But what steps do you need to take to make sure you get featured in Google’s rich answer box? Everything you need to know about answer boxes, from what they are to how to win them, is thoroughly detailed below in a step by step guide. 

1. What Is a Google Answer Box?
2. Search in 2026: From Answer Boxes to AI Overviews
3. Why Are Google Answer Boxes Important?
4. Google Answer Box Takeaways – TL;DR
5. How Does the Google Answer Box Work?
6. What Types of Google Answer Boxes Exist?
7. How to Optimize for Google Answer Box?
   1. Step 1. Identify Keywords That Google May Provide Answers for
   2. Step 2. Segment Keywords Based on Current Answer Box Relevancy
   3. Step 3. Write Website Content for the Google Answer Box
   4. Step 4. Quick Tips to Rank in Google Answer Boxes on Position Zero
8. How to Check Your Google Answer Box Rankings
9. Google Answer Box Strategy & Statistics – A Research on 10k Keywords
   1. Unique Domains Used by Google for Answers
   2. Top 10 Ranking Position Distribution for the Answer Box
   3. Title vs. No-Title in Google’s Rich Answer Boxes
   4. Trusted Sites Distribution in Google Answer Boxes
   5. Website Extraction vs. Website Definition in Answer Boxes
10. Can I Advertise in the Google Answers Box?
11. Can Any Site Appear in Google’s Direct Answer Box?
12. Does Google Answer All Questions?
13. How Do You Delete an Answer Box?
14. Is Google Ever Wrong? Google Answer Box Failures
15. Does a Google Answer Box API Exist?

What Is a Google Answer Box?

Google’s answer box is a type of result that is usually displayed at the top of the search engine results page.

You may have noticed that when you use Google to search for a certain answer to a question, a lot of times you actually get some sort of answer and not just a series of search results.

Google Answers Boxes are a SERP feature powered by the knowledge graph or scraped from different sites that provide fit answers to a specific query. Other terms used for Google’s rich answer box are position zero, direct answers, instant or quick answers or featured snippets.

For instance, if you’ve just recently made a terrible decision about changing your go-to barber’s shop and would like to find out how soon the damage will fade away, you might ask Google “how fast does hair grow”, to which the famed oracle of wisdom will give an actual answer, in what we will refer to as an answer box. Of course, it hasn’t come up with the answer on its own, but knowing what to look for is pretty cool in itself.

Answer boxes can contain text, graphs, maps, images or even videos.

So it’s not just showing up in the results, it’s showing up in the answer box, which has a different status in the mind of the searcher. Being there can get a lot of SERP “landscape”, especially if you own some important keywords in your niche.

Thanks to the Google Hummingbird algorithm from 2013 and the Google BERT update from 2019, Google is a lot savvier when it comes to interpreting things in context. And if it doesn’t have enough information to figure out what you actually want, like when we’re simply searching for “hummingbird”, it displays the most likely result, with an answer box containing text and images, but also a feedback option, right below the answer one, just in case you were thinking about something else. This is all pretty smart and very much related to the knowledge graph concept Google has been toying around with for a while.

Search in 2026: From Answer Boxes to AI Overviews

While traditional Google Answer Boxes and Featured Snippets still exist, search has rapidly evolved toward AI-generated answers.

Today, users increasingly receive responses from Google AI Overviews, AI-powered search engines, and conversational assistants instead of clicking through a list of blue links. Rather than extracting information from a single webpage, these systems generate answers by analyzing and synthesizing information from multiple sources across the web.

In the era of Answer Boxes, strong on-page SEO and well-structured content could often help you secure Position Zero. In 2026, AI systems evaluate much more than a single page or website. They assess the overall authority, credibility, and reputation of a brand across the entire digital ecosystem.

This is exactly why monitoring your online presence has become essential.

As an AI visibility and social listening platform, the BrandMentions software tracks real-time global conversations and analyzes brand sentiment, helping you strengthen the signals that AI-powered search engines use to identify trusted sources.

Technical SEO remains important, but it is no longer sufficient on its own. AI engines are increasingly influenced by what the web collectively says about your brand: mentions in articles, discussions on social media, reviews, industry publications, forums, and other third-party sources.

To earn visibility in AI-generated answers, brands need to build and maintain a strong digital presence beyond their own domains. The more consistently your brand is referenced, discussed, and trusted across the web, the more likely it becomes that AI systems will recognize it as an authoritative source.

As search continues its transition from traditional search engines to answer engines, success is no longer measured solely by rankings. The new challenge is becoming a trusted entity that AI systems choose to reference when generating answers.

Why Are Google Answer Boxes Important?

Being on the Google’s answer box will do you a big favor, making you appear on Google’s first page in the limelight.

From an SEO perspective, being listed within Google’s rich answer boxes will offer you a lot of SERP “landscape”. If you “own” answer boxes on the important keywords in your niche, you will most likely dominate your business field, from an SEO point of view. 

Being number one in searches no longer means the best position you can have.
Sure, being number 1 in the results for a search is still good. Yet, in a time where the number of ads on page have increased, to make sure your site is the one Google gets the answer for its answer box is very beneficial for you.  So no need to highlight the strong connection between Google answer box and SEO. 

You’ve probably got it: the SERP landscape has changed and having the chances of getting listed within an answer box can get you serious traffic to your site.

While knowing the SEO fact that only 2 of the top 10 most popular sites on the web are content sites, there is no need to advocate why ranking on position zero is more important than ever. 

Google Answer Box Takeaways – TL;DR

• Google’s answer box is a type of result that is usually displayed at the top of the search engine results page.
• Being on the Google’s answer box will do you a big favor, making you appear on Google’s first page not once, but twice.
• The content in an answer box does not necessarily come from the first result on the page, but from the result which Google considers that it answers the question best.
• Google answer boxes are a certain type of rich answers and can come in many shapes and sizes.
• Three tactics that will help you rank on position zero & perform Google answer box optimization: identify keywords that Google may provide answers for, segment keywords based on current answer box relevancy and write website content optimized for the Google answer box
• The easiest and fastest way to check if you’re ranking in an answer box is to go straight to your Google Search Console.
• According to Google, you cannot advertise on answer boxes as their purpose is informational and not commercial. 
• Any site can appear in Google’s answer box if it offers a fit answer for the query and if it’s considered to be a topical authority in the field.
• The percentage of search results with answer boxes out of the total number of search results is fairly small.
• You can opt out of Google’s special boxes by preventing snippets on your page.
• While the algorithm is quite impressive, it’s not 100% reliable yet.

How Does the Google Answer Box Work?

Google actually “gets” you. It knows “what you’re saying’”.

The content in an answer box does not necessarily come from the first result on the page, but from the result which Google considers that it answers the question best.

But how does Google decide which answer deserves to be listed within the direct answers?

Here comes the technical SEO part: according to some patents from Google, it assumes that one element of the search query will be an entity, and the other will be a certain attribute of the said entity.

For instance, if I were to search “Ukraine’s GDP”, “Ukraine” would be my entity and “GDP” would be the attribute. This is what the algorithm would identify as a “E’s A” type of query . It works similarly with a series of other phrasings, such as “what is the A of E”, “who is the A of E” (e.g.: “who is the husband of angelina jolie”) , “the A of E” or “who is the E’s A”.

Google has a database of entities with their potential looked for attributes. This means that you won’t find an answer for every question, but you should find answers for the most popular questions.

Similar patents are in place to further searches about specific facts. Google has patents for extracting entities from queries (US80058524 B2) , returning factual answers in response to queries  (US8655866 B1)  or for retrieval of information items (US8719244 B1). And although they look hard to digest, we will try to simplify the process and explain them.

The key elements in these are selecting the representative phrase/search fragment to then match with information and determining whether a certain fragment of the search query is, in fact, a fact query. Google then identifies potential results and ranks them according to an unknown scoring system, presenting to you the highest scoring results in the answer box.

So, when we asked the classical question “why is the sky blue”, we got an answer not from Wikipedia, as one might expect, but from a page on the Department of Mathematics, University of California, Riverside website (sometimes, an answer from NASA Space Place is also listed within Google’s instant answers).

At least one of the things that this site did well to get the highest score was having the question in the title of an article and the answer in the very first paragraph. Belonging to a .edu domain probably helped as well.

While researching this Google feature, an interesting thing caught our attention and we thought it was interesting enough to share it with you. For certain queries, attributes extraction is based on user location.

In the screenshot below, we can see that for the search query “how much does a passport cost”, using a USA IP we’ll have a different answer box than for the same search query with a UK IP. We cannot extrapolate this situation and use it as a general rule regarding how Google extracts the answers but it’s important to mention this: 

Google seems to take into consideration the user’s location.

Furthermore, we’ve found another interesting example that enforces this matter. If I search for a conversion from Colombian pesos into dollars (“transformar pesos colombianos a dolares”), Google takes into consideration my IP and local search so it displays the result adapted to that knowledge.

Only now it’s adapted the result so much that it doesn’t really answer my question. It is indeed evidence of the highly advanced technology that Google uses but as long as it doesn’t provide an answer for my query it is not much of a help.

Yet, it is important to mention that Google keeps on updating its algorithm constantly, and some of the examples provided within this article might have changed meanwhile. 

So, where do all these answers come from? A variety of places, really. Two factors seem important:

1. that the page selected for the answer contains the question in a very similar (if not exact) form, along with the answer, at a short distance from the question (repeating at least some of the words from the question) and
2. that the page selected for the answer belongs to a trustworthy website. So, most of the times, if it’s not Wikipedia, it will be a site that it can consider a non biased third party, such as is the case with a lot of “.edu” sites, or news organization websites.

That, of course, changes if you are purposefully looking for specific brand information, in which case the most trustworthy information might come straight from that brand’s site.

What Types of Google Answer Boxes Exist?

Google answer boxes are a certain type of rich answers and can come in many shapes and sizes.

To better understand what type of instant answers appear more often in SERP, a few years ago we made a research based on answer boxes generated by approximately 10,000 queries. From the total data we received, we wanted to see what types of answer boxes were most common. 

In the chart above, you can see the results of the research we made. 

It seems that most of the answer boxes included definitions or descriptions that were the result of various website extractions.
From the total of answer boxes we got, content extracted from websites summed up 69% of the answer boxes. All the other types of answer boxes – Web Definitions, Video Widgets, Google Widgets (conversions, maps) or Google Dictionary Definitions – taken together amounted for less than a third of the answer boxes. 

This is good news for SEO. This means that if your content is relevant and very well structured, it has lots of chances to appear in answer boxes.

If the answers only consisted of Google widgets, Google definitions or web definitions, you would have little to contribute to the landscape. As things are now, your website could be the source of a definition or description for the vast majority of the answers in the box.

We’re not going to list all the content types of answer boxes there are out there; however, below we’ll highlight the most common and interesting ones. 

Google Dictionary Definition

Google Dictionary was an online dictionary service of Google, originating in its Google Translate service. The Dictionary website was terminated on 2011 but after that, part of its functionality was integrated into Google Search and now it looks like it’s integrated in the paragraph snippet.

When it provides the direct answers from the Google Dictionary, you won’t see any URL near the generated content. It answers the question and it kind of gives you the feeling that Google “knows for sure” that the info is accurate and doesn’t need to give any extra explanation.

Google Answer Boxes with No Source

Google has quite an impressive and helpful number of widgets, including translating, weather, driving directions or currency converter services. These widgets really improve the user’s experience, sparing them lots of clicks and time invested.

For instance, if a user needs to find out how much  300 meters mean, reported to kilometers, they don’t have to go on several sites to find out how much one meter means and multiply it by 300. All they have to do is “ask” Google “how long is 300 meters” and they will get an answer instantly.

Google Video Widget

If you want to impress your friends with some new move dances or you are looking for a particular type of moves that you want to reproduce, Google understands this need and gives you a video result directly in the answer box.

Google Web Extraction

The definitions provided in the answer box from web extractions usually come from sites that have high authority and also include the search query on their site. For instance, in the example below, if we want to find out what an atom is composed of, the answer box extracted the information from education.jlab.org/qa/atom.html. As we follow this site, we will see that on the landing page we will have a dedicated content to this matter, with the matching title “What is an atom? What are atoms made of?”

Google Answer Boxes with Real Time Results

There are many instances where Google provides real time results for many events or competitions. From sports to concerts or any other important event happening in the world, most likely the answer box gets you covered. Usually, the results are updated and on time so that the searcher may not need any additional info. From an SEO point of view, that’s not necessary good, because if you want to get people to your website, you have a few options, under the high quality info from the direct answer. 

Google Answer Boxes with Company Information

Far will be the days when you’ll have to browse through a company’s website, looking for the about page to find out info about how or when that company was founded. A searcher can found out instantly mostly anything about a business. And even if a specific piece of data is not listed on the business’s site, most likely the most relevant piece of information that will answer that query will be listed.

Let’s take for instance the first case. From the “about” page from cognitiveSEO we get the info about when the tool took birth. When it comes to the second example, Google decided that the most relevant data for the BrandMentions tool was not the site’s “about” page, but a third party website that made a review on that tool. The founding data of BrandMentions can be found on its site as well, yet, Google found it easier probably to extract it from another source. 

Google Answer Boxes for Stocks

Google, Yahoo, and MSN have the authority for the time being when it comes to Google stocks info. What is particularly interesting when it comes to this answer widget is that it is highly complex, offering in-depth info that can be sorted by time, including an interactive chart.  

Google Answer Boxes with Multiple Sources

There are instances where Google consults multiple sources to offer an answer.  

For instance, in the example below, both Eurostat and Bureau of Labor Statistics (highly authoritative sources) are mentioned as sources for the unemployment rate in the UK. What is interesting is that once you check out the mentioned sources, none of them offers the rate mentioned in the answer box on their landing pages. If you dig into the data on those sites, you’ll get the info; yet, it is not listed “one click away” on their site. Therefore, a bit of research work has been made here to offer this kind of data.  

How to Optimize for Google Answer Box?

Ranking in position zero, on the top of Google search results, is the best position one can have.

It is the holy grail of the search engine optimization, it is the position that tells Google your content is useful and answering users’ direct questions. There’s no doubt about that. Therefore, you might want to appear there by all means.

Of course, there are a lot of other ranking factors that can influence an answer box result (social media; backlink profile; no. of referring domains, etc. ). Yet, these steps are a traffic hack that will surely help you create a Google answer box strategy that will help you win the answer box. 

So, here there are, four tactics that will help you rank on position zero.

Step 1. Identify Keywords That Google May Provide Answers for

As we’ve seen in the examples above, the keywords that are ranking in the instant answers category are usually queries that answer a direct question or solve an immediate need; for example: why did my organic traffic drop, does more traffic increase SEO or list of digital marketing tactics.  

Answer boxes are a certain type of rich answers and can come in many shapes and sizes; there are some special featured snippets. Most of the times, Google selects what info considers to be relevant for a specific query.

The really good news is that most of the answer boxes include definitions or descriptions from website extractions.

First things first, identify the keywords that have the potential to have a dedicated answer box. 

The easiest way to do this is by using the Content Optimizer and Keyword Tool. Let’s say that we are in the cooking industry (restaurants, cooking blogs, you name it). And let’s say that we want to rank as high as possible on topics related to “rice”. We want to be the “rice queens and kings” (and of search marketing, of course). Trying to rank for the keyword “rice” itself might not be the greatest idea; most likely, it’s a very competitive keyword and it would be very hard to rank on position 0 for it.  But we can find “rice-related” keywords that we can rank for, just like in the example below:

“Rice flour recipes” is not only a keyword that you can think about ranking in Google’s answer box but it is also a keyword that is highly searched (it has a monthly search volume between 1,000 and 5,000 and a cost-per-click of $0.23 – in case you’re interested in paid search marketing). 

You might wonder, if you own a restaurant or you are a rice producer, how this might be helpful for you or for your targeted keyword rankings. Let me tell you that it is highly beneficial. Content is king, no need to insist more on that, as you’ve probably heard it thousands of time. So, even if you have a rice factory or you are into the rice agriculture, that doesn’t mean you cannot get creative and directly answer to the users with awesome pieces of content. 

Google Answer Boxes provide mostly information content. 

Therefore, don’t create content that will be beneficial only for you; instead, create content that might actually help your users. Once you offer them something valuable, once you bring them to your website, they might reward with a purchase afterwards.  

Step 2. Segment Keywords Based on Current Answer Box Relevancy

It probably happened to you as well to be served by Google with irrelevant or incomplete info in the answer box.  I know but, as striking as this might seem, just like anything else in life, Google is not perfect.  But can we “take advantage” of these small imperfections and use them in favor of our own Google Answer box strategy?

Yes, we can. And we can do it not only for our own benefit, but for the search community as well. 

As you can see in the screenshot above, the Google answer box mixed things up (as the search engine is updating all the time, this answer box may change at the moment you perform a similar search). But the big G is aware of the search imperfections that can appear from time to time and this is why it allows us to offer feedback if the results are inaccurate. 

So, what’s left for you to do? (except improving the search community by offering feedback).

Search the answer boxes from your own niche that offer inaccurate or incomplete responses and try to create the proper content to rank with. 

A simple way to find answer box opportunities is with the help of our best friend, the cognitiveSEO’s Keyword Explorer.

We are not saying that the examples below are offering inaccurate answer box responses, or offer a bad user experience; we are just showing you a way to identify answer box opportunities. 

Being in your niche, you (should) know everything that is being said or talked about your niche and the topics you are most interested in. If not, there are monitoring tools that can help you out with this matter.

cognitiveSEO’s content tool gives you info on the frequently asked questions from Google as well as the most popular users questions so you can find adapt your SEO strategies and find new answer box ideas.

We know that it’s easier said than done, but what you should to at this point is try creating the content that will actually rank on the position zero. Which led us straight to step three. 

Step 3. Write Website Content Optimized for the Google Answer Box

Google likes content to be arranged neatly and in order. Keep in mind that you need to create content for the user but also to be on the top of the SERP. You need to write for SEO. 

So, structuring your content is highly important. The tidier you write content, the higher the chances to rank to the very top. 

As you can see in the examples below, Google likes bullets, numbers, structured data and very straightforward answers. So, when aiming for your position zero and you optimize your site, always keep that in mind. In our case, almost all the answer boxes we’re ranking for have very clear steps, definitions, ordered lists and simple to follow instructions. 

Therefore, if you want to get featured in Google’s answers, try to write clearly, easy to understand and on the subject. As much as possible, try creating numbered lists or steps that respond directly to a query.  And also try optimizing your content as much as possible so you can make sure you’ll rank right on the top. You can use our Content Assistant for this job. 

Let’s say that we want to have direct answers in the SERPs for the query: “how to figure out sales tax “. Add the piece of content that you want to rank high with (arranged neatly and in order, just like Google likes it) and let the tool tell you what keywords you should use in your content to get a big chance of ranking to the very top.  

Step 4. Quick Tips to Rank in Google Answer Boxes on Position Zero

• When creating content with the purpose of targeting Google Answer Boxes, make sure it is using the correct markup.
• Try to use the query that a user would search to find the Google Answer Box within your title or meta description.
• Try to earn links or to some link building to your Google Answer Box content using anchor text that matches the Google Answer Box call to action.

If the answer box has accurate information, they provide the user with better usability by sparing them another click or providing a shortcut to the final action they need to do. Not to mention that being there can get a lot of SERP “landscape”, especially if you own some important keywords in your niche. 

How to Check Your Google Answer Box Rankings?

The easiest and fastest way to check if you’re ranking in an answer box is to go straight to your Google Search Console.

You might be inclined to say that a manual check among the search engines is the way to figure out if your website is listed in an answer box. We are not saying that this wouldn’t be a way to do things, but it takes way too much time and energy. 

Two clicks away and there you are, face to face with your best rankings. So, let’s see the exact steps you need to take in order to identify your winning keywords and to see if you appear in Google’s answers.

Step 1. Filter the Data You Need in Google Search Console 

Google Search Console –> Performance –>Queries –>Filter CTR & Position

Starting with January 2018, Google released the beta version of its tool to all users of Search Console. Not all the features have been added in the beta version of Search Console yet, for our current needs, this version works wonders.  So, once you’ve logged in within your Search Console (we used the beta version), you need to filter the data so you can find the much desired answer box search results rankings. 

First things first, go to the Performance Section.  Once you’re here, you’ll see a list of queries, along with data such as Total Clicks, Total Impressions, Average CTR (click-through-rate) and Average Position. What we are interested in are the last two elements:  Average CTR and Average Position. The bigger these two, the higher chance of ranking in an answer box. 

If you are having a click-trough-rate of 60 and you’re ranking on position one or two, it’s very likely that for that query you are ranked in an answer box. 

Therefore, we filter the data so that we’ll see only the queries that have an average CTR greater than 30 (let’s say) and an average position smaller than 3. If these two conditions meet, chances are that those queries will rank in an answer box. 

Step 2. Instantly Identify Your Answer Box Rankings

After the filtering was done, all you need to do is check those queries, look and enjoy the results, just like in the screenshots below. Appearing in Google rankings never felt better, right?

Indeed, considering Google Algorithm updates, the knowledge graph, it’s very likely that you’ll see different boxes results than your neighbor living next door, who might be seeing different answer box displays. This is why we always recommend using a rank tracker when monitoring your keywords.

But besides the fact that it’s time and money consuming, the personalized results issue is another reason why we don’t recommend doing a manual search to check for the keywords ranking on position zero. Peeking at the data coming straight from the Search Console, we can do a bit of keyword research and look at those queries which we know for sure that have a well-performing CTR (click-through rate) and positions. Just like in Shakira’s most famous song, data don’t lie. 

The examples can continue but we think you got the main idea and we wouldn’t want to get you bored you with examples from our own SEO tips blogspot. We recommend you to discover your own Google rankings on position 0 and enjoy the feeling of seeing your piece of content within any type of answer box. 

Google Answer Box Strategy & Statistics – A Research on 10k Keywords

As mentioned before, to figure out what it takes to get your website on position zero and perform an efficient Google answer box optimization, we set out to find out more about the issue, with a more scientific outlook on things.

This is how, a few years ago (in 2015 to be more precisely), we came up looking at about 10,000 queries. We looked for phrases such as “what is…” and “who is…”, adding just one letter after the phrase ( “what is a”, “what is b”, and so on up to “what is z”) and taking into account the autocomplete suggestions (since those are supposed to be most popular searches, therefore the ones most likely to elicit answer boxes).

To have a standardized cutoff point, we only took into account the first 10 autocomplete suggestions for each generated keyword. Using this method to extract the keywords, we selected a sample of keywords that are most likely to return answer boxes. In the following lines you can read the most interesting findings of this research. 

To be able to implement an efficient Google Answer Box strategy, we first need to understand some communalities between the rich answers. And all these because position zero in SERP hilghly higher improves CTR (click through rate), which increases traffic to your website.

Unique Domains Used by Google for Answers 

It seems that in the world of the search engines the rich get richer. When we analyzed the answers that were extracted from websites, we found out that they only came from 342 websites. So, on average, about 3.6 answers per website. But averages can be deceiving and in this case they actually are. Of those 342 websites (mainly, Wikipedia, dictionaries or Glossary) not all got the lion’s share.

Top 10 Ranking Position Distribution for the Answer Box 

Of the many factors that might influence the “distribution”, one that comes to mind almost instantly is the SERP ranking. So we split the websites according to this criterion, and look and behold, websites that were found on the first position (or position zero) in the organic results accounted for a third (33%) of all answer box information. The top 5 pages accounted for more than three quarters (77%) of the answers.

There was just 1 answer box out of the total 1,236 that came from a page not in the top 10 (statistically, that’s less than 0.1%).

So, rankings matter. You would be right to suggest that the relationship implied by this correlation may be more complicated here than what we are seeing from the numbers. Yet, you’d be taking a pretty serious chance to bet on being that 1 case in 1,236 that doesn’t need to be up high in the rankings to make it to the answer box. Or, to quote XKCD scienc-y web comic creator Randall Munroe, “Correlation does not imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing ‘look over there.’”

Title vs. No-Title in Google’s Rich Answer Boxes

As you’ll go around searching for different queries on Google, you’ll probably notice that there are two types of answer boxes, if we take into consideration the title: answer boxes which have a title and answer boxes which don’t have one. Just like in the case of any piece of content, the title can make a great difference. Let’s take a look at the screenshot below!

We are not talking only about the title’s purpose to garner attention and entice people to start reading your content, but about the basic purpose of titles: functionality.

Beyond all, people need to know what the content is about. From all the analyzed answer boxes, about 30% have a title, while the rest provide the information directly in the box, without any other introductions. Is a title beneficial? It definitely is, as it highly improves user’s experience.

With a majority of “no title” answer boxes, it has been clear since then where Google was heading with this matter. We are almost in 2020 and things have changed a lot. Having titles in answers box is more of a scarcity these days.  

Trusted Sites Distribution in Google Answer Boxes

In all fairness, we are inclined to cut you some slack and say that it’s not necessarily  the SERP rankings that matter. But that’s only because the SERP positioning might simply be an indicator of some other measure of your website’s quality: referring domains. This is a case where more is actually more and better.

Sites with 10k referring domains are more likely to have content appearing in answer boxes. 

Interestingly enough, a lot more answers (twice the number) come from domains with between 1 and 5,000 referring domains than from domains with between 5 and 10,000 referring domains. That may very well be, though, due to the arbitrary split or due to a lot of the values being around the cutoff point.

Despite this, however, the 1 K mark is a fairly good predictor: more than 80% of all answers come from places that have 1,000 referring domains or more. But that means there’s still a reasonable chance of popping up in answer boxes even with less than that.

However, if you drop under 100, it seems that you are on your own: less than a 3% chance of hitting the jackpot. Or at least this is how things used to be around 2015 when this research was conducted. 

Website Extraction vs. Website Definition in Answer Boxes

I invite you to take a look at another interesting finding, regarding the Website Definitions.

As we analyzed other answer boxes extracted from different sites, we find out that a lot of them seemed to be low quality and sometimes even unrelated.

Things have changed a lot along the way and Google has fine-tuned its algorithm and for sure answers are more reliable now. Yet, allow us to share some findings from a few years ago that raised two legit question:

• how can a site that Google doesn’t consider worthy to be listed in the first 10 results be given as a resource in the answer box?
• shouldn’t we worry about the quality of the information found in the answer box, given this situation?

It was an interesting example that we found then, the query “what is a 360 link”. Even if the web definition provided by the answer box came from Wikipedia (where 51% from all web definitions came from), it cannot be found in the top 10 results. Even more, the content provided is unrelated and has a commercial flavor (it refers to a product from the ProQuest company).

Nevertheless, mysterious are the ways of Google but equally determined are the people from cognitiveSEO to find out answers. As we browsed so many queries with answer boxes, we identified a pattern in the web definitions extraction. It looks like the majority of definitions that are not coming from Wikipedia have a similar URL pattern using the words “glossary” or “dictionary” (and other variations).

Thereby, having  issues, answer boxes generated from Web Definitions didn’t look very reliable. Yet, in the case of website extraction things were more settled and we didn’t encounter the same problems. Judging by the fact that the data are shown differently, we assumed that the extraction from web definitions vs. Entity Extraction done using the Knowledge Graph was made totally different.

The Website Extraction seemed more precise, while the Website Definition seemed more basic.

Can I Advertise in the Google Answers Box?

According to Google, the short answer is no, you cannot advertise on answer boxes as their purpose is informational and not commercial. 

Here’s what John Muller from Google said  about “branding” the answer boxes:

We need to watch out […] so it doesn’t turn out to an advertisement for a web site but rather that it brings more information to the search results about this general topic.
	John Muller
	Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google / @JohnMu

Yet, as one might assume, advertising in answer boxes is something that any business would crave to. Just imagine the opportunities that it may bring.
But as long as there is another online advertising platform developed by Google (Google Ads), most likely advertisement in answer boxes is something that belongs (perhaps) to the future. 

Nevertheless, this doesn’t mean that there are no debatable situations on this matter. 

Let’s take an example: if you look, for instance, on how much does a dental implant cost. 

The answer box I got contains a link to an agency that provides brokerage for dental plans & more. As you can see, the Spirit Dental & Vision Company takes a lot of the search engine ranking page landscape. And although the answer box is not linking directly to a pricing page of a dental office, it does link to a company that sells dental services to a targeted audience, which is pretty much the same.

For this business, showing up in the answer box is most likely more valuable than showing up first in the search results when it comes to traffic and conversions. 

Yet, we need to understand that the search engine works on advanced AI algorithms. Even in this case, Google ranked on the position zero an article that is a very informative blog post. It informs the searchers about the cost, giving them lot of additional data on why it costs so much, how much should they expect to pay, what other costs are involved, etc. The blog-post is “answer box friendly”, it has the information well structured, and firstly, it responds to the query; after reading the article, you’ll have a price in mind when thinking about implants. 

Screenshot taken from https://www.spiritdental.com/blog/individuals/the-cost-of-dental-implants-broken-down

It’s true that other URLs ranking for how much does a dental implant cost have well structured data as well, a fact that leads us to the conclusion that most likely Google is testing and showing several sites within its direct answer section for the mentioned query. 

Screenshot taken from https://www.authoritydental.org/dental-implants-cost

There is another interesting situation when it comes to answer boxes and advertising that caught my attention, and that is the dedicated boxes for pricing. 

If you’re interested in finding out “how much does a passport cost”, be advised that the information in the answer box comes from the website of the UK government. We’re not sure whether this is because of the language settings, the IP, the fact that this was the most popular query, or some other factors as well, but even though the source may vary depending on the language settings, it will very likely remain governmental.

So, the landscape is fairly clear for generic products: how much does a gallon of milk cost, how much does a gallon of gas cost, etc., most likely you’ll get answers coming from statistics institutes, news publications or governmental sites. 

But what about products of really big brands?

For instance, if you’re giving into the electric car craze and want to find out just “how much does a Tesla cost”, you will get your answer right at the top, in a special box. You will actually get a price in the answer box, alongside with info about their stock.

When it comes to pricing,  the information is provided from third party sites, magazines, news websites and not the official selling car lot.

This fact alone says a lot about Google’s position when it comes to advertising in answer boxes. 

Whether we are looking for an iphone 5’s price, a google ad or garcinia cambogia weight loss pills, we can get an idea of this item’s prices, though not in a direct marketing-selling approach but from some third parties authorities.

What is Google actually doing here?

Google provides the users with a good experience by trying to offer an answer to the question, while keeping them away from the official advertising sites of these products.  

None of the sites we are sent to are selling the products in question nor have a direct connection to the marketing strategy of these items.

Not even when we ask Google how much a Google ad costs, we are not directed to the AdWords page as expected, but to a unbiased blog post that talks about this matter.  This “politically correct” Google attitude makes us have a better understanding of the saying “more catholic than the Pope himself”.  Yet, Google doesn’t have the price list for all the products as it gets confused when it is asked “how much a nexus 5 costs” (to be mentioned that Nexus is a Google product) or “how much a macbook costs” (a very well-known product).

Can Any Site Appear in Google’s Direct Answer Box?

Any site can appear in Google’s answer box if it offers a fit answer for the query and if it’s considered to be a topical authority in the field.

Let’s dig a bit more into the topical versus generic sites for a better understanding of this matter.

It’s reasonable to assume that when it can’t find its answers on an already trusted-and-verified site, Google will try to take some extra precautions by looking for authority sites or sites that it can trust.

Let’s look at the examples below and try to understand the way Google is making use of topical authority sites and the Generic ones.

If we try to figure out what a quantum computer or back pain is, Google will quote from a generic site (Wikipedia), giving us an overall idea about the computation device or the unpleasant but yet so common back pain.

But what happens when we try to find some info about a headache or a sciatica pain (a condition akin to back pain)?
Apparently, we are led to more specialized sites, to some pages that Google considers to be high authority pages. It is well known that Google’s goal is to return the best possible results that match not just based on the exact match query but on the intent of the user doing the query, boosting sites that offer a more in-depth topic covered than a simple article about the problem.

There’s a special note to make here, namely that medical terms seem to be filtered. For example, for sensitive terms searches, you are very likely to be instructed by Google to “Consult a doctor if you have a medical concern”. It is possible that the big G may have a self-medication monitoring system, giving different results in the answer box according to the severity of the health condition.

