Head of SEO & Content https://www.nobraineragency.com/author/laura-rudd/ Search-driven Content Agency Wed, 22 Oct 2025 08:43:00 +0000 en-GB hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.3 https://www.nobraineragency.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/cropped-nobrainer-favicon.png Head of SEO & Content https://www.nobraineragency.com/author/laura-rudd/ 32 32 Getting the right content marketing mix for your audience https://www.nobraineragency.com/content/content-marketing-mix/ Wed, 22 Oct 2025 08:40:02 +0000 https://www.nobraineragency.com/?p=25884 If there’s one thing that the web isn’t lacking at the moment, it’s content. The challenge for businesses isn’t producing more content, it’s about developing the right content for your specific audience, at the right time in their journey, to make it easier for them to take the action you want.  In this guide, we […]

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If there’s one thing that the web isn’t lacking at the moment, it’s content. The challenge for businesses isn’t producing more content, it’s about developing the right content for your specific audience, at the right time in their journey, to make it easier for them to take the action you want. 

In this guide, we explore how you can develop the right content marketing mix for your audience, whether B2B or B2C, by understanding:

  1. Who they are
  2. What drives them
  3. What holds them back
  4. What content resonates most with them 
  5. What they actually need in order to make conversion decisions. 

 

Getting the content marketing mix right for your unique audience helps to ensure that you make the most of your budget and maximise ROI. 

Jump to :

Segment your audience beyond surface demographics

Most brands think they know their audience, but sometimes this knowledge sits at surface level: age, job title, or purchase history. To shape an effective content mix, you need segmentation that connects behavioural data, psychology, and context.

Audience segmentation graphic

B2C audiences

Consider the motivations and moments that drive purchases from your various customers. Just because someone fits into a certain age category doesn’t necessarily mean they make decisions in the same ways. For example, if your segment is ‘millennial parents’, this could include:

  • Budget-conscious shoppers prioritising value and reliability
  • Time-poor parents looking for convenience
  • Ethically motivated buyers seeking sustainability

 

Each of these audience segments requires different messaging and different content types to connect and trigger an action. 

B2B audiences

This will depend on the type and size of businesses you want to reach, but in many cases, audience segmentation needs to account for a decision committee, not just an individual. For complex B2B purchases, there are often several stakeholders in different roles and they all have their own pain points, coming at it from very different angles. To be more successful, your content marketing mix needs to incorporate mapping these various roles and their needs into the strategy, as they all feed into buying decisions.

Finding the audience segment data

While we’re still waiting for the silver bullet of audience research tools to be created that does it all, there are a number of ways to gather this kind of useful data from different sources. 

You can use:

  • For B2B, use LinkedIn Audience Insights to find out user interests and engagement behaviour, on top of the usual demographics. On top of this, taking a bit of a dive into the LinkedIn and other public social media profiles of individual potential customers, including their posts, updates and the things they engage with, gives you real-world examples of the types of content that prompt them to action.
  • For your existing customers, look at GA4 audience reports. These are based on metrics that are relevant to you, such as number of purchases or types of events triggered, and how they engage with your site content.
  • Need actionable B2C insights? Try SparkToro. You can identify patterns in where your audience goes for their information (like press, socials, podcasts etc.), the brands they already connect with (giving inspiration on content type, tone, and more), as well as the different formats they engage with.

Combining this kind of information with your own first-party CRM and email engagement data helps you create more rounded personas that genuinely reflect your audiences and their digital content preferences.

Identify pain points and barriers to conversion

A well planned and implemented content marketing mix doesn’t just promote you, it actively removes friction from the user journey. Understanding why your audience chooses to engage (or not) is key to developing content that overcomes audience hesitancy and delivers meaningful connection (and conversions). 

How to uncover pain points

Talking to your target audience is the best way to find out what their pain points are. You can: 

  • Conduct customer interviews (short, focused, and open-ended)
  • Analyse customer service transcripts or chat logs
  • Monitor communities, review platforms, and social mentions

This can give you valuable insights into what frustrates and motivates your audience. It can also be used to inform content that builds trust and reassurance, showing that you understand the potential issues and concerns and can prove that you’re finding ways to overcome them.

Map barriers to the customer journey

Every stage of the customer journey will have potential barriers, like:

  • Awareness: “Why does this matter to me?”
  • Consideration: “I’m not sure this will work for my situation.”
  • Decision: “How do I know this is the best deal or choice?”

