROI, here’s our favorite SEO forecasting template for planning traffic growth. Clients love it, and it’s one of the most downloaded spreadsheets on the Tuff website. It’s a fantastic tool to help you see the potential impact of your SEO efforts on your traffic.

Looking ahead, what are your predictions regarding the future of SEO for brands? How should they prepare for potential changes or advancements in the SEO landscape?

Here are my thoughts on the future of SEO and AI:

I believe AI platforms are going to face a content shortage soon. OpenAI, for example, has already scraped a lot of available content and now has a deal with Reddit to access more. They’ll probably try to secure deals with other platforms like Facebook and YouTube as well.

As long as publishers keep producing content, AI platforms will eventually need to strike deals with them to access that content. This could involve partnerships with major publishers or even smaller-scale agreements with individual WordPress publishers. There might also be a model similar to YouTube’s monetization strategy, where publishers get rewarded for their content.

AI platforms know that without fresh content, their models can’t improve. 

So, I think we’ll see more AI-generated links to articles, which won’t be too different from our current search experience. High-quality content will still rank best, whether it’s on platforms like Gemini or OpenAI. They’ll pull content from publishers and link back to their pages, driving organic traffic.

To stay ahead, continue focusing on producing top-quality content. Also, think about user intent. When researching keywords, see what type of content ranks—YouTube videos, infographics, etc. Diversifying your content formats is key. Don’t just stick to text; create videos for YouTube, short clips for TikTok, and more. This will boost your brand presence and authority, making it harder for AI to replicate your content.

Nobody can predict exactly what will happen, but it’s going to be interesting to watch it unfold!

Ellen Jantsch

Ellen is the founder at Tuff and one of the team’s core growth marketers. She is a versatile marketer with expertise in multiple channels – from ppc to seo to email to others – responsible for the experiments and testing.  She is happiest when she’s on the ski hill or outside pointing her mountain bike downhill.

The post AMA on Generative AI, Organic Search, & Google I/O with Derek Coleman, Head of SEO at Tuff appeared first on Tuff.

Understanding the Migration Landscape

Navigating a site migration requires a nuanced understanding of its various forms and the unique challenges each presents. A site migration, broadly defined, can encompass anything from changing a site’s domain to fundamentally altering its platform or structure. Each type carries potential risks and impacts on SEO performance that need to be managed carefully.

Types of Site Migrations

1. Domain Migration: Changing a website’s domain name is often driven by business decisions such as rebranding or company mergers. The challenge lies in maintaining the site’s authority and trust, as the equity built up in the old domain needs to be effectively transferred to the new one without losing ranking power.
2. Platform Migration: This involves moving a website to a different CMS or e-commerce platform. It poses substantial risks as it can affect the underlying code and URL structure of a site. Such migrations require meticulous mapping to ensure that all redirects are properly established and that the new platform supports all SEO functionalities as before.
3. Site Structure Changes: Revising the architecture of a website can improve user experience and SEO but also poses risks if not done correctly. Changes must be logical, enhance the navigability of the site, and ensure that no existing content is orphaned in the process.

For Gympass, a website with more than 500,000 pages spread across more than a dozen subdomains – some of which are user-generated content (UGC) – this involved a brand and domain migration along with multiple CMS migrations.

Impact on SEO Performance

Site migrations often result in short-term losses in traffic and fluctuations in rankings. The primary reason for this is that search engines need time to process the new configuration and re-evaluate the site’s relevance and authority. Key to mitigating these effects is ensuring that all changes are correctly mapped to the new site, from URL structures to meta tags.

Migration Risk Factors

The concept of “migration risk” involves several critical components:

• Broken Links: If the new site structure leads to broken links, it not only degrades user experience but also impacts the flow of link equity throughout the site.
• Content Gaps: Failing to replicate content accurately on the new site can result in lost keywords and ranking opportunities. Ensuring content is matched or improved in the migration is vital.
• Indexation Issues: New content structures and URLs may confuse search engines, leading to delays in indexing or the indexing of outdated pages.

Google’s Algorithms and Migration

Google’s algorithms prioritize websites that provide a great user experience and accurate, valuable content. Migrations that enhance site speed, mobile responsiveness, and security (e.g., HTTPS) are generally rewarded. However, migrations must be managed to ensure Google can effectively crawl and index the new site. Informing Google through tools like Search Console about the changes can help expedite this process and minimize negative impacts.

Understanding these elements and preparing for them can vastly reduce the risks associated with site migrations, thereby maintaining SEO performance and even setting the stage for improved rankings post-migration.

The Gympass Journey: A Strategic Brand Migration

Our recent partnership with Gympass, a well-known player in the fitness and wellness industry, showcases the need for strategic SEO during a website migration. Gympass faced a common challenge: how to maintain and enhance their online presence during a domain migration. As they prepared to move their website to a new domain, they sought our expertise to ensure a smooth transition without sacrificing organic traffic.

Why Organic Traffic Matters

Organic traffic was one of the main sources of traffic for Gympass and reaching their target audience – fitness enthusiasts, gym-goers, and wellness seekers – hinged on maintaining visibility in search engine results. Whether users were searching for workout tips, gym memberships, or wellness programs, Gympass needed to be front and center.

Pre-Migration Planning

Successful site migration starts long before the actual shift in domains or platforms—it begins with meticulous pre-migration planning. For our collaboration with Gympass, a clear understanding of their current website’s performance was paramount, as was preparing for the potential SEO impacts of the migration. This section details the critical steps we took in the initial stages, setting the stage for a smooth transition.

Analyzing Current Website Performance and Traffic

The first step in any site migration plan involves a thorough analysis of the existing website’s performance. For Gympass, this meant diving deep into their analytics to understand traffic sources, user behavior, and key performance indicators such as page load times, bounce rates, and conversion rates. Utilizing tools like ScreamingFrog, Google Search Console, and SEMrush, we were able to gather a comprehensive picture of the site’s health and areas where improvements were needed.

This initial analysis serves multiple purposes:

• Identifying High-Value Pages: Ensuring that pages with the highest traffic and engagement are prioritized during the migration to preserve their SEO value.
• Benchmarking: Establishing performance benchmarks helps in measuring the impact of the migration and setting realistic recovery goals.

Predictive Modeling of Traffic Dips and Recovery Post-Migration

Understanding that site migrations often result in temporary traffic dips, we employed predictive modeling to forecast these changes for Gympass. This involved analyzing historical data from previous migrations, industry benchmarks, and the specific changes being implemented. Our model took into account various scenarios, from best-case to worst-case, enabling us to develop a robust contingency plan.

The predictive model helped in:

• Setting Expectations: Clear communication with Gympass about potential traffic impacts and recovery timelines.
• Resource Allocation: Planning the necessary resources for immediate post-migration actions to mitigate any negative effects.

Preparing a Comprehensive SEO Audit Checklist

A comprehensive SEO audit was crucial to ensure that no stone was left unturned. This audit included checks for:

• Technical SEO: Ensuring that the website’s architecture was conducive to search engine crawling and indexing. This covered aspects like URL structure, the use of canonical tags, redirects, and the implementation of XML sitemaps.
• On-Page SEO: Analyzing content relevance, keyword optimization, and meta tags to ensure that all pages were optimized for maximum visibility.
• Off-Page SEO: Reviewing the site’s backlink profile to safeguard against losing valuable backlinks during the transition.

The SEO audit checklist served as a roadmap, guiding every step of the migration process to ensure that SEO best practices were adhered to, thereby minimizing risks and setting the stage for a successful transition. With these preparations in place, Gympass was not just ready for a domain change but was positioned for success in its aftermath, leveraging enhanced site performance and improved SEO strategies.

The Audit Spreadsheet: A Behind-the-Scenes Look

We’re sharing the very spreadsheet we used to run the technical SEO audit – a comprehensive spreadsheet that allowed us to build a map of all website URLs, identify issues, and develop mitigation strategies. 

Spreadsheet

Running the Numbers: Modeling Scenarios

Our analysis focused on Gympass’s three key international markets: Brazil, Mexico, and the United States. We dissected the percentage of organic traffic attributed to branded versus non-branded search terms and found that the overwhelming majority of organic traffic originated from branded search queries. Since the brand name would be changing, we factored this into our organic traffic predictions.

Armed with this insight, we rolled up our sleeves and dove into the data. By modeling potential scenarios based on the expected dip in traffic during the migration, we could anticipate the impact on Gympass’s online presence and how to best prepare. 

Behind the Scenes: Audits, Redirects, and Best Practices

Our tactical approach involved:

• Auditing Subdomains and Main Domain: We audited all 13 subdomains and the main domain. Our goal? Identify pages with high organic traffic and uncover any technical SEO issues.
• Redirect Maps: We meticulously crafted redirect maps for every subdomain and the main domain. Ensuring smooth transitions from source URLs to final destinations was paramount.
• Loop-Free Redirects: No tangled webs here! We identified redirect loops and chains and built the redirect maps from the source URL to the final URL, ensuring users seamlessly reached their desired content.
• CMS-Specific Best Practices: Each subdomain had its unique content management system (CMS) – HubSpot, WordPress, Storyblok, Unbounce, etc.,. We tailored migration guidelines to suit each platform.
• Robots.txt and XML Sitemap: A new Robots.txt file and an updated XML sitemap were essential for search engine crawlers.
• Technical Redirects: We followed best practices – server-side redirects, testing with 302, and then making them permanent 301 redirects.
• Collaboration with Developers: Our close partnership with Gympass’s development team ensured flawless execution.