Furthermore,  the size of a business card or the date of the next solar eclipse are considered to be specific questions that need to be answered by topical sites with high authority in the field.  With the risk of redundancy, I am bringing back in discussion the fact that sites which bring  “additional value” to the web are considered to be topical authority  and promoted as such, whether it comes to SERP or answer boxes.

Therefore, it seems like that for more specific queries, content based Topical Authority Sites are quoted more in answer boxes compared to sites that only cover the topic briefly (even if the site covering the topic briefly has a lot of generic authority).

More articles written on the same topic increase the chances for the site to be treated as a “Topical Authority Content Site” on that specific topic and be listed in the answer box. But what Google considers to be high-quality content might remain a legit question.

Does Google Answer All Questions?

The percentage of search results with answer boxes out of the total number of search results is fairly small.

According to Google results, the short answer is no.

There is a dedicated featured snippet with this exact answer coming from Quora. It’s true that the answer does not refer to answer boxes, but to answers in general. However, even when we’re talking about Google’s rich answers, the answer remains the same, no. 

On the research we made a few years ago, research mentioned in a chapter above, we found out that only a small percentage of queries have dedicated answer boxes. We are in 2020 already and it’s very likely that those numbers increased.

Out of 10,353 queries, only 1,792 returned answer boxes, which is roughly only 17% of the total number of searches. 

We can say that this claim is true in general, since our sample size of 10,000 is enough to extrapolate for a population of pretty much any size with a high confidence level.

While this may sound pretty unbelievable, that’s just how statistics works. Admittedly, we haven’t really been using a perfectly random sample, so let’s just say that the claim we made earlier is true of all searches that could potentially yield an answer box: off all that could, rather few actually do.

How Do You Delete an Answer Box?

There is no such thing as “delete answer box” button.

If Google considers that a piece of content is relevant enough for a specific query, it can choose to show it within the direct answer box.

Yet,  you have the possibility to opt out of direct answer section. 

You can opt out of Google’s special boxes by preventing snippets on your page using the <meta name=”googlebot” content=”nosnippet”> tag on your page. This will remove all snippets on your page, including those in regular search results.

However, let’s say that you don’t want to opt out of all snippets but you want to remove just one answer box where the information is inaccurate. 

You have two possibilities: check out exactly where the content is extracted from and correct the piece of content; or let Google know that it’s a piece of information that is not accurate or not appropriate to be shown in the special box due to different reasons, even legal ones. 

Is Google Ever Wrong? Google Answer Box Failures

Technically speaking, Google is never wrong. Because all Google does is matching the query with an answer that it considers to be the best one.

However, this doesn’t mean that there isn’t mismatching in SERP in general, as well as in the direct answers section. 

Of course, you could make the case that not getting an answer box might be preferable to getting one with wrong or misguiding information. And you might be right.

Since we are an SEO blog, let’s look at a couple of examples from our very own field. Again, we need to mention that the search is an ever evolving industry and some of the examples given below might have been corrected meanwhile. 

If you’d like to know, for instance, “what is an SEO company”, the information you’ll get in the definition is about SEO in general. Close enough in this case, but not what I asked.

Things get worse down the road if we ask “what is seo company india”. That, you’ll quibble, doesn’t make much sense now, does it? How could we possibly expect to get an answer box for that? Well, we didn’t. But we did get the box anyway. A nonsensical definition from a shady website.
In fairness, the definition was nonsensical because it kind of looked like keyword stuffing. And the site looked shady because… well, it was.

That wasn’t very fair, we’ll admit, but let’s try a query that does make sense: “what is an seo keyword”. Not only does this make sense, but there should be plenty of reasonable, unbiased definitions lying around. And yet Google picked another slew of stuffed keywords from a shady website. There’s probably a bit of irony in there.

One last try: “what is an seo tool”. Again we get an incorrect definition (this one at least is an actual sentence, but not the answer to our query) from a somewhat shady site – or, at the very least, one whose presence in the answer box is shady.

There are other examples as well, from a variety of fields, which highlight the fact that the Feedback button at the bottom right of the search box is not merely a courtesy, but a potentially crucial tool, in a community-effort-buildup kind of way, for the development and improvement of the search box.

Therefore,  the answer box algorithm understands almost all of the 5 Ws: “why”, “who”, “what”, “when” and “where”. It doesn’t always get the right interpretation in the context though. For instance, if you’ve become nostalgic and you’re wondering “when the iPhone was released”, you’ll get June 29, 2007 as the date the iPhone was originally introduced, which is correct. Same if your question is about the latest model.

If, however, you’ve suddenly become a more practical, future-oriented person, and want to know“ when the iphone 6 is released”, you’ll only be reminded of the June 29, 2007 date for the introduction of the first iPhone. That’s not very helpful, but maybe Google doesn’t know the exact release date, so it’s understandable. Only that’s not the issue here.

If you were to search “when is the new iphone to be released”, you’ll actually get useful results about the iPhone 6 (which is the new one) release date speculations. Does Google not know that the newest version of the iPhone will be the iPhone 6? It is entirely possible. Further testing the search engine by inquiring about iPhone 8 or iPhone 10 seems to greatly confuse the big G and cause it to return incorrect or misguided results.

If people are searching for some iphone models that are not yet released, the search engine gets confused and doesn’t logically answer to the query. It offers info on some other versions of the phone or worse, for a totally different product. 

There are a lot of questions that simply go unanswered.

While the algorithm is quite impressive, it’s not 100% reliable yet.

Which is probably why we can assume that Google presents you with an accurate answer box if the questions are specific enough. It’s a “question and answer” game, where both need to be as specific as possible to be worth for a rich result.

If you’re wondering “how much gold is worth”, you’ll get some search results but no preferred answer. If, however, you’re asking “how much gold is worth per ounce”, then you’ll at least get an estimate in the answer box.

The same goes for the price of milk. If you’re simply asking “how much milk costs”, you’ll get a bunch of results, but no preferred answer in the answer box. This changes, however, if you ask “how much does a gallon of milk cost” as this time you get a preferred answer from a page on a news organization website.

Does a Google Answer Box API Exist?

There is no official Google answer box API available. Yet, there are some workarounds that may help you on this matter.

There were some discussions around the Google answer box API matter in the past, and even if there seemed to be some solutions, they are now deprecated.  There is an instant answer API available from the DuckDuckGo search engine, yet, the responses aren’t as robust as Google’s.

To retrieve the information returned from the answer box you can try using the cognitiveSEO API. The API allows you to accurately track all the keywords you or your competitors are ranking on, while also giving you the possibility of “hunting” position zero ranking opportunities. 

One of the main factors of your website’s performance is the ability to track its keyword rankings accurately. Once you put a Google answer box strategy to work, you need to see how well your SEO efforts translate into rankings and continue doing the things that work best to keep the progress growing. 

Seeing the correlation between your rankings and your Google answer box optimization and SEO efforts will let you easily see which changes have a positive effect (so you can focus more on these areas) and which may have a negative one. 

Conclusion

A pretty famous computer scientist said that “the question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.”  

Answer box is indeed, as Google stated: much of the work on language, speech, translation and visual processing relies on Machine Learning and AI that raises deep scientific and engineering challenges.

Everyday, Google search finds more “humane” ways to interact with its users and provide more direct answers.  With all the strings attached, appearing in the answer boxes is a way new level in the search industry and understanding them shouldn’t be just a recreational hobby but a must if you want your site to be known and ranked the best possible.

SERP landscape has changed a lot, you can see that just by looking at some SEO stats, and mostly because of the highly technological progress, Artificial Intelligence included, of course. Of course, advanced SEO tools like ours and other free SEO tools can help out in this situation. The artificial intelligence process suggests that the line between intelligent machines and people blurs most when a puree is made of that identity. No matter how much we’d like everything to be standardized, in the search industry results are not based directly on exact rules.

Rich snippets might be quite controversial as the Google Search user interface lets Google’s users view and copy content without visiting the content provider’s website. It can also has a big impact on dwell time. In addition to losing organic traffic, webmasters or content marketers might be also a bit “upset” with the fact that their perfectly well-functioning website doesn’t appear in the answer box while some broken site that doesn’t exist anymore is taking up the space . Double ouch for Google answer boxes!

Answer box results are highly important these days, and the steps to get your site ranking in the answer boxes queries should appear in all SEO training as well as advanced and beginners guide to SEO.

Proving Google that your site is trustworthy and deserves to be on the top of the SERP it’s way harder to be done than to be said. Of course, advanced tools like cognitiveSEO can make your life easier. But it pays off on the long term. Moreover, following the tips that we came up with in this post on how to optimize for the Google Answer Box might be also really helpful.

The post How to Win the Google Answer Box → The Ultimate Guide appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

If you understand what your users want and what their intent is when they are searching for a specific query, half of the job for ranking on that keyword is done. Of course, there is still a lot of work to do (like knowing what are the 3 types of intent and what type of content to write for each type of keyword and search intent). The good news is that this article will let you know everything you need to know about search intent, from A to Z: from how to understand user intent to how to best optimize for it and rank to the top for the keywords that interest you most. 

1. What Is Search Intent? 
2. The Shift from Keyword Intent to AI-Driven Contextual Intent
3. What Is User Intent in SEO?
4. What Are the Types of Search Intent?
5. How to Optimize for Each Type of Search Intent
6. Why & How to Optimize for Informational Search Intent
   1. What Type of Content Do You Need to Create for Informational Queries?
   2. How to Create Relevant Content for the Informational Keyword Intent
7. How to Optimize for Navigational Search Intent 
   1. What Type of Content Do You Need for Navigational Queries?
   2. How to Create Relevant Content for the Navigational Keyword Intent
8. How to Optimize for Transactional Search Intent 
   1. What Type of Content Do You Need for Transactional Queries?
   2. How to Create Relevant Content for the Transactional Keyword Intent
9. The Challenge of Matching Search Intent 
10. What Type of Search Intent Should You Start Optimizing For

1. What Is Search Intent? 

Search intent or keyword intent is the reason why people conduct a specific search. Why are they searching? What are they trying to achieve through their search?
Are they trying to figure out the answer to a question or do they want to reach a specific website? 

Over the years, Google has become more and more able to determine the search intent of people. The whole Google SERP now is trying to best fit the search intent and not the exact searched keyword. There are situations when the exact searched term is not even included in the Google search results page. And this happens because Google has become better and better at determining the search intent of people.

Google wants to rank high the pages that best fit the user’s search intent. And lately, it has managed to do that pretty well. 

Going back to the riddle from the beginning of the article, it’s true that we might not find out why did the chicken cross the road; yet, what we will find out (if you haven’t googled it already) is what this riddle is all about. And we’ll get videos about it and even a featured snippet explaining what’s all about. And this happens because the search engine understands my intent when searching for this query. 

2. The Shift from Keyword Intent to AI-Driven Contextual Intent

Search intent has always been one of the most important ranking factors in SEO.

In the past, search engines mainly relied on keywords to understand what users wanted. If someone searched for “best running shoes,” Google would analyze the query and return pages that matched that specific intent.

Today, things are becoming more complex.

With the rise of AI-powered search engines and generative AI platforms, understanding intent goes beyond matching keywords. Modern AI systems analyze context, sentiment, entities, and the overall reputation of a brand across the web to determine which sources deserve visibility.

In other words, it’s no longer just about what your website says about your brand. It’s also about what the rest of the internet says about it.

This is why contextual brand intent is becoming increasingly important. AI systems don’t simply evaluate a page based on a target keyword. They try to understand how a brand is perceived within a specific topic, industry, or purchasing journey.

To better understand this context, you need to monitor your brand’s digital footprint beyond your website.

As an AI visibility and social listening platform, BrandMentions app allows you to track  online conversations, and sentiment websites, news outlets, forums, and social media channels.

This gives you a clearer picture of the trust and authority signals that both search engines and AI-powered systems use when evaluating your brand.

As search continues to evolve, optimizing for keywords alone is no longer enough. Building a strong, trustworthy presence across the web has become an essential part of SEO, Answer Engine Optimization (AEO), and visibility in AI-powered search experiences.

3. What Is User Intent in SEO? 

User intent to SEO is like a moth to a flame. 

Putting it simple, if you want to rank high in Google, you have to offer content that best fits the users’ search intent. If you’re not able to do so, chances are that you’ll not be able to be on Google’s hall of fame, meaning its first page of search results. 

There are about 3.5 billion searches per day. And according to statistics, a searcher uses around 3 words in a search query.

Google has to figure out what exactly do they want, so it can offer them the search engine page results they need. And your job is to create content that is relevant to the Google users and matches their search intent.

4. What Are the Types of Search Intent?

Let’s say, for instance, that your search is related to sunglasses. Based on the keywords you use, the search engine might interpret your query as having different intents behind it:

• informational (if you search for “sunglasses polarized meaning”);
• navigational (if you search for the name of a particular brand of sunglasses);
• transactional (if you search for “cheap sunglasses” or “buy sunglasses”);

If you’re wondering which search intent is the most popular, you need to know that studies showed that more than 80% of the total search intents are informational, 20% being almost equally split between navigational and transactional. 

The concept of search intent was first coded way back in 2002 by Andrei Broder, and consisted of the first 3 categories illustrated above. These 3 categories also seem to be matching Google’s quality guidelines on understanding different types of queries. They call them:

• Know (informational),
• Do (transactional),
• Go (navigational).

By now you might be thinking: OK; that’s great. But how will I recognize a type of search intent when I see it? 

In the following lines, I’ll highlight the characteristics of each type of search intent so you can better understand them.

Wouldn’t be great if there was a tool that automatically classifies the search intent for you?

Did you know?

 

The Content Optimizer & Keyword Tool from cognitiveSEO automatically classifies the search intent for you. 

You just need to type in the keyword you are interested in optimizing for, and the tool does most of the job for you. The tool performs keyword research, it will tell you what is the user search intent, how popular is that keyword, how difficult it is to rank on it, and cream of the crop: what it takes to rank on that keyword, meaning, what are the exact keywords and links that boosted that page in the top of the search results. 

 

5. How to Optimize for Each Type of Search Intent

Even if most of the searches have an informational intent, we believe that all three categories of search intent need your attention as they can be seen as a cycle in the buyer’s decision and not individual searches. And that’s why it’s very important to understand how to tackle each type of internet search and how to best optimize your content for them.

6. Why & How to Optimize for Informational Search Intent 

Informational search queries are queries that cover a broad topic for which there may be thousands of relevant results: how tall Jennifer Aniston is, how to peel a pomegranate, steps to apply mascara, etc. Aside from these questions, the main question is how to make your website stand out and respond to the user’s need.

You might say that informational queries are hard to monetize so, what’s the point in optimizing for them?

While that remains true, optimizing for them is totally worth it. Google has a “special treatment” for these types of queries: Featured Snippets (also known as answer boxes, knowledge graphs or Google direct answers). If you’re searching for something like “how many calories does an apple have”, you’ll get a direct answer, highlighted within a box, just like in the examples below. We did a really cool research on answer boxes a while ago; you should check it out. 

Being on the Google’s answer box will do you a big favor, making you appear on Google’s first page not once, but twice.

So it’s not just showing up in the results, it’s showing up in the answer box, which has a different status in the mind of the searcher. For more info on answer boxes, you can check out this research we performed some time ago. 

Now that we hope we’ve convinced you of the importance of optimizing for informational search queries, here are some tips on how to do it. 

Most of the time, informational search queries contain question words like: 

• How can I
• What is
• How to
• What are the benefits of
• How do/does
• Ways to
• Guide
• Tutorial

This means that your content has to answer these questions, requirements the searcher has. The question remains: how should your content look like to make sure your content is optimized for these type of search queries?

6.1 What Type of Content Do You Need to Create for Informational Queries?

The users want to “know” something so they will use words that will help them learn more about a topic.  

The “formula” you should target is informational query + your industry term.

Let’s take the sunglasses niche for instance; in this case, you might want to optimize for “what are the benefits of sunglasses” or “how to clean sunglasses”. You have the informational query (what are, how to, what is, etc) + your industry term (in our case, sunglasses).

Below you can see a screenshot on how the Google SERP looks like for the “what are the benefits of sunglasses” query. As you can see, the very first result, on position zero is a direct answer with a list of benefits wearing sunglasses have. That piece of content responds directly to the user search intent; as you can see in the screenshot below, on the right side there is the website. Its content is simple, yet it responds perfectly to the user’s need. 

You need to create content that meets the user’s need and will also rank high on Google. 

The most effective content types for informational search intent should include:

• blog posts with tips, lists
• how-to videos
• infographics
• step by step guides
• checklists

Your main goal should be to create high-quality content that is useful and provides helpful information relevant to the query. Keep in mind that the users want hands-on info and direct answers. And through the content you create you can both meet your users’ needs plus drive traffic and leads to your site. To have added value, create content optimized for search intent.

6.2 How to Create Relevant Content for the Informational Keyword Intent

Step 1. Perform a quick Google SERP analysis

Every keyword research or content optimization process should start with a SERP analysis together with competitor analysis. The Ranking Analysis from the Content Optimizer Tool gives you tons of insights related to the analyzed keyword. Quick and easy, you get to know the search volumes, what type of content ranks on that keyword, how difficult it is to rank on that query (by following keyword difficulty), as well as how popular that keyword is among searchers. Also, the tool lets you know the exact keywords and links that boosted that page in the top Google results to easily optimize your content. 

Step 2. Create relevant & optimized content 

Remember when I told you that the Content Optimizer does most of the job for you? I know I’m biased and I don’t want to praise the tool too much, but the reality is that it does most of the job for you. Once you performed the ranking analysis, what you need to do is start writing a new piece of content or optimize the existing one and the Content Assistant will let you know the exact keywords you need to use so your content will be relevant for the informational search intent. 

Step 3. Get new keywords & rankings opportunities

You can also use the cognitiveSEO Content Optimizer to discover other queries that your users might be interested in. Searchers have more than one question when it comes to products from your business. Take the opportunity and offer them relevant content for most of their questions. You can use the same Content Optimizer for this task. The tool has two sections that will automatically let you know what other questions are related to your search query:

The Keyword Explorer  – this section is great for keyword analysis and discovering new keyword opportunities. It also gives you the possibility of seeing only the question suggestions. Get inspired by the list of questions, check out the relevancy of the question, its volume, CPC (cost per click), and choose the one that is the most suitable and profitable.  

The People Also Ask section – the Content Assistant will let you know the exact keywords you should use in your content, what are people searching, but it will also offer you a set of questions that relate to your original search query. You should consider answering these questions in your content or create new content starting from these questions. 

By being a topical authority in your niche, you’ll boost not only your brand awareness but your ranks as well. As mentioned above, back in 2007, which we know is a lot of time in the years of the Internet, a very interesting study suggested that from a total of one million analyzed queries, 80% were informational. That’s an impressive percentage. And even if time has passed by and user’s search queries types might have changed, it is clear that the informational search is the most common type of search. 

7. How to Optimize for Navigational Search Intent 

With a navigational query, the user is looking to reach a particular website or product/service that they already know about. In this case, there is probably only one likely website that they’re looking to reach. 

Most likely the user is searching for brand terms or names of products or services already known: facebook login, amazon, adidas, etc. You might be thinking why is this a search and why isn’t the user accessing the website directly? One reason could be that the user doesn’t know the exact brand or because it’s easier to type “youtube” within the search bar, instead of typing the whole URL. 

For the cases when the user is not accessing the URL directly, you need to know that navigational search queries include: 

• Brand name
• Service/Product name
• Brand Login 
• Reviews
• Location of
• Directions to
• Near me
• Hours of
• Cost of
• Testimonials

Once again, you might be thinking what’s the point in optimizing for these types of queries since the user knows exactly what they’re searching for and Google will list the brand name searched by the user to the very top of the SERP.

While it’s true that you don’t stand much of a chance targeting a navigational query (unless you happen to own the site that the person is looking for), there might be some room for optimizing for navigational queries. 

7.1 What Type of Content Do You Need for Navigational Queries?

The “formula” you should target is your own brand name or navigational search query + brand name. 

for example: Ray Ban Sunglasses, Ray Ban Sunglasses Presentation Video, etc. 

To make sure you meet your user’s needs, these types of content should be suitable when it comes to navigational search intent: 

• Clear landing pages and online forms
• Product demo videos 
• Case studies
• E-books
• Presentation pages
• Product and service lists
• Webinars
• or any type of content that relates to your navigational keywords

Let’s take the search “brand mentions”, for instance. As the Content Optimizer already tells us, this is a navigational query, as the user might want to access brandmentions.com. Yet, as you can see in the search results, there are many other pages that are ranking well for this query by targeting “brand mentions” as a topic users might want to find more about. 

Just by taking a look at the SERP analysis you can easily understand how the whole picture look like for this query. And while you won’t be able to overthrow the main brand ranking for its brand name, you might find yourself a place on the first page. 

Another important aspect here: make sure you own your own brand’s navigational query. Although it sounds surreal, there might be situations where the brand itself is not ranking first for their navigational query. Also, make sure you optimize for all “versions” of your brand (different spelling, common typos, brand name adjustments in different countries, etc.) 

Furthermore, we mentioned above that the search intent types must be seen more as a cycle than an individual search. And here’s what we’re talking about: remaining in the sunglasses area, if someone, by searching “how to clean sunglasses” found a specific product that helps with the cleaning (let’s say Windex), most likely they will search for Windex.

Therefore, it may happen that an informational search will be followed by a navigational one. 

7.2 How to Create Relevant Content for the Navigational Keyword Intent

As mentioned before, as you might say that you don’t stand much of a chance targeting a navigational query (unless you happen to own the site that the person is looking for), there is still room for improvement. Therefore, we recommend you to follow these steps to create relevant and optimize content. (the steps are elaborated above). 

8. How to Optimize for Transactional Search Intent 

With a transactional search query the users are looking to buy a product; are connected to commercial intents. This is a query that indicates an intent to complete a transaction, such as making a purchase, finding a place to make a purchase, or completing a task. For example: iphone x, where to buy Saeco coffee machine, Metallica tickets for sale, etc. 

To get to pages where they can make a purchase, searchers use buyer or transactional intent keywords that can include: 

• Buy
• Where to buy
• Discount
• Apply
• Purchase
• Coupons
• Schedule appointment
• Reserve
• Deals
• For sale
• Order
• Download

8.1 What Type of Content Do You Need for Transactional Queries?

As these are exactly the kind of queries that are mostly likely to deliver ROI in search (organic or paid), you need to know what type of content you should write for transactional search queries. 

The formula you should target should be: transactional keywords + brand/product/service name/industry terms. 

for example: discount ray ban sunglasses or where to buy ray ban sunglasses. 

You can easily target transactional queries with many types of optimized content or even blog posts or pages optimized for local SEO.

We recommend you should consider optimizing these types of content for your transactional queries: 

• Product pages
• Pricing pages
• Sign up pages
• Live demos
• Appointments pages
• Free consultations
• Sales pages

Now more than ever, Google is focused on offering a personalized experience for each user and their search intent, thus local optimization plays a crucial part in the play. When it comes to transactional search intent, you might want to keep in mind that local optimization is highly important. People are looking for places to buy things, they want to schedule appointments so being there, in the top results when they are searching for suck queries is what interest you. 

Therefore, try optimizing as well at a local level. The same Content Optimizer can be used for precise locations so choose the exact location you want to rank on, and see what it takes to rank be in top Google results.

Of course, offering relevant & optimized content at a local level is just one of the strategies when it comes to transactional search intents. Perform SERP analysis and check what your competitors are doing. See what it take to rank on the top and understand the user’s need. 

8.2 How to Create Relevant Content for the Transactional Keyword Intent

keep in mind that In this stage of user intent – transactional search queries – the user is ready to buy, is ready to take action. And most of the search results that show up with this query are from online stores that are selling the product the consumer wants to buy. Make sure that your existing content supports user intent. What you will need here will be product pages. Analyze your competitors, see what it took for them to rank and follow the three steps of creating relevant content for the transactional keyword intent. 

9. The Challenge of Matching Search Intent 

It’s important to keep in mind that search intent is not static. Think about searching for “amazon” – 9 times out of 10, this will probably be navigational, but during the past week or two, quite a few of the searches may have been informational, an effort to better understand news snippets or social media posts about wildfires in the Amazonian forest.

SERP answer boxes also seem tailored to the intent – you might get a definition for an informational query and a list of shopping pages for a transactional query. If there is a “people have also asked” section on display, it will make it even clearer how Google, for instance, interprets the intent for a particular keyword.

Some keywords tend to be associated more consistently with a given intent than others.

It’s likely that “facebook”, for instance, will always be associated with the social network and, on its own, will always have a mainly navigational intent behind it. Other keywords, however, tend not to be consistently associated with a singular intent. This can be exactly the kind of opportunity that might appeal to someone who is working in the SEO industry.

If the keywords you want to rank for have clear and consistent intent behind them, you can tailor your content format and structure to be the best possible match for that intent. 

A search for “how to make tiramisu” already has the clue in the title – it’s likely going to be a “how to” type of article that’s going to draw attention and given the context, a blog is probably the best type of page to host this content. On the other hand, with a search like “iphone 10 vs samsung galaxy 10”, you would fully expect for the first page of results to be filled with comparative review type pages from specialized review websites.

But aside from the format and structure of the page holding the content, there might also be an “angle” to it, which is similar to the USP (unique selling proposition) in marketing.

You might be looking for how to make tiramisu, but wouldn’t you prefer to know how to make the best one? or the most original one? Sure, you’re looking for headphones, but are you interested in the best quality headphones or the cheapest headphones? And the list goes on.

When it comes to format and structure, you want to go with the flow and do what everybody else does, because that is what has been proven to get results (search results, to be more exact). However, when it comes to the angle, that’s your time to be original. Format and structure land you on the front page. Angle can influence which position in the rankings you’ll show at.

10. What Type of Search Intent Should You Start Optimizing For

People are no longer only following a linear path from awareness to consideration to purchase. Google revamped this mental model, adding the Zero Moment of Truth (ZMOT) which takes account of the fact that purchasing decisions are now heavily led by self-directed online research. To optimize for search intent, we need to look for what customers are trying to achieve.

Know which rules to follow and which to break.

Search intent should dictate the type of content you create.

If the keyword has informational intent, write a blog post. If it has transactional intent, create a product page. Google rankings aren’t static. They fluctuate and change over time.

Given that you’re relying on the nature of the current top-ranking pages to infer search intent, that can be a problem. Reason being, what you’re actually doing is judging search intent based on a single snapshot in time.

If you were to analyze the top-ranking pages next month, or the month after, your understanding of search intent may be different. For that reason, it also pays to constantly check your targeted keywords and constantly update your content to make it as relevant as possible. 

Understanding search intent and adapting to it can yield numerous benefits. To mention just a few:

• It can reduce your bounce rates

Only the people who are interested in what you’re offering are going to land on your pages – and stay for more.This, however, does not mean reduced visits; on the contrary, you are more likely to show up further up in the rankings when there is a consistent match between the demand (the need for the searches) and the offer;
You are also likely to get a wider audience, as Google often finds matches between related types of queries, so ranking high for a series of keywords will likely open up new possibilities for related ones.

• Understand what you are offering and how it matches with the intent of the users 

Firstly, you need to figure out what your page stands for – is it mostly informational or transactional? If you want both, you might have to use different formats (website and blog) and very different structuring for your posts. You should also consider how to best link the two so that, on the one hand, it’s easy to slide from one into the other, but on the other hand, Google doesn’t think you’re trying to pull a fast one on the users and offer them transactional content when all they wanted was informational content.

• Use this knowledge to look for opportunities & niches

Do research on keywords and how they are associated with intent. Try to see if the keywords you’re interested in have stable or fluctuating intent associated with them. Get really familiar with the vocabulary for a particular intent, whether it’s informational, transactional or investigative. See what other keywords might be associated with not only the same query but also the same intent. Try to identify competitor gaps, and create content that fills in those gaps. Be aware that intent can be both active and passive and it is a lot more difficult to predict passive intent. A search might not include any of the traditional words related to buying or pricing, but still hide a transactional need.

Behind every Google search, there is an intention. If you want your business to be discovered by users on the web, you need to figure out that intention. And if you find it hard to figure it out, no worries as this is why tools like the Content Optimizer exist on the market, to help you increase what matter most for your business: traffic and therefore, sales.

The post How To Identify & Best Optimize for User Search Intent. The Step by Step Guide appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

But how does this PageSpeed Insights Tool from Google actually work? And, more importantly, does page speed affect SEO? You’ll find everything you need to know in this article.

The PageSpeed Insights Tool didn’t use to be very good in the past. Most of the information there could be found relatively easy elsewhere and it didn’t quite indicate speed itself. However, Google has recently updated the tool and it’s a lot better. Unfortunately, it’s also a lot harder to understand.

However, this tool has became popular among SEOs through PageSpeed Insights, which is, in fact, powered by Lighthouse, but provides the information in an easy to follow format, on a web page.

1. What Is Google PageSpeed Insights?
   1. Mobile vs. Desktop
   2. What is page speed actually?
2. Does PageSpeed Insights Affect SEO? Is 100/100 Score Essential?
3. Why Brand Authority Matters Beyond Technical SEO
4. PageSpeed Insights Metrics
   1. Field & Lab Data (Performance Metrics)
   2. Opportunities & Diagnostics
5. How Is the PageSpeed Insights Score Calculated?
6. Key Points in Improving the PageSpeed Insights Score
   1. Server response time
   2. Image compression
   3. HTML & CSS Structure
   4. Minification & Script Compression
   5. Cache Policy
   6. Lightweight Theme & Plugins
7. How to Bulk Check the PageSpeed Insights Score
8. Other Tools for Measuring & Improving Site Speed
   1. Pingdom
   2. GT-Metrix
   3. mod_pagespeed
   4. Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

What Is Google PageSpeed Insights?

PageSpeed Insights is an online tool provided by Google which is used to identify web performance issues on sites. Although mostly related to technical SEO issues, the tools also analyze the site from a User Experience and accessibility point of view.

You can access PageSpeed Insights by visiting https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/.

You can enter the URL there and after a few seconds the tool will return a page with some results regarding your website’s performance. At the top, there will be a general score, which is an average of multiple factors. Below you will see detailed information about what actually affects your speed.

However, it isn’t the only PageSpeed tool provided by Google. There also is mod_pagespeed, a server module used to solve these speed issues, and the full fledged Lighthouse (the site analysis tool that powers everything), available in Chrome itself. There are also a number of Chrome Extensions related to Google’s PageSpeed Insights.

We will discuss briefly about all of them throughout this article, but we will focus mainly on PageSpeed Insights as it seems to be the handiest tool most SEOs use when checking a website.

Mobile vs. Desktop

When you insert a page to test it, Google will give two scores: one for the mobile version and one for the desktop version.

Initially, the PageSpeed Tool only gave one score, for the Desktop version. But recently, mobile usage has became more and more popular. As of 2018, more than 50% of search engine users search on mobile devices. As Google moved to a mobile first index, it also made sense for them to test mobile versions for speed first.

However, if you have a responsive design, you might think that these versions are mostly identical.

If so, why do they have different scores?

Mobile: When you use the PageSpeed Insights tool, the first result you’ll get is for mobile speed. This means that your website has been tested on a mobile connection, probably with a 4G connection, as it seems to be the most common speed around the US at least.

https://www.uscellular.com/coverage-map/voice-and-data-maps.html

However, keep in mind that many mobile users around the world still get only 3G signal and, although they have a slower connection speed, they still expect the website to load really fast.

And here’s the problem. It’s not always about your site, it’s more about the connection’s speed. It might seem like your site is slow when, in reality, the connection speed is slow.

Desktop: On desktop, the score is higher because the connection speed is higher. That’s just the thing with light and fiber optics. Unless you live in the UK, of course, and still have cups and string internet.

So the website goes through the same testing, but it’s mostly the connection speed that differs.

That’s why mobile comes first, as mobile devices usually have slower connections. Things might change with 5G but, until then, make sure you focus on improving your site speed for mobile devices.

What exactly is Page Speed?

OK, so we know what the tool does: it gives a score based on how fast it thinks your site is. But what exactly is page speed?

Page Speed is the speed at which an individual page loads on your website. Different pages can have different speeds due to factors such as images and scripts.

But speed is relative. It depends on so many factors such as the website’s performance, the server’s performance, the particular web page you’re on, the connection type, the user’s internet service provider, the internet package, the device’s processing power, the Browser, what the user is doing at that point, how many apps are running and so on.