The right content can help to break down each of these obstacles, but you need to know they exist first. 

Using heatmapping and user journey tools such as Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity (which is free!), you can discover where your users often hesitate or drop off on your own website. If you can pair this data with customer surveys to help get under the skin of the ‘why’ then this gives you a much fuller picture of what’s happening, and how to best solve it.  

Match content formats to audience preferences

Your content marketing mix needs to take into account not just what you want to say, but how your audience prefers to find, digest and engage with content. This will be based on your own data and audience insights, but as an example:

Content formats that often work well with B2C audiences

  • Short-form video (TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube Shorts): Perfect for awareness and emotional resonance.
  • User-generated content (UGC): Builds trust through authenticity.
  • How-to blogs and guides: Drive organic search visibility while helping users overcome small barriers to purchase.
  • Email content and loyalty campaigns: Nurture repeat engagement and advocacy.

Content formats that often work well for B2B audiences

  • Long-form thought leadership (whitepapers, webinars, podcasts): Ideal for building authority and guiding early-stage research.
  • Case studies, reports, whitepapers and ROI calculators: Support middle and late-stage decision-making.
  • Interactive tools or demos: Offer a useful and time-saving solution to a known problem. Shorten the distance between consideration and conversion.
  • LinkedIn articles and SlideShares: Amplify professional credibility and drive conversation.

Testing content formats for your specific audience is key

Your audience will be likely to have a real mix of content preferences, so it’s always useful to audit performance for past content types and try different things when testing new content. 

Make sure your review of past content includes engagement metrics and conversion metrics as well as clicks/views/reach. To have an effective strategy, it’s important to identify which content formats genuinely help to drive movement through the funnel, not just impressions or likes.

Map content to every stage of the buying journey

Getting the mix right isn’t about having all the content types, it’s about having the right ones at each stage of the journey.

You can develop a brand-specific content marketing matrix to plot audience segments against journey stages and content types. This makes gaps and overlaps more easily visible in the planning stages, ensuring your resources go toward filling strategic holes, not duplicating effort.

This can also help to focus your creative ideation for what the specific content will actually be, further down the line. Our content marketing planning tips can also help with this. 

Here’s an example (below), but you could take this further, by shaping a matrix that’s audience-first and overlays your content pillars too.

 

Gather data and insight to refine your mix over time

A great content marketing mix isn’t static. The platforms, preferences, and behaviours of your audience evolve, so your strategy must do that too. That means developing an insight loop that keeps your content decisions data-informed and fresh. Some of the ways to do this include: 

Quantitative tools

  • GA4 & Looker Studio: To track assisted conversions and engagement by content type
  • CRM analytics (e.g. HubSpot, Salesforce): To tie content touches to pipeline impact
  • Social listening tools (e.g. Brandwatch, Sprout Social): To identify patterns, emerging themes or sentiment shifts.

Qualitative methods

  • Customer interviews and feedback loops: Regularly refresh your understanding of customer motivations and what they actually want from you to make conversion decisions
  • Sales and customer success team input: These are the people who hear objections and pain points daily, making their insights a goldmine for marketers
  • Content performance reviews: Quarterly audits of top-performing and underperforming content assets.

Check out our guide to content marketing metrics for more actionable tips to track and evaluate performance.

The most important part of this process is in actually taking action off the back of the data you gather. Once you know what is working best by audience segment, funnel stage and format, you can tweak your ongoing strategy to better give the people what they have shown you they want. 

Build a process for continuous optimisation

Getting the right content marketing mix is never a one-off project; it’s a continual process of testing, learning, and refining.

You can use this simple framework as a starting point to implement continual optimisation with your content:

  1. Benchmark – Identify your top 10 performing pieces of content by engagement and conversion
  2. Segment – Map which audience and funnel stage each belongs to
  3. Diagnose – Identify under-served audiences or stages
  4. Experiment – Test new content formats or channels targeted at those gaps
  5. Measure – Define KPIs upfront (e.g. sales, downloads, demo requests, CTRs, or dwell time)
  6. Refine – Double down on what works, phase out what doesn’t.

 

By turning this process into a quarterly discipline, your content strategy becomes more resilient and responsive, being grounded in data, not assumptions or guesswork.

Don’t forget to tell stories

Even the most data-driven content strategies need to leave plenty of room for creativity and storytelling. Whether B2B or B2C, your audience is still human, and humans respond to emotion, not just facts or logic.

