Content consolidation among winning SEO strategies, award winners say

The winners of this year’s Search Engine Land Award for Best SEO Initiative got down with George Nguyen of Search Engine Land to discuss SEO approaches and strategies.

Search Engine Land Editor George Nguyen delves into the best SEO methods and tactics for your campaigns in an interview with the Best SEO Initiative Award recipients. Here are the winners in each category:

To win the Best B2B Search Marketing Initiative – SEO. Lindsay Neilson from NP Digital collaborated with PROS to overcome the challenges of a conceptual product and obtaining search volume in the market.“We were attempting to strike a beautiful mix between product marketing buzzwords and intellectual notions of what their product accomplishes. As well as how consumers, various industries, and personas operate for those terms.”

Lily Ray

Lily Ray, the director of SEO at Path Interactive, won Best Overall SEO Initiative – Enterprise. Insurance for her work with an insurance customer who was impacted by a Google core algorithm update. “In terms of E-A-T, there was a lot of information on the website that needed to be updated to fulfill Google’s standards. We also accomplished a lot of other work on the technical front, such as content optimization, website architecture, and backlinks.”

Abby Reimer of Uproer won the Best Overall SEO Initiative – Small Business award for her work with CaringBridge to assist them to attract more visitors through their resources and blog sections. “The issue here was that as a nonprofit, they don’t have the time or resources that a huge corporation does. So we had to work around that, which required a lot of experience, authority, and confidence. When we considered who the experts are on topics like how to cope with a health crisis. We discovered that it’s CaringBridge users and people who have been through it themselves.

“Superablist’s site was not ranking for the particular set of keywords for 2018,” says Kaushal Thakkar, Founder of INFIDIGIT. Who worked with Superbalist to gain maximum traction during Black Friday to win the Best Retail Search Marketing Initiative – SEO category. They offered their best tips around optimizing for difficult industries, using paid data to inform organic search, using UGC in search campaigns, and getting 240x results for Black Friday e-commerce campaigns.

They shared their best advice on how to optimize for difficult industries. How to use sponsored data to guide organic search. How to use user-generated content in search ads, and how to get 240x results for Black Friday e-commerce campaigns.

When it comes to B2B and SaaS marketing, buzzwords are frequently a source of contention. How do you optimize an SEO strategy in this situation?

 

Lindsay:

When you work for a SaaS company, it’s definitely a struggle. Phrases like empowering digital transformation and phrases like omnichannel are used frequently. But it’s sometimes difficult to relate them to the solutions that people are searching for. We went a little deeper and discovered that one of the issues is that the sales cycle is extremely protracted. As a result, attribution, particularly with organic, can be difficult because you don’t always see a one-to-one relationship between a top-of-funnel visit to the site and revenue.

They now have a more extensive content offering. Which we were able to bring a lot of in front of the gate, despite the fact that a lot of it was previously unprofitable, not optimized, or only available in PDF format. One of the great things about PROS is that they have a plethora of brilliant thought leaders and subject matter experts on staff. We were able to take a lot of what they already had and reformat it or align it to very specific longtail keywords. That was more descriptive of how people thought about the products and solutions.

How do you plan for and think about how to recover from an algorithm update?

Lily:

One of the things that can happen and something that I see really frequently with sites that are negatively impacted by recent core updates is that they have produced so much content for so long–and maybe way back when the content did really well for SEO. But the rules of the game, kind of change.

So one of the things we were looking at was the fact that you have fantastic product sites, service pages, and brand pages, but you also have this blog with a tonne of material. In many cases, the content was not up to par with what we would expect from good quality information nowadays. So it’s all about chipping away at it and ensuring that whatever search engines index is actually high-quality information. So that was essentially the entire strategy.

How can businesses improve the E-A-T of their content?