Key Takeaways and Best Practices

From our extensive work with Gympass, valuable insights emerged that not only refined our approach to SEO but also provided us with a blueprint for future migration projects. Understanding the nuances of each step, from planning through execution and beyond, is crucial for maintaining the SEO value and ensuring the digital growth of any business.

Key Learnings from the Gympass Case Study

The Gympass migration underscored several critical elements:

• Thorough Preparation: Meticulous planning and testing helped anticipate potential issues, and minimizing disruptions in user experience and search rankings.
• Communication: Keeping all stakeholders informed at every phase ensured that any unforeseen challenges were swiftly addressed without significant delays.
• Flexibility: Adaptability in response to real-time data and feedback was essential for optimizing the migration process and outcomes.

Essential Considerations for Site Migration

Regardless of the industry or business goals, certain considerations remain paramount during any site migration:

• Risk Management: Identifying and managing risks proactively can significantly mitigate potential negative impacts on SEO.
• User Experience: Ensuring that the site remains user-friendly post-migration is vital for retaining and growing traffic.
• SEO Continuity: Maintaining SEO performance requires careful handling of all site elements that impact search visibility.

Actionable Best Practices

For companies planning a site migration, adhering to the following best practices is essential:

1. Conduct a Comprehensive Technical SEO Audit Before Migration: Assess your current SEO landscape to identify strengths and weaknesses. This audit should guide the migration strategy to avoid losing any SEO equity.
2. Develop a Detailed Content Migration Plan: Ensure all valuable content is accurately migrated to the new site. This plan should prevent any loss of content that could affect your site’s information hierarchy and keyword rankings.
3. Implement Server-Side 301 Redirects for All Old URLs: This is crucial for transferring the existing SEO value to the new URLs and for providing a seamless user experience by redirecting visitors to the appropriate content on the new site.
4. Update Your Sitemap and Resubmit It to Search Engines: Quickly updating and resubmitting the sitemap helps search engines discover and index the new structure more efficiently.
5. Monitor Performance Closely Post-Migration: Use tools like Google Analytics and Search Console to monitor the site’s performance. Quick identification and resolution of issues like traffic drops or page errors can prevent long-term negative impacts.

The Ongoing Importance of SEO After a Site Migration

Post-migration, continuous SEO efforts are necessary to solidify and enhance the site’s position in search rankings. Regular content optimization, proactive link building, and ongoing technical checks ensure the site remains competitive and relevant. This ongoing commitment to SEO not only helps in recovering from any short-term losses during migration but also in capitalizing on new opportunities for growth and visibility.

By integrating these insights and best practices into your migration strategy, your business can navigate the complexities of site migration while preserving and enhancing its online presence.

Ready to Elevate Your SEO Strategy?

At Tuff, we understand that the landscape of digital marketing is continuously changing. With increasing advertising costs, it’s more crucial than ever to invest in sustainable SEO practices that not only preserve but enhance your digital footprint. Whether you’re contemplating a site migration or looking to tweak your SEO strategy to align with the latest Google updates, our team is equipped with the expertise and experience to guide you through.

We’re eager to help you uncover the full potential of your website and ensure that your SEO strategy is robust, responsive, and results-oriented. If you’re considering any technical changes or simply want to learn more about how recent Google updates might impact your site, don’t hesitate to reach out.

Derek Coleman

Derek is a digital marketer based in Boston, Massachusetts with almost a decade of hands-on SEO experience. He finds it meaningful, challenging, and exciting to develop, test, and implement new SEO strategies. When he’s not auditing websites and optimizing content he’s usually backpacking and exploring new cultures.

The post Minimizing Risk in a Site Migration: A Data-Driven Approach to Sustainable Growth appeared first on Tuff.

Understanding the avenues users enter your site through is invaluable. Maybe social channels drive quality traffic to the site. For well-known brands, direct traffic may be the main driver. A large percentage of most businesses however are fueled by search terms targeted via organic or paid channels. Both of these channels play an incredibly important role in attracting users, but not just any users – quality ones. 

High-intent audiences are more likely to take the actions you want them to take on your site. Both PPC and SEO offer ways to attract these ideal users.

But how do we bring these efforts together to formulate efficient, actionable insights? What things can a brand do to capture as much existing demand as possible? Are there ways for your business to create demand? Can we increase efficiencies and drive more conversions in tandem?

We set out to answer all of these questions to give a look into how our team and growth marketing agency thinks about Keyword Research through the lens of PPC Management and SEO. They can sometimes be seen as two different worlds, but when you combine forces, powerful things start to happen.  

Dominating All Stages of the Funnel with Paid Keyword Targeting

Let’s start by taking a look at Paid Keyword Research, the bulk of which relates to Google Ads specifically. Every partner is in a different stage of their business. Some are more established, looking to scale Paid Search efforts with new keyword targets. Some are brand new and are not even sure what kind of volume is available for a PPC channel. Many, though, are somewhere in between. At the crossroads of maximizing existing volume & creating new demand. 

Capture Existing Search Volume within Your Growth Strategy

What demand is already out there that you can capitalize on? Is Paid Search already running with any success, and if so, can you expand on the current high value keywords? Answering these questions is the first step in Tuff’s research, regardless of the industry. Although there are many tools available, we mainly use two for this step of research; Google Keyword Planner and SEMrush. Both of these give us a holistic view on volume as well as deeper looks into the industry at large. 

First let’s take a look at the current Google account, if there is one for our partner. We set out to identify what we call High Value Keywords that exist in the account already. These keywords, as the name suggests, are the targets that are working best for the partner. Maybe they have the most efficient CPA. Or an incredibly high Conversion Rate. No matter the KPI, the most important metric to look for in these High Value Keywords is Impression Share. If Impression Share is below 70-80%, there is room to scale immediately. This can be done by simply allocating additional budget, or focusing on making optimization changes that affect Quality Score. The goal is to maximize the success of these keywords. Find the top performers and become the industry leader for all users searching those out. Capture existing demand. 

After we see the areas of what is working already, we go to the true depths of Keyword Research, and this is where Keyword Planner comes in. Below is an example of how it works. We provide a few keywords relevant to the partner, in this example we provided a few phrases surrounding financial advice. The key is to start with high intent keywords. These give the best indication into how much demand is available at this very moment. Evaluating performance at this stage of the funnel is based on revenue and last click conversions. 

Google then spits out hundreds of keyword ideas that are related to what we are looking for. We can get a gauge on monthly volume immediately, as well as an idea of how competitive these keywords may be. Much of our time is spent in this stage. Sourcing the right keywords to start bidding on takes some time. Not every keyword available is going to be relevant. Again, our focus at this stage is to maximize the use of high intent keywords. This is where Paid Search excels the most.

The highlight of Google Keyword Planner is its forecasting ability. Once you choose the keywords that you would like to target, you have the ability to see a general forecast based on a certain daily budget. This helps paint a picture of the existing demand volume available, but more importantly, how much it may cost. Tuff uses a report like this as an immediate jumping off point with a partner. “If we spend x amount on these keywords, this is the performance we can expect.”

Perform Keyword Research for the Competitive Landscape

An invaluable part of the keyword research process, that has implications across all Paid and Owned Media, is Competitor Keyword Research. What are the top competitors in your industry spending money on? Where is their focus and how can you tailor your growth marketing strategy to capitalize on that? SEMrush is our go to for this lift.

We could write multiple posts about the capabilities of SEMrush, but for right now we are going to focus on the Advertising Research tab under Domain Analytics. Here we can input any URL to see information regarding spend on Paid Search platforms. We start with totals. The monthly estimate for spend, traffic from that spend, and then available volume associated with the keywords that are being targeted. 

Digging deeper, we can then export the full list of keywords that are being targeted. This is where the true value comes in. Not only are we able to see what the competition is bidding on, we can even take a look at the ad copy they are using. This data can be utilized across all growth marketing aspects. PPC, SEO, Social, CRO, and Creative. If you can better understand the competition, you can better understand how to beat them. 

For businesses that don’t exactly know who their competitors are, we can use SEMrush to find them. Below is a list of competitors we found for Amazon. This is a high level glimpse into the industry. All of this information surrounding competitors is taken into account when developing a Growth Strategy across all channels. 

Create Demand With Brand Strategy and Broad Keyword Targeting 

The third and final pillar of Paid Keyword Research is demand creation. We have now maxed out the existing demand for high-intent terms, let’s expand. The main thing to keep in mind with this stage of strategy is that this is a long-term investment. Users are not going to convert immediately through keywords that fall into this Top of Funnel bucket. This would fall under Brand Awareness instead of Performance marketing. 

These are a few steps to how we go about a demand creation strategy for Paid and Organic keyword targets alike:

1. Identify low intent and long tail keywords. Look for terms that are easy to rank for organically and terms that have low CPC’s on Paid channels. Some tactics you can utilize on Google Ads are Dynamic Search Ads and Broad Match Keywords. 
2. Develop a content strategy focusing on these keyword targets. Content built around keywords that have low competition, but are still relevant, are an easy way to improve Organic performance. 
3. Allocate a low percentage of overall Paid budget to targeting broad and long tail keywords. These are to improve Brand Awareness and are not to be evaluated on last click conversion metrics. Instead, impressions, CPCs, and volume is what to monitor. Tip: Set a Max CPC on Google Ads to better control costs. We aim to have CPCs around 10% of high-intent keywords. 

Tactics like this have long lasting effects across all channels. Performance and Brand tactics work hand in hand this way,  pushing users in the right direction. A full-funnel approach takes time, but the upsides are certainly worth the effort.  

