Which SEO Metrics Matter Most to Marketing Leaders, According to Semrush's VP of Brand Marketing Having a strong SEO strategy is critical for reaching new audiences and generating leads for your business. In fact, 43% of marketing directors, VPs, and C-suite executives reported SEO as one of the most effective strategies their companies currently leverage. Creating a powerful SEO strategy requires consistent testing and iteration. Over time, certain metrics can help you identify which areas of your strategy are working — and which aren't. It can be difficult, however, to determine which SEO metrics actually matter. To truly evaluate the success of your SEO, what should you pay attention to? Organic traffic? Leads? Keyword rankings? Conversions? Here, I sat down with Semrush's VP of Brand Marketing, Olga Andrienko, to discuss the SEO metrics she'd advise leaders pay attention to in 2023. Let's dive in. The SEO Metrics That Matter Most, According to Semrush's VP of Brand Marketing 1. Focus on the metrics that tie directly back to revenue — like conversions and new MRR. You might've expected Andrienko to start with organic traffic or rankings as a top SEO metric, but instead, she advises leaders to start with the bottom line — revenue — and work backwards. Andrienko told me, "When we discuss quarterly goals, we always look at new user monthly recurring revenue (new MRR). And, in that case, conversion is the only thing that matters. I think the metrics that matter are the ones that...

How to Detect and Eliminate Keyword Cannibalization Keywords are king when it comes to engaging users and increasing your search engine ranking. As a result, search engine optimization (SEO) has become a multi-million dollar business with a host of experts offering advice on how best to move up the search engine results page (SERP) and claim the coveted number one spot. Most actionable SEO advice boils down to a few solid suggestions: Do your market research so you know which keywords are relevant to your target audience, and create content that's timely and relevant. Something that doesn't make the SEO rounds quite so often is keyword cannibalization. While this unpleasant-sounding issue won't sink your website, it can cause your pages and posts to rank lower than they should and — if left unchecked — could harm the overall reputation of your site. Here's what you need to know about finding, evaluating, and eliminating keyword cannibalization. What is Keyword Cannibalization in SEO? Keyword cannibalization occurs when two or more pages on your website end up competing for the same keyword. Let's say your company sells roof shingles. Your blog content will likely include posts about how to extend shingle life through proper care and maintenance — with the right combination of authority and actionable insight, this kind of content can attract the attention of your target audience and lead them to purchase shingles from your site when their home requires repair or replacement. To ensure you're capturing the right audience,...

7 Ways SEO & PPC Can Work Together in 2021 If your SEO (search engine optimization) and PPC (pay per click) teams exist in complete silos, it's time to change that. Commonly held opposing viewpoints are: PPC is too complex, and SEO is too slow. (For the record, I don't agree.) When these two teams collaborate, you'll be rewarded with magical insights, learnings, and results that neither team could get on its own. These channels aren't meant to be siloed, and getting them aligned is one of the most underrated ways to improve your overall digital marketing performance. PPC is one of SEO's most powerful tools — and vice versa. Here are seven ways to thrive in both SEO and PPC. 1. Avoid paid keyword traps. Sharing keyword intelligence is a standard best practice. Sometimes, certain types of keywords can have subtle differences, and end up aligning to the wrong intent. It's important to understand the intent behind search terms, because you want to avoid keyword traps. SEO-focused marketers are the masters of understanding search intent, and therefore collaboration between SEO and SEM is critical. For example, the restaurant POS software, Toast, is bidding on "phone systems for restaurants" but they don't sell phone systems! They're broad match bidding on terms containing "restaurant." This is why Google has become a modern day casino for advertisers. The marketing team at Toast is gambling on the mere possibility that restaurant managers seeking a phone system might also be...

What is a website taxomomy? While scavenger hunts can be fun, users don't want to frantically search through a website to find answers to their questions. They want them quickly, and they want them to be easy to find. The structure users want is called taxonomy. Scientifically, a taxonomy is a classification scheme that dictates how things are organized and classified based on their characteristics. A website's taxonomy can dictate the user experience, and can also influence search engine rankings. This post will go over what a website taxonomy is, and give you the resources to create a successful organization system for their site. Website taxonomy is also related to URL structure, which is how URLs are organized to reflect content within specific site pages. Every website domain stays the same for every URL address, but subdirectories and URL slugs change as page content gets more specific. For example, say your website’s primary domain is www.samplewebsite.com. Your taxonomic structure will include subdirectories within your domain that are relevant to the page’s content. So, if your samplewebsite has a ‘Contact’ or ‘Announcements’ page, the URLs would change to reflect the information displayed on each page. The URLs for these pages would be www.samplewebsite.com/contact and www.samplewebsite.com/announcements, respectively. Why is a website taxonomy important? A well-planned taxonomy can transform how users interact with your site, especially when your content is organized logically. If users can get to your site and find what they’re looking for, they’ll view you as a reputable...