  • In B2B, emotion often displays as trust, confidence, or professional pride
  • In B2C, it’s usually more about joy, a sense of belonging, or aspiration.

 

Injecting that human narrative (and tone of voice) into your content creates the emotional momentum that is needed in order for your content to be memorable and your strategy to be the most effective possible.

Getting the content marketing mix right for your audience isn’t about producing or repurposing more content for every platform and channel so that every possible base is covered, it’s about being more purposeful with the resources you have. When you better understand your audience’s motivations, challenges, and journeys, you can create content that meets them where they are and moves them closer to where you want them to be.

If you’d like some help with your content marketing or SEO strategy, we’d love to chat. Get in touch using the form below. 

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]]> Are Reddit and Quora users the new influencers? https://www.nobraineragency.com/seo/reddit-quora-users-new-influencers/ Tue, 01 Jul 2025 11:38:33 +0000 https://www.nobraineragency.com/?p=24991 I’ve been digging into a question that’s becoming impossible to ignore: as AI search grows smarter, are Reddit and Quora users emerging as the new influencers? Let’s unpack the data – and what it all means for SEO, content strategy, and digital PR. 1. AI search IS disrupting traditional SEO According to Semrush’s recent AI […]

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I’ve been digging into a question that’s becoming impossible to ignore: as AI search grows smarter, are Reddit and Quora users emerging as the new influencers? Let’s unpack the data – and what it all means for SEO, content strategy, and digital PR.

1. AI search IS disrupting traditional SEO

According to Semrush’s recent AI Search Traffic Study, “AI search visitors to surpass traditional search visitors in 2028” is no longer a bold prediction – it’s likely conservative. For SEO’s, that’s huge. These users aren’t just browsing – they’re high‑intent: “The average LLM visitor is worth 4.4x the average traditional organic search visitor.”

Semrush AI Search Traffic Study - Projected Annual Visitors by Source

What this means is clear: the future of SEO isn’t just about rankings – it’s about being cited by AI. If AI gives an answer straight from your content, you’re influencing without the click. That’s where Reddit and Quora come into play.

2. Why Reddit and Quora matter now

One of the standout insights from Semrush’s study is that Quora was the most‑cited site in Google’s AI Overviews (AIO), with Reddit a close second. Both platforms are full of niche, authentic Q&A that AI loves to integrate.

These platforms beat out so many mainstream publishers – not because they’re higher authority in Google’s eyes, but because they hold answers to very specific questions. Google’s AI Overviews team leveraged Reddit and Quora for that reason: they’re treasure troves of high‑quality, user‑generated insights.

Here’s the juicy part: Reddit’s even been integrated into Google’s AI models via a reported $60 million per year licensing partnership in 2024. It’s no accident that Reddit responses now pop up frequently in AI Overviews – and sometimes without links.

3. Are they the “new influencers”?

Short answer: yes – but not in the traditional sense. While Instagram and YouTube influencers built their empires on follower counts and curated content, Reddit and Quora users are gaining traction through authenticity, expertise, and relevance.

These platforms thrive on lived experience, long-form responses, and community moderation. Upvotes and responses act as social proof, turning ordinary users into trusted authorities in niche topics.

Reddit threads and Quora answers are often detailed, balanced, and written by people who genuinely care about a subject – or who have real-world knowledge to share. And in the ecosystem of AI-driven search, where Google wants to provide immediate, nuanced, accurate responses, these detailed contributions are gold dust.

It’s not about influencer selfies or sponsored posts anymore. It’s about real people answering real questions – and AI seeing them as the most credible source.

4. What this should mean for your search strategy

Laptop with Google on screen

This shift to AI-powered results doesn’t mean abandoning traditional SEO. Instead, it means evolving how and where your brand shows up.

To make the most of Reddit and Quora’s influence, here are four things to focus on:

  • Actively engage on Reddit and Quora
    Start participating in conversations in relevant subreddits or topic spaces. Offer valuable advice, not sales pitches. Use a genuine voice, answer questions thoroughly, and where appropriate, link back to high-quality content on your site (that helps answer the question further).
  • Deliver AI-friendly content on your website
    Create concise, question-led content that mimics the style of Reddit and Quora answers. Use subheadings, structured data, and a conversational tone. Think FAQs, how-tos, and expert explainers that AI can easily lift from. Good old fashioned SEO best practice!
  • Leverage Digital PR to drive brand mentions
    Earned media and thought leadership still matter. When your brand is mentioned in trusted media or forums, it boosts your perceived authority and brand credibility – not just to people, but to AI too.
  • Track mentions and visibility in AI Overviews
    Tools like Semrush or Ahrefs now show which URLs or brands appear in AI-generated results. Use this to monitor where your content is being picked up, and adapt your strategy based on what’s working.