A Full-Funnel Approach to SEO Keyword Research

Both paid and organic search aim to drive traffic and conversions using keywords. But the nature of the two channels influences the best way to capture demand. Organic search offers the ability to target users at multiple stages of the buyer journey with a mix of informative and commercial-focused content. 

Here’s how we approach SEO keyword research for a holistic strategy that supports PPC efforts. 

Examine Current Keyword Rankings

To lay the groundwork for a solid strategy, It’s important to understand where we’re starting from an organic search perspective. To do so, we’ll take a look at current keywords rankings to:

• Learn what keywords are driving traffic to the site 
• Find keywords that are being incorrectly targeted (misaligned search intent)
• Uncover low-hanging fruit keywords on pages 2 and 3 

Often, a brand has some visibility for keywords around a core service but is not maximizing traffic and conversion potential. Common mistakes include not covering the topic in-depth, creating content that does not align with searcher intent, and creating pages that don’t target specific, high-value keywords. 

At this stage, we can pull a list of top-performing non-branded keywords to identify areas to capitalize on in our strategy. For example, say a financial advisory company is ranking well for the term wealth management on a service page. 

A top spot on page one is great. But if the brand is not targeting terms higher up in the funnel, they are missing out on the higher traffic volume and increased brand awareness that comes with speaking to people earlier on in the journey. Using the questions filter in a keyword research tool, we can filter to find common queries around wealth management. 

Questions around what wealth management is and what a wealth manager does would make for informative top of funnel content in our organic strategy. These keywords don’t have immediate commercial intent so we won’t dedicate a large amount of the PPC budget towards them. 

While paid is great for hyper-targeting ready-to-buy users, organic offers the perfect opportunity to target those earlier in the journey, getting your brand in front of users early on so they are familiar with it when they reach the decision phase. This way, you don’t spend a large portion of the PPC budget on terms that are not immediately profitable.

Conduct Competitor Analysis

No SEO strategy is complete without competitor analysis. Here, we’ll take a look at what pages and keywords are performing well for competitors. 

The goal of a holistic SEO strategy is to drive relevant, high-value traffic to a site. So we need to look at multiple metrics to determine which competitor keywords are worth going after. These include search volume, difficulty, top 10 ranking pages for the term, and user intent. 

There are multiple components to this portion of SEO keyword research One helpful step is to perform a keyword gap analysis. This essentially uncovers relevant keywords that: 

1. Your competitors are ranking for and you are not

or

2. Your competitors are outranking you for 

In our financial company example, the firm has no rankings for “term deposit calculator” which generates almost 2000 searches a month while the competitor firm is in position 1.  

In instances like this, creating new content to fill in this gap is the way to go. Yes, new content will take a while to rank organically. But the upfront effort results in ranking for a keyword that is proven to drive relevant traffic to businesses like yours. This approach allows you to siphon off traffic from competitors. 

In other cases, competitors are outranking a company  for high-value keywords. Take for example, the keyword “smsf administration”. The brand is in position 7 on the SERP spot while its competitor is in position 1, meaning it’s garnering the lion’s share of clicks and impressions. Since this topic is core to the services offered, it makes sense to target it in an organic strategy. 

In this instance, the best strategy is to optimize existing content to better match search intent and compete with top-ranking pages. Fortunately, content optimizations typically see faster movement in rankings than new content. 

This step also offers a chance to collaborate with the PPC team. Say, for example, that the PPC team has been A/B testing ad copy and CTAs for the service that the SEO team is updating a page around. Use this data when creating content on the new page. Leveraging test result data  creates cohesive messaging for a better user experience across multiple touch points.

Target Keywords at Multiple Stages of the Buyer Journey

A well-rounded organic strategy should include a mix of informational keywords and high-intent ones to satisfy queries at multiple stages of the buyer journey. 

Using Organic Search to Build Awareness

What are people searching really early on in the journey? While these users won’t convert on the spot, the search is related to the offering so getting in front of them before they are in the decision mindset is beneficial. Generating awareness with those who are high in the funnel is a smart long-term play. This portion of the strategy focuses on driving traffic and building brand authority rather than generating conversions. 

Armed with questions from competitor research, internal customer information, and our keyword research tools, we can map the questions we find to different stages of the user journey.

The PPC Play: Since these keywords won’t lead to immediate conversions, it doesn’t make sense to spend a lot of paid budget on them. But, building brand awareness is still important. Delegate a small portion of your budget to this and mark it as a visibility play. Evaluate success based on Impressions, CPCs, and traffic to your site. 

Using Organic Search to Drive Conversions

A strong organic strategy involves targeting keywords with high purchase intent. These “money keywords” are highly relevant to your offerings and are regularly searched by your target audience. Unsurprisingly, these keywords are typically quite difficult to rank for organically. In our financial advisory firm example, these keywords include: 

• Wealth management services
• Financial advice in [city]
• Portfolio specialist

Now, difficult does not mean impossible. By laying the groundwork with content targeting topics higher in the funnel, your site gains authority and increases its chances of ranking for these high-intent keywords. But depending on your domain authority, ranking for high-competition keywords can be an uphill battle. 

This stage is another great opportunity for SEO and PPC to work in lockstep. Look at top converting terms for paid campaigns and aim to rank in the top 3 spots for these organically. Because these terms are difficult, whittle it down to a list of 10 or so high-value keywords to focus these efforts on. 

The PPC Play: Use data from campaigns to identify top converting keywords. Allocate spend to these terms, working in tandem with organic to ensure related content features aligned messaging for a seamless user experience. With both SEO and PPC efforts focused on these high-intent terms, you can maximize brand presence on the SERP. 

Combining SEO and PPC to Create a Synergistic Strategy

Now that we’ve covered the keyword research phase, let’s look at how we combine paid and organic efforts. Cross Team Functionality is the goal for Keyword Research and it is important to continue evaluating progress and performance after the initial stages. 

Here are a few specific areas where Tuff uses all the information above to get the most out of our Growth Marketing Strategy.

1. Use Data from Both Channels to Inform Strategy 

Good news. Utilizing paid and organic search in your marketing mix means you’ll have double the data to pull insights from.

On the organic side, top-performing pages can provide insights into the terms and pain points that most resonate with users. A high organic ranking signals that content is matching search intent and delivering value. Keywords with high organic performance should be added to paid campaigns and tested to see which lead to the highest conversions. This way, we double down on what’s working. 

This principle works in reverse as well. On the paid side, looking at Search Term reports in Google Ads is one way to zoom in on what terms are converting well. Once we’ve uncovered key terms that are driving revenue, we can prioritize these in our organic strategy. This may include optimizing existing content to include the terms or creating new content around these terms that align with search intent.

By cross-analyzing data and using this to inform keyword strategies, a brand can cover the SERP for terms that matter most to its bottom line. 

2. Leverage PPC & SEO to Dominate the SERP

Another reason SEO and PPC are better together? They allow a brand to maximize visibility in search results. 

Paid ads will always be placed above organic results, making them the first thing users see. So investing in paid can secure your brand a spot of prime real estate on the SERP. However, organic content brings an element of authority as users tend to trust organic over paid ads. To get the best results for important keywords, combine both strategies so you’re top of mind for searchers. 

3. Target Expensive Terms with SEO 

Certain keywords come with high CPCs that get more expensive over time. In these situations, it’s helpful to target these terms organically as part of an SEO content strategy. Targeting these high-value keywords in your organic search strategy is a smart long-term play. The time it takes to rank will depend on factors including your site’s domain authority and the top 10 ranking pages. 

4. Boost Organic Efforts with PPC Retargeting 

Many users will find your brand through organic search, but what happens when they leave without taking action? Paid offers the chance to retarget specific users so that organic efforts are bolstered. Because these users have demonstrated an initial interest in the brand, they are farther in the pipeline, making them a better bet for PPC spend. 

SEO & PPC: A Match Made in Marketing Heaven

Sherlock and Watson. Movies and popcorn. Some things just work better together. When it comes to maximizing your marketing ROI, combining PPC and SEO are a dynamic duo on that list. These marketing channels complement one another beautifully when looking at any stage of the marketing funnel. With more powerful insights into user behavior, you can drive conversions and increase efficiency. 

Chris Alarcon

Chris is a PPC Strategist based in Nashville, Tennessee. When he’s not scaling Google Ads & YouTube campaigns, he enjoys longboarding, tinkering with automation tools, and a little bit of gaming.

The post SEO & PPC Powerhouse: Capturing Demand at Every Stage of the Funnel appeared first on Tuff.

If your videos are not ranking at the top of search results, you’re likely missing a few key elements in your Youtube SEO strategy. 

We know the Youtube algorithm aims to match users with the most relevant content. So how can you work with the algorithm to get your videos pushed to the top of the search results? 

That’s exactly what we’ll cover in this detailed Youtube SEO checklist.  Let’s get started!

What is Youtube SEO Exactly? 

Much like traditional search engine optimization, Youtube SEO involves a set of practices aimed at helping your content appear high in the search results. By optimizing your title tag, video description, thumbnail and other key elements (more on that below), you can attract the right viewers to your channel. 

How Does Youtube SEO Work?

If you want to rank videos on Youtube, then there’s one thing you need to understand. Yes, you guessed it. It’s The Youtube algorithm (aka the system that determines what videos appear for each user). Simply put, Youtube analyzes multiple factors from user behavior to video data to determine what videos to present to users.

Getting your videos on the results page or on the sweet real estate that is the youtube homepage requires optimizing them. But what exactly do you optimize for?  Find out below!