However, we can only work with what we can work, which is our website and our server. We don’t really have control over the rest.

Just to get things straight, page speed isn’t a score, like PageSpeed Insights presents. It’s a web page’s loading time and it is measured in seconds. That’s what matters.

That’s why Google PageSpeed Insights wasn’t so good in the past. It didn’t quite give you information about how fast your website is actually loading. Just scores.

And that’s why this new version is just so good. It tells you everything you need to know about actual loading speed while also keeping the good stuff from the old version.

There are, of course, different points of interest in the loading time. For example, you may want to run some scripts towards the end because they don’t need to be used initially.

They might take a lot to finish loading, so the total loading time could be higher. But if the site is usable until then, it isn’t such a big problem.

For example, let’s say you want to run an exit intent pop-up script. That script takes a hypothetical 5-10 seconds to load. However, you want to show it to the user only after about 20-30 seconds.

If you start running your script immediately, you might postpone loading other important elements, such as the first thing the user should see: the above the fold content. This would be very bad, especially since you’re not going to use that script until about 20-30 seconds in the future.

So you can postpone loading the script after everything else that is vital loads in order to give the user a better experience.

However, if you have a script that makes the menu work or something vital to the usability of the website, you might not want to load it towards the end. This would ruin the experience as the user would not be able to access that function before everything else is loaded.

Does Page Speed Affect SEO? Is 100/100 Insights Score Essential?

The simple answer is that page speed does affect SEO. Page speed is a direct ranking factor, a fact known even better since Google’s Algorithm Speed Update. However, speed can also affect rankings indirectly, by increasing the bounce rate and reducing dwell time. 

At Google, users come first. Studies by Google show that average 3G loading speed is very slow. They also show that users leave the site after about 3 seconds. This means that their experience is bad and Google doesn’t like ranking sites which provide bad user experience.

What you must remember is that speed is measured in seconds, not in points from 0 to 100. While PageSpeed Insights is a tool that helps you improve speed, the score there doesn’t necessarily mean anything in the real world.

Even so, it is important to improve the Page Speed Score.

Why?

Because with Google we don’t know for sure whether the score there is or is not used as a ranking factor. Does Google use seconds? Does it use the score? Who knows…

However, I’ve seen sites with perfect pagespeed score ranking poorly and websites with a score lower than 50 that rank very well (#youtube).

However, you have to take into account how Google makes these tests. We don’t know where the tests are performed from. Is your server from Romania and Google tests it with a 3G connection in the US? Well then, you can obviously expect low speeds.

But just for the user’s sake, put the loading time first. And don’t use only PageSpeed Insights to test that. Stick to the end and I’ll show you a couple of tools which you can use to test the speed at which your website loads from different locations.

Sometimes, Google contradicts itself!

For example, Google PageSpeed Insights considers the Google Analytics script render blocking, which means you should load it later, in the footer. However, Google Analytics specifies it pretty clearly that the script must be placed in the <head> section of your website, otherwise it won’t work properly and won’t initially be accepted as a valid install.

So you get a small score hit in PageSpeed Insights… by doing what Google says… just to be told that you shouldn’t do it like that… by Google. You get the point.

Also, you can’t cache the script properly unless you store the analytics.js file on your server. That’s obviously something Google Analytics doesn’t recommend. It’s also a hell for maintenance, as every time Google Analytics JavaScript file gets an update, you would have to update it on your site as well.

This, of course, doesn’t happen only with Google tools and scripts but with any 3rd party script you don’t have control over.

In our defense, even YouTube, which is owned by Google and should theoretically set an example, has a pretty slow PageSpeed Insights score, at least at the time of writing this article.

But that doesn’t mean that the site loads slow. You can see that the field data (for which there is plenty of, as it’s YouTube) says the site loads in pretty much 4 seconds, which isn’t actually bad, considering that recently YouTube provides video previews in the thumbnails.

You can also test your site with https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-gb/feature/testmysite/ to get a more simple explanation of how fast your site loads!

Our other business’s website, BrandMentions loads in under 2 seconds on a 4G connection, as you can see above. We would see it as pretty good. Sure, there’s always room for improvement. By Google standards… it’s average.

However, Google seems to consider cognitiveSEO’s website speed slow, even though it loads in a little over 3 seconds, which is still pretty fast considering the amount of 3rd party tools we’re using.

Note that you’ll have to go under 1 second to be considered fast! To do so, you’ll probably need a very simple site with no 3rd party plugins or fancy pop-ups. Not easy if you actually want to do some digital marketing.

So yes, loading speed is important for SEO, but a perfect PageSpeed Insights score is not. As long as your website loads in around 3 seconds, you should be fine with most users.

Why Brand Authority Matters Beyond Technical SEO

Core Web Vitals are important for creating a fast and reliable website. However, technical SEO is only one piece of the puzzle.

Modern search engines and AI-powered answer engines evaluate more than website performance alone. They also look for signals of trust, authority, and credibility across the web. Even if your site loads quickly and achieves excellent PageSpeed scores, it may struggle to earn visibility if your brand lacks a strong presence beyond its own domain.

This is especially important as AI systems increasingly rely on external sources, mentions, reviews, and online discussions when deciding which brands and websites to reference in generated answers.

💡 Pro Tip: To better understand and strengthen these signals, many marketers rely on a dedicated AI visibility platform like the BrandMentions software..

While you optimize your code, the BrandMentions platforms acts as your continuous external defense perimeter. As a dedicated AI visibility platform, it outperforms standard PR trackers through real-time velocity monitoring. If your brand faces a sudden PR crisis or negative review spike, the platform’s advanced alerting system notifies you instantly, allowing you to mitigate reputation damage before it affects your algorithmic trust scores. Remarkably simple to use yet enterprise-grade in its data extraction, BrandMentions provides the definitive digital footprint analysis required to protect the traffic your technical SEO efforts work so hard to generate.

Combining strong technical SEO with a trusted digital reputation creates a more sustainable foundation for long-term search visibility. While technical improvements help users access your content faster, brand authority helps search engines and AI systems understand why your content deserves to be surfaced in the first place.

PageSpeed Insights Metrics

Since so many things can affect site speed, Google breaks everything up in different categories in the PageSpeed Insights Tool, for a better understanding of the issues.

This is helpful as Google also provides some sort of prioritization, showing you what exactly affects speed the most.

Field & Lab Data

These are the new metrics that are actually useful. They are split into two categories: field and lab data.

Field data is what’s important in the real world, as it’s the data extracted by Google from real users, either through Chrome or other data providers.

Sure, it’s an average and if Google doesn’t yet have enough data it will let you know.

Origin Summary shows an average of the site’s speed as a whole. This way you can have an idea on how your page compares to the site and how the site compares to other sites in the Chrome User Experience Report.

Lab data, although still useful, could be considered less important as it is collected from a controlled environment. This means that it’s tested through a single connection and it doesn’t aggregate data from multiple users.

The lab data is what actually generates the Google page speed score.

Due to the fact that Google doesn’t always have field data, it uses the lab data which is performed on the spot to analyze your site.

First Contentful Paint represents the moment when the users sees something on your web page for the first time. If you look at the series of images you can actually spot how it looks:

As you can see, the page has not fully rendered, something has displayed there.

First Meaningful Paint is the second step, let’s say, if we take the results above as an example. It represents the point at which the user can actually understand the first piece of content. For example, some readable text or an image displays, instead of just colors and backgrounds.

Speed Index is a more complex metric. It measures how quickly elements on your website are visibly populated. The faster they start to appear, the better. You’re looking for a lower score here, as it’s also measured in seconds.

First CPU Idle represents the point at which the site has loaded enough of the information for it to be able to handle a user’s first input. For example, if the site has not loaded enough relevant information, the user might tap elements or scroll down but nothing will happen.

Time to Interactive is the next level, the one at which the website is fully interactive. This means that everything has loaded in the device’s memory and is now ready to be used.

Max Potential First Input Delay is the delay a user experiences from the point at which they interact with the browsers to the point at which the browser responds. This is the only performance metric which doesn’t affect the page speed score.

Opportunities & Diagnostics

The opportunities section provides information on what you can improve on your site. It also tells you an estimate of how much each issue affects your load time and how you should prioritize your tasks.

Going through each and everyone of them would be overkill. However, under each metric you’ll have a small arrow which you can use to expand the section.

There you will find information about each and every recommendation and how to fix the issue to improve your site’s speed. You will notice that the elements which cause the biggest issues are, in general, images and 3rd party scripts.

The Passed Audits section is the list of things that you already do well on your web page. Basically, it will show elements from both the Opportunities and Diagnostics sections that fit within Google’s parameters.

The more you have in this list, the better!

How Is the PageSpeed Insights Score Calculated?

Although you might see so many things in the PageSpeed Insights Tool, the score is actually calculated using only the seconds in the Lab Data section. If you read closely, you’ll actually be able to see the message “These metrics don’t directly affect the Performance score.” under Opportunities & Diagnostics.

The metrics in the Lab Data are called performance metrics. There are 6 of them and we’ve presented them above. Each metric gets a score from 0 to 100. Each metric has a different weight in calculating the score.

3 – First contentful paint
1 – First meaningful paint
2 – First cpu idle
5 – Time to interactive
4 – Speed index
0 – Estimated input latency

By order of importance, they are listed as such: Time to Interactive, Speed Index, First Contentful Paint, First CPU Idle, First Meaningful Paint and Estimated Input Latency, which actually has no effect on the score.

The scores are based on Log-normal distribution algorithms so let’s not get too deep down the rabbit hole. If you want to learn more you can read this page.

Google has also put a Sheet file which you can use to see how the score is actually generated. If you know Excel functions, you can reverse engineer how everything works. You can download this file here, but you have to make your own copy (File -> Make your own copy) before you can edit it. There’s also a version for Lighthouse v5.

To put it in simple terms, the First Contentful Paint impacts the score more than the First Meaningful Paint, and so on.

Why? Well, probably because if nothing displays on the screen, the user is more likely to leave your website. If you display… something, you’ll win some time to get the rest of the thing delivered.

The scores are ultimately divided into 3 categories, Slow (0-49), Average (50-89) and Good (90-100). Then an average is generated as a final score for your website.

Generally, if you’re under 50, you do have some issues that need fixing! But again, don’t sweat it if your site loads in about 3 seconds.

Key Points in Improving the PageSpeed Insights Score

Everything up there might be a little big hard to digest. We get it. Most probably, you won’t be able to solve everything! We’ve ruled out that it’s not important to get a 100% score. However, here are the key elements that will noticeably make your site load faster.

Warning: perform a backup of both your files and your database before engaging in these improvements. They can mess up your website and you have to make sure you can return to a previous version!

Server response time

The server is something you can’t really improve yourself. You either have a good one or a bad one. To improve it, you would either have to reduce load on it significantly, or improve its hardware, both of which you don’t have control over, unless you own the physical machine.

So it’s important to have a good server in the first place. But how do you choose a good server?

Well, any hosting company that ranks well on Google should provide decent services. However, it’s up to you to test. Best advice? If you’re mostly focused on local SEO, choose a local server. For example, if most of your audience lives in Italy, choose a server with the datacenter in Italy.

If the datacenter is all the way in the US, the information will have to travel a big distance before reaching your target audience.

You can always test the hosting provider’s own website with PageSpeed Insights and look for their TTFB (Time To First Byte) or Server Response Time. If it’s in the Passed Audits section, you know you have yourself a good hosting provider.

However, it’s better if you know someone that is an actual client of the hosting provider so you can test the speed there.

Realistically, the host’s own website will probably be on a dedicated server, while your site will be on a shared hosting package. This means that you will share the computer’s CPU and internet bandwidth with other websites.

If you can test a real site from a client, that’s great. You might be able to look through the reviews and find clients or ask the support team to provide one.

Image compression

In general, images are the biggest problem with websites. They are big and take up a lot to download. 

There are two types of issues with the images. The first one is the screen size vs. the actual image size in pixels and the second one is the disk size.

Disk Size: The more physical space an image takes on a hard disk or SSD, the more it will take to download. 100 KB will download a lot faster than 1000 KB (1MB). If you have 10 images like that on your blog post, expect your site to load very slow.

You can use WP Smush to optimize your images. It’s a plugin that will compress the images without losing any quality. This means that you can shrink a 1000×1000 pixels image from 200 KB to 150 KB without noticing the difference in quality, therefore making it load 25% faster.

Screen Size: Screen size is the size at which an image is displayed. For example, the image below is being displayed at 300×300 pixels.

To make images load faster, you first have to make sure you’re not using an image bigger than it’s going to be displayed. For example, if you have an HTML section that styled with CSS at 300×300 pixels, but you load an 1000×1000 pixels image in the source, you’re losing load time for that 700×700 pixels.

That’s because the Browser has to download the 1000×1000 pixels image and then shrink it to 300×300 pixels. This takes more time for both the download and the shrinking process. You can fix this by uploading your images with the same width and height that they will be displayed at.

WordPress does this automatically by creating multiple instances of the image when you upload it. That’s why you’ll see that 300×300 or 150×150 suffix at the end of an image file path. That’s why you can choose sizes (Large, Medium, Thumbnail). Although it’s not perfect, especially if you manually resize the image with click and drag, and it takes up more space on your server on the long run, it does help with load speed.

Deferring the images is another thing that you can do to improve the load time. This means that you can download them later as the user scrolls down on the web page. There will be a brief moment when the images won’t be visible but they will eventually show up, one after another.

This helps the Browsers focus on the important part, the one which the users is viewing at that point.

There are a multitude of plugins that can help you do that. However, many have bugs or only defer images in certain situations, for example if they are created by WordPress or WooCommerce, but not when created or inserted by less popular plugins.

There are certainly plugins for other CMS, such as Joomla or Magento. Just perform a Google search for them. If you’re not on a popular CMS, such as WordPress, deferring images can be done with jQuery, but you’ll most certainly need a developer for it, if you’re not one yourself.

Next gen image formats are recommended by Google. They are very useful, especially when loading a website from a mobile device. However, there’s a reason not many people use them yet.

Next gen image formats are not yet supported by all major browsers. This means that you’ll need to dynamically serve different formats for different browsers.

If you can use a plugin on your CMS that might be easy, but if you’re on a custom platform, you’ll need to develop everything from scratch, which costs a lot. Here’s a list of which browsers support the WebP format.

If you size and optimize your images properly, the savings you’ll get by also converting them to next gen image formats such as JPEG2000 or WebP might not be worth the cost in time and money.

However, if you have the time and budget, by all means, go do it. You can use this tool to check if the browsers your users spend most time on are supported. Search for either WebP or JPEG2000.

HTML & CSS Structure

The HTML structure of your web page dictates the way it loads. Browsers read a page from the top to the bottom and they load the elements the same way. This means that if you want something to load first, you have to put it higher in your page.

Generally, the issues are not with HTML but with CSS. If you write your CSS chaotically, it will result in a slower loading time and a bad user experience.

Let’s take an example. Most websites, if not all, follow this HTML structure: head > body > footer.

If my CSS file styles the footer first, then the footer will receive the styling, although it is before the fold. Meanwhile, the header and body might remain plain.

It’s also a good idea to add your mobile styling first, as mobile devices are the slowest ones. You might need at least a basic CSS training to get the idea of this hierarchy and be able to identify problems with code on your own

The same goes with renderblocking JavaScript. Postpone scripts that are not vital. Add them to the footer so that they will be loaded last.

However, if you have important scripts such as Analytics which should run as soon as possible, then by all means keep them in the header and make sure they fire and run properly, even though this might result in a lower PageSpeed score.

Minification & Script Compression

Minification is a process of making a file smaller by removing unnecessary information from it.

For example, when writing JavaScript and CSS, most, if not all coders, like to use spaces in order to keep their code clean and easy to read. However, those extra spaces add up, especially if you have a long piece of code.

cssminifier.com

Another way of minifying code would be by combining similar elements.

For example, if my head and footer sections were identical, instead of writing them like this:

body {
font-size: 16px;
}
footer {
font-size: 16px;
}

I could write:

body, footer {
font-size: 16px;
}

Compression is the process of shrinking files by replacing recurring sequences of information with a single reference to that particular sequence.

So, for example, if I have the following code: 123 4 123 123 123 4 123 123, I could replace 123 with a 1 and get a compressed version like this one: 1 4 1 1 1 4 1 1. Of course, it’s far more complex than what I’ve presented.

This generally happens on the server side and the most common one is called Gzip compression. The server sends a compressed version. After the browser receives the compressed file, it decompresses it by reversing the process, to read its actual contents.

This works pretty much like WinRAR; we probably all know it, because we’ve been using it for free since forever!

If you’re on a popular CMS, you will definitely find a plugin for both compression and minification. For example, the W3 Total Cache plugin does a lot of things including both of these, if you set it up properly.

Remember that compression is dependent on server setup. If your server does not support Gzip, you won’t be able to compress files. If you have an Apache server, make sure you have mod_deflate installed.

You can ask your server provider if your hosting supports it. 99.9% of the time they will say yes. If it’s not already installed, they should do it free of charge, as it’s something pretty basic.

If you’re not on a popular CMS you can also enable Gzip compression via the .htaccess file (Apache servers) by adding the following code, as long as mod_deflate is installed.

<span class="token operator">&lt;</span>IfModule mod_deflate<span class="token punctuation">.</span>c<span class="token operator">&gt;</span>
  <span class="token shell-comment comment"># Compress HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Text, XML and fonts</span>
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> application<span class="token operator">/</span>javascript
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> application<span class="token operator">/</span>rss<span class="token operator">+</span>xml
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> application<span class="token operator">/</span>vnd<span class="token punctuation">.</span>ms<span class="token operator">-</span>fontobject
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> application<span class="token operator">/</span>x<span class="token operator">-</span>font
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> application<span class="token operator">/</span>x<span class="token operator">-</span>font<span class="token operator">-</span>opentype
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> application<span class="token operator">/</span>x<span class="token operator">-</span>font<span class="token operator">-</span>otf
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> application<span class="token operator">/</span>x<span class="token operator">-</span>font<span class="token operator">-</span>truetype
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> application<span class="token operator">/</span>x<span class="token operator">-</span>font<span class="token operator">-</span>ttf
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> application<span class="token operator">/</span>x<span class="token operator">-</span>javascript
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> application<span class="token operator">/</span>xhtml<span class="token operator">+</span>xml
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> application<span class="token operator">/</span>xml
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> font<span class="token operator">/</span>opentype
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> font<span class="token operator">/</span>otf
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> font<span class="token operator">/</span>ttf
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> image<span class="token operator">/</span>svg<span class="token operator">+</span>xml
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> image<span class="token operator">/</span>x<span class="token operator">-</span>icon
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> text<span class="token operator">/</span>css
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> text<span class="token operator">/</span>html
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> text<span class="token operator">/</span>javascript
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> text<span class="token operator">/</span>plain
  AddOutputFilterByType <span class="token constant">DEFLATE</span> text<span class="token operator">/</span>xml

  <span class="token shell-comment comment"># Remove browser bugs (only needed for really old browsers)</span>
  BrowserMatch <span class="token operator">^</span>Mozilla<span class="token operator">/</span><span class="token number">4</span> gzip<span class="token operator">-</span>only<span class="token operator">-</span>text<span class="token operator">/</span>html
  BrowserMatch <span class="token operator">^</span>Mozilla<span class="token operator">/</span><span class="token number">4</span>\<span class="token punctuation">.</span><span class="token number">0</span><span class="token punctuation">[</span><span class="token number">678</span><span class="token punctuation">]</span> no<span class="token operator">-</span>gzip
  BrowserMatch \<span class="token package">bMSIE</span> <span class="token operator">!</span>no<span class="token operator">-</span>gzip <span class="token operator">!</span>gzip<span class="token operator">-</span>only<span class="token operator">-</span>text<span class="token operator">/</span>html
  Header append Vary User<span class="token operator">-</span>Agent
<span class="token operator">&lt;</span><span class="token operator">/</span>IfModule<span class="token operator">&gt;</span>

Sometimes, you can also combine the scripts. There are plugins that do this, such as Autoptimize, which I’ve presented before. Combining scripts is exactly what it says. Instead of having two files, you combine them into one. This way there’s only one request made to the server, instead of multiple ones.

However, combining scripts can many times causes bugs, so make sure you back up everything before.

Cache Policy

Caching is the process of storing files in a client’s browser in order to be able to quickly access them at a later time.

For example, if a user comes to your website for the first time, your logo will have to be downloaded. However, if you have an effective caching policy, that file will be stored in the user’s browser. When the user accesses your site a second time, it won’t have to download that file again as it will be instantly loaded from their computer.

Dynamic Elements (short cache policy): Dynamic elements are elements on your website that change frequently. For example, you might keep adding new posts in a slider on the Homepage.

In this case, the HTML is the dynamic element, so set a short caching policy if this fits you. 30 minutes might be enough, just in case the user returns to that page in the same session.

In some cases, you might not want to cache those elements at all, if promptitude is what matters for your users, such as on news websites.

Static Resources (long cache policy): Static resources are files that rarely change. These are usually images and CSS or JS files, but they can also be audio files, video files, etc.

You can set a longer cache time for images and CSS files since you know you will not be changing them very frequently. You can even go up to one year, but 3 months is usually enough.

Third Party Tools: You don’t really have control over 3rd party tools, so if you feel like a tool that is hosted elsewhere makes your website run very slow, better find an alternative or give up on it.

A solution would be to host the files on your own server and cache them. However, this might not be very productive and it’s not recommended, as you’ll have to constantly update those files as soon as new versions come out, otherwise the tool or app won’t work properly.

Cache Plugins: There are a lot of plugins that will properly handle the cache protocols required for a good user experience. If you’re on WordPress, one of these plugins is W3 Total Cache. However, if you want to go for a better option, WP Rocket is also pretty popular, but it will set you back a couple hundred bucks.

Just search for cache plugin / extension / module + your platform on Google to find what you need. Look at the reviews to pick the best one.

.htaccess file cache: You can also set a cache control header from your .htaccess file on an Apache server, if you don’t run your website on a popular CMS.

There are multiple ways:

## EXPIRES CACHING ##
<IfModule mod_expires.c>
ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType image/jpg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/jpeg "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/gif "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType image/png "access 1 year"
ExpiresByType text/css "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/html "access 1 hour"
ExpiresByType application/pdf "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType text/x-javascript "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType application/x-shockwave-flash "access 1 month"
ExpiresByType image/x-icon "access 1 year"
ExpiresDefault "access 1 month"
</IfModule>
## EXPIRES CACHING ##

Or you can also use this code:

# One year for image files
<filesMatch ".(jpg|jpeg|png|gif|ico)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=31536000, public"
</filesMatch>

# One month for css and js
<filesMatch ".(css|js)$">
Header set Cache-Control "max-age=2628000, public"
</filesMatch>

The numbers in the max-age attribute are in seconds, so 3600 would mean one hour, 86400 one day and so on.

Resetting the cache: When you make modifications to a web page, you want to reset the cache if an older version has been cached previously. However, you can only reset the cache on your server.

This means that users who have downloaded a previous version of a certain file will still load that old version from their computer when they access the website again. The file will be refreshed after the set amount of time in your caching policy or if the user manually resets their browser cache.

If you have a critical error in your web design or code, you can change the filename of your file. This way you can be sure that the cache for that particular file will be reset.

Sometimes, Chrome’s cache can be difficult to reset. Sometimes, routers and datacenters between the client and the server might also cache files so, if you don’t see the modifications, give it a couple of hours.

Lightweight Theme & Plugins

The more you load your website with plugins, the heavier it gets and the slower it runs.

A website’s theme is the biggest ‘plugin’ the site has. Most themes out there come with heavy 3rd party builders and huge libraries of plugins which all make the site run slower.

For example, slider plugins generally add the slider JS code to all pages, although it will probably be used only on the homepage or a landing page. That’s some heavy code to be loading on every page! Not to mention that nobody likes them and they lower the conversion rate.

So when you’re looking for a theme, try to find one without too much animations, sliders, functions and so on. If you look at the big websites you’ll see that, in general, they’re pretty simple.

A good theme which I recommend is GeneratePress. It’s lightweight and will load very fast. You can enable or disable elements to keep your site as clean as possible.

Combining it with an optimization plugin such as WP Rocket (paid) or a combo of free plugins such as Autoptimize + Fastest Cache will make it blazing fast! You can also use W3 Total Cache, a plugin which does almost everything listed above pretty well.

When you install new plugins, think about how important they are to your website. After you install them, test your score and loading speed. Does the plugin make your site run slower? If yes, is it critical to keep the plugin? Maybe look for a better alternative or remove it completely.

How to Bulk Check the PageSpeed Insights Score

The annoying part about PageSpeed Insights is that it checks only one web page at a time. It would take an eternity to check all the pages on your website, depending on its size.

However, there’s a way of bulk checking the PageSpeed Insights Score. Have you guessed it yet?

It’s the CognitiveSEO Tool Site Audit. Once you set up the technical SEO analysis with the Site Audit, go to your Campaign -> Site Audit -> Performance -> PageSpeed.

Of course, you can do a lot more with the tool, from improving your technical SEO and content to monitoring your rankings and link building efforts.

There’s also a somewhat free alternative which is a Chrome Extension. However, what it will actually do is ask for a list of URLs and then just open them as new tabs in the online PageSpeed Insights tool.

This means that the process is OK for about 10-20 tabs, if you have a medium to high end computer CPU. Anymore than that and the browser could crash or you’ll grow old waiting. It’s still pretty inconvenient.

Other SEO Tools for Measuring & Improving Site Speed

Of course, Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool isn’t the only tool to check and improve page speed. For once, we don’t really know where the tests are being performed from. If your site is hosted on a server in Europe and Google performs its tests from the US, it’s natural that the site will be slower.

However, there are tools which specify where the test is being performed from.

Pingdom

Pingdom Speed Test is a great tool which measures the speed at which your web page loads. Once the test is done, you’ll get some results which are similar to the ones on Google’s tool, at least visually.

What’s interesting about it is that you can select where the test is going to be performed from. Sure, the options are limited, but it’s still better than not even knowing it.

If you focus on local SEO, choose the location closest to your server. If you don’t know where it’s actually hosted, ask your hosting provider and you’ll find out.

It’s also a good idea to make multiple tests from different locations, just in case you have an international audience.

You can find more similar tools to Pingdom.

GT-Metrix

GT Metrix has been one of my favorite speed testing tools out there. Although it tests only from Vancouver, Canada, the insights it gives are very useful.

Quick tip: If you create a free account with them, you won’t have to wait so much for the test to be performed. To reduce load on their servers, they add you in a queue when there are too many requests. However, registered users have priority.

mod_pagespeed

The mod_pagespeed is a server addon from Google. Its purpose is to fix any page speed related issues at a core level, directly on the server side. This means that even if you add unoptimized images, mod_pagespeed will automatically compress, optimize and convert them to next gen image formats.

However, installing mod_pagespeed is definitely more technical than just dealing with everything in WordPress.

If your server already has it or you know what you’re doing go ahead and install it. However, it’s always a better idea to have a fast site in the first place instead of trying to cover things up.

Any way, this mod will increase load on your server as every time you upload an unoptimized image, it will have to use processing power to convert it.

Google AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)

If you want your site to be really fast on mobile searches, you can always implement Google AMP.

Google AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages is a special type of HTML, stripped of heavy, slower loading elements.

More than that, AMP pages will preload in Chrome mobile browser as the user scrolls through the search results, resulting in an instant load of the page when the user taps the title.

There are also disadvantages, of course. You’re limited from every direction, although things are getting better and better every day. Also, your site’s design has to suffer and will pretty much look like any other site that uses AMP. Bummer.

The URL isn’t yours either, because Google loads a cached version of your site, on their URLs. However, Google developers have promised to bring native URLs into AMP.

On WordPress and other CMS, you can add AMP to your website through a plugin. For custom websites, you’ll need to get in touch with your developer and give them this link.

Conclusion

Improving your site speed is important for better search rankings. PageSpeed Insights provides a set of best practices and possible improvements, prioritized by their impact on your site’s speed.

While the score itself shouldn’t concern you too much, it’s a good idea to try and get it at least over 50. However, focus on load time, which is measured in seconds. A good website should load in about 3 seconds. A really, really fast one should load in about 1.

Having a good server, compressing images and keeping things clean and simple in your code will benefit you the most when it comes to website speed. While smaller sites will benefit most from a shared server, if you are a larger business, hosting your site on a custom tower servers would be a recommended choice. Allowing the businesses to edit and maintain their site, a private server would offer flexibility and reliability when they need it most.  

What’s your PageSpeed Insights Score? Have you seen better rankings after improving the loading speed of your website? Share your experience with us in the comments section below!

The post How Page Speed Affects SEO & Google Rankings | The 2026 Page Speed Guide appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Well, as Head of Web SPAM at Google John Mueller said, “in general, no”. But the key words in that answer are “in general”. That’s the usual answer we get from John and, as much as we’d like to say we will dissect it, the truth is that we can only be speculating and interpreting things based on own knowledge and experience.

Let’s jump to it and find out whether web directories are still useful for SEO in 2022.

1. What Are Web Directories Really?
   1. Why Directories Were Created
   2. The Evolution of Citations: From Web Directories to Modern Brand Mentions
   3. Why Directories Died
   4. The Web Directory Legacy
2. Do Web Directories Still Work for SEO in 2022?
   1. The Problem With Today’s Directories
   2. Local SEO & Directory Listings
   3. Directories That Are Still Good
   4. Why Do We Still Have Web Directories?
3. Should You Disavow Directory Links?

What Are Web Directories Really?

In order to better understand why directories work or not in 2022 we have to create a background for them. Like an introduction.

Most people probably think of directories as just sites that list other sites. While that’s true, the reality is that they’re much more.

Before modern search engines, such as Google, web directories were THE INTERNET.

Why Web Directories Were Created

In the very early days of the internet, only a few people had websites. Internet connections were uncommon and there wasn’t much profit to be made out of it. Still, different websites emerged, in different niches.

However, you had to actually remember the domain names in order to access those websites, as there was no Google.

But, as the internet grew, more websites started showing up. Soon enough, people couldn’t remember all those names. But some clever guys from Yahoo! had the brilliant idea to store the best website into something they called a web directory.

At first, only a few websites were listed, the most ‘popular’ ones or the ones that they thought were worthy of being listed. This way, you would only have to remember one website (Yahoo!) if you wanted to find all the other good sites.

At first, the sites were listed alphabetically but, as the number grew, they started getting listed under categories and subcategories. This way it was easier for users to find what they needed.

Web directories made money out of selling advertising space or boosting certain results in exchange for a fee.

The Evolution of Citations: From Web Directories to Modern Brand Mentions

The era of mass-submitting websites to low-quality web directories ended over a decade ago. These obsolete citation methods are now actively penalized as link schemes.

Today, search algorithms and advanced AI response models validate a business not by its directory listings, but by natural, unlinked brand mentions occurring in reputable blog posts, news publications, and social media discussions. These modern citations are the true currency of digital trust.

💡 Pro Tip:  To discover, manage, and leverage these modern citations, professionals rely on the BrandMentions platform.

Shifting the focus from link quantity to reputation quality, the BrandMentions software operates as an industry-leading social listening tool. It differentiates itself from generic backlink checkers by executing comprehensive searches for unlinked brand citations across the darkest corners of the web. Its sophisticated dashboard is engineered to be highly advanced yet remarkably simple to use, providing granular data on competitor mentions, brand reach, and historical sentiment evolution. By converting scattered web noise into a measurable KPI of brand authority, BrandMentions provides the ultimate framework for scaling modern digital PR.

Why Web Directories Died

Unfortunately, when the number of sites started getting way too high, people soon realized it wasn’t so convenient to browse through all those categories. It would take too much time and, ultimately, the best results were mixed up with the less good ones.

This is how search engines appeared. It was by far more convenient to type in a keyword and get a list of top results than to browse through categories trying to figure out which website is the best.

The search engines worked on algorithms, just as they do now (although not as complex). Depending on the keywords in the title and other factors, some sites would rank better than others.

Yahoo! had its own search engine. However, it is no secret that Google took the lead because of their improved algorithm, but this isn’t the only reason why Google eventually took the lead. Yahoo! was a giant back then, in the days of Yahoo! Mail, News, Answers and Messenger, but a number of bad decisions made them fade out.