Cut through the noise of AI-generated answers

One challenge, particularly on Quora, is the rising volume of AI-generated responses. The platform has always welcomed a broad range of contributions, but there’s now a noticeable uptick in formulaic, shallow, or generic answers – many clearly written by AI tools.

For brands or individuals wanting to genuinely build trust and visibility here, the key is standing out for the right reasons. AI-generated content often lacks the nuance, context, or lived experience that makes an answer resonate.

Here’s how to cut through the noise:

  • Be specific
    Use real-world examples, industry knowledge, or data to anchor your response. AI tends to generalise – humans bring detail and tell stories.
  • Show personality
    A conversational tone, a sprinkle of wit, or even a story helps signal authenticity. If it reads too clean, it’s probably forgettable.
  • Go deeper
    Avoid surface-level explanations. Break down your answer into logical, clear points with helpful formatting (bullets, bolding).
  • Engage in comments
    Follow up with users, clarify points, and engage in the discussion. It’s something AI can’t do – and shows you’re present (and real!).

This doesn’t just help with visibility on the platform – it increases the likelihood that AI tools like Google’s AI Overviews will see your response as worth citing over others. AI rewards clarity, structure, and the trust signals we’ve already explored – and those are easier to deliver when you’re genuinely contributing, not just publishing for the sake of it.

5. Comparing brand-sourced vs user-sourced content

You don’t need to choose between your brand’s content and community-driven platforms – you need both. Brand content establishes authority, consistency, and trust. It gives you a home base to link back to and ensures key messages are well articulated.

But community content – whether that’s reviews, forum answers, or Reddit/Quora contributions. It adds a layer of social validation and discoverability that traditional brand content often lacks.

Let’s break it down:

Type

Role in AI Age

Key Advantage

Brand content

Gives authoritative, structured info; supports SEO and AI inclusion

Full message control

Reddit/Quora content

Generates authentic, niche Q&A that AI loves to cite

Micro‑influencing

Think of it like this:

  • Brand content = your polished shop window
  • Reddit/Quora content = customers chatting about your product in the street outside

The magic happens when those conversations lead more people to step inside. A smart SEO strategy will leverage both.

6. A tactical roadmap

Here’s a practical five-step roadmap to build visibility across both AI Overviews and trusted community platforms:

  1. Audit
    Identify the questions your audience is already asking and tie them to your content pillars. Use tools like AlsoAsked, AnswerThePublic, and your own site search data to surface FAQs and long-tail queries.
  2. Community engagement
    Dedicate time each week to contribute to Reddit and Quora. Share genuinely helpful insights. Don’t sell – serve.
  3. On-site Q&A content
    Build or expand your FAQ hubs, blog posts, and pillar pages using the same language and tone as the best answers you see on community platforms.
  4. Monitor
    Track brand mentions and content snippets being pulled into AI Overviews. If your content is being cited, understand why. If not, reverse-engineer what is.
  5. Amplify
    Use Digital PR to pitch thought leadership, expert opinions, or community-driven stories to top-tier media, boosting both your brand’s visibility, credibility and authority.

Final thoughts

Yes, Reddit and Quora users are becoming a new class of influencer – not because they have massive followings, but because they’re useful. They offer answers, insights, and perspectives that help people make decisions, they also help AI decide which content to serve up first.

This shift is rooted in relevance, trust, and authenticity – principles that have always underpinned effective SEO and content marketing. But as AI search evolves, we need to ensure our strategies are too. It’s no longer just about ranking – it’s about being the kind of brand that AI chooses to reference, and being present in the conversations your audience is already having.

I was chatting about this with our Senior Technical SEO Manager, Jake, and he asked a great question:

“How long before this space becomes saturated or starts to lose its authenticity and relevancy?”

It’s easy to imagine a future where brands start reaching out to influential Redditors or Quora users, encouraging them to seed discussions or share sentiment in favour of a client or product. Just like we’ve seen with Instagram or TikTok influencers, this could blur the line between genuine recommendation and paid promotion.

If that happens, there’s a real risk that the credibility and influence these platforms hold could be diluted, and relatively quickly. The power of Reddit and Quora lies in their honesty and community-driven dialogue. Once that feels commercialised, users and AI models may begin to look elsewhere for trusted input.