Optimize for Youtube Ranking Factors 

So, what is important for YouTube SEO? Well, there are multiple factors at play in the complex Youtube algorithm. 

But at the heart of the Youtube algorithm is a simple goal: Youtube aims to present each user with the videos that align with their interests AND get them to keep watching. To do this, the video platform uses multiple data points. Some of these, like what a user has watched in the past, are out of your control. 

However, the seven elements listed below are ones you do have control over. Let’s dive into these important Youtube ranking factors together!  

Titles, Tags and Descriptions

Your video title, description and tags help Youtube determine what the video is about and who to serve it to. Remember, the algorithm is working to match users with videos that are most relevant to them so filling in these details is essential. This is especially important when you first publish a video since YouTube has no data on watch time, click through rate, like to dislike ratio and other metrics. We’ll dive into some juicy title, description and tag SEO tips in the next section. 

TLDR: Youtube uses title and descriptions to determine who to serve your videos to. Keep them interesting and accurate!

Thumbnails

Think of the Youtube results page as a row of stores on a busy street. Each thumbnail is like the storefront window. Based on a quick glance, someone will determine whether to enter the store (click on your video) or walk into another store with a shinier, more enticing display (click on a competing video) . 

TLDR: Your thumbnail needs to stand out to get those clicks!

CTR (Click-Through Rate)

Speaking of clicks, let’s talk CTR. Out of all the people seeing your video in the search results, how many are clicking on it? This percentage is known as your click-through rate. Wondering how your CTR compares to other channels? Youtube shared that half of all channels and videos have an impressions CTR ranging between 2% and 10%. 

TLDR: The more people that click through to your video, the better. So make yours irresistibly clickable.

User Engagement

We’ve all heard our favorite Youtubers cheerfully reminding us to “like, comment and subscribe.” This is because user engagement is a key metric on any Youtube SEO checklist. The more comments, shares and likes your video gets, the higher your engagement rates will be. Plus, this data can help guide future video creation. 

TLDR: Don’t just tell people to share and comment. Make videos that people can’t help but engage with. 

Audience Retention

Once a user clicks on your video, what portion of it do they watch? This percentage is your audience retention rate. It’s no secret that videos with high audience retention rates tend to get prioritized in search results. In fact, Youtube admitted to “adjusting the ranking of videos in YouTube search to reward engaging videos that keep viewers watching”. 

From opening with an interesting hook to adding on-screen graphics, there are lots of ways to boost audience retention. The Youtube SEO checklist below will walk you through data-backed retention strategies.

TLDR: Hold audience interest from beginning to end to get on the Youtube algorithm’s good side. 

Watch Time

Watch time is the total amount of time users have spent watching your video since it went live. Videos with lots of accumulated watch time are more likely to be pushed high in search rankings. Holding viewers’ interest is a key component of increasing your watch time. 

TLDR: Gaining more collective eyes on a video can boost your content in rankings.

Session Time 

Remember that Youtube wants users to stay on the platform for as long as possible. Session time is the amount of time users stay on the platform in one visit. After watching your video, do they exit Youtube? Or do they stay on the platform and watch more videos?  Because Youtube generates revenue via ads, it prefers the latter. Using your current video to encourage viewers to watch others on your channel is a great way to boost session time and watch time for your channel. 

TLDR: After getting people to watch, keep them engaged! It’s a win for you and Youtube.

Youtube SEO Checklist: Before You Shoot Your Video

We’ve covered how Youtube SEO works and the key metrics in Youtube’s search and discovery algorithm. Now, here’s what to do for high ranking videos:

Perform Youtube Keyword Research 

Starting with keyword research is essential for any SEO strategy.  After all, there’s no point in optimizing a video that covers a topic no one is searching for. So how do you uncover an in demand topic in your niche?

• Use Youtube’s auto suggest feature. To learn what people are actually searching for on youtube, go straight to the source. Once you know your main idea, Youtube can help you narrow it down. 

For example, “vegan recipes” is a broad and competitive keyword. But typing the keyword into Youtube’s search bar with the word “for” provides more specific topic ideas. 

• Try Google Trends. To use it, navigate to trends.google.com and type in a topic. Then, hit enter and set the search filter to Youtube search mode. Once here, you can see the relative popularity of the term over time and analyze interest by region. 

Google Trends will even reveal related topics and queries. Sticking with our vegan recipe idea, we can see that vegan casserole, smoothie and low calorie recipes are in demand. 

• Leverage Youtube Keyword Research Tools. We’re big fans of keyword research here at Tuff. And we get by with a little help from our friends, like Tube buddy or Vid IQ. These YouTube SEO tools can help inform your video content strategy. Ahrefs also offers a Youtube search function in its Keyword Explorer tool. 

The tool filters in clickstream data to offer thousands of keyword ideas that you can filter by search volume, average clicks and phrase match. Say I notice that vegan cheese content is getting popular. I can input “vegan recipes” and filter results to include the word cheese. Ahrefs will then display related terms and their respective search volumes. 

You’ve done the work of uncovering a target keyword. Now, weave it into the title, description and content of your video. Read on to learn how to do this with maximum impact!

Create a Captivating Video Intro

Your video intro is a critical part of your Youtube SEO strategy. Here’s why: It’s common for users to click out of a video within the first 30 seconds of watching (yes, we were shocked too). This leads to low audience retention scores and, you guessed it, lower visibility in search results. To enhance your intro:

• Include your hook and value proposition early in the video 
• Tease the best part of the video at  the start 
• Experiment with different intro styles to learn what your audience prefers

In short, you need to convince your audience to continue watching your video once they click on it. 

Script Your Video Body  

Remember our keyword research from step one? This target keyword needs to be in your video. Yes, saying the keyword and related phrases is helpful for Youtube SEO. *Gasp* So Youtube SEO is about more than just placing the keyword in the title? Yup. That’s because Youtube uses speech-recognition technology to learn what your video is about and create closed captions for your viewers.

For a streamlined video that gives the viewer what they came for, write a script before you hit record. This allows you to add structure, remove unneeded information and ensure you deliver on the title.

End with an Optimized Video Outro 

Viewers tend to click away when they know the video is coming to an end. To avoid dips towards, carefully plan your outros. 

First, don’t abruptly end the video. Instead, have a bridge that naturally leads users into the next one. For example, at the end of a vegan cheesecake recipe video, urge viewers to watch your 10 best tools for vegan baking video. 

Next, leverage the end screen. This final card is a great place to promote other videos. Youtube allows you to customize your end screen  so take advantage of this area. A great end screen includes calls to action and links to relevant videos. This is important for increasing session times. 

Youtube SEO Checklist: Before Publishing The Video 

You’ve scripted, filmed and edited. Now it’s time to publish! Use the checklist below to optimize your Youtube video before it’s live.  

Create an Intriguing Video Title 

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of your video title. Youtube uses video titles as a ranking factor. Users decide whether to click on a video based on the title. Here’s how to optimize yours: 

• Include the target keyword in the title, preferably at the start
• Avoid confusing language or industry jargon that users may not know
• Ensure the title aligns with the video content (no clickbait)
• Look at titles of top performing videos and create similar ones
• Add interest to your titles power words, numbers and related keywords

Let’s compare two titles for the term “cook a vegan cake”.

This title is straightforward and aligns with user intent. But it’s not very interesting.

This title incorporates multiple related keywords that someone searching for a vegan cake may look up. A superlative like Best and a fun emoji make this title enticing to the user. 

Craft an Optimized Description 

The description box lets Youtube understand what the video is about so the algorithm can serve it to the correct users. It’s also a great place to encourage users to engage with you and your content. For a strong description: 

• Create a summary on what the video is about, including your focus keyword
• Link to any resources you mention in the video
• Include partial matches and variations of the focus keyword 
• Add timecodes  that covers the structure of the videos to improve video SEO

While the start of each description should be unique, you can end each description with a templatized blurb about your channel and links to your social media. 

Create a Captivating Thumbnail 

Remember our storefront analogy from earlier? Your thumbnail is the visual representation of your video that users can either click on (yay 🥳)  or scroll past (sigh) as they look at video options. A great thumbnail should:

• Visually complement your title
• Stand out from other top videos on the results page
• Be image focused rather than word-focused 

Let’s compare two thumbnails for the term “vegan dessert recipe”. 

This thumbnail does display the focal point of the video but it lacks any messaging around why a user should click. There are no overlays, fun fonts, or contrasting colors to add interest.

This thumbnail contains bolded words that emphasize what the user will get when they click into the video. In addition to the dessert, the human element of the men baking adds interest.

Add closed captions 

Closed captions might not spring to mind when you think of video optimization. But this feature can increase engagement among viewers, especially on mobile. Plus, having high-quality closed captions expands reach among non native speakers and those who are hard of hearing.

Youtube automatically generates captions for your videos. But these Auto Speech Recognition (ASR) captions are not always accurate. To produce the best captions, you can edit the captions or use a captioning tool. 

Post Publishing: Youtube SEO Tips 

Oh, you thought our SEO strategy was complete? Creating quality video content is essential. But there’s more you can do to give your videos a boost in Youtube search results. 

Promote Your Video

After your video goes live, it’s time for a little good old fashioned promotion. To encourage current subscribers to watch, create a community post on Youtube highlighting the new video. Repeat the process on your other social media platforms. Be sure to include an interesting angle to avoid coming off as too self-promotional. 

In this community post, Vegan focused Youtube channel Pick Up Limes promotes a new video and lets users know the value they will receive.