The Web Directory Legacy

Even though web directories dropped dramatically in popularity, people still used them. But not for what they were supposed to used them.

As much as people say that web directories are still useful, the truth is that people have been using them merely for link building and online marketing for a long time.

I’m 25 now and I’ve been using a computer since I was 6. My first contact with the internet was in 2002 and I can’t recall ever browsing on a web directory. I remember Yahoo! and Google. I remember ODC ,DC++ and other popular hubs. I remember Floppy disks with drivers. But I don’t remember web directories.

In fact, my first contact with web directories was back in 2013, when I first started learning about SEO. I had probably ended up on similar websites before, but not solely for searching a specific website.

Although the truth was that web directories weren’t of interest to the general public, new web directories kept popping up.

There were of course, useful directories, such as business listings (Yellow Pages), which people visited if they wanted to search for a particular business (name, phone, address, legal details, etc.).

There were also niche directories, which only listed websites in a particular field. Those might have got some organic traffic and potential customers when people searched for things like “list of XYZ websites”.

But the truth is that, most of the time, web directories were only there because links brought better rankings. People found ways to get listed on as many directories as they could, therefore destroying the purpose of a directory. Even paid directories were full of SPAM.

Fees were usually low, ranging from $5 to $20 if you wanted to get a listing on the homepage. However, most of the time that wouldn’t bring much more traffic to your site, since most of the users visiting web directories were SEOs trying to build links.

I’m not afraid to say that I only visited web directories for link building purposes. Everybody was doing it and it worked. It was easy and convenient.

But the question is… do they still work now?

Do Web Directories Still Work for SEO in 2022?

In a local SEO social media group somebody tried to prove a point by showing us a #1 result for a keyword, claiming that he had only built 2 directory links to that page and it’s now #1.

He was trying to attack us “white hats” that always state web directories don’t work when, in fact, he had proof that they do. Only problem was the keyword he was ranking for had virtually 0 searches and the competition was basically inexistent.

Did the web directory links actually helped him to rank better in Google’s search results? Probably… Did he prove any points? Definitely not.

Web Directories probably still have a small impact on your rankings, just like any other site that links to you and passes Page Rank. However, because they’ve been abused as an SEO tactic over the years, Google penalizes people that use web directories. With the rise of Penguin 4.0, many of them are probably ignored.

Or, as John Mueller (the current Head of Web SPAM @ Google) said:

generally no.

— ? John ? (@JohnMu) February 25, 2017

Bu that answer can be interpreted in very many ways. Let’s see first why web directories got such a bad reputation in SEO.

Web Directories’ Main Issues for SEO

I’ve already discussed how web directories don’t really provide much value as users don’t really use them for anything other than SEO.

However, the story doesn’t end there:

Web directories got spammy & tricky: As people always want the quick way, they started automating processes. With more automation, more SPAM came along. These types of things are inconvenient for Google because they waste a lot of resources. Don’t you just hate spam comments? I know I do.

Google eventually figured out that the best way to deal with this was to penalize people that would use directories as a way of improving their rankings. So when important updates such as Penguin started to roll out, web directories had the perfect opportunity to make money.

Although some websites were listed for free, now that Google was penalizing websites for spammy link profiles, some web directories asked for removal fees.

Web directories are not managed anymore: Even if you do find a good web directory, chances are that nobody is going to answer you.

A couple of years ago, I was in the process of building links for someone. Advertorials were too expensive for his budget and all their competitors had the directory links. Without exception. They ranked well, so I thought I’d better try it at least.

After a few days of efforts, it was pretty clear that it won’t work. Not because Google penalized me or anything, but because the directory sites either had errors on their submission forms or nobody replied/approved my sites.

Since they don’t make as much money as they used to, people have stopped putting effort into managing them.

Web directories are not efficient: Even if you manage to get some business directory listings, they will probably have a very little impact, if not none at all.

Your time is better spent creating content and engaging with your audience. 1-2 links won’t help at all and scaling this is risky and can result in penalties.

Google penalizes you: Of course, the biggest issue with web directories these days is that your website can get penalized if it tries to trick the Google algorithms.

Building links in mass, be it through web directories, blog commenting, article submission, guest posting, you name it, is risky and can get your site in trouble.

Now I’m not saying that you’re going to be penalized if you submit your site to a directory. By all means, if you find an interesting site that also happens to have a list of other interesting sites, go for it!

But it’s a good idea to check their background a little bit. What’s their domain authority? Is their backlink profile spammy? Are they linking to quality websites or a bunch of phishing potholes full of malware?

In other words, does that website bring any value at all to the internet or for any users? Is it in any way relevant to your site? If the answer is no, then you should definitely stay away from it.

Local SEO & Directory Listings

When it comes to local, it’s probably the only field where people actually still visit renowned “directories” to find a good location.

For example, Google My Business is considered to be a web business directory. To some extent, it is. It lists businesses. However, it’s turning more and more into a search engine itself. The rankings are done based on algorithms.

Local Search Listings | Google My Business

People do browse and look for reviews, but most of them just stick with the top businesses (the ones that get listed first by Google My Business on local search and Google Maps) because they are, usually, the best results.

When it comes to local SEO, it does help if your NAP details (name, address, phone) are listed on multiple websites. However, title, distance from the user and reviews probably play a more important role.

The key thing with NAP is consistency. Google might have some issues if you keep having a mixture of different names, phones and addresses all over the place.

However, let’s all be honest that citations here and there aren’t the key to local search SEO success. It’s not that they don’t help (they do, you get brand visibility) but whenever you have a citation, you should accompany it with a backlink.

Local business directories are a great start. For example, you might find sites such as “yourcitynews.xyz” that have a section called “Great Locations in Our City”. If you can list your local business there, that’s great because the relevancy comes from the local orientation of the website itself. Most news will be about your city, which means your business should be there to rank better in that particular city.

If you can’t find a local business directory, you can also find these types of backlink opportunities with BrandMentions. This tool monitors when your name/brand is mentioned on the web. You can then engage with people and build relationships (and also ask for a backlink in case they haven’t made one).

Directories That Are Still Good

Now obviously you’re probably asking “Hey, where can I still find good web directories if all are bad?”

Well… there are some. This isn’t really the purpose of this article, but I’ll only list a few so that you get an idea how modern, useful web directories actually look like.

White Hat SEOs will probably jump and say “How can you recommend profile link building or any sort of web directory link?”

The key word here is RELEVANCY. If the listing is relevant to your site, it is going to help you. 

I don’t want you to take “web directories are bad” for granted and miss an opportunity that might actually be helpful to you.

Many search engine optimization experts react badly to blog commenting or forum posts, because they know it doesn’t work. However, blog comments are still the fuel of blogs. Forums are still popular in industries such as music, automotive, health and even fashion.

Matthew Woodward built an award winning blog and much of his direct and organic traffic was thanks to the posts he made in the BlackHat Forums. Just don’t spam. Be relevant. Be useful.

An example of good directories were the local sites that might have listings. I can’t really give a specific example, but I hope you get the point. If they have an active social media account, post from time to time and bring in some traffic, you can try to list your local business there.

It all comes down to relevancy. Is the listing relevant to your scope/niche? If yes, go for it!

Here I can give a specific example. SoundCloud is a directory for musicians, for example. If you’re a musician, you can get a profile backlink from your SoundCloud profile. Another similar example is last.fm.

Is this spammy? It could be if you just create a profile and leave it like that. But if you’re a musician, maybe it also makes sense to post on your SoundCloud account from time to time, build an audience there and actually send some traffic to your site through that link and maybe even get some potential customers.

Other good local listing sites are Yelp or maybe Yellow Pages. Although Google has heavily bashed them because they’re evil, it’s still a good place to list your business.

Why Do We Still Have Web Directories?

Most businesses, such as Moz or Yahoo, have closed their directories (Dmoz and Yahoo Directory).

The truth is probably that the web is still full of directories because of low maintenance costs (hosting and domain).

Many directories if not all lack moderators (which actually cost money), but still probably make some small amounts of revenue from advertising.

This whole article idea started from us observing these weird anchor texts such as “.2523765 yourdomain.com” in our tool for multiple clients. You might see these anchor texts in your cognitiveSEO dashboard as well.

They’re generated by The Globe network, a sort of directory that crawls and indexes websites by simply linking to them on pages which contain thousands of external links. The network is owned by Ascio Technologies Inc (a domain registrar). Luckily, I’ve looked at their backlink profile and they also have the spammy anchor texts, so at least it’s fair.

Their model is different. They want to sell the entire network of sites for millions of dollars. They present it as some sort of world wide web, the most visited site on the planet (which obviously, it isn’t). I’m not sure how old this thing is or how it started, but there’s a BlackHat Forum thread about the network where you can read more about this.

Should You Disavow Directory Links?

One thing that people rush in to do is disavow links that they think Google might consider spammy or that might get their websites penalized.

This is an entire topic to discuss and I really recommend that you read my article about disavowing links.

However, just to give you a short answer, in general, it’s a good idea not to play with the disavow tool unless you’re sure your site has been penalized and you have isolated the reason to be the link profile, after you’ve checked and excluded everything else.

For example, most of The Globe network, the site I’ve mentioned above, isn’t even indexed in Google, so it doesn’t really make any sense disavowing those links, since Google already doesn’t count those links in any way.

Conclusion

Generally, you should avoid them, but sometimes web directory submissions might be useful, especially when it comes to local businesses and local SEO. Before you submit your links, make sure that the online directory is relevant to your niche and has a good link profile.

What do you think about web directory submissions? Have you ever used them? Do you still use them? Do they still work? Let us know in the comments section (but be careful with the links if you’re a WhiteHat SEO as you might get penalized!)

The post Are Web Directories Still Relevant for SEO in 2026? appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

Before saying that you don’t need to bother with this because you will hire a specialized digital agency to take care of all this, take this scenario: You get a great offer for a freelance or an agency, saying that they will take care of everything content related for you. That sounds appealing, yet, how can you hire them if you don’t know what they are supposed to deliver? Once you know what a complete list of content marketing services looks like, you’ll be able to set expectations, measure the efforts of the company you hired, and better understand the results. 

Quick Summary: This guide outlines the five essential content marketing services required for business growth in the modern search landscape: Strategy, Creation, Distribution, Constant Updates, and Analytics. It emphasizes a shift from traditional SEO to a holistic approach that incorporates Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) and AI visibility. Key highlights include the use of advanced keyword research to identify semantic opportunities, the importance of long-form, share-worthy content creation, and the necessity of multi-channel distribution to earn organic backlinks.

By integrating specialized tools for content optimization and social listening, companies can establish the industry authority needed to earn citations in AI-powered search results. This resource serves as a strategic blueprint for business owners and marketing managers to set clear expectations, measure agency performance, and drive measurable business value through content-led growth in 2026 and more.

So, here are the top content marketing services business owners should be aware of: 

1. Content Marketing Strategy
   1. Use Keyword Research Tools
   2. Check the Top-of-mind Keywords
   3. Look for Seed Keywords
   4. Prioritize the Keywords You Want to Rank For
   5. Select Top Keywords
   6. Track the Real ROI of Your Content Marketing
2. Content Creation
3. Content Distribution
   1. Link Building
   2. Social Media
   3. Community & Relations
4. Constant Content Update
5. Content Analytics Reporting
   1. Organic Search Traffic
   2. Keyword Rankings
   3. Social Shares
   4. Backlink Volume

Content Marketing Strategy

A good content marketing strategy should respond to the question why.

Why do you want to create content? For whom? Why will your content be different than what already exists?

Content marketing strategy means more than a content strategy. This last one is focused more on content creation, which we are going to talk about later.

First thing first, you need to clarify what do you want to achieve with content marketing: Increased traffic? More leads? Educate customers? Increase online presence?

If you’ve been watching the trends lately, you’ve seen articles piling up about content marketing and how it’s changing the SEO game forever.

It seems that Google is dead set on providing visitors with pages that have the most relevant content to their search and the trend of creating quality content to be more relevant to your target audience seems to become more of a need than a game played only by the cool kids.

More and more SEO professionals are boarding this train and it’s no longer to be believed a hype and a way to reinvent the so-called “dead SEO”.

Once you got the “why” question responded, you can go to the next step within any content marketing strategy, the keyword research. You don’t want to write just for the sake of writing, right?

You want to create good content that will reach your audience. But to do so, you need to know what topics to tackle and what keywords you can create content for. So, check out the next steps, which are foundation stones for all the other content marketing services.

Use Keyword Research Tools

Finding keywords shouldn’t be hard, yet it’s not a walk in the park either. In the modern SEO landscape, a keyword research tool is not just a passing trend but a must.  

The Keyword Tool and Content Optimizer is an awesome helper on this matter. It’s like your best buddy you can call in the middle of the night to get you out of trouble. You can find new topic ideas and keywords related to the one you are targeting. 

You’ll be able to make an idea of how difficult it is to rank for those particular keywords. It also shows you how relevant other keywords are compared to the current ones.

When you perform the market research, it’s best if the keywords you’re trying to rank for have a high search volume and a low difficulty. High search volume means the phrase is popular and many people are typing it in their browsers. Low content and links difficulty means that it is fairly easy to rank on that keyword without many links or highly competitive content. Combining these three metrics will result in profitable phrases that are easy to rank for.

Why any analysis should start with a keyword research?

Because if you don’t know the keywords you want to target, you can’t possibly know your true SEO competition.
This step will also determine what level of difficulty you wish to perform the analysis at.

For example, let’s assume that we’re performing online marketing in the shoe business and wish to open a web store. Depending on our budget, we can either start targeting very high search volume keywords or lower search volume keywords. Keep it realistic.

It either takes money or time to get there. In fact, it takes time in both cases given you’re working with organic search.

Without a strategy, content is just stuff, and the world has enough stuff.
	ARJUN BASU
	Award-nominated author

The trick with ranking is not to force it. When everybody’s trying to rank for the same keywords, there’s not much room for long-term development. This is where you can improve and find keywords semantically related to your niche, but not necessarily used by your competitors.

Check the Top-of-mind Keywords

Top-of-mind keywords are phrases that pop up in your head right away when you think about a niche. It’s like a brainstorming process. They are also frequently called seed keywords.

You can use the Google search engine to get real-time suggestions. Simply go on Google and start typing your keywords, and new ideas will appear right under the search bar. A highly competitive keyword would be, in this case, “buy shoes online”.

Phrases with the word “buy” in them are called buyer’s keywords or transactional keywords. They are usually the most competitive, as we know from the phrase itself that people are already set to buy the product. Ranking for those keywords practically guarantees that some sales will indeed be made. Where sales are guaranteed, big players come.

A lower competition keyword can be “best shoes for …”.

More niched phrases tend to be less competitive. One reason might be the fact that they are untapped, meaning that not many people actually discovered them. They are called longtail keywords. Review and comparison sites often try to rank here. People are still inclined to buy, but for he moment, they might just be looking to compare products or find ideas.

Look for Seed Keywords to the Keyword Explorer or Google Keyword Planner to Get New Ideas

Use the seed keywords you acquired from the previous step to generate a list of keywords.

You can go classic and use the Google Keyword Planner, though data is limited if you don’t have a paying PPC management account.

You can try multiple keywords here, export the data as CSV, sort the keywords, and add some to your list.

cognitiveSEO’s Keyword Tool can give you tons of keyword opportunities. It works like a content marketing agency that will work on most of your marketing plans, your pieces of content…you got the idea your whole marketing effort in general.

You can check out for questions people are looking for an answer on Google. You can filter the keywords ideas by volume, relevancy and so on, so you can find the best keyword opportunities for you. 

Prioritize the Keywords You Want to Rank For

Now comes the more difficult part.

For which of those keywords can you realistically rank in top Google search?

After you’ve determined a list of keywords you’ll go after, you have to take a look at two things:

Content Performance and Domain Performance.

You can use the Ranking Analysis section of the Content Optimizer Tool.

Let’s take as example the keyword this article is talking about: content marketing services.

You can easily see a lot of important metrics, just one click away:

• how many links would this article need to be competitive?
• what is the monthly search for this keyword and how’s the searching trend for it? 
• who is ranking in top 10 and how do their content looks like?
• how old/fresh is the content already ranking?
• what focus keywords did my competitor use within their content?

While the Content Performance is something that we have control over and will improve in a future step, backlinks aren’t something we have that much control over.

So, you want to see websites with as few referring domains as possible compared to your site (which you can check with the Site Explorer).

Of course, if you see a lower content score and/or word count, those are also good indicators that it will be easier to create content for or improve existing content.

Select Top Keywords Based on Relevancy and Search Volume

For the purpose of this analysis example, we’ll just stick to these keywords: “buy shoes online” and “best shoes for”. One is broader and the other is narrower, but both are attractive in terms of relevance and search volume. Let’s assume that we start from the bottom (narrower keywords), but leave room for expansion in the future (broader keywords).

From these two keywords, we can observe that the broader ones tend to return root domains as results, while narrower ones return pages from websites. This is a good indication of what our homepage should be targeting, and what we should target with pages.

The final list should include keywords around your general niche and some current or possible (future) sub-niches. You can group them into separate sheets. This way you’ll be able to select top competitors from multiple sub-niches easier. The more keywords you’re willing to analyze, the better you’ll understand what you’re dealing with in the long run.

You can use the Google Search Console to easily determine the keyword you’re already ranking for. (the below screenshot is taken in June 2020).

Can you improve this existing content? Or should you target new keywords? These are questions you should ask yourself when putting together your SEO content marketing strategy. 

Track the Real ROI of Your Content Marketing

Whether you hire a content marketing agency or manage services in-house, measuring success by page views alone is a flawed strategy. Content marketing success isn’t measured solely by rankings, impressions, or pageviews.

Effective content marketing doesn’t just sit on your blog; it gets shared, debated, and referenced across the web.

To evaluate the real ROI of your content, you must measure its external impact: how often it is cited, who is amplifying it, and the overall sentiment it generates in your industry.

Modern content marketers should also monitor visibility beyond traditional search engines. As AI-powered search platforms and answer engines become more influential, tracking brand mentions, citations, referral traffic, and AI-generated references can provide a more complete picture of content performance.

To track this off-site content amplification, you need specialized social listening tools rather than traditional web analytics. BrandMentions functions as a comprehensive social listening software that tracks where content campaigns are discussed across social networks, news outlets, and niche communities. By providing real-time sentiment analysis, it allows brands and agencies to quantify the value of their content services, showing how a single article elevates brand visibility and establishes the industry authority required for AI search engine citations and AEO.

Ultimately, the real ROI of content marketing is not just attracting visitors, it’s turning visibility into business value.

By regularly measuring both SEO metrics and business outcomes, you can identify which topics, keywords, and content formats generate the highest return. This allows you to invest more resources in strategies that drive measurable results while eliminating efforts that fail to contribute to your marketing objectives.

Content Creation

No worries, comparing to the previous section, content creation will feel like a breeze among the content marketing services list. 

First, consider that it’s always best to consider landing page optimization for a single main keyword and a single search intent per page.

You can sometimes combine very similar keywords, but try as much as possible to stick to one main keyword and one search intent. Feel free to find out more about search intent here. 

A great way to do this is to write content about questions that are very often asked in your industry, or case studies.

For example, this article about meta descriptions affect SEO or not has been linked to multiple times by other SEO blogs trying to make a quick point without getting into too much detail.

Write content that stands out and is share worthy. 

While doing so, also make sure to: 

• Have great Titles, Headlines and Descriptions.
• Optimize your titles with keywords for SEO, but also keep them catchy for Social Media.
• Use the Open Graph property to set different titles for SEO and Social Media.

Longform content tends to perform better in organic search results. Yet, look at what type of content your competitor have. Is it long, short? What type of content is Google serving within its first page for the type of content you want to rank? 

You keep on hearing: write content having readers, but also SEO in mind. But what does this really mean?

We can spend a lot of time on debating that, or we can use a tool that will help us write that exact type of content. As time is so precious these days, I’ll choose the second option. 

Open the Content Assistant section from the cognitiveSEO’s content optimizer and hit Start Optimizing.

Once you do so, you’ll get everything you need there:

• the keywords you should use in your content
• the content score you should reach
• keywords ideas to use in your content
• the focus keywords that might help your content with ranking
• the keywords you shouldn’t use that much to avoid stuffing

Basically, you’ll get all the resources you need to write content that is relevant for your users first of all, but also SEO oriented. 

The idea is to think of the recommended keywords as subtopics or areas of interest that you should cover in your content.

When people search for something, you already know they are interested in it. That’s why SEM has such a high conversion rate and people spend time reading in-depth articles.

Regardless of the tools you’d be using, keep in mind that the best tool you have at your disposal is your own knowledge.

You should keep in mind that writing naturally is the best way to go. 

I know: writing original content regularly might not be easy. Moreover optimized content. Even if you’re a marketing expert that wants to improve brand awareness, an account manager  or a search engine optimization, writing with SEO in mind is never easy. There are no perfect marketing guides that will drive results in no time. And copywriting implies extra marketing costs, video content creation costs, maybe website design, content promotion and so on. Yet, when creating your monthly reporting, you’ll check the return on investment and you’ll see that those marketing efforts did pay off. That monthly content and those business goals you struggle with, those SEO audits, they all bring great results. 

Content Distribution

The journey shouldn’t stop when the article goes live. On the contrary, you should carry on with the process of boosting your content. You need to understand that content distribution isn’t a single technique or a one-time thing. It incorporates an umbrella of multiple unique techniques you need to follow in order to get better results.

We all had that moment when we gave our soul into a post and made it so shiny, with thorough research, relevant visuals but nobody read it.
And then you start wondering what went wrong. What in the name of God happened? Or why did it happen to you? And the questions could go on.

But there is something that you missed. And that “something” could be content distribution and amplification. 

Content distribution is a powerful method to reach a wider audience.

Amplifying your content should be mandatory if you want people to know about it and increase your website traffic.

You can look at the distribution process as a way of strengthening the signals of your post. And here are some channels to do so: 

Link Building

If, in the past, the traditional ways of building links meant to meaninglessly spread out all over the internet, without thinking of relevance and essence, through the help of web directories, blogrolls, keyword stuffing and others, now we need to think of our target audience.

Things have changed now, but links are still an important ranking signal and they are very helpful when trying to rank high in the search engines. 

It’s a harsh reality but link generating through content marketing will surely become harder and harder.

Yet, harder doesn’t mean impossible. Use blog posts, videos, infographics, eBooks and so on. Create resources that are valuable and that will earn links.

Also, don’t forget about internal linking. 

If you’re looking for an SEO move that can quickly boost the position of your website, then internal linking is the move you want to make. 

A proper internal linking strategy can really boost your ranking power because it does two things:

#1: It helps search engines understand the structure of your website, how different pages interact with one another and which pages are truly important withing the structure of your website.

#2: It helps users navigate the website and it keeps users on the website by providing relevant content through links that can be followed. This ultimately sends search engines another signal that your website is great, because it provides a good user experience.

If you’re interested in some valuable link building lessons, wrote from experience, check out this article. 

Social Media

I know it and you know it. The internet has become so fed up with marketing strategies, that people become immune to content in its mediocre form.

Influencers from all marketing channels are no longer impressed so easily, and in order to put your brand “in their mouth” you need to do some wheel greasing.

So that’s why super important to create content that it’s worth sharing; content that “has something to say”, that brings added value.

Invest in social media marketing as much as you can.  Get dedicated account managers or marketing manager if possible. There are many social content marketing companies that are offering good services, just make sure to get the right one to grow your business.

There a lot of tips and tricks on how to perform better on social media. You can consult blogs like BrandMentions‘ one for this.

Promote your content as much as possible but on the right social media channels for your niche. 

Use paid media and social media advertising (like Twitter or Facebook advertising) if needed. Make use of partner programs, press releases, custom content, go for  influencer marketing if needed. 
Yet, it is highly important to make yourself visible on social media. Even if this implies some graphic design activities or video production to steal your potential customers’ attention. Here’s a video production tool you can check it out. 

Social media management is as important as writing optimized pieces of content when it comes to building your brand.

Community & Relations

When I think of content marketing, a line from the movie Jerry Maguire comes to mind – Help me, help you!

We’ve seen common outreach methods of content marketing like guest blogging being abused in the past, because people misunderstood the idea behind it.

Generating  links through content marketing is not about trying to beg for them, it’s about creating relationships with other businesses and people that reside in the online medium.

You can no longer strive for the number one spot in Google’s eyes if you can’t create new pals that are willing to talk about you and share your content or vice versa.

“Link begging” your way out of a situation will do you more harm than good so we don’t recommend that.

There’s one way out of it and that’s creating content that others might find interesting enough to share it with their audience.
Organic Links are a “hard to get” commodity these days and you’ll be happy to find and keep connections with influencers that like and distribute the content that you create.

In order to help yourself, you need to attend to the needs and interests of others first!

When you can’t create engaging content on your side of the street, try going to the place where the discussion is currently happening.

It may sound like a cheesy tactic but I assure you it’s not a laughing matter. You may include comments in your content marketing strategy as you can generate links and help the community at the same time, in real time.

Comments are a great way to:

• create meaningful content
• connect and engage with your target audience
• create links pointing to your site in a natural manner.

Comments can prove to be a blade with two edges and you need to treat it with care.

Try and find the most important forums in your niche and where the discussions are taking place.

Look at what people are asking and what questions they have.

As long as you stay on topic and your comments are not only meant for link building, then you won’t have nothing to worry about.

Above are just a few content distribution ideas. For even more ideas for amplification, check out this article. 

Constant Content Update

What if I were to tell you there’s another way, besides tapping into that creative juice barrel?

Nobody expects you to create original and engaging content all the time.

You just can’t create quality content on an assembly line and everybody knows that, and no, you shouldn’t resort to gimmick techniques to win your target audience’s attention.

What you can do is to recycle outdated content that may still be of interest to your target audience.

Some content has been geniously created in the past and widely distributed, but that doesn’t mean you cannot use that already developed interest to your advantage.

Those infographics that were widely distributed and shared, which created a lot of discussions over the internet can be refurbished using the same layout and the same structure but with fresher and more relevant data.

You can also improve old content by adding more information and thus more value for the viewer.

While this might be appealing for those looking for a shortcut method of generating content, it should be part of a balanced diet.

It seems easily exploitable, but if done improperly, you might end up feeding your site with low quality content.

We’ve done an interested experiment some time ago: We’ve updated 40 blog posts with fresh, updated information.

The result? 70% SEO visibility increase. So, it could be a tactic that could work for you to. You can check out the case study here. 

Content Analytics Reporting

You know the saying. No job is done until the paperwork is done. 

In our case, not literally paper, but reporting the results. This is an equally important part of the content marketing services list.  

So, you’ve created a content marketing strategy; you’ve written awesome content or updated the existing one, you’ve highly distributed. 

Now, what’s to do? 

Check out the result!

But what should you check?

Measuring content marketing and SEO efforts is often easier said than done.

Yet, here are some metrics you should definitely look at. 

Organic Search Traffic

Organic search traffic refers to website visits that originated from search engine results and not through ads. Organic search traffic is a highly effective indicator of overall success. When a website’s content includes keywords that frequently match what users are searching for, that website is likely to appear in a larger number of search engine results pages (SERPs) than competing websites.

Using Google Analytics, open the Acquisition menu. From there, select All Traffic, then select Channels.

You’ll now be presented with a view of a website’s sources of traffic, which are sorted by channel.
Select the Organic Search channel for a useful report that displays a site’s organic traffic stats.

This report is a versatile one. It gives SEO practitioners the ability to uncover critical information such as:

• Which landing pages are the most effective at attracting traffic
• Which keywords are delivering the highest amounts of traffic
• Which of the search engines are directing the highest amount of organic traffic to a website
• What pages are frequently the biggest exit pages (or the last page a visitor views before leaving the website)
• And many other vital stats

Keyword Rankings

Keyword Ranking is how well or how poorly your content ranks in SERPs for a given search term.

Google analytics isn’t as helpful as some SEO practitioners would like it to be as far as tracking keyword rankings.
Its keyword tab (within the campaign tab) often displays the phrase “not provided.”

Instead of Google analytics, consider the rank tracker provided by cognitiveSEO.
One of its advantages is that it allows you to track keywords at a universal level as well as at a local level. It also allows you to analyze the keyword performance of competitors.

So, add your keywords you created content for within the Rank Tracker and constantly check out the evolution.

Social Shares

Social shares can be defined simply as the sharing of your content by social media users.
While it’s generally thought that Google does not take social signals and shares into consideration when ranking SERP results, social shares are still very important to your SEO efforts.

Tracking your social shares is beneficial because of the important impact social media plays in content marketing strategies.

As more people share your content with their followers, the higher the chances that more people will view it and ultimately migrate over to your website.
More visits to your website means a boost in organic search ranking.

Backlink Volume

Useful for measuring the authority and popularity of your website, backlinks (often referred to as inbound links) are links to your website that originate from someone else’s website.
Backlinks to your site can also originate from other pages on your own site.

Measuring this performance indicator will go a long way in helping you rank higher.

By tracking it, you’ll always know where you stand with what some in the SEO industry view as the most important ranking factor used by Google.

When you know whether you’re succeeding with your backlinks, you know how much you need to improve by.

Using Google Analytics, open the Acquisition menu. From there, select All Traffic, then select Referrals.

You can now look at your referral traffic, which is Google’s way of saying “backlinks.”

Also, for a comprehensive backlink analysis tool, cognitiveSEO aggregates backlink data from trusted link databases and analyzes the links on demand for each of their clients.

I know, there are a lot of information from the digital marketing area to deal with.

But even if you’re one the one who’ll be implementing all the content marketing services above, even if you’re hiring marketing agencys, it’s important to know what’s all about. 

If you or your marketing team are out of breath after reading this post (or worse yet, discouraged,) don’t be overwhelmed!
Take heart, force a smile, and accept the fact that victory never comes easy. I know, lots of things are involved: technical SEO, marketing budget, web design, content calendars or advertising costs. But it does pay off in the attempt of building brand that is strong and competitive. 

Success and competitiveness are for those who are willing to work harder and get their hands dirtier.

The bottom line here is that you can do this, and it will be worth it.

The post Content Marketing Services | The Complete List for a Successful Digital Strategy appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

 The primary benefits of these methods include significantly higher click-through rates, improved domain authority, and increased citation potential by both traditional search algorithms and generative AI models. This resource serves as an essential toolkit for digital marketers seeking to move beyond basic SEO and dominate competitive search landscapes in 2026 and beyond.

The Comprehensive List of Advanced SEO & AEO Strategies for 2026

1. Wikipedia Link Rot – A Secret Goldmine for Broken Link Building
2. The Overlooked Traffic Technique: Harvesting Unlinked Mentions
3. Boost Your Traffic Using the Synonyms Ranking Technique
4. Benchmark Your Competitors’ Broken Links
5. Use the Adwords Campaigns to Inspire Your Keyword Usage
6. Use Content Curation to Create In-depth Articles that Engage
7. Get Ahead of the Game by Diversifying Your Link Profile
8. Diversify Your Rankings with Youtube Descriptions
9. Engage Extra Audience and Gain Traffic with the Skyscraper Technique
10. Use Long Tail Keywords to Target Specific Audiences
11. Get Keyword Ideas from Wikipedia
12. Publish Information-rich Content
13. Use Internal Links to Spread Your Page Authority Sitewide
14. Turn Evergreen Content into a Constant Traffic Source
15. Rank Better in Search Engines by Creating Your Own Keywords
16. Create an Expert Roundup to Generate Awareness about Your Blog
17. Keep Track of Your Competitors’ Strategies with In-Depth Link Audits
18. Improve Conversion Rates – Optimize Your Landing Pages
19. Create a Mobile Friendly Site to Increase Your Rankings
20. Use Infographics to Increase Visibility
21. Build a Robust Profile on Authoritative Social Media Platforms to Boost Rankings
22. Help Your Page Indexing with Internal Deep Links
23. Get More Traffic by Updating Old Content and Sharing It on Social Media
24. Try Guest Blogging to Increase Exposure and Consolidate Your Brand
25. Optimize Your Website for Better Page Indexing
26. Be Creative In Your Outreach and Link Building Strategy
27. Use Influencer Marketing to Frame Your Content Marketing Statements
28. Associate Photos with Your Brand by Asking Websites to Give Image Credits
29. Engage with Influencers Who Recently Mentioned You on the Web
30. Use Comment Marketing to Generate Leads
31. Improve Brand Management – Use Press Releases When You’ve Got Something Big Going On
32. Target One Keyword Per Page to Avoid Cannibalization
33. Make Multimedia Part of Your Content and Increase Engagement
34. Link Out – Use Appeal to Authority to Back Your Statements & Gain Credibility Boost
35. Create Tables of Contents to Improve User Experience
36. Use Heatmap Tracking to Optimize Your Call to Actions Display
37. Minimize Bounce Rate with Friendly 404 Pages
38. Rank Better – Get Rid of the Unnatural Links & Prevent Negative SEO Attacks
39. Show Social Proof of Your Popularity
40. Use Diacritics to Perform to a Specific Level in Terms of SERPs

1. Wikipedia Link Rot – A Secret Goldmine for Broken Link Building

Not having a lucrative profile makes Wikipedia one of web’s most trusted sources when it comes to delivering impartial, objective information to its readers. Getting a link from it sparks the interest of anyone, since it’s authority is sky high. That is why promoting yourself through its means isn’t an easy job.