Lily:

For example, with this client, there was some content that required medical review or expert review that the company wasn’t demonstrating that they had actually used expert reviewers throughout that content. So you read the article and it’s like, “Who wrote this? Should I trust them? ” So we made a lot of enhancements just like on the template level to depict that we can be trusted. There was a lot of consolidating and getting rid of content in cases where we felt a little questionable. Even if the client said things like, “Oh, we wrote that six years ago, it’s not really accurate anymore.”

It’s often hard for clients to retire content. What tips do you have to help?

Lily:

I believe it is always based on evidence, rather than a gut reaction about content. (Though it is possible.) We’ve had clients tell us that something needs to be removed from the website. “Yeah, it’s not safe information anymore,” they say. As a result, it’s a lot easier to get rid of.) However, the data speaks for itself. So, if you notice that there isn’t much organic traffic coming to the page. That there aren’t many page views, that there isn’t much engagement, or that it hasn’t ranked for anything in a few years. It’s a lot easier to suggest what to do with it. It’s not always as simple as deleting it. In many situations, it’s merged into this article. Which is then redirected and updated.

How do you use paid to inform your page titles and meta descriptions?

Lily:

Yes, this is something we enjoy doing because you get so much more direct information on the effectiveness of keywords and paid search, and you can more readily tie it to conversions than you can with SEO. But it’s been a long time. So, if possible, we like to bring in data, cross-reference it with organic title tags and meta descriptions, and make sure we’re using the best available wording.

So, as an example for this customer, we have state pages, as do many other businesses. Rather than having a template title tag where you just write in the name of the state. We can look at it on a page-by-page basis to see if different wording resonates differently in different states. Perhaps you can make some linguistic changes that better resonate with the audience and that state, and the keyword itself may alter as a result of how people describe things. You can get that kind of information if you pay for it.

How do you use user-generated content for an SEO campaign?

Abby:

That relates to CaringBridge’s major issue. Which was a lack of time and resources to conduct one-on-one interviews with individual users, as well as doctors and therapists. We learned that experts in areas such as “how to help someone who is going through a cancer journey” don’t have to be doctors. It’s the individuals who live with it every day. Whether it’s in their own lives or in the lives of their loved ones.

 

So that’s what prompted us to conduct a study on the subject and develop content for social media. CaringBridge is a well-known brand with more than 300,000 Facebook fans. So we thought, you know, why not try asking for their advice? Some blogs attract upwards of 100 to 200 comments of people giving their stories, their recommendations, or guidance. We notice recurring themes in them and then incorporate those observations into the text itself.

How do you assess where you can compete in SERPs and how do you go about talking to clients about that?

Abby: 

The simplest approach I’ve found to discuss this with clients is to show them the search results and ask, “Do you want to be discovered here?” No, we don’t want to compete with someone who has a Ph.D., which is the most common response. So simply showing them what genuine search results look like and comparing it to when we look at more supporting products. Then we find competitors like Hallmark or Caregivers.com, where we would like to see ourselves among those brands. One of the ways I connect with them is by giving them the search results and being quite sensible about it.

What are some things to take into consideration when you’re running a Black Friday campaign?

Abby: 

The thing about Black Friday is that you can face competition from any kind of website–news websites and anything else. Say you’re ranking number 1 or 2. And a news publisher writes about Black Friday sales happening across e-commerce companies. They can suddenly come and outrank you.

One thing to keep in mind while working on this portion of SEO is to organize our strategy. So that we can outrank even news websites and BlackFriday.com. We needed to make sure that the page performance was perfect, that technical SEO was taken care of, that the site’s health was optimal, and that multiple keywords supported that one specific page so that it could rank well.

How did you implement content for Black Friday?

Kaushal:

 

We worked on a number of infographics and video content–both of which were required for the schema we implemented–and it proved to be really beneficial. We made an infographic to show you how to shop for Black Friday. The number of clicks and CTR were substantially higher than usual when Google featured it on the featured snippet. It also assisted us in achieving 240x more traffic than paid search.

 

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