Use Youtube Analytics for Insights

Youtube Analytics is a treasure trove of data that you can leverage to accelerate your channel growth. In the tool, you can dive into your audience demographics to tailor your content to better serve them. You’ll also be able to analyze the key moments for audience retention to know when people are interested and when they click out of your videos.

As you can tell, there are a lot of moving parts at play when it comes to Youtube SEO. The Tuff team has the tools expertise you need to create and execute a holistic SEO strategy that engages the right users to grow your business.

The post Youtube SEO Checklist to Skyrocket Your Visibility appeared first on Tuff.

Finding the perfect SEO report template is a challenge. You need to provide enough insights so that anyone looking at the data can understand what the numbers mean. 

However, you don’t want to overload your reports with data without providing context. On top of that, your report should reflect your brand, track your SEO progress accurately, and save you time.

At Tuff, we use several tools to track the progress of our SEO efforts, including Google Analytics and Search Console. Then, for some partners, we use Google Data Studio to bring it all together into a dashboard that updates in real-time and includes visuals like charts and graphs. 

In this article, we’ll go over how to use Data Studio to create professional SEO reports. We’ve also provided this free SEO report template and we’ll show you how to customize it with your own site’s data. 

What is an SEO report? 

An SEO report tracks your SEO metrics or key performance indicators (KPIs) and provides an overview of the impact of your organic efforts. 

Which SEO metrics should you track in your report? 

The SEO metrics you track may vary slightly depending on your brand’s goals and KPIs. But, for the most part, SEO experts track similar metrics to indicate success. 

At a minimum, you should be tracking organic: 

• Monthly traffic
• Leads 
• Revenue
• Conversions and CVR 
• Pages per session
• Bounce rate 
• Keyword movement
• Top performing pages

At Tuff, we use an SEO metrics spreadsheet similar to this one to track our performance each month. 

Although we also use dashboards, a spreadsheet forces us to manually go into Analytics and look at the data every few weeks. 

A dashboard helps you visualize your data in charts. Also, because it is connected to your data sources—whether that’s Google Analytics, Search Console, or another platform—it automatically updates in real time.

With a dashboard, you cut down your time spent pulling data manually. However, it shouldn’t be a set it and forget it solution. You should keep track of your data and check in on your campaigns regularly—at least once a week. 

What does an SEO report include? 

This SEO report dashboard includes organic: 

• Traffic sessions 
• Leads 
• Pages per session
• Session duration
• Bounce rate
• Keyword performance 

Because it is a Data Studio Dashboard, you can customize the data to fit your needs. For example, we created filters to view non-branded keyword traffic. 

What does a good SEO report look like? 

Usually, an SEO report will track metrics like your monthly organic traffic and conversions. However, because SEO is a long-term investment, you should also be able to view your progress over several months to a year. 

It should have a combination of quantity (organic traffic increases) and quality metrics (session duration, bounce rate, leads, and conversions). 

I also recommend including a summary page that includes the most important insights that you pulled from the data. 

For example, if your organic traffic tripled in the last month, you should identify why. It could be that you refreshed several pages and they now rank at the top of the search results. However, it could also be that your site got hit with bot traffic. 

Providing that high-level insight distinguishes experts from everyone else. It also provides you with learnings about your strategy, so you can identify what is working and eliminate what isn’t. If you see that one page gets a lot of traffic and has high session duration and organic conversions, maybe there is something on that page you can apply to others across your site. 

How to Use the SEO Report Template

You don’t need to be an expert in Data Studio to copy this SEO report template and use it. However, you will need access to Google Search Console and Analytics and basic to intermediate knowledge of how to use them. You should also have an understanding of what goals and segments you have set up in Analytics. 

First, go to the SEO Report template here, go to “File”, and click “Make a copy”. Alternatively, you can click the three dots in the corner and select “Make a copy” from the drop-down. 

A box like the one below will appear. You’ll need to be signed into the Google account with access to your analytics data. 

Go to “New Data Source” and choose where you want to pull data from—Analytics and Search Console—then hit “Copy Report”. 

You can also pull from other sources once you are inside the template by going to the Data tab on the right. Then, click on “Add Data” at the bottom. 

It will show a popup with options to connect from Google products or to build your own. With this, you can pull in data from social channels or SEO tools like Semrush. For SEO, you likely won’t need social, but Semrush may be useful. However, keep in mind that the more data you add, the more complicated it can get.

Our Dashboards often blend data sources from Analytics and Search Console. Blending is more advanced, so we’re not going to cover it for this template. 

Once you have your data sources, you can begin editing and customizing the SEO report template. 

Keep in mind that this example may look different. It is because we are using Google’s sample data rather than revealing website data. 

Before we dive into the report pages, you’ll need to know how to customize them with your site metrics and branding. 

How to Edit Charts 

To edit any of these, you simply click on them. A Chart tab will appear next to the Data tab. Underneath it, there are two options—Setup and Style. 

To configure the data that is used, you’ll choose “Setup”. To customize the look and appearance, for example, to change the bar chart colors, you’ll go to “Style”. 

Inside the “Setup” tab, you’ll need to know these configurations: 

1. Data Source – This is the data that appears in the chart you select. To update it, choose your Google Analytics as the data source. 
2. Dimension – We set this to show month and year. For reporting purposes, you’ll probably want to leave this as it is. 
3. Metric – This is the metric that appears in the bar chart, and in this case, it’s sessions. You can change this by going to the Metrics section and clicking “Add metric”. 
4. Default date range – You can customize the time frame that appears on the horizontal axis. It is preset for you with a yearly range, but you can adjust it with custom dates. 
5. Filter – This section is a must. You need to have a filter in your analytics that is organic search only. Otherwise, you’ll be pulling in all website traffic from all sources, not just organic. 

For the most part, you’ll leave the other settings as they are in the template. Once you know how to edit the charts and update them with your site data, it’s pretty simple. 

Cover Page 

You can customize the cover page to match your branding by either inserting an image or editing it inside Data Studio. If you do the latter, click on the elements and background to edit. You can change the color of the background, adjust the font, and add your logo. 

Also, you can go to “Insert” and “New Page” if you want to add a summary page or add other pages to this template. 

Organic Traffic Overview

The second page—organic traffic overview—is one of the most important in the report. It includes the key metrics in cards at the top.

• Sessions
• Users
• New users
• Pages per session
• Average session duration
• Bounce rate

It also automatically updates with the percent increase or decrease from the previous reporting period. 

With this template, you can choose to filter by country and date as well with the boxes at the top. 

In the middle of the page is a bar chart that shows organic sessions for each month. Remember that we are using sample data, so it will show “No Data” until you update the template with your data sources. 

When you pull your site’s actual data, it should update to include your organic traffic for each month. You can also choose to change the metric that appears in the bar chart from Sessions to New Users or another metric by updating that in the “Setup” tab. 

Organic Leads 

On this page, you can track how many leads you’ve gotten from your organic efforts. However, you need to have your goals set up in Google Analytics first. 

The chart on this page is blank in the report because it’s pulled from sample data. You have to update it by going to “Metrics” and choosing the goal you are measuring from the “Goal Conversions” list. 

Then, it will update with a bar chart measuring your leads. It should look like the below chart of example data. 

Top Performing Pages – Organic 

The first few pages pull data from Google Analytics, now we’ll be pulling from Google Search Console. 

Again, because this is pulling data from the Google sample set, it will look different from the report that you generate. 

Mainly, this one is using “Query”, but you’ll be using “Landing Page” instead. The sample data doesn’t include URLs or landing pages, so it is not there. 

For example, Tuff’s report looks like this: 

The table also includes:

• Impressions 
• Clicks 
• Click-through-rate (CTR)
• Average position
• Percent decrease or increase for each

Optionally, you can use the next page, which has the same metrics but also includes a heatmap and ranks the top pages by clicks, CTR, and impressions. 

Keyword Performance (MoM)

One of the most important metrics for tracking SEO progress is keyword movement. You need to know what keywords you are ranking for as well as your past and current position. 

In other words, you need to know where you started to see how far you’ve come. 

For example, let’s say you identify a target keyword and you’re currently ranking in position 12. You want to refresh that page to increase your ranking and get to page one, even better, in the top three results. 

As we know, the top position gets the most clicks. The number of clicks goes down as your position falls, so you get more site traffic when you are higher on the results page. Plus, you need to be on the first page to get any meaningful traffic these days. Only .63% of people go to the second page of Google.

But, you need to track your keyword rankings to know if the changes you make have an impact or not. This is where the Keyword Performance (MoM) page of the SEO report template comes in. It tracks your keyword rankings over time. 

You pull data from Google Search Console and use “Query” as the metric. Again, similar to the top-performing pages slide, you can view clicks, impressions, CTR, and average position. However, you are doing it by keyword rather than landing page. 

You can also track clicks and impressions month-over-month and filter by country and date.

This is helpful to monitor when you lose key positions too. When you see a drop, you can react faster to regain top positions and any traffic you lose in the process. 

Non-Branded Keyword Performance (MoM)

As you can guess, this slide tracks the same metrics as keyword performance. However, we’ve set up a filter to only track non-branded terms. 

SEO often focuses on increasing search visibility for non-branded terms—those keywords that do not include your brand name. Although, this varies. For example, if you are creating comparison content you might want to also track branded, which is why we have the option for both. An example of this is if you optimize for keywords that include [your brand name] + vs + [your competitor]. 

To set up a non-branded filter, you go to “Filter” in the “Setup” chart tab. Then, “Add a filter” that excludes your brand name. 

You can use this as a monthly SEO report template or as a dashboard. Since it is connected to the data sources you use, it will update automatically. 