There is, however, one way of associating yourself or your brand with Wiki – and that’s spotting opportunities of link building from broken sources on their articles. Finding the broken links isn’t hard to do, as they have a dedicated page for it.

After finding the links that used to serve as sources for the Wikipedia articles that interest your professional area, it’s not enough to just write something sloppy hoping you’ll get to replace the initial source. The editors, who are dedicated to providing the most qualitative information there is, will do anything to make sure that the article you’ve written is at least as good as the previous one.

Now the question remains, how can you see the content of a dead link/broken page? The Wayback Machine is the solution to your problem here. Inserting the URL of the former Wikipedia source, you’ll be able to browse through that link’s history and see what it once used to look like.

Now you’ve got a sense of what the encyclopedia editors believe is a solid piece of content that’s worth being mentioned as a source to their articles – and this has got to count for something. All that remains for you to do is to actually replicate a dedicated page on your website on that specific topic and make sure that’s more thorough and useful to the reader. Then submit it and wait.

While the answer rate isn’t quite 100%, it can get up to 50% and, if you’ve done the documentation right (and if your website doesn’t scream out ‘spam’) you have a good chance of being approved.

2. The Overlooked Traffic Technique: Harvesting Unlinked Mentions

Many marketers try to increase website traffic by publishing more content, optimizing pages, or building new campaigns. While these strategies are important, one of the fastest ways to generate qualified traffic and improve search visibility is often overlooked: unlinked brand mentions.

Every day, customers, bloggers, journalists, creators, and industry experts mention brands, products, and services across websites, forums, news publications, podcasts, and social media platforms. However, many of these mentions do not include a link back to the company’s website.

These unlinked brand mentions represent valuable opportunities for both SEO and referral traffic generation. When a publisher adds a link to an existing mention, businesses can gain:

• More referral traffic from relevant audiences
• Higher-quality backlinks that strengthen domain authority
• Increased visibility in search engines
• Stronger brand signals across the web
• Better discoverability by AI-powered search and answer engines

To identify these opportunities at scale, businesses need real-time brand monitoring. This is why top growth marketers rely on BrandMentions.

Engineered as an advanced AI visibility tool, BrandMentions continuously crawls the internet in real-time to find every instance where your business is discussed. Its advanced monitoring technology tracks mentions across news sites, blogs, forums, reviews, and social media channels, helping businesses uncover conversations that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Unlike traditional alert tools that often generate large amounts of irrelevant data, BrandMentions uses AI-driven analysis to surface the most relevant and contextual brand mentions. This enables marketing teams, SEO professionals, and digital PR specialists to focus on high-value opportunities instead of manually filtering noise.

By identifying unlinked mentions as they happen, businesses can quickly contact publishers and request a backlink to the original source. This simple outreach strategy can increase referral traffic, improve backlink profiles, strengthen organic search performance, and enhance overall online visibility.

For organizations looking to improve both search engine rankings and AI search presence, monitoring and reclaiming brand mentions remains one of the most effective and scalable link-building tactics available today.

3. Boost Your Traffic Using the Synonyms Ranking Technique

The wording of your search query matters a great deal when it comes to the returned results. This is because, since Hummingbird (Google update algorithms), we know for sure the search engine is trying its best to contextualize semantic meaning in order to understand the intention behind the search query. Moreover, introducing conversational search, Google aims to provide answers that are to-the-point and accurate.

However, the explanation for this phenomenon is as it follows: whenever I search for a term, the search engine will understand that there’s a need behind my search query and will try to answer to that instead of the textual wording. Partial synonyms work great as well.

For instance, if I’m searching for the term ‘SEO consultant’, among the first results on the first page will be ‘SEO expert’, ‘SEO services’, ‘SEO company‘, as the meaning behind the wording doesn’t differ that much.

And although we risk being a little redundant as to what a synonym is, in this case it doesn’t necessarily refer to the lexical identical meanings we were taught in school, but rather a contextual, broader meaning. Many times, the synonym will be an association that we make, a logical path that we follow in our thought processes, hence the differences in meaning from our screenshot above.

4. Benchmark Your Competitors’ Broken Links

Even the most popular and authoritative sources on the web have to constantly deal with the issue of broken links. While redirecting or repairing them is a solution when you’re the admin of the site, there are other perspectives of this issue as well.

From a competitive point of view, if one of your competitors has broken links with a large number of link juice coming from many referring domains, there’s no reason why you wouldn’t turn this in your favor.

After finding the number of broken links, you can export the links to see which one best suited the style of your own website. Of course, there are a few very tempting moments when you are willing to replicate the content of whichever page that used to have 100 k links and 5 k referring domains. However, the challenge is to create something even better, more in-depth, but equally relevant.
After saving the broken pages that are most linked to, you can run a separate analysis with the Site Explorer to check the backlinks of each URL that you’re interested in. Our Site Explorer runs a quick backlink analysis, showing you a number of relevant stats on the page that interests you. One of its features is that allows you to have a clear picture of who linked to the specific content.

This way, you can transform the badly managed situation of your competitor’s into an advantage.

As it generally happens in digital marketing, content comes first. Make sure its quality is indisputably better than the former one. Then, you can contact the webpage’s owners to let them know they may be interested to replace a broken link with something of value that you’ve written.

To have a better idea of what quality looks like for the owners of the pages linking to the content of your competitor, you can use the Wayback Machine to access the page as it used to be when it was live.

After you’ve pictured a clear image of how the former content looked like, it’s time you started working on something even better – significantly better, to increase the chances of getting links from authority sources. Then, you can email them about the broken links and suggest your newly created piece of content to replace the initial one.

While some of the admins will be reluctant at first and will believe you’re only in for the links, the better you document the article and the more information-rich it is, the bigger the chances to get a good link.

5. Use the Adwords Campaigns to Inspire Your Keyword Usage

Because Keyword Planner doesn’t always suggest the most innovative keywords, it’s always best to look over the fence and see how people in your industry promote their products and/or services. It’s clear that, while they’re paying for them, the keywords are very relevant for the targets, so all you have to do is get a fresh perspective on what seems to perform best on the SERPs.

If you remember the semantic associations and the synonym using discussion earlier, the reason why these long tail keywords seem to work although they’re not necessarily very to the point is that people often search for solutions.

It’s enough to identify the concept behind a search query to associate with anything semantically related to it. And, if you’re out of ideas, the AdWords campaigns are always there to give you a hand.
For instance, supposing you own a cat food blog, just type ‘cat food’ into Google and you’ll find these results:

• cat food analysis
• optimize cat food production
• get free food
• find a neighborhood food pantry

All you have to do now is incorporate these newly found long tail keywords in your further blog posts on your website. Needless to say, this SEO tip is only complementary, so it’s probably best not to rely on just this method for your SEO endeavors.

6. Use Content Curation to Create In-depth Articles that Engage

Before any other discussion, publishing duplicate content brings little or no value to readers, which is why it’s not only Matt Cutts who find it useless, but also the search engine and any publisher who is preoccupied of creating something better for the readers’ needs.

Curating content starts from a huge challenge – writing rich information without oversimplifying the facts. Give your audience credit, while at the same time offering systematized information that’s really easy to access and  actionable.

There are different ways in which you can curate content. The best way is to elevate the content that currently exists on the web on that specific topic. You can find the best sources with the most documented examples and, before writing about them all in an organized manner, maybe running an analysis of your own would be a great idea.

What’s most important in content curation is to try and transform the content you’re approaching as opposed to just imitating it.

7. Get Ahead of the Game by Diversifying Your Link Profile

Making constant efforts to be memorable in your industry may have got you good quality links from a few trusted sources. However, while it’s not recommended to center your SEO efforts around the search engines but around being useful to the reader, there’s a catch.

The more diverse the (preferably deep) links pointing to your content, the more the search engine will be inclined to believe you’re making efforts to keep a natural profile of your website.

A huge volume of links means nothing compared to a robust link profile coming from authority sources and – when possible – a diverse profile. While it’s perfectly fine to have a majority of links coming just from one webpage type, it’s also recommended that it’s not the only source of your backlinks. Your strategy can focus on getting links from just one source, but exclusiveness is a sign of an unnatural profile. The example below shows a well implemented natural strategy.

However, diversifying your link profile shows adaptability, especially if it follows a specific strategy and isn’t randomly done.

8. Diversify Your Rankings with Youtube Descriptions

It’s a fact that Youtube videos come up in search results on the first page very often. And the video mammoth isn’t going to lose any of its popularity and influence any time soon, which gets me to the following point – why not turn this fact into your little advantage?

Video content gets a lot of popularity – and so can you. Ranking for keywords when it comes to it isn’t that much of a chore as it seems. Whenever uploading a new tutorial you can update the description of its content, which has a significant contribution to your ranking success.

Shortly after the video was published, with under 6 k views, Brian Dean ranked 4th under the ‘link building’ Youtube search. You may think that 4th isn’t such a great performance, but given how mature the SEO niche is and how fierce the competition, this little SEO tip got him very far with small resources and investment.

Aside from being popular on Youtube, assuming that the generic SEO efforts of people in this niche don’t necessarily focus on videos, a well described Youtube post can get you to appear on the first page of Google results. You can’t expect this to work instantly, it’s a process – but the investment-result ratio states this strategy is a gold mine.

9. Engage Extra Audience and Gain Traffic with the Skyscraper Technique

Let me clarify a misconception. People often correlate the ranking of a website with its content efforts, believing that what’s on the second page of Google results may as well be a top secret confession – because nobody gets to read it anyway. The skyscraper technique is about creating a piece of content that’s not only better than any other one on the topic, but than all of the articles indexed on the web put together. Chances are, treated correctly and updated constantly, this will be an evergreen goldmine.

While in terms of ranking it’s true – the websites getting over 99% of the popularity are the ones on the first page, the second part of the statement is hugely mistaken. Being on the second page of Google results doesn’t say ‘I don’t care and I have crappy content and little to say to the world’; it says ‘I’m desperately trying to get to the first page and I’m doing all the effort that I can to achieve this, regardless of the very competitive industry’.

You can exploit this situation from an SEO perspective – find the best content out there, make the arithmetic average of the opinions on a topic and create the most complete article there is. This technique, copyright Brian Dean, the owner of Backlinko, works every time if you don’t just skim through content and actually research it thoroughly.

10. Use Long Tail Keywords to Target Specific Audiences

Quick concept. A lexical construction containing three or four words addressing a specific topic is what we call a long tail keyword. We call it so because of the traffic graphic. Contrary to popular belief, most of the traffic doesn’t come from the very generic keyword representing a brand or a topic – it comes from small parts composed of more specific keyword groups containing the brand or topic keyword.

This means one thing, above all else – that your content efforts (as well as your link building ones) should be diverse and address more than just the generic audience. Generally, ‘breaking’ the traffic into smaller pieces of content for audiences interested in specific sub-topics will give us a better chance of ranking higher, due to the distinct interests of all the personas we’re targeting.

11. Get Keyword Ideas from Wikipedia

When it comes to finding anything on the web, however specific, Wikipedia is the place to go to get a first impression on a topic. Let’s face it – it’s one of the most comprehensive content sources there are, and the result of a collaborative effort of keeping it objective and relevant. It almost sounds like there’s no better place to look for new keywords, doesn’t it?

The reason why you may find it very useful is that being information-centric instead of keyword-centric allows the articles to be written in a very natural manner, thus providing you with fresh keywords with organic relevance on the topic that you’re researching.

It’s the style that doesn’t seem to abide to the rules of content writing as we apply them today that makes Wikipedia a hot source to freshen your perspective on the words and concepts you should start using more in your articles.

12. Publish Information-rich Content

There is more than just one criterion to take into consideration before outlining your content marketing strategy. One of the points that we have always found crucial is deciding the amount of information that’s specific enough to be relevant and concise enough to be readable.

It’s not enough to think of content as a complex of information that has to be read in a specific number of minutes. Instead, here are some valid criteria that make a good article:

• the purpose of the content – depending on the informational need that it satisfies, content will have to take various shapes. Something news-related, for instance, can be easily treated in a short article, while a case study will aim at painting an in-depth picture of an entire situation with its consequences;
• the complexity of the topic – it wouldn’t be fair to approach something very knowledge-specific in a 1k words article, because it wouldn’t be relevant enough and it would fail to provide all the necessary explanations;
• how savvy your primary audience is – tech-oriented, knowledgeable people won’t need an entire novel to get the idea of a specific strategy you’re proposing, for instance, while beginners in a niche will always make good use of all the explanations you’re willing to give;
• the content depth – it seems like all we read is how everything has to be in-depth in order to have a legitimate audience. In fact, this isn’t always necessary – depending on the type of audience, the media that enhance the communication process etc. content can be to the subject and concise. However, in case you’ve decided to write something substantial with a sensitive acuity and only addressed to a specific niche, you shouldn’t be expeditious and superficial.

While these are all valid criteria we should take into account before writing a piece of content, it’s also true that – especially on a blog – any article of under 1500 words will be considered as too thin for the search engines and specialized audiences, excepting the once-a-year, news-related articles that sometimes can be summarized well in 800 words.

13.Use Internal Links to Spread Your Page Authority Sitewide

One of the lessons we all learned when entering the content marketing industry was that internal links can also be a great asset for our site. And although this is true, it’s also essential to understand the process through which we can transform them into an instrument that helps building a hierarchy into our website architecture. Additionally, you will have to keep an eye on the performance of every page of your website, in case strategy changes are required. For instance, if one page performs better than you expected, you may want to take into consideration boosting it through meaningful deep internal links, as well, to give it a push in the ranks.

Anchor texts are one main character in this story, and the way we use them sometimes decides whether we’ve helped our on-page SEO or not. Let us be redundant yet again – it’s in Google’s best interest to deliver relevant results. Tricking the search engines is something that not only seems to rarely work, but is short timed as well. This is why we’re going to suggest the no-tricks policy – use the anchor texts naturally to keep them relevant – just like you would if there were no Big Brother to establish your rankings.

The second main character in this complex internal linking story are the deep links. Usually, the more contextually you’re linking, the more relevant that internal link is. And it’s not only good for the search engine, but for the readers as well. Keeping the links natural gives the readers a positive, meaningful experience. Correlate the content to other relevant articles on the topic or – when necessary – on a closely complementary topic that completes a perspective.

14. Turn Evergreen Content into a Constant Traffic Source

Without doubt, there are endless types of content that doesn’t date. Since investing in creating relevant, information-rich articles that satisfy the readers’ needs is something that always takes a lot of time and research, it’s unfair to see how after you’ve published it you’ll only get traffic from that specific blog post for a few hours.

Content doesn’t have to be generic and superficial to be evergreen. And if so it happens that you create a piece of content that is, let assume, a retrospective for 2015, update it the following year and maintain your content’s relevance, while also generating information-rich articles.

The secret of evergreen content is being constantly preoccupied to find something that will maintain its relevance for your audience in time. Once you did this, taking time to do serious documentation is crucial since otherwise the entire idea of creating something that stays actual loses its purpose.

15. Rank Better in Search Engines by Creating Your Own Keywords

Let’s see what happens when you’re dealing with a mature niche. Instead of being easy to rank for the most popular keywords in your industry, it’s actually a work of Sisyphus even trying to get to the (not first, not second) third page of Google results.

How come we’re so bold as to say this? It’s easy – you can replicate this theory of ours yourself. Find a mature industry that’s highly competitive and the acuity of content marketing has to be spotless to make it work. Then search for a keyword in that industry. Then go to the 3rd page of Google results and open a link randomly.

I know. Shocker. It’s not only very relevant to the subject, but it’s seriously documented and very well written as well. And why does this happen? Because people are dying to rank for very popular keywords. While this endeavor is something we very much agree with as a long term strategy, it’s always smart to rank for your own keywords.

The example of Brian Dean is perhaps the most illustrative for this point. He invented the skyscraper technique as a means to create the best article based on what was already on the web on a certain topic, after thorough documentation.

It’s distinct from content curation by the fact that it doesn’t aggregate the existing content but it uses it as a premise to create the most in-depth piece of content that brings more relevance than reading the first pages of Google results after a search query.

As you can see in the screenshot above, he ranks best for the keyword he created and his name is associated with the technique, all in the first page of Google results.

16. Create an Expert Roundup to Generate Awareness about Your Blog

The web era is the context where influencers have a lot to say – and they always seem to trigger a high response rate. Gathering them in the same place can have extraordinary results. Think of it this way – you’re organizing an event, a concert for instance. If the headline is a great band, your chances of gathering more people at your event increase. However, if you make it a festival and you get together 7 bands as popular as the headline, you’ll have a lot more participants to your event.

Of course, they won’t be exactly 7 times more than the initial number of participants – because they have some common interests, which means that you can only add to the number of readers the ones that represent a specific difference between one expert and another. However, even in these conditions, the results can be spectacular.

The following example makes no exception. The article gathered over 40 experts to give their opinions on content marketing and it easily made over 8 k shares.

It’s a win for the writer of the post, who triggered a large number of pageviews, while also getting to be a little more popular after contacting the experts through email outreach. And it’s also a win for the reader, whose interest is respected in this post – giving specific, concise and valuable information on how to grow your blog.

17. Keep Track of Your Competitors’ Strategies with In-Depth Link Audits

Running a link audit is, in many aspects, like looking directly into the soul of your competitors’ marketing strategy. Interpreted correctly, this can help you figure out the generic idea behind their publishing efforts.

Knowing if your competitor is mostly linked by blogs, forums or news sites is vital in understanding who they’re aiming at when publishing a new piece of content, and so is knowing the webpage category in figuring out what kind of industries are most interested in their articles.

If my competitor is successful and manages to engage a community as to constantly come back on the site and read their content, you can read their articles and then see what type of information or structure style is preferred by people who own a blog in the tech industry, for instance. Then you’ll know what to do to reach that exact audience and have a real chance to succeed.

Popularity is 99% sweat. High quality content alone doesn’t do miracles. However, exceptional planning skills do – and being Sherlock from time to time doesn’t kill either. Online visibility is much more than the number of shares your articles have – it’s everything from planning on addressing a certain audience to understanding their needs and their reaction to topics similar to yours.

18. Improve Conversion Rates – Optimize Your Landing Pages

The difference between a prospect landing on your page and then leaving immediately and one who will engage on your website and spend time there often lies in the way your landing page is optimized.

One of our favorite examples is Monotype. To make their activity clear – and interactive, their fully text based landing page offers the possibility to both change the font of their copy and edit the text into anything.

There are many things to be said about landing pages. One of the first, by far, regards their number on your site. Although many small businesses fail to see how that’s relevant, landing pages are crucial in a functional marketing strategy that converts. It’s not a secret that Dell has well over 1000 landing pages that perform 300% better if tested against website pages, or that Genworth increased lead volume by 3000% and their digital-driven revenue by 350% by changing their landing page approach.
Another interesting stat that you may want to take into consideration is this one: Websites increasing the number of landing pages from 1-5 to 6-10 didn’t experience any major change. However, the ones increasing their number from 6-10 to 11-15 had 55% increase.

19. Create a Mobile Friendly Site to Increase Your Rankings

The same keyword or topic performs distinctly on web and mobile. The fact that mobile searches are dramatically growing in popularity because – let’s face it – desktops are less dynamic than smartphones, hence the growing preference for the latter category.

While in theory this only means that we’ve got adaptive mechanisms that help us cope with the flooding amount of information we come across every day, for SEO professionals it also means something else. Mobile optimization is a key factor in ranking mobile, especially since 72% of the smartphone owners believe it’s more likely to visit a website again if it’s mobile friendly.

User experience has become more and more important since it’s one of the decisive factors in your traffic numbers. And because to the search engines it is equally important to provide a satisfactory experience as it is for the users to have one, the screenshot above was taken on Google Developers’ Mobile Friendly Test, especially since it’s one of the ranking factors of Google’s algorithm.

20. Use Infographics to Increase Visibility

Being concise is what often attracts an audience more than anything else. This is why infographics, while also visually pleasant, attract people through their conciseness, providing the website with a much larger engagement rate than usual content.

According to an infographic published by Neomam, 99% of sensory information is filtered out by our brains due to the overstrain, meaning that only 1% of what we’re presented is actually given a proper chance, while 90% of the information we come in contact with is processed through visual stimuli.

And if what you’re thinking right now is that maybe you don’t want to hire a full-time designer to do this job, you don’t have to be an expert in Illustrator to find free websites that allow you to create your own infographics.
One of these inspiring sources is Canva, which provides great default layouts for infographics.

Another great place to go to when you need to personalize an infographic layout in order to make it suit your site’s design is Easel.

This doesn’t mean that all your information should be delivered through the form of infographics, but that this tip should be taken into consideration given the increased memorability of visually-delivered information.

21. Build a Robust Profile on Authoritative Social Media Platforms to Boost Rankings

Getting out of the box with your content can often prove to be highly useful when it comes to rankings. Consolidating your brand’s presence and the keywords you wish to be ranking for can be done through the means of other platforms than the ones you own and the generic social media posts.

LinkedIn is a high-quality publishing platform that grew to be the most reliable source for professionals. Depending on how much your industry is related to the presence online, it can be highly beneficial to duplicate the Twitter contacts (for instance) by LinkedIn connections. After you’ve done this, publishing an article a month can increase your brand reputation, since the platform is solely dedicated to professionals and, therefore, you no longer have to compete with posts from thousands of other entities.  To further strengthen your professional presence, using a LinkedIn banner maker helps create visually consistent branding that enhances profile credibility and supports stronger audience engagement.

Secondly, there’s Slideshare. Creating a presentation and uploading it on this platform can help you increase the number of leads, as well as boost your rankings due to two main reasons:

1. the diversity of sources where your name (or brand) will be connected to a series of keywords or topics and, generally to a specific area of expertise and
2. the very authoritative source that will host your content, thus constituting a perfect means of promotion.

Similar to the Slideshare strategy, you can start promoting your content on other authoritative platforms populated by knowledgeable people, such as Quora. Aside from the ranking advantages, you can also increase and diversify your audience.

22. Help Your Page Indexing with Internal Deep Links

Everybody seems to be talking about building a solid link profile, which means both being linked to by high authority pages and linking to the same category for a change. This mechanism applies just as well when it comes to on-page SEO. Linking to a piece of content from an already indexed page that you know is popular helps your search engine marketing for more than just one reason:

• It creates a bridge between a page that has good authority and one that generates leads or performs well in terms of readability;
• It improves your rankings for certain keywords, provided that you use the relevant anchor texts;
• It helps transferring not only your audience from a page to another, but the authority as well;
• It helps the crawlers index your site completely based on the internal connections you’re creating;
• It represents a powerful hook for your readers, on the condition that the content you suggest for further reading is closely related to the ones they spent time on.

Thinking of thick industries where there is a lot of content to be read, such as travel or fashion, it can confuse the search engine, particularly when there are very few or none external links. This is where internal linking also pays a crucial role, creating a semantic connection between different topics, in order to help avoiding any possible confusions of the search engine.

23. Get More Traffic by Updating Old Content and Sharing It on Social Media

Often, it’s almost not worth it spending so much time documenting a piece of content thoroughly just to see it get lost in the content avalanche online. The first content writers who decided to update their previously documented content instead of working on another piece from scratch were clearly under the same impression as we are today.

And it’s not only beneficial in terms of traffic – although this is the main advantage around this SEO tip – but in terms of link building as well. You’ve already worked to make a piece of content specific enough to be niche-relevant and get quality backlinks. Start from here.

Take the example of Sugarrae below. Updating old content to match Google’s changes in algorithm is a smart move for everyone in the SEO business, especially since it can significant traffic using a smaller effort than it takes to write an article from scratch.

The great advantage is that, having written on the topic, you know how interested people are in reading about it – which gives you leverage on updating the content that brought the most traffic when it was first published. Of course, it goes without saying that the content will also have to be relevant and up to date, while also keeping the user’s interests in mind.

24. Try Guest Blogging to Increase Exposure and Consolidate Your Brand

Short clarification: the reason why the search engines can’t afford to make their algorithm public is that, whenever pieces of it become widely known, people try to cheat the system, abusing the specific criteria.

This is very relevant contextualization when it comes to guest posting – a few years ago this technique was a mess. Not because people didn’t know how to do it, but because they overdid it. There were guest posts everywhere, very few of which related to the area of expertise of the guest blogger.The technique was abused because it was used as a cheap source of links.

However, this technique has proved that it can still be highly useful when done properly. After the abusive-period there began the penalty-period because of flooding link profiles. However, writing relevant content on a specific topic in your niche can have tremendous effects on your brand recognition in the context of professional, responsible guest posting.

Being exposed to strikingly reputable websites creates a trust and reputation transfer in a reader’s mind from the source where you published your content to your brand.

Take this article we published on Search Engine Journal, for instance. It had 700 shares and over 10k reads, which makes it quite popular.

Of course, we focused on satisfying an informational need of the audience. This content-focused attitude is what builds credibility and reliability as a professional source online. It’s vital to distinguish between the services you’re promoting and the audiences you’re trying to get to.

Consequently, the article being written as a thoroughly documented piece brought us extra traffic.

Generally, a well written guest post will be a refreshing method to generate leads, provided that you take into consideration the type of platform you’re posting it on as well as the general audience of said website.

25. Optimize Your Website for Better Page Indexing

An important part of the SEO process, although few seem to talk about it, is the on-page strategy. The reason why it’s so scarcely approached is not due to its lack of importance, but to the fact that it’s a lot easier to implement than the off-page strategies, partly because it doesn’t involve any external factors.

These being said, use proper titles and descriptions. The more easily read these are, the more relevant they become for the crawlers as well. It’s essential that the naming process takes into consideration the topic and structure of the content, as well as the direction of the topic. The URL structure has to be clear and to use a permanent link in order to be both memorable by readers and accessible to crawlers.

Descriptions are what’s displayed in the search results – a short 150-words summary on the content. Advertising the page properly dramatically increases the chances of accessing the page and reading as much from it.

Because formatting is sometimes what sells the content, it’s also crucial to make it structurally clear – everything from quotes, underlines, bolds and italics can contribute to readers spending more time on your website – not to mention proper titles and subtitles with H1, H2, H3 etc. attributes.

Images are another important factor and they can be optimized as well. Starting with reducing their dimensions to make the loading smoother to using ALT tags to describe their content as to be relevant for the crawler, there’s nothing to be left out.

For instance, the image file name matters almost as much as the image itself – giving it a descriptive name that helps the bots understand what it contains increases its chances of organically appearing on Google results on the image section.

26. Be Creative In Your Outreach and Link Building Strategy

This is exactly what it looks like: cookies. And not your generic Oreos that you hear about everyday, but cookies from AppSumo. Now you’d ask yourself what it was that John did so well as to make Noah from AppSumo think: ‘That guy deserves a cookie! What’s his ZIP code?’

You guessed right. The answer is ‘great emailing technique’. He earned the cookies by convincing Noah that he can be a) relevant, b) personal (see PPPS) and c) creative, while also to the point (see subject line).

The most reliable outreach email doesn’t lack anything from sugar and spice to everything nice.

As we’ve documented in another article, the response rate for a cold email outreach is generally very low, because people often forget to treat it like a contextual content – one that has to persuade, to impress and to invite to action. However, the approach in the screenshot above managed to stand out because of its natural, yet pertinent tone.

The reason why usually outreach emails have such a low response rate is the very natural law of offer-demand ratio. Since there are plenty of people emailing influencers, it’s only logical that they’ll answer to the most appropriate and to-the-point requests.

27. Use Influencer Marketing to Frame Your Content Marketing Statements

A significant part of traffic comes from organic searches – this is why we’re so considerate about our search engine marketing. For instance, getting to have 77 comments on one blog post is quite a performance, supported by the fact that expert opinions were shared and featured in the article.

However, it would be naïve and counterproductive to neglect the importance of other factors in this very complex success formula, one of which is influencer marketing.

Micro-celebrities or, as they’re called from a marketing point of view, influencer marketers are very popular people in their micro-niche, who represent a standard of quality and professionalism. Targeting them to spread your content on social media doesn’t only bring new traffic, but also generates an implicit associative mechanism through which part of their image capital is transferred to you.

Truth is, starting from the premise that no business can survive online without serious storytelling implication, influencer marketing can be of great help in amplifying your stories.
There’s nothing easy in making an influencer want to share the wisdom you spread across social media platforms – and it’s partly because the moment they share or retweet something of yours, you automatically have a huge increase in credibility AND they are aware of this.

However, the key in impressing the influencers so much as to share your stories is to be personal and make them relate to your experiences – show a human side you think they’d like to be associated with.

28. Associate Photos with Your Brand by Asking Websites to Give Image Credits

Reverse Image Search is a neat link building technique, especially because the cost-benefit ratio makes it more than worth your while. Now let’s suppose you wish to see whether an image of yours is being used somewhere else on the web without it being linked to your site.

Let’s take this image from one of our blog posts. It belongs to cognitiveSEO.

After clicking on Copy Image Address, go to Google search and paste the address in there, then press search.

You’ll be suggested to try searching by image. Click on it.

The returned results display two important categories: a) the photos on the web that are found to be similar to yours and b) the URLs of the websites where this image is featured in the posts.

All you have to do now is click on each of these URLs (which didn’t stop to the first page, in our case) and see which of these don’t link to your site. Contact the admins/authors and you’re on the way of getting the well deserved credits.

29. Engage with Influencers Who Recently Mentioned You on the Web

It’s almost physically painful to try and stay connected to everyone mentioning you on the web – it requires constant monitoring and a humongous amount of time. However, there are tools where you can monitor your brand to see instantly who’s talking about you on the web at the moment. We used BrandMentions to run the analysis, a tool we created especially for real time monitoring.

Type in your brand name and see what’s been happening on the web while you were busy writing great content – get instant feedback of how you perform and what people in the industry think of you meeting their competitive requirements.

There were 34 mentions of our brand during the last month – many of which didn’t link to our site. Contacting the authors of the posts personally doesn’t only create a huge networking opportunity, but it also constitutes a great link building opportunity – especially because everybody appreciates a prompt professional.

30. Use Comment Marketing to Generate Leads

Comment marketing is the technique by which you provide insightful comments to niche articles, without directly promoting your business, for the solely purpose to help users. For this to work you first have to get it out of your head that comment marketing is the same as randomly commenting on blog posts. It goes without saying that the strategy you should apply further depends directly on the type of objective that you’d like to accomplish through this technique. However, in order to help your reputation management strategy succeed, you will have to be specific in your approach and always address the right audience on the appropriate platform.

Let’s assume your goal is more traffic – leads that will be interested in visiting your website just after reading your comment.

For this to happen, make sure that they’re no more than one click away from your website. Instead of agreeing with a general opinion or posting an emoji, maybe you should write something significant – an opinion that will stand out and raise eyebrows, something that will make people curious to see what you’re about.

Concerning the type of blog you’ll be commenting on, it will have to meet all or as many of the following criteria as possible:

• It’s top notch in the industry – everybody recognizes it as an authority;
• It has a frequent posting schedule (and maybe a recurring posting schedule to make people know when to get back for more content in an organized manner);
• It has a lot of traffic from competitive actors in the industry.

Regardless of your purpose, you should be consistent and relevant in your endeavor, otherwise you’ll be that-annoying-guy-who-doesn’t-understand-the-industry-but-has-an-opinion-nonetheless. And that’s not an option in comment marketing.