So yes, Reddit and Quora users are quietly shaping how people and machines find information. But if we want to engage meaningfully, it can’t be forced. The opportunity lies in contributing value, not just visibility – with integrity, not manipulation. That’s how you’ll win.

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]]> Are all links equal? What types of backlinks matter for SEO success? https://www.nobraineragency.com/seo/are-all-links-equal-what-types-of-backlinks-matter-for-seo-success/ Tue, 10 Jun 2025 08:10:47 +0000 https://www.nobraineragency.com/?p=24562 Since the late 1990s, Google and other search engines have been using the links pointing at one website directly from another, also known as backlinks or inbound links, as a factor in how they rank those websites in search results. Over the years since, the ways that links are measured and valued by search engines […]

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Since the late 1990s, Google and other search engines have been using the links pointing at one website directly from another, also known as backlinks or inbound links, as a factor in how they rank those websites in search results. Over the years since, the ways that links are measured and valued by search engines as a ranking signal has evolved significantly, through multiple Google updates and changes. 

In this guide, we look at different types of backlinks and what organic visibility implications they can have for your website.

Jump to:

What are backlinks and why are they important for SEO? 

Backlinks are simply a name for links from one website to another. They are a foundational part of Google’s algorithm and are sometimes referred to as “votes of confidence” for your website.

The idea is that when a reputable website links to your content, it signals to search engines that your page is trustworthy and authoritative. Over time, earning high-quality backlinks for your website can lead to:

  • Higher rankings in search engine results pages (SERPs) for relevant terms
  • Increased referral traffic when users click on the link and visit your site
  • Enhanced brand authority and visibility through the links and brand citations

It’s not quite as simple as it appears though, because not all backlinks offer the same SEO value.

What types of backlinks actually matter for SEO? 

Understanding the various types of backlinks that exist and the ways they can benefit, or otherwise, a website’s link profile is essential to help develop an effective SEO strategy.

Editorial backlinks

What they are: These are links naturally placed within high-quality content on another website, such as blog posts, news articles, or long-form guides. They could be referencing your site as a source for information or indicating to users where they can find out more about a specific topic.

Why they matter: Editorial backlinks are among the most powerful because they are often earned rather than requested. They typically come from authoritative, relevant sources and are placed within the flow of well-written content. This ties in with Google E-E-A-T principles, which rewards credible and authoritative websites in organic search results.

Guest post backlinks

What they are: Links included in articles you contribute to other blogs or industry sites.

Why they matter: When done well, by posting genuinely insightful expert content on relevant, high-authority sites, guest post backlinks can drive both SEO value and brand exposure. However, overuse or abuse ( through PBNs or on low-quality blogs acting as ‘link farms’) will potentially  damage your online visibility and credibility.

Nofollow vs. dofollow links

What they are:

A standard hyperlink from one website to another is a ‘dofollow’ link. A ‘nofollow’ link is one where the website that is linking uses a specific link attribute in the code to tell search engines not to pass any value to the site being linked to.

  • Dofollow links pass SEO value (often called link equity) to your site.
  • Nofollow links contain a tag that tells search engines not to pass on authority.

Why would a website use nofollow links? 

Google first introduced the nofollow attribute for links in 2005 to help combat link spam and stop SEO value being attributed to every single link. This was originally aimed at things such as forums and blog comments, which were easy to manipulate to create links at scale. Google encouraged websites to use the nofollow attribute to have a measure of control about who their website ‘associated with’ online through links, as it could reflect on their own SEO authority and performance if they had a high number of dofollow outbound links, especially to low quality websites. 

Even two decades after this attribute was launched, some websites still have a policy of only using nofollow links, despite things having evolved since then in the world of search. For example, Quora, Wikipedia and YouTube all automatically nofollow all outbound links.

In recent years, Google has introduced more nuance to the nofollow link attributes, implementing tags for websites to use in links specifically to paid content (rel=”sponsored”) and user-generated content like comments and forum posts (rel=”ugc”), as well as the general rel=”nofollow” value. 

Why they matter: While dofollow links are generally preferred for sending a stronger ranking signal, nofollow links do still have value too. They can drive referral traffic and diversify your link profile. In recent years, search engines have also become better at interpreting nofollow links as potential trust signals too.

In an ideal world, it’s good practice for websites to aim for a natural mix of both dofollow and some nofollow links with their SEO strategy. A backlink profile made up entirely of dofollow links can appear suspicious or manipulative.