Although using Data Studio for your SEO reports can increase efficiency, you should still set aside time to assess the data and pull insights and learnings. If you are working with an SEO agency, they should provide you with those high-level insights that help strengthen your SEO strategy and organic growth. 

The post Free SEO Report Template appeared first on Tuff.

When conducting technical SEO audits, one of the most common errors that I see on sites is duplicate content. It is also one of the most important issues to fix because it can hurt your chances of growing your site organically. 

Luckily, with a basic understanding of what duplicate content is, what it means for your site’s SEO, and how to identify and fix it, dealing with it will seem less daunting. 

Table of contents: 

• What is duplicate content in SEO? 
• Why is having duplicate content bad for SEO?
• How to spot duplicate content
• Examples 
• How to fix duplicate content

What is duplicate content in SEO? 

Duplicate content is when you have similar or the same content on different pages of your site. 

The definition of duplicate content might seem self-explanatory. However, in practice, the reason your site is flagged for duplicate content and the solution to fix it varies greatly. Therefore, it can be complex for someone that is not familiar with duplicate content or SEO. 

Why is having duplicate content bad for SEO? 

“Why does it matter if we have duplicate content?” I’ve heard variations of this question from several clients. Duplicate content negatively affects your SEO in four main ways.

• Site health
• Organic performance and rankings
• Crawling and indexing
• User experience

No matter what is causing the duplicate content issue on your site, the issue itself greatly impacts your health and performance because it confuses search engines. 

When you have similar or duplicate pages, Google doesn’t know which URL or version of a page to index. As a result, you could end up not ranking for anything or not appearing in the search results at all. Not to mention, you could be wasting your crawl budget on duplicate pages. 

Lastly, if you have multiple URLs that have similar or identical content it can also negatively impact your user experience. 

Is there a duplicate content penalty? 

You may hear the term “duplicate content penalty” thrown around. Google does not have an official duplicate content penalty. However, many sites experience ranking and health issues because of duplicate content. 

Site health scores also tend to increase—sometimes by as much as ten points or more—after fixing duplicate content SEO issues. I’ve seen sites that were struggling to rank for keywords or had wild fluctuations begin to steady and rank on the first page of search results. 

Duplicate content happens for a variety of reasons, and it’s not usually as simple as “there’s the same content on different pages”. Most of the time, it requires technical SEO fixes. 

The first step to fixing duplicate content is to identify where it is on your site and why it’s happening. 

How to spot duplicate content 

To identify duplicate content, you can use an SEO auditing tool like Semrush or Ahrefs. These are user-friendly tools that will crawl your entire website and generate a report on the technical SEO issues that it finds. 

Typically, if you have duplicate content SEO issues, a crawl report will look similar to the one below. 

Even though it’s called duplicate content, title tags and meta descriptions also fall under that umbrella. For example, if I were fixing the site from the above audit, I wouldn’t consider duplicate content issues resolved until all instances—including title tags and meta descriptions—are gone. 

Auditing tools can help you identify SEO errors, but they have limitations. They may tell you where duplicate content appears but you have to understand how to fix it, which requires technical SEO knowledge. 

In addition, if you are using Shopify, I’ve actually seen Semrush miss duplicate content issues in its audits. So, I advise either consulting a technical SEO agency or running a second crawl with another crawling tool like Screaming Frog, and comparing the results. 

4 common duplicate content examples 

Technical SEO issues vary from site to site. The duplicate content issues may be unique to your site, but they tend to fall into one of these categories. 

1. Ecommerce product pages 

A common example of duplicate content happens with ecommerce product pages, specifically when you have the same product but different sizes or colors. 

Let’s look at an example. If you go to the Allbirds site and click on the popular tree runner shoe, there are lots of color options and different sizes. 

If you choose the “Sol” edition and a size 9, the URL updates to the below. 

• https://www.allbirds.com/products/mens-tree-runners-sol?size=9

Technically, it could be flagged as duplicate, but it isn’t because they’ve set up a canonical tag. If you look at the image below, you’ll see this line of code below. 

•  <link rel=”canonical” href=”https://www.allbirds.com/products/mens-tree-runners”>

It’s a canonical tag, and it signals to Google that the “Sol” URL is a variation and identifies the original URL “mens-tree-runners” as the one to index. 

Canonical tags are one way to fix duplicate product pages, but it’s not the only solution.

2. Inconsistent URL structures 

If a site has recently gone through a migration or redesign, it is not uncommon to see inconsistent URL structures, specifically in the domain. However, they shouldn’t be there. The best practice is to keep your URL structures consistent across your site. 

For example, the Tuff website’s homepage (https://tuffgrowth.com/) uses https and a non-www in the URL. Every other page of the site follows the same structure. 

• Resources – https://tuffgrowth.com/growth-marketing-resources/
• Blog – https://tuffgrowth.com/blog/

You get the idea. If your site has varying URL structures it will also result in duplicate content issues. Variations that you might come across include: 

• Http or https (you should always have https for security and SEO)
• Www or non-www
• Trailing and non-trailing slashes (slashes at the end of a URL)

Even though it may seem like a slight variation of the URL, Google will view them as two separate pages with the same content. Typically, you’d set up 301 redirects (more on those below) to the URLs with the format that you are using and stay consistent.

3. Duplicate content and global SEO

If your company operates in different countries and you have different sites for each, you’ve likely considered what that means for global SEO. 

Luckily, if one site is in the United States and written American English, and another is in Spain and written in Spanish, the pages aren’t usually flagged for duplicate content. Because it is written in two different languages, Google considers them unique. 

However, this gets trickier as you move between countries that have similar languages with small adjustments. For example, a site with American English and British English. Without diving too deeply into the nuances of global SEO and hreflang tags, you could get around this by creating unique content for each market. 

4. Tracking parameters 

When you use tracking parameters, whether they are URL parameters, session IDs, or tracking IDs, it can create duplicate content issues. These URLs may look like this: 

• https://example.com/folder/?utm_source 

But, they may also have variations like the examples below. 

• /?tab_id=
• /?_ga=
• /?session_id=

Primarily, you’ll want to look for the URLs that have a slash (/) followed by a (?). There are ways to get around URL tracking parameters. To fix duplicate content, however, you could use a no-index tag or directive in your robots.txt file. 

It will be a line of code that follows a similar format to this: 

• Disallow: */?

This acts as a suggestion to Google, where you are asking it not to crawl the URLs that follow this URL format. For example, if you go to IKEA’s robots.txt file, they have several disallow directives. Some of these are for filters and others are for tracking parameters. 

This is not a comprehensive list of duplicate content examples. Ultimately, you’ll want to conduct a technical SEO audit of your site or hire a technical SEO agency. If you do an SEO audit of your own, it will identify where the errors appear, but it won’t tell you how to fix them or implement the fixes for you. 

A technical SEO agency can fix most duplicate content issues, depending on the CMS that you use. If you are on a traditional CMS like WordPress, a technical SEO specialist can fix duplicate content issues in a few clicks.

On the other hand, if you are using a custom, headless CMS like Contentful and Sanity, it takes longer. This is because everything is custom-coded, and as a result, it requires development. You may work with your in-house development team to make fixes with SEO guidance or hire a developer that has an SEO background. 

How to fix duplicate content 

The solution to fixing duplicate content will depend on why the issue is happening, but generally, there are three technical adjustments that can fix it. 

1. 301 redirects 

You use 301 redirects to signal to Google that the old URL is no longer in use and specify a new URL that it should point to. Keep in mind that this is a permanent redirect, and you’ll use 301s for more than just fixing duplicate content. If you use a 301 redirect, the old URL should be one that you don’t plan on using again, likely a 404 or broken link. 

How to set up a 301 redirect depends on the CMS. For example, if you use WordPress and Yoast Premium, it’s simple. You go to Yoast SEO > Redirects. Then add the URL slugs—the part that appears after the .com slash—in the old and new URL sections. Otherwise, you might directly edit the .htaccess file, which configures your site. Again, this varies by CMS.

2. Canonical tags (rel=”canonical”)

As a reminder, the canonical tag is used to identify one URL as the original. By using it, you can avoid duplicates that have the same or similar content on different URLs. 

• <link rel=”canonical” href=”https://example.com/” >

First, you need to identify which URL to mark as the canonical one. Then, you add a canonical tag to the head of your HTML code for each of the duplicates.

3. No indexing

Similar to canonical tags, you can ask search engines not to index pages by adding a noindex tag. It looks like this: 

• <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

As the name suggests, it tells search engines that they shouldn’t index—crawl and show the page in search results. For example, if you are running paid ads with landing pages that look similar, you might no-index them to avoid duplicate content and other technical SEO issues. 

This list is not comprehensive, but each site is unique. To fix duplicate content issues, you first need to identify and diagnose the problem. Then, look at your site structure and CMS to determine the best course of action. It can get pretty technical depending on the error, so if you’re unsure it’s best to consult a technical SEO specialist or agency.

The post Duplicate Content and SEO Guide appeared first on Tuff.

Naturally, if you are looking for SEO services, one of the first questions you have is how much does SEO cost? 

Many successful brands from Canva to NerdWallet have leveraged SEO, or more formally search engine optimization, to fuel their growth organically. SEO can be a powerful growth engine. Recent estimates show that over 53% of website traffic comes from organic search. It makes sense considering there are roughly 5 to 8 billion searches made on Google each day. However, SEO is a long-term investment. 

As with any digital marketing strategy, you want to know how much you need to invest in both time and money. SEO pricing can be complicated because there’s no standardized cost. Plus, there are several cost factors from the type of SEO service—technical SEO, YouTube SEO, content strategy—to experience, pricing model, and more. 