If your goal is exposure – becoming notorious, you’ll have to channel your efforts towards finding the pieces of content that influencers go to and start from there. Unlike the one about your traffic, the exposure objective refers to anybody who can be thought of as a prospect for your business, not just people already gravitating around it.

Take the Search Engine Journal for instance. It is a good complementary idea if you’re trying to strengthen your authority as a professional source in the field, because of all the daily visits, the authority, etc. Writing a good comment there can be the reason for a hundred people associating your name with an authoritative opinion – and that’s the secret of being memorable.

31. Improve Brand Management – Use Press Releases When You’ve Got Something Big Going On

It doesn’t take too much experience in this industry to fully understand how difficult a process of building quality links is, there’s no need for an explanation here. However, it’s vital that the press release isn’t something boring that emphasizes your lack of personality. On the contrary, one of our favorite examples of press releases is this Infographic

This technique requires, first of all, a complete lack of abuse coming from an objective evaluation of your product’s most important features and releases.

However, whenever you’re in the position of doing something great that people should know about because it benefits them objectively and it constitutes a newsworthy topic, you should consider writing press releases for the following reasons:

• It’s a great strategy for quality, naturally gained links that will count as earned media as long as you keep the topic newsworthy; this comes along with the brand recognition benefits and the humongous exposure we could all use every once in awhile;
• It’s an important source of new traffic to your site – the press agencies finding your releases (or whichever important event you have going on) of interest for their readers are probably right. Nobody would risk publishing something that lacks value to their readers, especially from the position of a press agency. Yet, you shouldn’t leave the topic entirely up to their decision, but invest a significant amount of time in making sure the audience will be captivated instead of bored;
• It contributes a great deal not only to your link profile in itself, but to your website’s ranks as well.

Of course, the immediate disadvantage is that such authoritative sources choose their employees to be skeptical and it’s a quality in their actual job description, which may make it a little harder to persuade them that your professional improvements constitute a valid press subject for them, which is exactly why this tip shouldn’t be abused.

32. Target One Keyword Per Page to Avoid Cannibalization

It’s infinitely easier for the overall strategy of your site to succeed in terms of SERPs positions if you focus the efforts of internal linking towards lifting one page per keyword. Let’s assume you’ve got the keyword ‘link building’ that you want to rank for. First of all, the quality of your content may have to suffer, keyword targeting aside, if you focus on the same topic all over again and your entire website may become redundant instead of useful, in time.

Assuming you always write for the readers’ best interest, it’s still true that the search engine will find it difficult to prioritize between distinct pieces of content on the same keywords that you’re linking to so – best case scenario – this will lead to cannibalization.

Having established that it’s detrimental to try to link for a keyword on more pages, this also constitutes the premise for great quality, well documented content on each of your pages – given that you’ll focus on different micro-topics instead of the generic theme.

33. Make Multimedia Part of Your Content and Increase Engagement

There are various stats supporting visual marketing particularly as part of the generic multimedia marketing trend. And as much as many marketers are still reluctant to giving into these tendencies, the numbers should at least make us take it into consideration:

• While generally only 10% of the information is remembered after only 3 days from reading it on the web, accompanying the content with an image increases this number to 65%, making the content strategy all the more efficient, according to this article;
• Relevant images increase the number of views of a piece of content with 94%, as we find out in this Kissmetrics blog post;
• According to a Syndacast prediction, 74% of all web traffic – which is 3 quarters! – will come from videos in 2017;
• Content in infographics is shared and tweeted 3 times more in social media compared to classical content, according to this Massplanner blog post;
• Facebook posts that have images perform 2,3 times better than the ones without images, as shown by this Buzzsumo article.

Don’t be afraid to be bold when it comes to video integration – it can take you a long way. When this wireless-bungee-jumping fake experiment first appeared, only featuring it in a post could guarantee for a thousand reads. Visuals engage!

However, given that visual aids have to be the sidekick of great content, we always suggest high quality articles before establishing to what extent you’re going to be using this tip!

34. Link Out – Use Appeal to Authority to Back Your Statements & Gain Credibility Boost

It’s not wrong unless you’re doing it wrong. Generally, linking to a high authority, even with the ‘rel=nofollow’ tag, tells the search engine’s crawler that you’re mostly interested in providing quality information from reliable sources, thus keeping the readers’ interest on top of your blogging business.

In this concern, it’s highly relevant to think of the domain ownership as one of the main factors in establishing its authority (assuming you’re not using any tool to provide you with information on this matter) – a webpage .org, for instance, will give away from the TLD that it’s covering a social interest rather than just a commercial one.

It’s not uncommon for SEO practitioners to believe that the most important source of ranking success lies in being linked to by highly performing websites with good authority. However, while this is a place to start from, the search engine marketing strategy should always dig deeper and take all the micro SEO techniques into considerations. After all, it’s the extra mile that makes all the difference.

35. Create Tables of Contents to Improve User Experience

Ultimately, the entire ranking process along with the information neutrality principle have the same purpose – to serve the user as well as it’s humanly (or spiderly?) possible. With this in mind, the content strategy concerning the informational structure of the articles you publish on your blog has to start from the premise that a dissatisfied reader will immediately leave your website and never come back.

Of course, there are almost as many reasons as there are readers out there, but they can all be broken into smaller categories. One of these – and highly important – is how easily the user can find the content he clicked in for. There are more indicators that contribute to this quite generic type of satisfaction – such as having a sitemap that makes navigating through content intuitive, site-wide speaking.

Article-wide, it’s crucial to organize the material as to satisfy the informational need as rapidly as possible and a table of contents is the type of guidance that a user needs in order not to get bored inside a large post.

You’ll say that once the informational need has been satisfied, the user will leave the page, thus reading just 1 subheading of, say, 24, like in the example below.

And while you’re right, the alternative wouldn’t be a user who reads the content entirely just to find what interests him, but someone who leaves the blog and never returns because of a negative experience.

In the economy of decision-making processes regarding the user experience you provide on your blog, structuring the information in a friendly way improves the bounce rate dramatically on the long run, as it also increases the reader loyalty.

36. Use Heatmap Tracking to Optimize Your Call to Actions Display

The user’s attention span is 8.25 seconds and falling. This means that informational points have to be delivered quickly and in the most appealing manner in order to improve reader loyalty (and traffic, for that matter). Heat maps are a great instrument when it comes to deciding what button to place where, as they offer you information about the consumer behavior.

Depending on your purpose, there are more types of mapping:

• Clicking heatmaps – concentrating on where users click more on the pages;
• Scrolling heatmaps – to help you outline the perfect moment to place the most valuable piece of idea of the articles, especially since Above-the-Fold design isn’t a content design pillar anymore;
• Attention heatmaps – showing you where it is that people stop skimming through content and actually read it wholly; connecting eye movement with mouse movement and establishing the perfect place for a Call to Action.

Although it’s best to use each of these instruments to conduct separate research and aggregate the data, if you’re in a hurry concerning your CTA positioning, the most relevant one is the attention heatmap, giving you direct insight on the best place to position a call to action that converts.

37. Minimize Bounce Rate with Friendly 404 Pages

Being a little creative and showing a sense of humor or maybe a little self deprecation whenever something goes wrong can take you very far. Of course, it all depends on the kind of audience you’ve got, on the relationship that you’re establishing with them. Is it personal? Is it highly professional? What commonalities is it based on?

Depending on the answers to these questions, you can do what Worrydream does. Be artistic, funny and breezy about it. Maybe reference Magritte.

Or, however, be a little jovial about it, like Lego does.

Or be smart about it, like Magnt – use a Venn diagram.

In the end, keep in mind that whichever strategy you choose, it’s only meant to make a difference – to be witty and raise eyebrows.

38. Rank Better – Get Rid of the Unnatural Links & Prevent Negative SEO Attacks

Rankings won’t improve naturally unless you monitor them constantly. However, it’s almost impossible to do this without a tool to guide you through the process.

Among the many dangers that come with the SEO business is the one of facing a negative SEO attack. As the very definition of it is something a competitor or somebody with bad intentions does, it’s even more difficult to prevent it.

However, fortunately we’ve got this tool to perform Unnatural Link Detections and the possibility of filling in a Google Disavow file to send to the search engine specialists and request not to take those specific domains in consideration.

And, of course, because maybe there’s some personal touch we’d like to add to this analysis, it’s always best to know you can rely on a self-learning algorithm that takes into consideration any manual change that you may be making as to improve the accuracy of the overall results.

39. Show Social Proof of Your Popularity

Recently, there’s been a discussion about the shareability of an article not necessarily meaning it was read thoroughly (or at all!). While this may be true, it’s also safe to say that whatever makes the first people share gets the ball rolling, transforming a piece of content into a sometimes endless or at least very long lasting slippery slope.

People who see that others have shared a piece of content will be more keen to believe that that certain article is more sharing-material than an article that has no sharing buttons displayed. While it’s uncertain if this kind of attitude is nothing else but a mellow form of peer pressure, it seems to be working.

40. Use Diacritics to Perform to a Specific Level in Terms of SERPs

This – last, but not least – technique is not used by many people in the industry, and maybe this is exactly why it works wonders.

As we’ve already documented a detailed article explaining the procedure and implementation of this tip in the form of a case study of Über, we’ll only go through the basics.

And while you’ll be tempted to believe that this specifically lingual difference in spelling shouldn’t affect the returned results of a search query, you couldn’t be more wrong. The truth is, for the keyword ‘Québec’ there are around 15 million results without diacritics and not more than 300 thousand with diacritics.

What this means in terms of rankings and why it should very much interest you is better, easily improved rankings. Targeting the diacritics version of your brand – especially when it has the bad luck of being composed of quite common words – can improve the SERPs results dramatically.

Conclusion

While there are hundreds of criteria based on which the search engines’ ranking algorithms are made, doing a little of everything while always keeping your reader’s best interest in mind is the best key to success.

However, we’re not at all implying that this list of SEO techniques is all you can do to increase your website’s performance. So what is it that makes you so creative and you’d like to share?

The post 40 Rarely Used SEO Techniques That Will Double Your Traffic & AI Citations appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

If there’s one thing I’ve noticed during many years of practicing SEO, it’s that people heavily neglect titles. Countless times have I been told – “I’ve worked with an SEO agency before, but with no results” – just to see that the “agency” hasn’t even optimized something as basic as the title tag.

But today, the stakes are even higher. A great title tag can no longer just target traditional search engine crawlers; it also needs to signal deep contextual relevance to AI answer engines while triggering a genuine emotional response from human searchers. Let’s dive into how you can bridge that gap and master both.

1. What Are Page Title Tags?
2. Writing Titles Driven by Emotional Intelligence
3. Why Are Title Tags Important for SEO?
4. What’s the Difference Between H1 Tags and Title Tags?
5. SEO Title Tags Tips & Best Practices
   1. Write the title for humans first
   2. Keep your titles short and to the point
   3. Try adding the main keyword closer to the beginning
   4. If possible, try optimizing the title for multiple keywords
   5. Try to avoid keyword cannibalization with other articles
   6. Make your title catchy to improve CTR
   7. Fill short titles with calls to action
   8. Make your article & title look fresh
   9. Back up your title tag with relevant content
   10. Use different titles for SEO & Social Media
6. How to Craft an SEO Friendly Title Tag
   1. Step 1: Choose your keywords wisely
   2. Step 2: Draft your title tag
   3. Step 3: Optimize the title tag
7. How To Write Bulk (Auto-generated) Title Tags for eCommerce Websites
8. Why Is Google Showing a Different/Wrong Title Tag?

What Are Page Title Tags?

You might think that the title tag is the phrase you write in WordPress or whatever platform you use and which represents the title of your page/article. However…

The title tag is actually an HTML element which serves a number of key roles in browsers, search engines and on the web, in general.

Like any other HTML tag, the title meta tag is surrounded by angle brackets and it has a start tag <title> and an end tag </title>. The actual title is found between those tags.

The title of this particular article you’re reading right now is written as follows:

<title>How to Write SEO Friendly Title Tags | Guide & Best Practices</title>

If you hit CTRL + U on your Windows machine (I don’t know the combination for Mac OS Safari) or right click anywhere on the article and hit View Source, you will be able to spot the title tag in its true form.

If you can’t see it, use CTRL + F to search for the start tag <title>.

The title tag’s contents are also displayed inside the browser tabs. You can hover over them to view the full title of a web page.

However, titles aren’t there just to look pretty. They serve a purpose, especially for search engines and SEO.

Writing Titles Driven by Emotional Intelligence

Optimizing your title tags with exact-match keywords is essential for traditional search crawlers, but securing a human click requires emotional resonance. The highest-converting titles tap directly into the real-time friction, aspirations, or explicit intent your audience is experiencing right now.

But how do you decode the psychological state of your market?
You uncover this by leveraging BrandMentions.

While standard keyword tools only provide legacy search volume metrics, this advanced AI visibility platform captures linguistic and emotional context. It differentiates itself through multi-layered NLP (Natural Language Processing) sentiment tracking, which transcends basic positive-versus-negative binaries. By executing deep, emotion-level semantic analysis across forums, blogs, and social ecosystems, it maps whether your market is experiencing “frustration,” “curiosity,” or “skepticism” around a specific topic.

Ultimately, by integrating these raw emotional insights, your title tags evolve from simple keyword strings into high-converting entity signals that capture attention across both traditional search results and AI-generated answer engine responses.

Why Are Title Tags Important for SEO?

The title tags are considered to be an important SEO ranking factor. There are multiple reasons why titles are important for SEO. The first one would be that it’s the main thing users see when they search something on Google or any other search engine.

Unless specified otherwise, the title meta tag will also be used on most social media platforms when sharing a link.

You might notice a slight difference between the Google title and the Facebook title. Truth is that the original title is actually the one in the Facebook post.

Our homepage’s title tag is actually “SEO Tools to Increase Your Traffic – cognitiveSEO” but on Google it’s “cognitiveSEO: SEO Tools to Increase Your Traffic”.

Why is it different in the Google search results? Well, it’s because sometimes, Google tends to rewrite titles. It’s not something we did on purpose. Google chose to do it.

The ‘brand first’ rewrite is one of the most common title rewrites. It usually happens only with the homepage. As you can see, the pricing page has the branding at the end of the title.

We’ll talk more about title rewrites towards the end of the article, so keep reading.

What’s the Difference Between H1 Tags and Title Tags?

Although they seem very similar and do share some similarities, there is a pretty big difference between the title tag and the H1 tag.

They are completely different HTML tags (<title></title> vs <h1></h1>) and serve different purposes.

The big main difference between the Title Tag and the H1 Tag is that the Title Tag does not show on the web page itself.

The Title Tag’s main purpose is to show on search engines and external websites that make a reference to your web page’s title.

On the other side, the H1 shows on the webpage or within the website itself.

This isn’t always the case and it depends on the CMS you’re using. However, most Content Management Systems out there tend to use the H1 tag as the on-page title.

Most of the time, the Title Tag and the H1 Tag are identical. For example, in WordPress, when you create a new blog post and write the title, you’re actually writing the H1 Tag. WordPress then pulls that information and also adds it to the Title Tag.

However, if you use an SEO plugin such as Yoast SEO, you can specify a custom SEO Title Tag which will be different from the H1.

This means you can show something on your website but something different in the search engines. This is useful as you can add multiple keywords into your H1 tag when the Title Tag is too long and doesn’t fit.

Here’s one example of a longer H1 tag:

And the shorter Title Tag accompanying it, that fits the SERPs:

Another big difference is that there can be multiple H1s on a web page, although we recommend using H2 and H3 tags for multiple subtitles and sticking with a single H1 tag.

For example, on the blog page, WordPress automatically converts all the blog posts H1s to H2s, as the H1 of the blog page is “The SEO Blog from cognitiveSEO”.

On the other side, it’s crucial that your website has only one title tag per page. Multiple title tags can negatively impact your rankings, so make sure you don’t do that.

SEO Title Tags Tips & Best Practices

Before we talk about actually crafting your SEO titles, we have to make sure you’re following the best practices.

Here’s a list of things that you should try to constantly keep in mind when you’re writing your titles. Once you know these, writing an SEO friendly title meta tag should be pretty easy!

Write the title for humans first

I’m writing this first because it’s very important. Sure, the titles are read by robots and algorithms and they’re the ones that rank your site.

However, when they finally make it to the top, titles are read by humans, who eventually dictate if they will click on it or not! If they don’t click on it, the algorithms will know your title isn’t a great one.

Try to avoid keyword stuffing and instead focus on being relevant.

User intent is also an important factor. What are your customers looking for? Are you writing your title for a commercial keyword or for an informational one?

Try to think what your target audience and customers would click on. You can always take a look at what your competition is doing. Don’t copy, but get inspired. The top positions are clearly doing at least something right.

Keep your titles short and to the point

When writing your title tag for SEO purposes, one of the first things you have to keep in mind is that the title has to be short.

Why?

If your title tags are too long, Google will make them shorter and will add […] at the end. This process is called truncation and it looks just like this:

This won’t directly impact your SEO but it can affect your CTR, which will eventually impact positions. Generally, you want to keep your title short enough to fit the Google search results.

How long can your title be? Generally, it’s a good idea to keep the title tag lengths between 60 to 70 characters. However, Google actually has a limit of 600 pixels in which it displays the title and, because different characters have different widths, the limit number might be different.

That’s why it’s a better idea to use tools such as the Yoast SEO plugin to make sure your title fits properly.

If you don’t use WordPress or another CMS and cannot install an SEO plugin on your web host, you can always use a tool such as MetaTags.io to quickly check if your title, URL and meta description are displaying properly in the search engine result pages.

You can then manually add your titles and meta tags for SEO on your website, regardless of your platform or web host.

Keep in mind that it’s also a bad idea to keep your title too short. Too short titles might not grab the user’s attention either.

Quick tip: You can use | instead of – as a separator in your title sections. | has less pixels than – and in some situations it can help you get a fully displayed title, without having to remove any words.

Try adding the main keyword closer to the beginning

Google puts more weight on the keywords that are closer to the beginning. This also boosts the click through rate, as users click more on the results which contain the keywords they have just searched for.

Sometimes, you won’t be able to add the focus keyword with the most search volume right at the beginning.

For example, the primary keyword with the most search volume for this article is “title tags SEO”. However, that’s pretty hard to get inside a title and still make it sound good and natural.

Google is smart enough to figure out what an article is about, but you have to give it some good hints. If you give the right hints, it will figure it out easier and will reward you for it with better rankings.

So, writing “SEO Title Tags” instead of “Title Tags SEO” won’t be a big problem.

Quick Tip: If you also do Google Adwords, it’s a good idea to follow the best practices offered there. Google spends a lot of time perfecting CTR, so they definitely know what users want to click.

If possible, try optimizing the title for multiple keywords

Try to keep them in order. For example, this article is optimized for the following keywords:

“how to write seo friendly title tags”

“seo friendly title tags”

“seo title tags guide”

“seo title tags best practices”

If you look at the title of this article, you’ll see that you can find all these phrases in order, from left to right, although there might be some other words in-between.

The keywords must also align with what you have to say in the article. You shouldn’t include keywords just because they have a high search volume.

Optimizing one article for too many keywords is a bad idea. You might try to kill two birds with a stone. For example, if you write an article entitled “SEO Guide”, don’t expect it to rank for “keyword research”, “onpage optimization”, “link building”, etc.

Take advantage of the H1 Tag as well. If you can’t fit all the keywords you find relevant into the title, you can squeeze a couple more in the H1. Make sure you keep the focus keyword in the H1 as well.

Also, don’t forget the meta descriptions. You should add your keywords there as well, as Google tends to ignore your meta description if it doesn’t contain the keywords the user is searching for.

Try to avoid keyword cannibalization with other articles

You should take care of this before you even start writing your article. Check if your site doesn’t already have a page optimized for very similar keywords.

In other words, you need to have unique titles for your articles, each targeting a specific topic and set of keywords.

However, writing separate articles for each and every keyword is also a bad idea! You’ll end up with an issue called keyword cannibalization, when too many articles are competing for the same keywords.

For example, if I had two separate articles for “how to write seo title tags” and “seo title tags best practices” they would both compete for the keyword “seo title tags”.

Sure, you could still optimize them separately and they might even rank the way you want. However, if you start having more and more articles that target the same keywords, it might become harder and harder to rank with them.

So, since both of these keywords cover similar topics (regarding writing title tags for SEO) I’ve decided to try and optimize the article for both keywords.

However, for a completely different topic such as “Do Title Tags Affect SEO?” I would definitely write a completely separate article.

Cannibalization can also happen often when you publish a lot of content. When you’re writing 3 pieces a month for 2 years straight, you sometimes simply forget you’ve written about a topic before. I’ve done this mistake before.

That’s why we’re trying to cover as much of a topic as possible in a single article. Chances are that we won’t be writing something specifically for writing title tags again. We will only improve this article when the time comes.

However, that doesn’t mean you can’t add something about titles in another article. For example, you can have an H2 section about titles and how to write them in an SEO Optimization Guide. You can then use this content to improve your internal linking strategy.

Make your title catchy to improve CTR

The first thing potential readers see about your article when they search for a keyword on Google is your title tag. If that title tag doesn’t convince them to click, Google will observe that and consider it as a negative signal.

On the other hand, if more users click on your title, Google will see that as a positive signal and reward your website with better positions.

So, if your article is currently ranking #3 and out of 1,000 impressions, 18% of the clicks go to your article, 12% to the #2 spot and 25% to the #1 spot, you have a high change of switching seats with the #2 spot, to your benefit.

That’s why you have to make your title catchy. You can do this by adding emotion to your title or words that increase CTR such as “free”, “example” or even numbers (7, 21, 77 etc).

Here are a couple of examples:

5 Keyword Research Tips That Will Blow Your Mind

Best Free SEO Tools to Help You Improve Your Rankings in 2019

However, keywords have a higher priority, at least until you get your article to the top. Until you get to page 1, almost nobody except the search engines will see your article anyway.

Don’t bother testing the CTR by changing the title until you’re at least on page #1 of Google. Also, keep in mind that any modifications can impact your rankings negatively as well.

For example, if a no. 1 position increase on the main keyword resulted in 100 more visitors per month but the trade off in modifying your title would be to remove a set of keywords that could bring 200 visitors per month, then it’s not a good trade-off.

If your article is already ranking #1, you should’t make any changes until your competitors rank better than you.

Quick tip: You can use ▷ in front of your title to make it stand out from the crowd. You can also try adding emojis to your titles. where it makes sense. However, don’t turn your title into a clown (no offense intended to any clown SEO readers). Keep it civil.

Fill short titles with calls to action

If your main keyword is very short and you don’t have any secondary keywords that are relevant or make sense to add into your title, add a call to action or try to make it catchy.

For example, if your title is simply “Ski Rental Prices” and there are no other keywords that have search volume or make sense targeting, then you can add “50% Discount for 1st Time Clients” or “Best Prices in the Entire Resort”.

This way, you are taking advantage of the real estate instead of wasting it.

Make your article & title look fresh

Convince your potential readers that the article is relevant by adding the current year inside your article’s title. If you have a topic that keeps changing or evolving, it’s always a good idea to keep updating your articles.

However, once you update it, make sure you let your users know about this. Here are some examples from our blog:

Are Web Directories Still Relevant for SEO in 2019?

(This article was written a long time ago and updated this year).

21 Effective Low Effort & High Return SEO Techniques for 2019

(This article was written as new this year).

You can also add these keywords in the meta description if they don’t fit inside the title, although it’s better if they are in the title as well.

When you update articles, make sure you don’t also modify the URL. The URL should never be changed, if possible.

Back up your title tag with relevant content

The title is a very important ranking factor. However, there is a ranking factor more important than the title: the content itself!

That’s why it’s always a good idea to back up your title with relevant content. You can do this by adding relevant keywords in your content.

You can find these keywords easily by using the cognitiveSEO Keyword Tool & Content Assistant.

Also, make sure you avoid what SEOs call keyword stuffing. This occurs when a particular keyword or set of keywords is found too often inside an article.

Use different titles for SEO & Social Media

If you use social media to promote your content (and you should) you can always use different titles for different platforms.

By default, social media platforms take their titles from the title meta tag. However, you can use protocols such as Open Graph or Twitter Cards to set custom titles for your social media posts.

This can help boost your traffic and engagement, as you can stick with using keywords on your SEO title, while using something catchy and rich on emotion on your social media posts.

If you use WordPress, you can quickly do this via the Yoast SEO plugin. You can even specify a different description excerpt and image. This comes in handy in case the thumbnail image sizes on your website don’t match the ones on Facebook.

On a custom platform you can manually add the meta tags into the HTML:

OG example for title: <meta property=”og:title” content=” “/>. The title goes between the apostrophes under the content attribute. This title will show on Facebook instead of the title tag itself.

How to Craft an SEO Friendly Title Tag

Once you have the best practices in mind, you can start actually creating your title. However, step one doesn’t involve any writing!

Step 1: Choose your keywords wisely

Everything in SEO starts with keyword research. Without it, you’re venturing into the dark. You don’t know if the keywords have any search volume, you don’t know your competition and you don’t even know if your content is relevant.

Make sure you pick a primary keyword to target for your article. You can then pick a set of secondary & long tail keywords if they fit.

For example, in an article in Romanian which I worked on for a client, we decided to write about the primary keyword “weight loss exercises”.

However, you can always have secondary keywords, especially if you’ve decided to target more long tail phrases, with less traffic and competition.

The final title ended up begin “Best & Most Efficient Weight Loss Exercises You Can Do At Home”.

This title targets multiple keywords: “weight loss exercises”, “best weight loss exercises”, “efficient weight loss exercises”, “weight loss exercises at home”, “best weight loss exercises at home”, “efficient weight loss exercises at home”.

While this article is primarily optimized for “weight loss exercises”, it will gain traction a lot slower for this keyword as it is more competitive. Meanwhile, the other long tail phrases will bring traffic as the competition is lower and they will rank high easier.

Step 2: Draft your title tag

If you’re on WordPress, there is a dedicated field for the Title. By default, what you fill there will act as both the Title and the H1 tags.

You can use the Yoast SEO plugin as mentioned above to differentiate these two.

If you have a custom made website, ask your developer where the <title> meta tag is generated from and insert your title there.

Often times, new webmasters ask themselves if they should write the title before or after they write the article.

Well… Yes. You should write the title before the article, as well as improve it later on after the article has been written.

Writing the title first will help you outline the general idea of the article. However, the title ultimately represents the article, so until the article has been written the final title remains uncertain.

Step 3: Optimize the title tag

As you write your article/webpage, you might notice that there are new ideas that pop up in your head and new subtopics that you want to cover. Some of them might even be relevant enough to be included in the title as well.

That’s why you often have to rewrite your title tag to better fit your content. If the title tag is not relevant, it won’t be as effective.

Optimizing title tags isn’t always an easy task. If you want to include multiple keywords while still keeping the focus on the main one, things can get tricky.

Count in the best practice of making it catchy and you really don’t have enough space to write everything you want!

That’s why it’s a good idea to keep the SEO Title for SEO and take advantage of Open Graph and Twitter Cards to optimize your titles for social media as well.

However, one rule to keep in mind here is to try and keep things simple. Overly complicated titles might do more harm than good.

After you publish the article, you have to keep an eye on how the title is performing. We all know that SEO takes time. At first, it won’t be ranking very high.

Monitor your article with Google Analytics and the Google Search Console to see how it performs. Once it gets to page #1 or the search results, take a look at the click through rate.

If the article starts stagnating on the 5th or 4th spot, you can try to play with the titles & meta descriptions to improve your CTR. This will result in higher rankings if you do things well.

Keep in mind that this can also negatively impact your rankings. For example, in an attempt to gain more clicks, you remove a long tail keyword from your title which will most probably result in a drop in rankings for that query.

However, it might be a good trade-off if your CTR for the primary keyword increases and brings in more visitors than the other long tail keyword would have brought.

How to Write Bulk (Auto-generated) Title Tags for eCommerce Websites

So now you know how to write an SEO friendly title tag for each and every page or article on your website.

But Adrian, what if I have thousands and thousands of pages and can’t afford to write titles for each and every one of them?

That’s a good question! Often times, you can’t afford to write a title for each and every post on your website. It simply takes too much time and it isn’t practical.

In this case, you have to dynamically set up your titles. This is usually done using the CMS. If you’re on WordPress, the Yoast SEO plugin can definitely help you. Just go to the Search Appearance Settings and you can set up templates for content types:

You can also have a template for your meta description and even set up custom variables to make the titles exactly the way you want. Maybe you want to add size or weight into your titles automatically because that’s what your users seek on your products.

Other platforms might have similar plugins. Just search the web for them. Magento, for example, already does this out of the box, as it is a platform specifically designed for eCommerce and hosting a ton of products and categories.

If you’re on a custom platform, then the variables must probably be set up into the database and called in the title tag dynamically using PHP. If you don’t know how to do that, then you should get in touch with your developer.

Here are some examples of good title structures for eCommerce sites or websites where manually writing each title isn’t an option:

• Product Name | Your Brand
• Product Name | Category | Your Brand
• Product Name | Call to Action | Your Brand
• Service | Location | Your Brand

This way you can generate some templates that will automatically write titles for your products and category pages.

However, for those important pages you should spend some extra time doing the proper keyword research, analyzing the competition and crafting unique titles and descriptions.

If you really want to see results, the best shot is to seek out those pages with good results and traffic and to properly optimize them. This includes writing unique titles for them.

You can find those pages in your Search Console or in Google Analytics. You can also determine those pages from keyword research.

Why Is Google Showing A Different/Wrong Title Tag For My Site?

The one true answer here is because it can. However, there are multiple reasons why Google might choose a different title for your site.

The first one is obviously that your titles are simply bad. If the title of your Homepage is Homepage, then you’d probably be grateful rather than concerned anyway.

Google wants to show the most relevant title possible for the user. Here’s a quick example of how Google does that.

If I search for “do meta descriptions affect seo” this is the title we get from the SERPs:

If we also add the brand to the query, “do meta descriptions affect seo cognitiveseo”, Google modifies the title tag.

This is Google trying to prove to the user that the results it is showing are the most relevant ones. They include the brand the user was searching for.

Another example was mentioned before, where the brand name inside a title was moved from the end of the title to the front for a branded search.

In these cases the keyword was in the title already. However, Google might get the required keywords from the content itself, be it from general paragraphs or headings.

This “rewriting” also happens with the meta descriptions. In fact, the very article I’ve mentioned above has a different meta description.

The original meta description is “This description might influence whether you visit our site or not. So, do meta description tags affect SEO? If you haven’t figured it out yet, click here.”

However, Google chose to show the direct answer to the question. Unfortunately, this isn’t in our best interest, as answering that question directly might result in users not clicking through to reach our website!

It is however in Google’s best interest, as the more time users spend on Google, the more ads they see and the more money Google makes.

Secondly, your titles might be taken from anchor texts of both internal and external links pointing to your pages.

This usually happens when your pages are blocked from being crawled and indexed.

Not being able to reach your page and read its title, if Google finds a URL pointing to your page on another website, it can still index it. If that URL is under an anchor text, that anchor text can be considered as a title for the page.

This case is extreme and if you’re blocking pages from being indexed, you have greater concerns than title rewrites.

Last but not least, it is possible that the Google Cache is simply outdated. If you have recently changed your title, it might take some time until Google recrawls your page and sees the modification.

You can try to rush this action from the Google Search Console by searching for the URL and hitting the Request Indexing button:

Can you stop Google from rewriting your titles?

Well… yes. By rewriting them the way it wants. However, as long as you follow the best practices and include the right keywords in your titles, you shouldn’t worry about it. It’s not such a big deal if Google partially rewrites your titles in some cases, especially if you’re ranking high!

Conclusion: Balancing Algorithmic Data with AI Intelligence

Title tags remain one of the most powerful, high-leverage assets in your entire SEO arsenal. However, as the digital landscape moves deeper into the era of conversational search and AI-driven answers, the definition of a “well-optimized” title has fundamentally evolved.

Years ago, it was enough to simply stack a few keywords together and hope for a high ranking. Today, success requires a dual-threat approach. By following the structural best practices we’ve discussed, front-loading your primary keywords, keeping pixel widths clean, and avoiding cannibalization, you satisfy legacy search bots. But by overlaying emotional intelligence and decoding user friction, you elevate your title tags into clear entity signals that modern AI engines love to process.