19 SEO Tips Straight From the Mouths of HubSpot's SEO Team Throughout all of 2017, HubSpot experienced something that had never happened before -- our blog's monthly traffic flattened. Even worse, it started to decline. So after months of stressing over the mysterious cause of our blog's traffic plateau, we decided to sit down, chug a bunch of coffee, and find the culprit. What we discovered is that our editorial strategy of brainstorming topics and relying on our intuition to determine our audience's content preferences didn't suffice anymore. Coupled with almost every social media platforms' unwillingness to direct users off their website and the ever-growing mountain of emails piling up in people's inboxes, we decided to pivot and focus our energies on the channel that has consistently generated the majority of our blog's traffic for its entire existence -- organic search. Today, years after we adjusted our organic strategy, we've exceeded the majority of our monthly traffic goals and even broke some monthly traffic records. Needless to say, we're thrilled (and relieved) that our organic strategy fueled our traffic boost and shattered the great traffic plateau of 2017 -- and we'd love to share the essential SEO tips that helped us devise this strategy. 1. Spend as much time on the SERPs as you do in tools. Even though an algorithm dictates the rankings of a search engine's results page (SERPs), the algorithm is meant to reward web publishers that craft the best content on the internet. That's...

How to Reduce Page Weight on Your Website When it comes to your website pages, size matters. The smaller the file size of a page, the faster it will load for anyone who requests it. And people do notice how long a page takes to load. In fact, according to data from Pingdom, 24% of users will abandon a site that takes four seconds to load, and 38% of users will leave the page if it takes five seconds. Not to mention, Google has admitted to using site speed in web search ranking, as faster sites tend to create happier users. Additionally, nowadays, plenty of searchers use their mobile phones to find and explore websites —where spotty internet connections and slow data speeds make it even harder to load large page sizes. Ultimately, in order to maintain a healthy page rank, your business needs to be focused on delivering a fast, optimized website experience across all devices. To ensure your website doesn't take a hit in traffic,this post will explaineverything you need to know about page size and how to reduce it. What's Page Size? "Page size" — also called page weight — refers to the overall size of a particular web page. A page size includes all of the files that are used to create the web page, including the HTML document, any included images, scripts, and other media. What's a...

Why You Should SEO-Optimize Your Content, Even if Your Goal Isn't Organic Traffic Nowadays, you can't conduct a successful content marketing strategy without incorporating SEO methods. Neil Patel explained it well when he wrote: "Good SEO ... means consistent output of content. Consistent output means that you're doing content marketing, and you're doing it right. There isn't any way around it." I can imagine you might be thinking — "OK, but my goal for content marketing isn't just SEO. It's also creating thought leadership content, and lead generation, as well." Of course, every marketer should consider more than organic traffic when analyzing success metrics. After all, SEO isn't the only component of a successful marketing strategy. But SEO efforts don't just help you reach organic traffic goals — they can also help you achieve your brand awareness and lead generation goals, as well. Here, let's explore how SEO can help you meet all your marketing goals, even if those goals don't require organic traffic. How SEO Can Help You Reach the 3 Main Content Marketing Goals Before we dive into how marketers can use SEO strategies to reach their content marketing goals, let's take a short detour and refresh ourselves on three of the primary reasons for doing content marketing: Lead generation. If you have salespeople ready to close sales but need to fill their pipeline with more qualified leads, the primary goal for your content marketing is probably lead generation. Lead generation is the process of converting people...

How to Increase Your Organic Growth by Over 400%, According to the SEO Lead at Nextiva Here's a reality check for 2020 — only one-third of businesses make it to the 10 year mark. No market demand, running out of cash, and getting out-competed are among the leading reasons businesses fail. The good news? You don't have to figure it all out on your own, because I've done a lot of the legwork for you. When I served as the VP of Marketing at Sales Hacker (a publication and community for B2B salespeople), I uncovered strategies and processes that exploded our growth. In fact, the results were outstanding: in just over a year, we were able to grow Sales Hacker's traffic from 19,000 monthly organic sessions to over 100,000 monthly organic sessions. That's a 426% increase. As a result, Sales Hacker was acquired by Outreach, a sales engagement platform. Now, I'm using that same exact process to lead SEO at Nextiva, and here is a snapshot of our organic keyword growth to prove that this really works: If you're looking to skyrocket your organic growth with an efficient SEO strategy in 2020, check out the five proven steps I've taken with both Sales Hacker and Nextiva to achieve tremendous results. First things first: why is it so hard to stand out in search? The goal of owning search rankings is simple: organic presence means qualified traffic, which leads to conversions, which turn into sales....