Contextual links

What they are: Links embedded within relevant content, surrounded by related text. For example, a link to an outdoor goods website on a blog that’s about camping is an appropriate and relevant context. A link to the same outdoors website within a blog about luxury hotels… not so much. 

Why they matter: Google favours backlinks that are placed naturally within content as opposed to those in footers, sidebars or those that are unrelated topic-wise to the rest of the page. The context surrounding a link helps search engines understand its relevance.

Directory Links

What they are: Links from online directories, business listings, or citation sites.

Why they matter: Local SEO can benefit from high-quality directory links (such as Yelp, Yell, or Google Business Profile, as well as local/regional business listing sites), but low-quality or spammy directories offer little to no SEO benefit and can even harm rankings.

Press Release and Digital PR Links

What they are: Backlinks earned through online press releases or coverage from journalists and media outlets.

Why they matter: We’ll explore this in much more detail below, but digital PR links can be among the most valuable types of backlinks you can get.

Factors that influence the value of a backlink

Even amongst the same type of backlink, there are several more variables that can have an impact on the link equity it brings to the destination website. Some of the most important of these include:

The linking website’s authority

Search engines judge how trustworthy, useful and influential a website is, which is often referred to as ‘authority’. The factors that determine this authority are a whole separate issue, but to cut a long story short, a website with high authority linking to yours has more SEO value than a link that is identical in every way, apart from it coming from a site with low authority.

Authority scores are offered by a number of third-party SEO tools, such as Ahrefs (who use Domain Rating, or DR) and Moz (who use Domain Authority, or DA). These proprietary scores can be a useful indicator of domain strength growth over time, but are never going to be a 100% accurate reflection of how Google views your website’s authority. 

As part of your SEO strategy, aiming to earn backlinks from sites with a higher or comparable DA/DR to your own is a great foundation, but a variety of different linking site authorities is usually the most natural kind of backlink profile to have. 

It’s important to note that an unnatural linking profile, with a high volume of links built through spammy tactics (such as paid links or mass low-authority directory submissions, which usually appear over a short space of time), can result in an algorithmic or manual penalty from Google. 

Topical relevance

Relevance is one of the most important aspects of a backlink’s value. A link from a site in your industry or niche is far more valuable than one from an unrelated sector.

For example, a fintech company’s SEO strategy will benefit more from a backlink that comes from a finance publication than from a general lifestyle blog.

Anchor text

The anchor text (another name for the clickable text used in a link) really matters. When the anchor text used for the link is relevant, descriptive of what is being linked to and keyword-rich (but not spammy), it can help boost your rankings for that keyword.

That said, it’s important not to over-optimise. Too many exact-match anchors can potentially look spammy, which can damage your site’s credibility with search engines.

Link placement

Links placed in the main body of content are generally considered to carry more SEO ‘weight’ than those in footers, sidebars, or author bios. Placement matters because links surrounded by contextually relevant content are more likely to be seen as genuinely useful.

Indexability

If the page linking to you isn’t indexed by Google, the backlink won’t be seen. Ensuring the linking page is crawlable and indexable is essential. This can mean that links behind a paywall (like subscription sites), in gated content (that someone needs to give their details/data in order to access) or links from a site or page that is no-indexed, doesn’t have SEO value. 

"A strong backlink profile is crucial for SEO success because it signals trust, authority, and supports relevance to search engines like Google. Links from reputable, contextually relevant sources help improve SERP visibility and enhance brand credibility. Avoid manipulative tactics and focus on natural, editorial, or digital PR-driven links. This will reduce the risk of algorithmic or manual penalties. Ultimately, sustainable link building is about earning links that genuinely add value, not just inflate metrics in a third-party tool."
Jake McCreith
Senior Technical SEO Manager at No Brainer

The role of Digital PR in building high-quality backlinks

One of the most effective and sustainable ways to earn high-quality backlinks is through a carefully planned digital PR strategy. 