When a generative AI engine builds a real-time response for a user, it looks for authoritative nodes of information to back up its answers. A title tag that perfectly balances technical keyword structure with conversational, high-intent sentiment tells both traditional crawlers and AI pipelines that your page is the definitive source worth clicking and worth citing.

Optimizing your title tags doesn’t have to be a monumental hurdle. Start with the low-hanging fruit:

• Fix the basic truncation and pixel errors on your top-performing pages.

• Set up dynamic, clean templates to handle the bulk lifting for your eCommerce or catalog pages.

• Use advanced sentiment tracking to inject real human emotion where it moves the needle most.

The search ecosystem will continue to shift, but one truth remains: the web belongs to the brands that write for the human mind while structuring data cleanly for the machine. Master both, and you’ll dominate the rankings, whether they show up as legacy blue links or a top footnote in an AI response.

How do you approach your title tag optimization? Are you still relying solely on legacy search volume, or are you optimizing for AI answer engines too?
Let us know your strategy in the comments section below!

The post How to Optimize SEO Title Tags for Humans and AI Engines appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

If you’re the only business in town, you’re always going to show up first. However, if there are hundreds of similar businesses nearby, it can get quite frustrating, especially if you’re new in the game. Incorporating the right Google My Business tips can make all the difference in standing out.

Some people pay marketing agencies a lot of money to get their local business listings to the top of search results. What they don’t realize is that these companies often use unorthodox techniques, which can lead to issues like a hard suspension, causing you to lose everything, including your photos and reviews.

Whether you manage your business profile yourself or hire an agency, it’s important to follow best practices for Google Business Profiles (formerly known as Google My Business) to ensure your listing is safe and compliant. For local search, following Google Businesses guidelines is key to maintaining visibility and a strong online presence.

Make sure to review a list of do’s and don’ts to keep your listing secure while avoiding risky practices.

This guide provides a strategic framework for optimizing Google Business Profiles (GBP) to dominate local search results and improve Answer Engine Optimization (AEO). Key recommendations include the strategic use of targeted keywords in business titles, the necessity of profile verification to unlock engagement features, and the strict avoidance of keyword stuffing to prevent account suspension.

By integrating social listening tools, local businesses can monitor sentiment across the web, resolve PR issues in real-time, and strengthen their “citation potential” for AI-powered search engines. This comprehensive approach ensures that a business not only ranks in the Local Map Pack but also establishes the credibility required to be cited as a top-tier local recommendation by generative AI models.

1. Listing Information Dos & Don’ts
2. Reviews, Questions and Answers Dos & Don’ts
3. Photos and Videos Dos & Don’ts
4. NAPW (Name, Address, Phone, Website) Dos & Don’ts
5. Beyond Google My Business: Managing Total Local Reputation

1. Listing Information

The information you provide is the most important thing. It’s often the client’s first contact with your business and most of time time people are looking for basic information, such as your phone number, address/location or opening and closing hours.

Therefore, you should make sure you spend enough time crafting this section.

Dos:

Add accurate profile information: The first step is to have a Google My Business listing, of course. If you don’t have one, head on to https://www.google.com/business/ and claim your Google profile.

Sometimes, the listings might already be there, so make sure to search for your physical locations on Google Maps. If it’s there, you can claim it and start filling out your profile with key information like your name, address, and phone (NAP) to improve your local search rankings.

After creating your business, Google will prompt you to edit crucial information such as Name, Address, Phone number, website, working hours, business category, and more. Accurate NAP and a physical address are essential to building trust with Google and attracting more customers.

Optimize your profile: One of the key criteria for ranking in local search is relevancy, which is determined by how well your business profile is filled out. Ensuring your contact details are correct, including phone calls, will help boost your profile in search engine optimization (SEO) results.

Add main SEO keyword in your title: The title should always contain the name of your business, but it’s also smart to add a targeted keyword related to your services or location for better SEO for Instagram and Google. For instance, a med spa might include “Med Spa in Miami” in its title to attract local business.

For example, if my business were simply called Arcadia LTD and it were in the hotel industry, I would put the title like this: “Arcadia: Hotel & Restaurant in London”

Verify your listing: An unverified listing risks losing edits and changes, and worse yet, someone else could claim it.

Verifying it through the Google My Business dashboard is easy—just look for the verification message, then you’ll be able to edit key sections like business profile optimizations and monitor and respond to google reviews link and google messages.

After you verify it, you should see the representative shield icon near your listing name:

Don’ts:

Keyword Stuffing: Avoid cramming multiple keywords and hashtags in your title, which can lead to hard suspensions. Instead, focus on one specific keyword and leave others for your website or social profiles.

A good example of keyword stuffing which you should avoid is the following: “Arcadia: Hotel, Motel, Bed and Breakfast, B&B, Restaurant in London.”

Google doesn’t like that and will often hard suspend pages that do this, so avoid it.

List outdated information: Keep your name, address, and phone current across all locations. Outdated details not only frustrate users but can also harm your search engine optimization efforts and local business growth.

It’s even worse when the brand has multiple locations with outdated information.

Although the phone number is the most common, imagine the frustration felt when Google MyBusiness says that a shop opens at 8 AM only to get there and find out that you have to wait for one more hour.

Google doesn’t want its users to end up having bad experiences from using its site, so that’s why it’s possible to suggest changes. However, do you really want other people to suggest changes on your schedule, or do you want to manage it yourself?

If you’re a marketing professional, prepare an e-mail to ask your clients if they have any unverified listings on Google. If they do, then they (or you) should manage them.

Create fake locations: Only create listings for physical locations. For businesses offering services in different areas, select a service-area option to avoid confusion and comply with community guidelines.

I mentioned above the frustration about a business’s hours being wrong, now imagine someone going there and not finding what they were looking for at all!

If you have a digital store or run a company from home, you can always just select the Service-area option from the edit address section. There you’ll be able to select locations that you serve. Make sure you uncheck the “I also serve customers at my business address” box. This will prevent people from knocking on your door.

For better results, use Google Analytics, social media marketing, and social media tools to track performance and engage with accounts to build brand awareness. Incorporating social listening, customer stories, and seo hashtag strategies will enhance your marketing efforts across multiple platforms, whether you’re posting an update or using bio generator tools for more dynamic profiles.

2. Reviews, Questions and Answers

Reviews are a critical part of your Google My Business profile success. Not only do they impact local search rankings, but they also greatly influence potential customers’ opinions about your business and your online presence.

Dos:

When managing your reviews, do the following things:

Ask clients for reviews: 

When starting out, it can be tough to get reviews, but a good strategy is to ask early customers or friends to leave reviews for your business account. If customers are happy, encourage them to leave positive reviews, perhaps by offering a discount for their next purchase. This helps boost your listing in search rankings and builds trust with your audience.

It’s almost guaranteed for customers to leave a review if their experience is bad. To compensate for that, try to get your happy customers to leave positive reviews. This can be achieved by asking them to do it once they make a purchase in your store or via e-mail, if it’s eCommerce. QR codes can increase your chances of getting reviews—simply turn your business page link into QR code and place it at your counter or table so customers can scan and leave a review in seconds, with no instructions needed. You can add incentives like discounts for the next purchase in the menu, if they leave a review.

Get renowned local guides to review your place: Local guides reviews have a lot more weight into Google’s and potential customers’ eyes. They are known for visiting and reviewing places and do this on a regular basis. The higher their Google Guide Level, the better.

Getting a high level local guide to review your business can help your listing get a boost.

But how do you find these local guides? Well, the best way is to become a guide yourself. You don’t necessarily have to take this as a business opportunity. I’m sure you often visit places, so just take a couple of pictures and say 2-3 phrases about that location.

Then, you can meet other guides at Local Guides Connect. It’s probably a bad idea to pay them to review you. Some might accept, but others might leave you a negative review instead. However, if you invite them to your restaurant to check it out or tell them about your business when you chat you’re most probably going to get a review.

Try to make some new friends.

Incentivize clients to share photos: Encouraging customers to share photos along with their reviews adds authenticity to your Google My Business listings. Whether it’s a restaurant or retail shop, photos of your products or services can help enhance your Google Business profile and attract more customers.

This is pretty common in restaurants, but nobody says you can’t ask your clients to review the new T-shirt they bought by publishing a photo with them wearing it.

The photos will also add to the MyBusiness photo collection. Keep in mind that people can also publish photos with bad reviews, such as flies in their soup or bad quality products!

Answer questions and reviews: Engage with both positive and negative reviews. Answering questions or replying to reviews shows you’re active and attentive. Google determines local ranking partly based on profile optimizations and user activity.

Ignoring reviews, especially negative ones, can hurt your business. A thoughtful response can help turn a negative review into a returning customer.

Learn from your negative reviews: Negative reviews provide valuable insights into your business’s weaknesses. Take them seriously and use them to improve your services, which can, in turn, enhance your business growth.

Negative reviews can be a great way of learning how customers act and what makes them angry. Try to avoid the same mistakes in the future.

Don’ts:

When managing your reviews, don’t do the following things:

Ignore clients or argue with them: Ignoring reviews, particularly negative ones, can damage your reputation. Always respond politely and offer solutions, such as discounts, to resolve any issues. This shows potential customers that you care about customer service.

Never ignore the negative reviews! Always answer them and try to turn that negative review into a happy customer. You can offer a discount for their purchase.

It’s a small price to pay because this will prove to other potential customers who are researching your business that you are active and care about your customers’ thoughts.

Add fake reviews: Creating fake reviews can lead to penalties, including being dropped in search results or getting banned.

Even worse, customers will likely detect them, leading to a loss of trust and credibility.

This is even more dangerous, as they will most probably leave a review saying all other reviews are fake, which can greatly impact your business!

Also, keep in mind that people are more likely to leave a negative review than a positive one. You can create only so many accounts to keep reviewing your business 5 stars, but if your services aren’t up to the task, you’ll soon get outnumbered by the negative ones anyway.

Add negative reviews to competitors: Leaving negative reviews for competitors is not only unethical but also a waste of time.

Instead, focus on optimizing your Google Business profile, using GMB posts, and improving your service to stand out from the competition.

You can also get into trouble if people find out. You’ll ruin your business’s reputation.

Finally, verify your Google business to make sure your listing is secure, and take advantage of the Google My Business dashboard to monitor reviews, post type updates, and engage with customers. By focusing on profile optimizations and optimizing your Google business, you can boost your visibility, increase engagement, and drive more traffic to your business.

3. Photos and Videos

Photos and videos play a critical role in your business listing. People often want to see where they’re going, especially if it’s a restaurant or hotel. High-quality visuals can also improve local rankings by helping users recognize your business location and giving them a sense of what to expect.

Dos:

Include images in every category: When creating your Google My Business listing, make sure to upload photos in each category: Interior, Exterior, Products, Menu, Team, etc. This business information enhances transparency and can build trust with potential customers.

The “Team” section is particularly important, as it shows you treat your employees well, which often correlates with better customer experiences.

Add videos: Videos are a great asset to your business profile optimizations. Whether it’s a store or a restaurant, you can upload videos of the entrance or the products you’re offering. This not only helps customers find your location but also gives them a preview of what you offer.

Videos also enhance conversion rates because they help potential customers engage more deeply with your business.

If you’re a store, you can always make a video showing the entrance. Maybe it’s a little bit hidden and not really into the view. Help them out. You can also add videos of products, even say a word or two about those products. Invite them to the store. People like to be told what to do!

Optimize Google My Business with post updates that include images or videos regularly. Posting high-definition visuals can help keep your listing fresh and encourage more interaction, improving your local ranking on Google.

Again… it’s easy to get videos done. Everyone has a smartphone these days.

Go crazy with uploads on Google’s servers: When you upload images or videos to your Google My Business account, you don’t have to worry about file size slowing down your site.

Google’s powerful servers will handle the load. So, feel free to upload high-definition images that showcase your business in the best light.

If needed, Google will automatically resize them, helping to optimize your listing for search engines.

Don’ts:

Add fake images: Never upload images that aren’t from your business. This can hurt your credibility and may lead to copyright issues.

If you sell products like Nike shoes, don’t rely on official images from the Nike website. Instead, take your own photos of the products in your store. This keeps your local search results authentic and engaging.

Post pictures of clients without approval: Be careful about posting images of customers without their permission.

Even if someone tags your business, avoid adding those photos without consent. This can lead to potential privacy issues and affect business optimization.

I’ll share a story: there was this guy speeding on a highway. The static camera got him, so he received a ticket at home about 2 weeks later. However, his wife received the ticket first. She didn’t have any problems with the ticket, but with the location of the car. Turns out that the husband had lied about where he was going and, apparently, in the passenger seat a very pretty blonde woman could be spotted. The woman filed for divorce so the man sued the police and won the trial for them ruining his life.

I consider the man ruined his own life, but if you don’t want to take any part in ruined marriages and get yourself in a hell of a lawsuit, you’d better not post any pictures with clients in them without their approval!

In conclusion, optimizing your visual content is key for optimizing your Google business and improving your local search rankings. Regular business profile optimizations using relevant and high-quality images help customers engage more with your business, increasing your chances of showing up higher in Google searches. Be sure to include all relevant contact information, business description, and relevant keywords in your posts to make the most of your Google My Business profile. And of course, always verify your Google account with the verification code to secure your listing and boost your local rankings.

5. NAPW (Name, Address, Phone, Website)

NAPW stands for Name, Address, Phone, and Website. It’s commonly referred to as NAP, but including the website (NAPW) is also important for online visibility.

Dos:

List the information on your website: Ensure the same information in your GMB profile (Name, Address, Phone) is also listed on your website. Including this in your footer is efficient, but be sure to also add your business name, business hours, and other relevant info on your contact page. This consistency is key for Google business profile optimizations and helps attract customers.

You can add those in your footer as they don’t take up much space, but on your contact page you should also add your company’s real name, opening hours and other relevant information.

Build citations: Citations are like backlinks for your Google My Business profile. They help boost local SEO and increase visibility in competitor profiles. To stay ahead of the competition, you can research their citations using tools like BrandMentions.

Make sure your citations are accurate and include your relevant category to ensure Google recognizes your business correctly.

Post on Google: Regularly post on Google through Google Posts to keep your profile active. Whether it’s a promotion, a blog post, or new updates, these posts help you stay relevant and attract new customers.

Use google qa to answer common questions and interact with potential clients directly through your business profile dashboard.

Optimize your business: To further improve visibility, optimize your business by enabling features like enabling messaging, which allows direct communication with potential customers.

This personal touch can improve engagement and enhance your digital marketing strategy.

Don’ts: 

Be inconsistent: If your citations, business hours, or other information vary between your website and Google My Business profile, Google will get confused, negatively impacting your local SEO. Consistency is crucial.

Even if you have multiple locations, include the city name in your GMB title to differentiate listings and ensure accurate local search results.

Avoid irrelevant categories: Ensure your business is categorized correctly. Choosing an irrelevant category can confuse search engines and customers, making it harder to reach your target audience.

Beyond Google My Business: Managing Total Local Reputation

While optimizing your Google My Business profile is essential for local SEO, it’s only one part of the equation.

Google doesn’t rely solely on the information found in your business listing. Its algorithms also look for signals across the web to determine whether your business is trustworthy, relevant, and popular within the local community.

This means that reviews, mentions, discussions, and customer feedback on other websites can directly influence your local visibility and reputation.

Therefore, it’s important to monitor what people are saying about your business beyond Google itself.

To protect and manage your local footprint across the entire internet, smart local businesses use BrandMentions.

Operating as a highly accurate social listening tool, it monitors the web far beyond Google’s walled garden. Whenever a customer leaves a review on an obscure directory or complains about your service on social media, the software alerts you instantly. This gives you the power to resolve local PR issues quickly and maintain the flawless digital reputation required to dominate the Local Map Pack.

Dos:

Monitor brand mentions across the web: Customers don’t always leave feedback on Google. They may post reviews on Yelp, TripAdvisor, Facebook, industry directories, local forums, or even mention your business on social media.

Keeping track of these conversations helps you understand customer sentiment and identify potential issues before they affect your reputation.

Respond to negative feedback quickly: One unresolved complaint can spread across multiple platforms and damage customer trust.

The faster you identify and address concerns, the easier it is to prevent small issues from becoming larger public relations problems.

Use reputation monitoring tools: Managing multiple review platforms manually can be difficult, especially for businesses with several locations.

Tools like BrandMentions can help automate the process by monitoring online mentions, reviews, and discussions across thousands of websites and social media platforms.

Whenever your business is mentioned online, you’ll receive a notification, allowing you to react quickly and maintain a positive brand image.

Track local sentiment regularly: Google wants to recommend businesses that provide good customer experiences.

Monitoring online conversations helps you spot recurring customer complaints, improve your services, and strengthen your overall local presence.

Don’ts:

Focus only on Google reviews: Many businesses spend all their time monitoring Google reviews while ignoring other platforms.

However, customers often research businesses using multiple sources before making a decision. Poor ratings or negative discussions elsewhere can undermine the trust you’ve built on Google.

Ignore customer complaints on social media: Social media conversations are public and can spread quickly.

Even if a complaint doesn’t appear on your Google profile, it can still influence potential customers who discover it through Facebook groups, local communities, or industry forums.

Wait for reputation problems to escalate: Reputation management is much easier when handled proactively.

If you only start monitoring online conversations after a crisis occurs, the damage may already be done. Regular monitoring helps you identify trends early and take action before they impact your business.

Assume every mention is positive: Not every online mention is a compliment.

Tracking both positive and negative conversations gives you a more accurate picture of how customers perceive your business and helps you make informed decisions about improving customer experience.

For businesses that want to maintain a strong local presence, combining a well-optimized Google My Business profile with active reputation monitoring is one of the most effective ways to improve visibility, build trust, and strengthen long-term local search performance.

By following these tips and tricks, you can optimize your business for local SEO success. Consistent citations, accurate business information, and regular Google posts will not only help you collect customer data but also boost your visibility in search engines.

And don’t forget to verify your business for better rankings!

Conclusion:

Having your business at the top of Google Maps might take some time, which is normal for any new business types. Initially, you’ll get noticed by people searching near your physical address, but as you continue to satisfy your customers, your reach will expand. Google determines local visibility based on factors like conversion rates, customer satisfaction, and google business profile optimizations.

Improving your listing is relatively simple—avoid shortcuts and tricks. Instead, focus on filling out your profile with accurate contact details, adding a complete business description, and selecting a relevant category. Keep your GMB profile updated with correct profile information, including your business name, phone calls, and post updates. Regular google posts and gmb posts will help keep your listing active and engaging. Also, ensure that you verify your Google business and claim your Google listing to avoid issues with ownership or edits.

Engage with customers by monitoring and responding to reviews and google messages. Answering common questions and enabling enabling messaging helps build trust, improving local ranking on Google. Don’t forget to include relevant keywords in your profile for better search engine optimization (SEO), which will enhance your visibility in google searches. Tools like Google Analytics can help you track your marketing efforts and see what attracts customers the most.

If you’re running a business, or managing a client’s Google My Business account, consistency is key. Update your business profile dashboard regularly, optimize your listing with business profile optimizations, and use a variety of post types to keep your profile active. Using a google reviews link in communications also encourages customers to leave feedback, which helps boost your ranking.

Lastly, make sure to optimize your Google My Business profile by ensuring all contact information is accurate and that you’re listed in the correct business category. Use these tips and tricks to help boost your local ranking on Google, and don’t forget to verify your business with the verification code provided by Google. Focus on business optimization and good digital marketing practices, and soon enough, you’ll see results. Have you had any issues or successes with Google My Business? Leave a comment, and maybe we or other readers can help!

The post DO’s and DON’Ts on Google My Business | Tips to Get Your Listing to the Top appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

As automated and AI-generated content floods the internet, the H2H (Human-to-Human) marketing paradigm has become more critical than ever. To break through the digital noise, we must focus our attention on building meaningful, authentic relationships with our audiences through creative storytelling. To help you execute this, we have conducted extensive research to curate the most efficient digital marketing tactics and techniques, each fully backed by real-world case studies.

Below you can find the most effective 40 digital marketing tactics and techniques for a kickass start in 2026 and beyond:

I. Content Marketing

1. Re-optimize Your Content to Gain 70% SEO Visibility Increase
2. Boost traffic by 300% While Using Editorial Calendars
3. Use Content Syndication & Get a Constant Traffic of 250,000 Unique Visitors
4. Promote Your Business with SlideShare to Drive 20% More Organic Traffic
5. Sales Growth with 185% by Offering Highly Qualitative Case Studies

II. Search Marketing

6. Build a Network of Partner Websites to Get Influence on the SERP and Jump up to 30+ Positions
7. Rank Higher on Review Sites to Have an Average 18% Uplift in Sales
8. Be Part of the 90% of Marketers Who Saw a Significant Increase in ROI by Taking Advantage of Trends for Traffic Generation
9. Gain a Higher Advantage in Front of Your Competitors with AMP Receiving 40% Organic Traffic from the Whole Site Traffic
10. Write on Medium to Get Awarness Through 6.2 Million Pageviews

III. Social Media Marketing

11. Develop a Facebook Customized Page Tab and Engage 40% of Fans
12. Write Valuable Content on Linkedin Pulse and win up to 1,900 Social Shares in 30 Days
13. Use Reddit to Grow Your Business & Generate $6,188 in 3 Months
14. Target the Online Communities and Hit 10.000 Monthly Unique Visitors
15. Get Social Influence to Receive Higher Rankings by 15%

IV. Email Marketing

16. Design a Smart Automated Reactivation Campaign and Boost Sales by 164%
17. Get Personalized Emails to See an Average 19% Increase in Sales
18. Reduce Friction and Increase by 100% Your Email Sign-Up Rate
19. Use Segmentation to Increase Deliverability & Experience 141% Increase in Revenue per Campaign
20. Increase Your Email Open Rate by 33% with a Subject Line That Triggers Curiosity

V. PPC & Paid Advertising

21. Collaborate with Influencers to Write About Your Product to Generate Over $300.000 in 3 Months
22. Have an Integrated Approach about Paid Promotion on Social Media
23. Increase CTR with 64% in PPC Ads with Site-Links Extentions
24. Use Emotion Triggers in Headline Ads to Get 6x Above Average CTR
25. See a 32% Return on Investment for a Promoted Twitter Account

VI. Marketing Automation

26. Set up Automated Behavioral Triggered Emails to get 71% Higher Open Rates
27. Collect Customer Data Through a Transparent and Unique System to Gain Trust of  44% of Customers
28. Make use of retargeting & Experience a 400% Increase On ROI
29. Develop a Lead Scoring System to Generate 50% More Sales at Half of Costs
30. Get More Social Exposure Through the Social Media Automation

VII. Online PR

31. Encourage Brand Lovers to Support You Against Trolls
32. Built a Strong Customer Following & Get Free Endorsement
33. Gain Free Media to Get Everyone Talk About You on News and Get 5 Million Views on YouTube
34. Create Fascinating Video Content to Attract Native Customers & Increase the Conversion Rate by 80%
35. Use Webinars to Gain 16,394 new leads

VIII. Affiliate Marketing

36. Start Running an Affiliate Program to Monetize Your Website & Get Extra $4500 Monthly Profit
37. Generate Product Order Increase by 9.8% Through Voucher and Reward Sites
38. Map out the Affiliates’ Value to Increase the Long Haul Share by 19%
39. Reach Over 60% Social Engagement and Advocacy for the Brand with Respected Influencers Through an Affiliate Program
40. Implement a Publisher Strategy to See a Monthly Revenue Growth Rate of 177%

1. Re-optimize Your Content to Gain 70% SEO Visibility Increase

Top positions in Google, Bing or any search engine are a pinnacle of today’s online success. After a lot of research and content experiments, we discovered that there is a strong correlation between content performance and rankings. So a few time ago, we decided to evaluate our content and re-optimize it.

We analyzed the positions and engagement for each article and decided which content needs to be refreshed and re-optimized. We proceeded with the keyword research using the Keyword Tool and Content Optimizer for the whole process:

• Firstly, do keyword research: we looked at keyword recommendations, volume, type of query and other relevant keywords for double optimization the same piece.

• Secondly, we added the keywords into Rank Tracking before re-optimizing to have an accurate view of where we started and how it improves after the re-optimization.
• Third, we started adding the content into the Content optimizer to see the performance score and find out how much we’ll have to optimize. We added the keyword recommendations and check it at the end by clicking on Check Score.

• Fourthly, we searched for the page in Google Search Console to make sure it is indexed, do a live test just to be sure everything is ok. We kept tracking of the keyword’s evolution in search engines. 

After the keyword optimization was finished we saw a big increase overall for our whole website. Our rankings improved and our traffic increased by almost 70%. Below you can see a printscreen with our search visibility in Google from Site Explorer:

2. Boost traffic by 300% While Using Editorial Calendars

New content appears daily. You must bring something fresh every time. Investing in social media, sales funnel, conversion rate optimization, customer relationships, marketing budgets, web analytics; they are all keywords that pops in your head all the time. Yet, which are the most effective tactics one should use?

Scheduling your blog posts is mandatory, especially if you work with multiples copywriters. Make sure your marketing plan includes an editorial calendar for improving your results. Creating an editorial calendar is easier than you think. There are lots of apps that can help you with that. Meistertask is a task management app you could use to drag and drop tasks for each participant and create an editorial calendar easily. Below you can see a screenshot with an editorial calendar created in Meistertask:

Source: https://www.meistertask.com

Trello gives us another digital marketing technique example you could use to create editorial campaigns. CoSchedule has a Content Marketing Calendar component.

Source: coschedule.com

They used a process that helped them to increase traffic by 299%. Follow the next steps to achieve similar results:

• have a broad goal behind your calendar;
• set metrics to measure your goal;
• find your baseline performance of an average month for that metric;
• establish smart objectives for each blog post from your calendar;
• find out how many blog posts you’ll need to meet your aspirational goal;

3. Use Content Syndication & Get a Constant Traffic of 250,000 Unique Visitors

Content syndication is the process of publishing your content on third party sites. You need to find authoritative publications. The idea behind is to drive more engagement for your content. Outbrain and Taboola power your content on their marketing channel. Once you republish your article on a big site like those two, you are exposed to a new audience and could reach a higher traffic.

James Clear used this digital marketing tactic and built an email list of more than 100,000 with a  constant traffic of 250,000 unique visitors per month on the blog. He republished a blog post on Lifehacker and got almost 99k views as you can see in the next photo. Quick tip: If you have an account on Google Analytics you can easily track your performance and see how many unique visitors you have.

4. Promote Your Business with SlideShare to Drive 20% More Organic Traffic

Slideshare is the largest marketing platform for sharing presentations and it’s best suited for B2B companies. Didit Marketing, an advertising agency from New York, conducted a study showing that SlideShare gets 500% more traffic from business owners than Facebook, Twitter or Youtube.

An important fact you need to keep in mind is that SlideShare received billions of viewers every month and it’s a great way to connect with different specialists and find quality information in a friendly format.

Ana Hoffman, blogger at Traffic Generation Cafe, conducted a study showing how she received from 0 to 243,000 views in 30 days on Slideshare. The fun part is that you don’t need entirely new content to do a presentation, you can work through your old content displayed in a visual form to be easy to read.

20% of the SlideShare visitors come directly from Google. The rest come from social media and other SlideShare presentations. Always keep on eye on your metrics from Google Aalytics to see how are you performing in terms of organic traffic, paid traffic, visitors and so on.

5. Sales Growth with 185% by Offering Highly Qualitative Case Studies

Smart and effective digital tactics are a gold mine. Case studies as well. Not to mention the conversion optimization rates you can get with them.  Case studies have a huge potential to grow traffic, sales, and revenue if you offer quality results and show your product brings value. The Content Marketing Institute conducted a research where they saw that 63% of UK marketers believe that case studies are an effective digital marketing tactic. Case studies are the fifth most popular marketing tactic used out of 12, after social media, newsletters, blogs and blog posts.

Neil Patel, one of the top 10 marketers according to Forbes, conducted a study to see the influence of the use of case studies on his own site. He witnessed a growth in his revenue by 185%.  

6. Build a Network of Partner Websites to Get Influence on the SERP and Jump up to 30+ Positions

Brand mentions on well-known publications are important and hard to get. They could lift you up in ranking on the search engines for the right keyword phrases and you could improve your Search Engine Optimization (SEO) efforts. Usually, startups collaborate with content marketing specialists or firms because some of them don’t have the budget for a full-time person. Building a network of partner websites for a short period of time is an effective digital marketing technique to bring awareness and traffic to your site. The profile of the website could include publications, edu websites, web directory, blogs, forums, e-commerce and so on.

OutreachMama employed a study to see the results after their partnership with publisher Companies like Forbes and Huffington Post. In only 2 months they received 350 total backlinks from over 100 domains. Besides that, they saw a natural increase in their backlink profile.  

www.outreachmama.com

In the second month of the partnership, they saw that they money keywords jumped up to 30 positions in the search engine result page.

7. Rank Higher on Review Sites to Have an Average 18% Uplift in Sales

9 out of 10 people look at online product reviews before they make a purchase decision. According to BrightLocal, 72% of Consumers say positive reviews make them trust a business more. Other 88% say they trust customer reviews as much as personal recommendations.

Source: http://searchengineland.com

Reevoo discovered through an in-house case study that online reviews bring an average 18% uplift in sales. In 2015, US  e-commerce sales were about $341.7 billion showing an increase of almost 15% over 2014.

Source: http://images.internetretailer.com

With a continuous growth in e-commerce sale, customer reviews (all reviews, not necessary the ones coming from some ideal customers) are a major factor, an efficient trigger and quite essential tools nowadays for e-commerce websites.

8. Be Part of the 90% of Marketers Who Saw a Significant Increase in ROI by Taking Advantage of Trends for Traffic Generation

Google Trends is a pocket of gold. You’ll find a lot of data to help you to generate content and see what’s trending to stay on top of your competitors. The particularity of this tool is that you’ll find real-time search data or help to gauge consumer search behaviors over time. Below you can see a screenshot from Google Trends with searches for 3 holidays: Halloween, Christmas and Thanksgiving.

You need to keep your eyes open for the marketing trends that will come. The marketing trends that will dominate 2022 include the Internet of Things, virtual and augmented reality, live streaming video, visual storytelling, native advertising, marketing automation, influencer marketing, mobile marketing.

Adopting multiple of these emerging trends is a smart move, and many digital marketers are syndicating content to make the most of the trends. For example, music photographer Matt Walter syndicates his photography podcast to audio platforms such as Apple Podcasts and Spotify, while also covering podcast content in different methods including dedicated live streams and through other visual mediums to maximise digital marketing effectiveness.

In 2016, video content was very popular and still is. Fire Brand proved that following trends can bring growth. The results showed that 90% of marketers have noticed significant increase in Return on Investment (ROI) through video content.

9. Gain a Higher Advantage in Front of Your Competitors with AMP Receiving 40% Organic Traffic from the Whole Site Traffic

AMP is a simpler and easier way to built light-weight web pages with static content that loads faster on mobile devices, due to its technology. The project is based on AMP HTML, new open framework built of existing web technologies.

The pages with an AMP version see a 2% higher CTR, which translates to more clicks, as you can see in the next screenshot.

Source: https://www.2dogsdesign.com

AMP version has 40% of all the traffic for a page. It is an utterly amazing improvement for many sites because the content renders faster. The project comes to the rescue for a  large number of publishers.

10. Write on Medium to Get Awareness Through 6.2 Million Pageviews

Medium is a network built out for people from people and offers a new kind of content – publishing, and social media synergy. Every day, there are newly published articles that could get you over 45,000 views.

Publishers can see 3 stats graphs on Medium for 30 days, minutes read, views and visitors. Ali Mese, startup marketer at GrowthSupply.com, created a report with the statistic for his best traffic-generator article. For an article of about 1,000-1,500 words, he received over 4 million pageviews and 144,920 followers on Medium as you can see in the next picture.

Source: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com

For a global audience, it’s best to publish your piece of content on Sunday at 0:00 GMT, because people look forward to reading something new as the week starts. To give it a kick, you should use an A/B emailing test sent at different hours to see which hour has the best open rate.