If that all sounds confusing, don’t worry. We’ll walk you through how SEO services are priced and how to evaluate if an SEO agency or specialist is worth their salt. 

SEO Pricing Models

The answer to how much does seo cost depends on several factors, including: 

• Pricing model
• SEO service
• Expertise and experience

SEO pricing models fall into one of four buckets—monthly retainer, salary, hourly rate, or per project. 

Monthly Retainer – Agency

Many SEO firms and agencies (Tuff included) operate on monthly retainers. As a client, you get the benefit of having a set monthly budget without any unexpected costs that sometimes arise with independent consultants or hourly freelancers. 

You also get tools and a team of experts that most businesses don’t have access to in-house. 

On the lowest end, the monthly retainer for a local SEO agency falls between $2,500 to $5,000 per month. Now, at this price point, SEO firms are usually working with local, small businesses that have minimal SEO needs. It also tends to focus on content and doesn’t include more technical SEO services. 

Typically, the cost of monthly SEO services for higher-end agencies falls between $10,000 and $25,000. Many of Tuff’s clients fall in this range, and services usually include technical and SEO content strategies. 

However, if your SEO needs require website development, custom designs, and landing pages, it can be more. Another factor that will increase the cost of SEO in your monthly retainer is the size of your business. Enterprises may pay upwards of $50,000 to $100,000 plus every month for extensive services, including global SEO and large word counts (15,000 words per month and up).

Salary – In-House

If you look up the average salary for an SEO specialist, it’s all over the place, and frankly, deceptively low. 

According to Glassdoor, the total estimated annual pay for an SEO specialist is $72,539 per year. However, the limitation that many of these salary calculators have is that they tend to use a general average, without accounting for years of experience, special areas of expertise, or location. Although it might be more realistic for an entry-level position at a lower cost of living, it doesn’t reflect the rest of the market.

As someone with over ten years of experience, I’ve gotten to know many skilled SEO professionals. Most in my network would not take a position at a pay rate below $70,000. In reality, an experienced SEO specialist (with expertise in technical and content SEO) will look for a salary between $85,000 and $120,000. 

Although, if they specialize in technical SEO and also have development or coding experience, expect to pay the rate you would for a developer (and then some).

When you are planning your in-house SEO budget, you’ll also need to factor in the cost of tools and subscriptions your team may need. Google Analytics, Search Console, and so on are free. However, many experts use Semrush, Ahrefs, SurferSEO, Screaming Frog, or a combination and those come with a monthly subscription cost.  

Hourly Rate or Per Project – Freelancer

If you work with an independent or freelance SEO consultant, they typically charge per hour or project. 

Again, the rate depends on your project and their experience. However, most freelancers charge between $100 to $150 per hour. 

If they operate on a per-project basis, it ranges depending on the complexity and timeline. You can expect to pay at least $2,500 to $5,000 per project.

Although it is possible to pay for project-based SEO services, it is not always the best type of arrangement. SEO is ongoing. It’s like growing a garden. For anything to grow, you need to water and tend to it consistently. It’s the same for SEO—you need to consistently publish and refresh content to see meaningful results. 

Per project works for temporary or occasional needs, which may make sense for a site migration or technical SEO audit. 

Is the cost of SEO worth it? 

Of course, as an SEO expert, I’m biased. However, data analyzing the ROI or return on investment of growth marketing strategies also shows that SEO is worth it. 

Based on Smart Insights research, search engine optimization is second only to email marketing when it comes to ROI. On average, every $1 spent on SEO brings in over $22 in revenue. This varies depending on your industry. 

Like PPC, with SEO, you can attract website visitors, get qualified leads, and increase conversions and sales. Unlike PPC, you aren’t paying anything when someone clicks on your site (outside of your SEO fees). So, you can reap the rewards of your organic efforts for years afterward. It may also take years to build up your traffic (which is why we combine SEO with PPC), but it can pay off in the end.  

SEO is absolutely worth the investment, but unfortunately, not all SEO companies or freelancers are worth the cost. If you are tempted to outsource to a cheap SEO freelancer in another country, you can, but I strongly advise against it. At the least, do a very thorough vetting process. (I’ll offer guidance on how to do that and what to look for further in this blog.)

Hiring an inexperienced SEO freelancer or questionable agency can do more damage than doing nothing at all. I’ve come across several companies that unfortunately had these types of experiences. As a result, they end up paying more to fix the mess the last person made.  

On top of that, Google punishes poor SEO practices, whether it’s low-quality content or technical mistakes. It can take months to years to recover from it. 

What Is the Average Cost of SEO? 

To recap, here are the common SEO pricing models and their costs. Keep in mind that each arrangement has pros and cons, and cost can vary based on the factors we mentioned above. 

• Agency – monthly retainer of $10,000 – $25,000, more if you require web development
• In-House – salary of $85,000 to $110,000 per year, more depending on experience
• Freelancer – $100 to $150 per hour or $2,500 to $5,000 per project

What Services Are Included in SEO Packages? 

You might still be scratching your head when asking—how much does SEO cost? If you aren’t familiar with the services SEO providers offer and what they mean for your business, it’s understandably difficult to understand the costs. 

Below is a cheat sheet on common services to help you decide what you should include in your SEO budget. 

Local SEO 

Most entry-level SEO consultants start out doing local SEO, which means that you optimize your website and business so that it appears in local search results. So, if you want to grab an iced latte before work and search “coffee shop” on your phone, you’ll see a list of results like this one. 

Most of the time, local SEO involves creating a Google Business Profile, managing your listing, reviews, and other factors that help capture people that are nearby your business location. 

Because of its limited scope, it is one of the lowest cost services at about $300 to $2,000 per month. Most small business owners that are just starting out can save money by doing this on their own with some guidance. 

Also, note that Tuff does not offer local SEO services. 

Global or National SEO 

Now, on the other end of the spectrum is national and global SEO. Although these are technically two different services, they both focus on broad searches. As you may have guessed, national SEO focuses on increasing your search visibility in a specific country. 

Most growing startups and ecommerce companies need national SEO. Although, we don’t tend to call it that—it’s just referred to as SEO. 

If you operate your business in multiple countries (and languages), then you’ll want to consider global search engine optimization, also called international SEO. 

Large enterprises and ecommerce businesses from IKEA to Amazon have multiple variations of their sites for the different countries they operate. Each needs global SEO. The actual services vary, but SEO for international sites most commonly includes how to set up URL structures, handle duplicate content, and translate pages to different languages. 

Because these services are similar, many agencies that offer SEO services (not local), have global SEO capabilities. 

Technical SEO

Technical SEO services tend to be the most expensive, and here’s why—it’s specialized expertise that can require web development.

That said, it has a huge impact on your site performance. Great content means nothing if your site has technical issues. 

Technical SEO services may include: 

• Tech SEO audit – An expert will identify the specific errors that appear on your site and create a roadmap that details how they will be corrected.
• On-page optimizations – On-page is everything on your site that impacts your SEO. So, these optimizations update anything that impacts your site’s health and organic performance.
• Speed and Core Web Vitals – Google uses Core Web Vitals to measure your site’s speed, responsiveness, and user experience. Speed optimizations greatly improve your performance, but making them can take a lot of looking through and updating code.
• Site migration – If you are redesigning your website or moving it to another domain or content management system (CMS), you’ll need a tech SEO expert. They’ll ensure that everything is moved over properly, so you don’t lose valuable traffic.

This is just a small sample of what technical SEO experts offer. Most start off with an audit to identify what your site needs, and that can cost between $2,000 to $5,000. Then, implementation costs more, depending on your CMS and if you need a developer.

Link Building

There are tons of factors that impact how likely you are to appear at the top of search results. One of those factors is your authority score, also called domain rating. It’s a score between zero to 100, and it signals to Google the level of authority or trustworthiness of your site. 

The higher your authority score, the more Google trusts you. Also, the more likely you will appear at the top of the search results faster. 

Now, one of the only ways to accelerate your rankings and increase your own authority score is to get a lot of backlinks from high-quality sites—aka link building. 

News and media publications like Forbes, Hubspot, TechCrunch, and so on have scores of 70 and up. New sites tend to have low scores until they build up their authority, which usually takes over a year. Spam and toxic sites also have low authority scores, so you want to avoid giving and receiving backlinks from them as it could tank your site’s health. 

The cost of link building ranges, and, this might be controversial, but it’s an SEO service that I recommend doing in-house. If you outsource it to an agency, you really have to trust them and know that they understand your company. 

In the old days of the Internet, some sites would swap backlinks easily or pay for them. Similar to never paying for Instagram followers, you should never pay for a backlink. (Sponsored content does not count.)

Buying backlinks is frowned upon by Google and could get you in hot water, especially if the links are from low-quality sites. 

Most quality link-building opportunities originate from partnerships or relationship building. Or, they happen naturally when you create top-quality, original content like studies, research data, and templates.  

Keyword Research and Content Strategy

Keyword research is the process of identifying the specific words and phrases that your target audience is searching for on search engines. It looks at relevant terms and prioritizes the ones that have a high search volume and low difficulty, meaning that you can realistically rank in the top 10 or above. 

In addition to keyword research, you should also conduct a competitor analysis. Competitor research will reveal which brands are beating you in organic search. It will identify which terms and content are driving traffic to your competitor’s site and what you need to do to outrank them. 

The idea is that if you rank for these keywords, you’ll increase your search visibility and reach customers at multiple stages of their buying journey. Your list of keywords helps you build a content strategy. 