Why Digital PR works for SEO

  • It earns editorial links from high-authority, relevant media outlets
  • It helps position your brand as a thought leader on relevant topics
  • It creates natural links from trusted sources
  • It often results in contextual, dofollow links

Examples of successful digital PR activities to earn links can include:

  • Publishing unique research, statistical data or surveys
  • Responding to journalist queries and newsjacking
  • Running creative, data-led campaigns that earn media attention
"When executed properly, Digital PR campaigns have the power to earn links naturally and boost brand awareness at the same time. Ensuring the types of backlink you secure are varied and come from several different sources is vital to deliver the very best outcomes. At the heart of any successful campaign is usually a creative idea that resonates with the target audience and makes an instant impression. The other key factor to keep in mind is relevancy. It's becoming more and more important to make sure the types of content you create – and the places where you pick up links – have a natural connection with your brand."
Tori Attwood
Digital PR Director at No Brainer

How many backlinks do I need to rank?

The honest answer is a bit of an SEO meme: it depends.

There’s no universal number of backlinks to your website required to rank for a keyword. The answer varies based on:

  • The competition level of the keyword
  • The strength of your competitors’ backlink profiles
  • The authority and relevance of the links you earn
  • The quality of your content and on-page optimisation

In some niches, a few high-authority, relevant backlinks can help to push you to page one for a specific search term. In others, you may need hundreds of great links just to compete. That’s why understanding the types of backlinks that matter, and building the right ones in the right ways, is far more important than chasing a magic number.

A great place to start strategically is to perform a competitive backlink analysis to benchmark your website against top-ranking competitors for pages and keywords that you want to rank for.

Why link SEO value will always be a case of quality over quantity

All backlinks are absolutely NOT equal.

In order to get the best possible SEO return from link building activity, it’s a matter of earning the right types of backlinks, rather than ‘any links will do’. Prioritise links that come from relevant, high-authority sources, and try to specify specific elements like anchor text and link placement when possible. Of course, balance is always important, and you only have so much control over how other websites implement a link to yours, but asking politely for what you want is often effective.

Long-term SEO success usually requires incorporating digital PR into your strategy, alongside other activities to build quality links. It’s one of the most powerful tools we have for building natural, high-quality links that stand the test of time.

If you want some help with link building, digital PR or any other element of your SEO strategy, we’d love to chat! Get in touch using the form below. 

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]]> Ecommerce trust signals that can boost your sales https://www.nobraineragency.com/seo/ecommerce-trust-signals/ Tue, 15 Apr 2025 10:34:27 +0000 https://www.nobraineragency.com/?p=24466 The ecommerce space is more crowded than ever, but unfortunately not every online store is legitimate or offers the kind of service that customers would want. Shoppers want to take advantage of the convenience of buying online and hopefully also getting a good deal for their money, but the sad reality is that not every […]

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The ecommerce space is more crowded than ever, but unfortunately not every online store is legitimate or offers the kind of service that customers would want. Shoppers want to take advantage of the convenience of buying online and hopefully also getting a good deal for their money, but the sad reality is that not every retailer is equal or can be trusted.

How do consumers know who is the real deal? How can they feel safe buying from a website? That’s where trust signals come in.

Jump to:

·       What are trust signals?

·       Why is trust so important in ecommerce?

·       Building customer confidence with these key trust signals

·       Additional trust signals worth considering

·       How to build trust in ecommerce with search engines

·       Implementing new trust signals on your ecommerce site

What are trust signals?

Trust signals are things that are displayed on your website, usual visual or textual, that reassure potential customers that your site is credible and reliable enough for them to buy from you. Many trust signals aren’t something that visitors might consciously notice, but when they are present, they can play a big role in reassuring someone as they complete a purchase.

Why is trust so important in ecommerce?

If you’re buying something online vs in a physical store, you can’t really look at, feel or try a product before you buy it. This naturally means that consumers need a little more convincing before making that leap.

The simple reality is that potential customers trusting your website is the difference between making online sales or not. People need to have confidence that you will deliver (literally and figuratively) on your promises, before they part with their hard-earned money. If your website doesn’t instil this confidence, visitors are unlikely to commit to buy, which makes implementing trust signals an essential process that directly affects your bottom line.

Every interaction your customers have with your brand either builds trust or erodes it.

A trusted website can benefit from:

  • Higher conversion rates and lower cart abandonments, as customers are reassured during the buying process.
  • Ongoing customer loyalty, as shoppers come back to websites they have had a positive and secure experience with.
  • Better organic search performance, as trust signals support Google’s guidelines and can impact rankings.

Building customer confidence with these key trust signals

Have a secure website

These days, if your website doesn’t have a valid Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate, it’s unlikely that potential customers get past the initial landing on your site in the first place. This is because some browsers, such as Google Chrome, will flash up a warning for users that the website’s security certificate can’t be trusted.