11. Develop a Facebook Customized Page Tab to Engage 40% of Fans

Investing in social media is a must. Yet, don’t know if you knew that a customized page tab gives you the advantage to offer exclusive information to fans. A personalized page tab can be used to promote registration for upcoming events, to bring fans to your website, to promote an app or a contest, create a content library, feature customers reviews or case studies and so on.

 Socially Stacked demonstrated that a customized page for a discount can influence the engagement for that page. In the end, 42% fans liked the page to get a coupon or discount. On the same side, a case study by Wildfire Interactive showed that a Facebook coupon-based page tab  received the highest engagement rates beside giveaways, sweepstakes, trivia Contests, Sweepstakes, Contest essays, photo contest, coupons, and video contest as you can see in the next graph.

12. Write Valuable Content on Linkedin Pulse and win up to 1,900 Social Shares in 30 Days

LinkedIn Pulse is a professional self-publishing platform. At first, everyone could write and publish content without any approval. Currently, it is composed of 500 selected experts.  According to Kapko, LinkedIn Pulse “lies somewhere between blog and social network”. Authors add a number of 50,000 articles on the platform every week.

Brian Lang, blogger at Small Business Ideas, conducted quite an interesting study on 300 posts featured on LinkedIn Pulse. Most articles from Pulse were about careers (42%), then about business (15%) and self improvement (9.33%) and other (33.67%) which includes technology, sales & marketing, current events, and productivity.

On average, the articles from Pulse got 1,843 social shares, and only 10% had less than 500 social shares, which leaves almost 90% with more than 500 social shares. If you are featured on LinkedIn Pulse, it can bring you a good amount of social exposure. From now on, writing on Linkedin Plan should be a part of your marketing plan.

13. Use Reddit to Grow Your Business & Generate $6,188 in 3 Months

Reddit is a community that has been growing since 2005. Here you can meet people with similar interests. It’s a place where you could follow news in a thread categorized in “hot”, ”new”, ”rising”, ”controversial”, ”top”, ”gilded”, ”wiki” and “promoted”. The nice part is you could follow lots of subreddits depending on the industry you’re interested. There were numerous cases when different stories from Reddit became famous and gained many upvotes.

 If you choose to post a link instead of a text you can link to your business and bring visitors to your website. Scott Keyes is an example of best practice in this case. He is a reporter for Think Progress and founder of Scott’s Cheap Flights. He turned an obsession with cheap plane tickets into a $1 million business in under 2 years. In 3 months he managed to make $6,188 only by posting on Reddit. According to what he said, his posting got him 1,000 free subscribers and 250+ premium subscribers.

14. Target the Online Communities and Hit 10.000 Monthly Unique Visitors

Online communities are a great way to grow your online presence and to catch insights. Being apart of an online community has its perks. Being around by people with similar interests and exchanging knowledge is a good way to develop yourself and the company you are working at.

 The best online marketing communities you need to join are LinkedIn, Reddit, Quora, Slack, GrowthHackers and, Inbound.org, ordered in chronological order. A good example of using the last two comes from Grow and Convert. The company was born when Devesh Khanal and Benji Hyam met a few years ago. Since they launched their site, they were active in online marketing communities, Devesh Khanal on GrowthHackers, on the one side, and Benji Hyam on Inbound.org, on the other side.

They set up a goal of bringing 40,000 monthly unique visitors in 30 days. As you can see in the next picture it is not quite like that, but they were able to bring more visitors from online communities than from organic searches. That is a good start!

15. Get Social Influence to Receive Higher Rankings by 15%

There is a lot of fuss around the subject about the importance of social signals in rankings. We already know that investing in social media is an effective digital tactic that can help out with the conversion rate optimization. Moz study says that Google doesn’t use social share counts directly in its algorithm. Neil Patel, on the other hand, claims that there might be a connection between social shares and rankings as you can see in the next screenshot from a Quick Sprout gifographic.

A huge lift of almost 15% in rankings was the result of an increase of 100 Google Plus followers for a business page. Facebook brought a 6,9% increase in ranking from 70 shares and 50 likes. Lastly, 50 Tweets lift rankings with only 2,88%.

16. Design a Smart Automated Reactivation Campaign and Boost Sales by 164%

Each business makes its own format for newsletters, but designing a segmentation for customers that interacted with the site is a guaranteed path to lift the reactivation of inactive subscribers. The ideal customer will open all emails and buy your products every time, but that will happen in a month of Sundays.  

The email marketing platform PostUp created an in-house case study for one of their clients to convert inactive subscribers. They built up an automated reactivation campaign and succeeded in boosting email-related sales by 164%. This is a great example of improving the conversion optimization of your inactive subscribers. 

Eventful created a new approach to automated reactivation campaign where emails included recommended news based on the previous behavior of the users. Below, you can see an example of an email from them:

Source: https://assets.econsultancy.com

This campaign was a success. The recommendation performer alert produces 15% median open rate, 3% median click rate and the spike was a 400% increase in reactivation rates.

17. Get Personalized Emails to See an Average of a 19% Increase in Sales

Over the years there have been numerous studies showing that email marketing is the most effective digital marketing tactic for lead nurturing in your digital strategy. Personalized emails are more efficient than non-personalized emails and can bring relevant results. Personalized emails are based on a more in-depth research and understanding of customer behavior and marketing trends. Most important of all, it requires you to know your buyer persona to deliver relevant information.

You can see a comparison between segmentation and personalization below:

Source: http://blog.revampcrm.com

Dropbox uses personalized emails. See an example of this kind below:

According to a study from CMO.com, marketers who use personalized email see an average 19% increase in sale. Personalized emails have a 600% conversion rate, but the sad part is that only 30% of brands can use them.

18. Reduce Friction and Increase by 100% Your Email Sign-Up Rate

In marketing, friction means everything that slows down the process of a user to convert. The ideal marketing planning is not to have friction at all, but since that’s almost impossible, it’s best to have less friction so you could convert your leads easily.

The news company Quartz leads a research by reducing friction in email sign-ups. The changes they made to the sign-up process was to simplify it by using only an email address for subscription and moving to double opt-in (the user had to click on a link in the first email they received to activate subscription) to opt-out. When visitors want to subscribe, they go to a new landing page.

The results were quite satisfying; the daily subscriber rate has doubled. You can see a screenshot of their growth below:

Source: https://cdn-images-1.medium.com

Besides that, Quartz increased the number of people who subscribed on the weekend, when the activity was very week.

19. Use Segmentation to Increase Deliverability & Experience 141% Increase in Revenue per Campaign

If you aren’t able to use segmentation to target your audience, you won’t succeed in writing relevant subject lines. You can use segmentation based on interests, location behavior consumption, mobile marketing, keyword phrases, lifestyle or other factors.

There’s plenty of email marketing software on the market to help you segment your database faster and easier by connecting an individual’s social media profiles with their email address. MailChimp is a well-known option, but you may also want to check out the most popular alternatives.

Lyrics discovered that 4 out of 10 marketers who used segmentation experienced a higher open rate, 3 out of 10 marketers saw a lower unsubscribe rate and 2 out of 10 experienced better deliverability and greater revenue. Below, you can see the graph with all the segmentation results from the research.

Source: http://www.emailonacid.com

Another research worth mentioning is the Johnny Cupcakes emailing campaign. within their digital marketing technique they used a segmentation for gender, customers interests, brand preferences and media habits and for the first time ran a product launch campaign with different emails for men and women. See below a screenshot of the email sent to women:

Source: http://content.marketingsherpa.com

After they analyzed the results, they saw an increase of 42% in CTR, of 123% in conversion rate and 141% in revenue per campaign. These are quite some results for such small improvement.  

Make sure you use segmentation in your digital marketing strategy.

20. Increase Your Email Open Rate by 33% with a Subject Line That Triggers Curiosity

Your subject lines are everything when you’re thinking about the email open rates. Everything comes from there. The call to action from the subject line must be relevant to your audience. Before you send the message to your list, think you’re sending the message to one person, someone you know. Keep in mind that your message shouldn’t be cold, no matter the industry you’re in.

A study from Informz shows how important a subject line is. 33% of email recipients open email are based on the subject line alone. So you can put your creativity to work or look for specialist advises making sure that your letter is well written, you are concise, you don’t use buzzwords and test.

Make sure you are concise, you don’t use buzzwords and test.

21. Collaborate with Influencers to Write About Your Product to Generate Over $300.000 in 3 Months

To create and maintain an online presence you must be one step ahead of the game and reach people.And influencer marketing can be of a real help in this situation. To create buzz in the online media, you should use influencers to help you to promote your business. A creative campaign with influencers was realized by Neil Patel, online marketing consultant. He spent $57,000 to models who posted a picture on Instagram with the message “Who is Neil Patel” and the hashtag #whoisneilpatel and earned $332,640 in three months.

This is just an example of a picture posted during the campaign:

Another example of influencers comes from people from your field of interest, specialists and experts in your industry. Another example of influencer marketing would be to use specialists from your field of interest, and experts in your industry.

22. Have an Integrated Approach about Paid Promotion on Social Media

Even though paid promotion is a digital marketing tactic used by numerous businesses, not everyone knows how to do it right. Having a large promotional budget is not a guarantee of success. The key is to address the right audience and engage with it.

In the 2016 Benchmarks, Budgets and Trends report from Content Marketing Institute, you can see that 51% of B2B marketers say social ads are an effective paid advertising method.

47% of B2B marketers consider that promoted posts are also effective, as you can see in the picture above. The results show that more and more marketers consider paid promotion on social media a must. You should focus your attention on your paid social campaigns since those efforts could see high returns, as expressed in the example above. To keep up, digital specialists should look for new ways of investing in social platforms to reach new audiences.

To get yourself ahead of the game you could start taking an interest in mobility marketing if you’re using mobile advertising. Mobility is a way of fulfilling customer’s needs to get tasks done on the move. Let’s take Facebook as an example. Has it ever happened to you to visit a new city and receive notifications in the app with recommendations of places to visit and restaurants where you could eat near you? Connecting with the user on the go through an mobile app is a great way to push them down the funnel.

23. Increase CTR with 64% in PPC Ads with Site-Links Extentions

Site-links extensions are a path to lead visitors to specific pages from your website directly from a PPC ad. They look something like this:

Source: https://lseo.com

PPC Hero did an experiment to see the results after they added site links to their paid search ad. They saw an improvement; their CTR grew up from 1.16% to 1.9%. Only by adding site links, the CTR experiences an increase of 64%. Below, you can see the results before adding the site links and after adding them.

Source: http://www.ppchero.com

The case study also showed that there are situations where the site links have a lower CTR compared with the headline of the ad, but the CPA has a lower value. Even if the site links don’t get clicks near as much as the headlines, they do produce additional CTR and conversions.

24. Use Emotion Triggers in Headline Ads to Get 6x Above Average CTR

Either we are talking about a headline from a blog post, a newspaper, a book, a billboard, a PPC ad or a newsletter, headlines have a decisive impact whether the piece of content gets clicked or not.

Brainstorming for compelling headlines is mandatory. Copyblogger said that on average, 8 out of 10 people read the headline, and the rest 2 out of 10 read the rest.

Larry Kim, founder WordStream, saw that using negative emotional triggers in a PPC ad can score impressive results. By using the hero/villain persona to express anger/revenge, the next ad got 6x above average CTR.

Source: http://blog.ezanga.com

If you use fear, you could see a 125% increase in appointments booked, and 170% increase in call volumes. See the paid search ad used for this experiment below:

Source: http://blog.ezanga.com

Wordstream offers a free version of the tool Adwords Performance Grader to see how your ads are performing. You can use it to make a test before the changes you make in Google AdWords and after, based on the recommendations you receive.

25. See a 32% Return on Investment for a Promoted Twitter Account

Nowadays, everyone knows about Twitter. If you want to run an advertising campaign on Twitter, there are three ways to do it: promoted trends, promoted accounts and promoted tweets.

 Hubspot, inbound marketing pioneer, wanted to find a more effective way to:

• generate new leads;
• engage existing followers;
• grow the sales conversion rate;
• improve ROI.

The solution was to use the promoted accounts advertising type from Twitter to target B2B decision-marketing users that are interested in marketing subjects. To deliver better results, the campaign included promoted tweets with a specific call to action such as webinar invitations, free e-books. After the campaign had ended, it resulted in 150% increase sales, 46% lower cost-per-read and 32% ROI.   

Reaching new customers with Twitter promoted accounts is an effective digital marketing technique indeed.

26. Set Up Automated Behavioral Triggered Emails to Get 71% Higher Open Rates

For an email to be effective, marketers knew that emails see a better open rate if they follow the behavior of the users on the website.

According to Unbounce, automated behavioral emails are triggered by multiple events:

• a user abandoning the products from their cart;
• a subscriber becoming inactive;
• a subscriber purchasing a product that needs a replenishment.

See an example of this kind below:

Emails that use automated behavioral triggers have 71% higher open rates and 102% higher clicks than non-triggered emails.

This technique delivers value because it’s sent in the moment of utmost relevance and needs to your prospect. 39% of marketers say “automatically sending emails based on triggers” is the most effective technique for having a higher email engagement.

27. Collect Customer Data Through a Transparent and Unique System to Gain Trust of 44% of Customers

Along the years, studies reported a decrease in the visitors’ level of trust in brands and companies. Edelman Trust Barometer showed that 44% of customers express trust in business, which is almost a half of the audience.

When you can demonstrate how the data you gather is kept secure, you’ll see improvements. State of the Data Nation showed that a clear privacy policy (43%) earns consumer trust.

Informatica surveyed 2,000 UK adults and found out that almost 6 out of 10 people are concerned about the use of the personal information they shared with brands. Another interesting result from Informatica shows 7 out of 9 people admitted they were cautious with the information they share with brands.

Thread, U.K. online personal styling service for men and women, has a unique and transparent system of collecting customer data. Now it is available only for men. After you enter the site you select menswear:

They use this system to offer custom product to help your stylist find the best clothes for you, such as which trouser fits you like or how open are you to try more daring clothes or how much you usually spend on clothes and other specific questions.

In the end, you’ll be asked to leave your email address for further actions.

28. Make use of retargeting & Experience a 400% Increase On ROI

The retargeting method is used when you want to convert a user after entering the site. The process is quite easy; the user comes to your site, a cookie is set to their browsers. Afterward, you can track him to show him ads on the website he’s visiting. Based on the activity he had on your site you can deliver specific display ads. Below you can see the most effective types of retargeting:

Source: http://thumbnails-visually.netdna-ssl.com

Niche Hacks tried retargeting pixel to send visitors back to the email opt-in page. They converted 51,54% of all retargeted visitors into new subscribers, even though the ads were basic, landing page was basic, the stock images were simple. Basically, everything was average. In spite of all of this, they converted quite a large number of people.

American Apparel used Perfect Audience platform on Facebook retargeting and saw a 400% increase in ROI, converted new customers and increased the revenue.

29. Develop a Lead Scoring System to Generate 50% More Sales at Half of Costs

Lead Scoring is a system where every company can rank prospects according to a scale based on the value they represent for that company. Lead scoring can be implemented in numerous marketing automated platforms. For example, you can to assign a value to social media interactions or specific website behavior. Based on the results, you can see which lead must be pushed down the funnel or contacted directly by a sales representative.

By integrating your CRM system with a lead scoring system, you can create advanced sales analytics reports that reveal which channels produce the most lucrative leads, and which bring mostly useless ones. While setting up lead scoring can be a complicated process, it’s definitely worth your time and effort. Once you have lead scoring analytics in place, your sales team can stop wasting their time on prospects who are not likely to convert and focus instead on those who are more likely to buy now.

Studies revealed that companies with well-put lead nurturing system see 50% more sales at a 33% lower cost. Lead Generation Marketing Effectiveness Study showed that 68% of successful marketers say lead scoring is the most effective method to improve the revenue contribution from lead nurturing.

30. Get More Social Exposure Through the Social Media Automation

As the name says it, social media automation means using tools to automate the social marketing process by making your account stay active without manual posting and monitoring. On January 2016, We are Social said that 31% of world’s population (7.395 billion) were active social media users. With such a large audience you can’t stay up all night to make sure you post at the current local time when there is a peak of your audience. The automation appears at a time of need to make things easier.

A unique approach to the automation process on social media platforms happened in 2012 when Barack Obama’s social campaign used the Dashboard.

It was an online registration platform where volunteers could make an account to support Obama’s candidacy. Everybody with an email address could register and see news, political and election events. Through that platform, Obama’s team collected data about the activity of the volunteers such as phone calls, donations, and tasks. Afterward, it was very easy for the team to target only the volunteers that were interested. The results of the automation process were remarkable not to mention that in the end, Obama became president. Great digital marketing technique, isn’t it?

31. Encourage Brand Lovers to Support You Against Trolls

Brand lovers are those who play the role of brand advocates and define the term evangelism marketing. They are highly satisfied customers and identify themselves with the brand. They are an asset because they promote the brand waiting for nothing in return. McKinsey and Company say 70% of purchase experiences are based on how the customer feels. It is bloody important to provide value and customer fulfillment.

Besides the fact that brand lovers will make sure to tell everyone your product is the best, they will support you against trolls. Nowadays, people on social platforms are very critical, and a single wrong comment or tweet can ruin you. Some haters and trolls can make your life a living hell on the social media. But, thank God for brand advocates!

OldNavy, an American retailer, got socially trolled. The company tweeted an upcoming sale with an interracial couple image, and then a group of racist people started posting negative tweets about the brand with hashtags #whitegenocide and #miscegenation. Before the team from Old Navy began to respond, some advocates of the brand started supporting the company by posting their own pictures with interracial couples they have in the family. In times of crisis, it is best to have your brand lovers that can make a powerful statement.

32. Built a Strong Customer Following & Get Free Endorsement

Millennials are a socially conscious generation. Embracing a cause might be just the answer you’re looking for if your brand addresses the Y generations. If they believe in a cause, they are willing to pay more and even a premium price. Knowing they give something for a better cause makes them feel valuable.

The shoe brand TOMS created a campaign based on a cause that brought endorsement from celebrities and famous people. They created a new concept ‘One Day without shoes’, meaning that for each purchased pair of shoes, another pair goes to a child in need. People from all over the Globe started a word of mouth campaign and even walk without shoes the whole day.

Charlize Theron became a strong supporter of the cause, alongside a lot of other celebrities, such as Lenny Kravitz, Chaske Spence and Julia Jones from Twilight, Dawn Olivieri from the Vampire Diaries, plus Cheryl Tiegs, Gillian Zinser, Jason Mraz, Tara Mercurio and Lacey Chabert, Thomas Jane, Matisyahu, Living Things and Tory Burch.

33. Gain Free Media to Get Everyone Talk About You on News and Get 5 Million Views on YouTube

Earned media or free media is a term that describes all the publicity that is not paid but rather gained through promotional efforts. Earned media happens when you make people talk about your brand no matter where it appears. Earned media happens after you make smart and creative ads or involved in successful real marketing actions, created impactful events and so on.    

Avon used a digital marketing tactic that generated massive amounts of earned media. “Choose Beautiful” reached over 5 million of views on YouTube and the term <Dove ‘choose beautiful’> received more than a million entries on Google. Hundreds of media outlets covered the video; numerous news websites claimed that “proves beauty is a choice”.

Source: http://delamanoconvenezuela.com

The ad received a lot of free media. Ad Age named it the best advertising campaign of the 21st century. People started to talk about it on Buzzfeed saying “Not everyone is beautiful and that is perfectly okay”. Some of them were encouraging the message “I find it odd that people disapprove of an ad whose whole purpose was to get women to all realize that they were beautiful”.

The psychologist Nancy Etcoff and self-esteem expert Dr. Tara Cousineau, together with Dove, created a toolkit named “Mindful Me” designed to help women manage thoughts and feelings in order to offer them the confidence to feel beautiful.

Send a powerful message to your audience and then expect to gain free media.

34. Create Fascinating Video Content to Attract Native Customers & Increase the Conversion Rate by 80%

Video content started to gain a lot of attention in the past few years. Almost 1 billion  unique monthly visitors are on YouTube, 130 million on Vimeo, 100 million on Dailymotion, 45 million on LiveLeak and 42 million on Vine. That is a lot of viewers! Let’s not forget the social video part, 100 million hours of video are watched on Facebook, and 82% of Twitter users watch video content on Twitter. In 2013, Instagram introduced videos in addition to photos and more than 5 million videos were shared in the first 24 hours. Video consumption on Instagram has increased by 40% in 2016.

According to Hyperfine Media, 90% of users say that product videos are helping them in the decision process and almost 40% of online consumer trust video ads as you can see in next infographic.

Source: http://www.hyperfinemedia.co.uk

Most recent studies show that a video placed on the landing page can increase conversion rate by 80%. 96% of B2B companies use videos in their marketing campaign, and 73% say this improved their ROI.

35. Use Webinars to Gain 16,394 new leads

Organizing webinars can produce juicy content. They are great to deliver useful content to your readers and engage with them. Practically you can give a presentation to them and then discuss to see their main points. This is a great way to receive hot information, smart insights and see what topics you can debate on the blog in order to push the leads down the funnel.

Basically you need a microphone, a PC/laptop, and you’re set. Then use a service like AnyMeeting or GoToWebinar to connect with your viewers.

Webinars are such and effective digital marketing technique that could bring you 518,399 visitors and 16,394 leads from 77 webinars as KISSmetrics experienced. Neil Patel, founder at KISSmetrics, estimated that those webinars generated $1,638,000.

36. Start Running an Affiliate Program to Monetize Your Website & Get Extra $4500 Monthly Profit

There are upsides and downsides of an affiliate program in your digital strategy. The upside of this marketing technique is that it can generate high revenue and the downside is that it doesn’t work for all kinds of business.

For example, the popular web hosting service Bluehost gets new customers through its affiliates. Shopify uses an affiliate program that rewards its affiliates with $2,400 per sale.

A study from NichePie by Luqman Khan shows how you can generate a monthly profit of $4,500 in 4 months. See the statistics in the next screenshot.

Source: http://nichepie.com

He posted 8 articles and 1 infographic and received 14,206 unique visitors in 4 months.

37. Generate Product Order Increase by 9.8% Through Voucher and Reward Sites

In 2015, the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) released the Online Performance Marketing study showing that 57% of product orders were through voucher and reward sites. Thomas Cook, one of the world’s leading leisure travel, developed a campaign based on the use of voucher codes to encourage users to buy online tickets. They wanted to keep the cost-per-order (CPO) lower than £65. As a result, the orders increased by 9.8% while the CPO decreased, thus keeping it under £65.

38. Map out the Affiliates’ Value to Increase the Long Haul Share by 19%

Thomas Cook Airlines has a long activity in the affiliate marketing area, and this led the company to always improve their marketing strategy. They learned that knowing the values of their affiliates is highly important. One of their affiliate campaigns had the next objectives:

• minimize the average cost-per-sale (CPS);
• increase the number of long-haul bookings (meaning the bookings for travelers that last a long period of time);

A way to do that was to map out the affiliate’s value. For that, all the bookings from 2014 were analyzed to see the path to conversion for each affiliate. This helped the company to discover the CPS and the contribution brought by each affiliate. The results were quite impressive: they kept the average CPS below 2% of revenue and reduced the cost-per-click by 73% while increasing the long haul share by 19%. On top of that, they sold thousands of seats from routes that weren’t performing well at all.

39. Reach Over 60% Social Engagement and Advocacy for the Brand with Respected Influencers Through an Affiliate Program

The affiliate agency Schaaf-PartnerCentric conducted an in-house study based on REACH (Relations, Exposure, Advocacy, Connection, Hype) program that provides customized outreach and guarantees placement on influencer websites for a boutique fashion retailer. The client has proposed to increase the exposure and advocacy within a short period of time with the help of influencers.

The campaign raised 63% social engagement in the first week after the big launch. Instagram saw the highest engagement, with 92% of the social interactions. Pinterest increased up to 6% social interactions.

40. Implement a Publisher Strategy to See a Monthly Revenue Growth Rate of 177%

Cost Plus World Market is a furniture store that implemented a publisher campaign through an affiliate program. The online retailer has been in the furniture market for almost 30 years now and has had more than 100 brands and thousands of products. They implemented a publisher program with the help of Schaaf-PartnerCentric team. Only after 90 days, the company’s results were highly visible. The monthly traffic increased by 100.7%, the monthly sales increased by 257%, and the monthly revenue grew by 177%.

The Unifying Tactic: Centralizing Your Brand’s Knowledge Graph

Digital marketing is often heavily siloed: the SEO team builds links, the PR team manages press releases, and the social media team handles engagement. However, modern AI response engines do not see these silos. They evaluate your company as a single, cohesive Knowledge Entity, calculating your semantic trust score by synthesizing your search presence, brand sentiment, and PR footprints into a unified digital footprint. If your visibility tactics remain disconnected, you risk fragmentation in AI training data.

💡 Pro Tip: To unify your digital footprint under one roof, industry leaders use BrandMentions. It acts as an enterprise-grade AI visibility platform and social listening engine that feeds raw, real-time web data into your marketing strategy.

By transforming unlinked brand mentions into connected nodes of authority, the platform gives your entire marketing department a single source of truth. Whether you are tracking a competitor’s topical authority, measuring the semantic sentiment of a PR launch, or reclaiming links for traditional SEO, it provides the precise Brand Intelligence needed to dominate AI engine responses and traditional search results alike.

Conclusion: Turning Inspiration into Algorithmic Authority

Creating engaging, data-rich content will always be the bedrock of visibility. Let’s face it, the internet craves genuine creativity. We need it to differentiate our businesses, spark organic word-of-mouth, inspire our audiences, and earn the kind of “free advertising” that paid media can never replicate.

But inspiration without execution is just noise. If you implement even a fraction of the frameworks, case studies, and tactics curated in this playbook, you will see a measurable shift in your digital performance.

To get started, don’t try to boil the ocean. Take action today by following these three steps:

1. Select Your High-Impact Tactics: Audit the strategies above and choose 2 or 3 strategies that align with your current resources 

2. Bridge Your Data Silos: Ensure your SEO, PR, and content efforts are communicating so that every brand mention feeds your broader digital footprint.

3. Commit to Continuous Optimization: Embrace the reality that sustainable growth requires constant adaptation, whether you are optimizing for a higher human click-through rate (CTR) or structuring your data to be cleanly read by AI crawlers.

The future of digital marketing belongs to the brands that treat their online presence as a unified asset.

Choose your next move, leverage the right intelligence tools, and start building an authoritative brand that humans love to read and AI engines love to cite.

Good luck! Maybe you will be the next case study for an effective digital marketing technique.

The post 40 Most Effective Digital Marketing Tactics and Techniques in 2026 appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.

This article curates a collection of articles on organic link building, providing a comprehensive historical and strategic overview of natural backlink acquisition. Featuring insights from industry leaders like Backlinko, HubSpot, and Quicksprout, the list covers essential topics including content-led growth, relationship-based outreach, and the transition from manual link building to “link earning.” Key themes explored include the impact of content marketing on search rankings, creative outreach methods, and future-proofing websites against algorithm updates. 

Since it becomes clear that the future of SEO relies on organic links, natural links, high quality links or any other term you know them by, we’ve decided to compile a comprehensive list with some amazing organic link building articles. Personally, they’ve added value to my knowledge and some have a different perspective from what I’ve written about organic link building.

The Ultimate Organic Strategy: Brand Mention Reclamation

Throughout all the amazing link-building strategies listed beyond, one foundational truth remains: the most organic backlink you can ever acquire is one that transitions from a natural brand mention. Generative AI engines and modern algorithms are extremely adept at spotting manipulated links. However, when an independent author writes about your brand naturally, turning that existing text into a link is the purest form of White Hat SEO.

To automate this process at scale, top SEO professionals deploy BrandMentions.

As a dedicated AI visibility platform, it removes the manual labor from link prospecting. It instantly alerts you when your brand, your product, or even your executives are mentioned organically anywhere online without a link. By utilizing its advanced filtering capabilities, you can quickly separate high-authority mentions from the noise, allowing you to execute highly targeted, high-conversion outreach campaigns that skyrocket your organic authority.

1. 15 Types of Content That Will Drive You More Traffic

2. The Complete Guide To Building Your Blog Audience

3. How Content Marketing Affects Search Engine Rankings

4. White Hat SEO Case Study: 348% More Organic Traffic in 7 Days

5. 7 Ways to Protect Your Site Against Google’s Next Update

6. Turning Keywords Into SEO Content

7. Link Building Case Study: How I Increased My Search Traffic by 110% in 14 Days

8. The Art of Link Earning

9. Creating Authoritative Content Without Client Input

10. Evolve Or Die – Why SEO & Tiered Link Building Has Changed In 2014

11. How To Steal Your Competitors Best Content & Use It Against Them

12. How I Built A Top 100 Blog In 12 Months & How You Can Do It Too!

12. The Power of Authors and Content for Link Building

13. 12 Scalable Link-Building Tactics

14. The End of Link Building as we Know It

15. The Blueprint to Content Marketing Success

16. Remarketing: How to Make Your Content Marketing and SEO up to 7x More Awesome

17. Link Building Success Stories

18. 6 Types of Links and Why They Matter

19. Link Building Tactics to Supercharge Your SEO Efforts

20. After Guest Blogging…What’s Left for “Safe” Link Building?

21. 80+ Link Building Strategies You Can Try Out Now

22. 11 Ways to Build Links Through Content Marketing

23. SEO is Dead: Long Live OC/DC

24. 10 Content Promotion Strategies That Work (With Examples)

25. Building Relationships (and Links) from Natural Content

26. From Link Building to Link Earning: 3 Ways to Transition

27. Top 8 Google Analytics Reports for Managing Organic SEO Campaigns

28. The Future of Link Building: 5 Important Messages

29. Creative Link Building Ideas For Really Boring Webistes

30. Link Building at The Speed of Natural

31. How to Analyze a Link: Link Building Basics

32. SaaS Link Building Strategies That Actually Work In 2024

33. What People and Data Have to do with Link Building

34. How Relationships Work in Link Building

35. Alternative Outreach Methods for Link Building: Thinking Creatively

36. Google’s Love/Hate Relationship with Links

37. I’m Not a Link Builder, I’m a Link Artist!

38. 16 Blogging Mistakes to Avoid

39. Blog SEO for the Modern Marketer: How to Optimize Your Posts

40. Learning SEO From The Experts

41. 11 Ways to Become a Better Blogger

42. Google SEO Best Practices – How to Keep Google Happy

43. How to Grow Your Website Traffic Without Building Links

44. The Growth Acceleration Framework Blueprint

45. 3 Examples of Content Marketing Earning Awesome Links

46. 5 Best Practices for Effective Organic Link Building

47. Adjusting Your SEO Strategy For A Post-Hummingbird World

48. SEO for Start-Ups: 3 Powerful Tips for Driving SEO Traffic Early On

Transitioning from “Link Earning” to “Citation Earning”

While the foundational principles in the articles above remain timeless, the mechanics of organic visibility are experiencing a massive shift. We are moving rapidly from traditional SEO into the era of AEO (Answer Engine Optimization).

Generative AI engines don’t just count links to measure authority; they read the web’s entire context to establish factual consensus.

When an independent blogger mentions your brand alongside your core keywords, an AI engine processes that semantic connection. Whether they turn that mention into a hyperlink or leave it as plain text, AI models map it to your brand’s “entity.” When users ask an AI assistant for recommendations, the engine synthesizes these broad web mentions to generate its response, dropping an AI Citation (a footnote source) to the most relevant, context-rich pages it can find.

Therefore, modern organic link building isn’t just about passing traditional PageRank anymore—it’s about feeding the AI data pipelines with high-quality, trusted, third-party validation.

Conclusion: Future-Proofing Your Organic Authority

Looking back at over a decade of industry insights, from the shift away from tiered link schemes in 2014 to the relationship-driven strategies of today, one truth stands out: shortcuts always have an expiration date. The transition from manual link building to “link earning” was the first major evolution. Today’s evolution demands that we create content so authoritative, and build brand presence so undeniable, that both human editors and AI algorithms cannot help but cite us. By focusing on genuine brand reclamation, deep relationship building, and high-utility content, you ensure your site remains resilient against whatever algorithm update Google or AI platforms roll out next.

Do you have any other articles that you would like to include in this list? Please share them in the comments 😉

Photo credits: 1

The post From Backlinks to AI Citations: 48 Definitive Guides to Organic Link Building appeared first on SEO Blog | cognitiveSEO Blog on SEO Tactics & Strategies.