An SEO content strategy is more than just blogs. SEO content may include: 

• Landing pages (with CRO and SEO copywriting)
• Pillar pages
• In-depth, how-to guides
• Templates
• Infographics
• Interactive content like quizzes
• Video (YouTube)

Some content marketing experts may know how to do keyword research and content strategy. However, it doesn’t mean that they have extensive knowledge of search engine optimization, especially technical SEO. Therefore, standalone keyword research and content strategy tend to be less expensive, but they are just as important.

An experienced SEO agency or consultant should help you understand which services you need and build an SEO package that helps you meet your specific business goals. 

Green Flags – What to Look For in an SEO Company or Expert

Some green flags will signal whether or not a person or agency possesses SEO expertise, and consequently if they’re worth the cost. 

If you’re looking for quality SEO services, they tend to have these habits. 

1. Goes beyond what you’ll find in a tool 

Tools like Ahrefs and Semrush have made SEO auditing easier. They will crawl your site and generate a list of errors that might look like the one below. 

Now, if you are not familiar with SEO, this probably means nothing to you. Also, these are just tools, and they have limitations. 

For example, they can flag items that aren’t actually high-priority SEO issues. An example of this is hreflang tags—these tell Google what language a page should show, depending on a user’s location. They are super important for global businesses, but if you don’t sell outside of the U.S., it isn’t a priority.

On top of that, how issues are fixed will depend on your unique site infrastructure, tech stack, CMS, and so on. These tools lack those personalized, problem-solving capabilities. 

An expert won’t just regurgitate the report from an auditing tool. You can go to Semrush or Ahrefs, get a monthly subscription, and do that yourself. Like any tool, it takes a skilled person to wield it to its full potential. 

2. Prioritizes low-hanging fruit and identifies opportunities

The value of having an SEO expert is that they provide context, prioritize issues, and educate you on what is most important to fix first. 

For example, I create a technical SEO priority list for every new partner that I work with at Tuff. It includes the top three to five opportunities. These are usually low-hanging fruit—big issues that are easier to fix but will have a significant impact on health and performance. 

In addition, an expert can go in and fix simple issues in a few clicks, when it would take someone else hours to weeks to figure it out. 

3. Explains complex topics in simple terms

In addition to creating a priority list, I also provide context. For each issue, I explain in plain terms that anyone can understand: 

• What the issue is 
• Where it appears on the site
• Why it matters
• How to fix it 

Most people don’t know what an hreflang tag is or why they shouldn’t have duplicate content on their site. If you are hiring an SEO agency, you don’t necessarily need to know what these things are, but you should understand their impact and feel welcome to ask questions. 

4. Sets realistic expectations that are grounded in data

Let’s say an agency promises to grow your organic traffic and sales by 300% in three months, with only 5,000 words of content. They don’t show their data or projections for how they will do it. In that case, run. They are either lying or do not have experience. Either way, they are selling promises they won’t deliver on. 

SEO takes time, but it does lead to incremental growth. Along with how much does SEO cost, you can absolutely and should ask what expectations or results do you expect? 

Although it’s impossible to predict the future completely, you can estimate with experience and data. At Tuff, I also developed an SEO forecasting template and process that I use with new partners. 

I pull two to three years of historical data and look at past organic traffic numbers to predict your future growth. For example, if you’ve hovered around 10,000 to 12,000 monthly organic traffic, you are not going to suddenly jump to 100,000 in a few months. (At least not in a way that is sustainable for months and months, and even then, you’re likely combining several one-off campaigns outside of SEO.)

5. Shows a deep understanding of your business, goals, and audience

The struggle that sometimes comes with outsourcing SEO to a freelancer or agency, is that don’t always understand the nuances of your business and audience. This really shows when they conduct keyword research. 

For example, let’s say you run an online accounting business, but your target audience is large businesses in two or three industries. Someone that doesn’t understand your business fully may pull keywords like “individual income tax returns”, which isn’t relevant for businesses. 

Instead, an expert will take the time to learn about you and your goals. Before even conducting keyword research, they’ll ask you: 

• What questions do customers and prospects frequently ask your sales team? 
• Which services do you do better than any of your competitors? 
• What pain points does your audience have? 

I encourage you to consider all of these options to find the right fit for your business. Hiring the wrong SEO agency or freelancer can do much more harm than good. 

If someone’s cost seems too good to be true, it probably is—and you can’t afford to get SEO wrong. That doesn’t mean that an SEO agency that charges a large monthly retainer will mean better quality. It just means that it takes careful consideration to understand which are worth the value, and which are not. 

The post How Much Does SEO Cost? appeared first on Tuff.

As a growth marketing agency, when we work with fast-growing startups like Pathstream, a VC-backed startup that offers certificate programs to help people advance their careers, we often hit the ground running on paid acquisition strategies to hit short-term growth goals. 

But for long-term success, it’s important to invest equally in long-term wins like content. For Pathstream, our team focused on optimizing their existing site and creating new SEO content to improve their position in non-branded search results.

Here’s the story of how we increased non-branded organic traffic to account for ~23% of all organic traffic, up from less than 1%, driving a 486% YTD increase in weekly non-branded organic clicks, and helped to drive down Pathstream’s overall CAC.

SEO & Non-Branded Traffic

When we first created the SEO strategy for Pathstream, they had no blog on their website, just a Medium blog, and nearly 99% of all organic traffic was coming from branded search terms. There was so much opportunity to improve their site, and we started with the basics – a technical SEO audit, migrating the blog to their root domain, optimizing existing content, and creating new content based on a strategic list of focus keywords.

Technical SEO

We started by analyzing and optimizing the technical SEO aspects of Pathstream’s website to make sure we were in a good place before we began with the rest of our strategy. 

Pathstream’s core website pages run on a JavaScript application which was causing issues when crawlers tried to scrape the metadata. The metadata wasn’t loading asynchronously, so when the crawlers attempted to scrape the content, it was all empty. 

Of course this was a problem because Pathstream’s pages weren’t being indexed in SERPs with the correct SEO titles and meta descriptions that were present in the source code. 

We worked with Pathstream’s developers to get the metadata to load asynchronously so that these pages could start ranking in SERPs for their target keywords. This was a fairly quick win with a huge potential impact.

Migration

The next step was to get more value out of the original content that Pathstream was creating on their offsite Medium blog. This meant not just migrating it, but migrating it to Pathstream’s main domain as a subdirectory rather than a subdomain. 

This involved installing a new WordPress instance on a subdirectory of Pathstream’s domain, migrating the content, and internally linking it throughout the website. 

This was a team project that involved our CRO and UX team creating beautiful mockups for the blog homepage and blog category pages.

Keyword Research

Once we had a solid technical SEO foundation, we narrowed in on our competitive analysis and keyword research. 

The most crucial part of keyword research is nailing down your 5-10 focus keywords that you’ll build pillar page content for. Once we got those keywords we were able to build out a list of semantically-related secondary and tertiary keywords to build our high-quality content strategy around.

Keyword Mapping and On-Page Optimization

This keyword research equipped us with enough ammo for the next few months of content creation. 

But before we start creating new content, we want to make sure we’re getting the most value out of the existing content. 

We do this through keyword mapping. ScreamingFrog is a great tool for keyword mapping, it extracts the URL, SEO title, and meta description of each page on your website. Your job is determine the target keyword of each page based on that information and then decide if you need a new target keyword or not.

We take a look at all of the existing pages on the website and we map them back to a target keyword. 

This helps us find pages that aren’t optimized for any specific target keyword, pages that are targeting the wrong keywords, pages that should be no-indexed, and more.

We then cross-reference that list of keywords with our keyword research to determine if it’s a keyword that we want to target and what it’s going to take to rank on page one for that keyword. 

Will we have to create additional content and is this the best page that we should be attempting to rank with?

Content Creation

Once our foundational technical SEO and on-page SEO was complete, we launched our content creation machine.

We utilized our optimized landing pages as our pillar pages and created supporting blog content to build out the cluster strategy. This allowed us to build comprehensive content throughout the whole website with landing pages, blog posts, and additional types of content. 

We also tapped our UX and Creative team to include original images in all of our blog posts, which helped increase the average time on page.

Keyword Movement

We primarily use SEMrush, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics to track non-branded keyword movement. 

We analyzed Pathstream’s top pages and non-branded keywords at the beginning of our partnership and continuously monitored them week over week and month over month. 

After just a few weeks, we started getting great results from our strategy and seeing significant positive keyword movement for our target keywords. 

Organic Traffic – Weekly Organic Scorecard

We saw significant increases in non-branded organic clicks to Pathstream’s website in our weekly and monthly organic scorecard. We just recently had our two highest back-to-back weeks of non-branded organic clicks ever, according to Google Search Console, with 722 and we’re on pace to beat it next week. 

According to Google Search Console, we’ve seen non-branded organic clicks increase YTD by 1,180% with an increase in average CTR and average position. According to SEMrush, we saw a 258% MoM increase from February to March, alone and at the time of this writing, July 2022, we’ve seen another 194% MoM increase in non-branded organic traffic, and we’re not slowing down.  

Interested in learning how Tuff can help skyrocket your organic search traffic? Hit us up! 

Derek Coleman

Derek is a digital marketer based in Boston, Massachusetts with almost a decade of hands-on SEO experience. He finds it meaningful, challenging, and exciting to develop, test, and implement new SEO strategies. When he’s not auditing websites and optimizing content he’s usually backpacking and exploring new cultures.

The post Compounding Growth: How We Increased Pathstream’s Non-Branded Organic Clicks 486% appeared first on Tuff.