The same goes for if you don’t use HTTPS and still use just HTTP, because this means that the website connection isn’t encrypted and so puts any information used on that website, including your personal details and payment data if making a purchase, at risk to potential security threats. Google Chrome will tell you that the website is ‘Not Secure’ before loading the page.

Connection not private warning from Chrome browser

Source – Google 

Display customer reviews across the website

Having real and independent customer reviews showing on your website can make a big different to trust. Whether it’s product reviews for specific things you sell, or reviews of your ecommerce brand as a whole for the service that customers have received, it can all have a positive impact on how trustworthy you are perceived to be. Displaying your rating from a well-known third-party review site such as Trustpilot can also help. Don’t worry if every review isn’t five stars (in fact, it looks pretty suspicious if they are). Respond to reviews as needed and engage with customers to try and resolve issues. Turning a negative shopping experience review into a positive one shows that you value customers.

Show customer ratings in search engine results

When you’re competing in the SERPs with other retailers, anything that can help your search result snippet stand out is of value. Using review related structured data (also known as schema markup) in your website’s code can mean that your organic rich search results start to display your review ratings, which can increase your click-through rate (CTR) when compared to search results not showing this trust signal.

Star ratings in organic SERPs example

Display badges, logos and certifications

Before buying from a website, shoppers want to know that a site is legitimate and secure, so displaying badges and logos of relevant organisations and certifications can be a strong trust signal.

The below example is from Pharmacy Online, with their homepage clearly displaying their sector registration info (Pharmacy reg no.), that they use a third-party review platform (Rewviews.io), that their website has been vetted against a relevant standard (Legitscript certified), and that it meets security standards (McAfee and ICO).

UK pharmacy trust badges example

They also clearly show which payment methods they take to help instil trust in customers when they see that their chosen ways to pay are supported.

Clearly provide NAP details and other important information

Name, address and phone number (NAP)

We’ve probably all been on ecommerce sites where the contact information is really difficult to find, which can be a major red flag. A business that only allows you to contact them through an online form or chatbot can be a sign that it’s not a legit business.

Having the company name (which is sometimes different to the trading name), their registered address and a contact phone number all clearly displayed on the website is the bare minimum as far as trust signals go.

VAT number

While not a legal requirement for ecommerce businesses, displaying your VAT number in your footer is a commonplace trust signal and another small sign that your business is legitimate.

Company registration number

For UK-based limited companies (and LLPs), displaying your company registration number on your website is a legal requirement, so if you’re not showing it, that can be a serious anti-trust signal to potential customers.

Google Business Profile

Having an updated and optimised Google Business Profile can help you build credibility. While many might assume that it’s only worth doing for a bricks and mortar business, having a clearly active profile can be a trust signal In itself because it links your ecommerce brand with a physical location, even if that’s just the registered office of the company and not an actual store.

Google Business Profile optimisation tips

Make your returns info straightforward and easy to find

While many ecommerce businesses of course want to minimise the product returns that they get, this shouldn’t be because people can’t find the right information on your website easily. Having a clear, easy-to-understand returns policy is an indication that you are confident in your products but understand that customers need to know before they order that returns are available and how the process works. Ideally, your returns policy should be:

  • Straightforward and written in simple terms
  • Visible to consumers before they check out their basket

Use ‘real’ images and videos across your site

Using stock images, or manufacturer-provided product images, along with increasing use of AI-generated or edited images, is very common in ecommerce. The problem with this is that it’s very generic and impersonal.

Using real photos of your team on your website adds a ‘human’ element that is sometimes missing when people buy online. Taking your own unique product images and videos of products being used for their intended purpose or in different contexts etc can be a strong trust signal that you sell quality goods that aren’t just the same as from the next retailer, who is using generic visuals. Of course, if you sell a huge range of products then this might not be possible for everything, but choosing some hero products to create unique visuals for is a great place to start.

Use unique product descriptions

Another common occurrence in ecommerce is to use the manufacturer-provided product descriptions on your website. This isn’t going to help you stand out in search and it is a missed opportunity to boost trust too.

Customers appreciate tailored and helpful product descriptions that speak directly to their needs and concerns.

Maintain an active social media presence

If your brand social media profiles aren’t active, it can give customers the impression that you’re not a legitimate and active company, or that you don’t engage with customers – neither of which are great for building confidence that you’re a good retailer to buy from.

Active and engaging brand social media accounts show that you’re a living and breathing retailer, whilst also giving customers another touchpoint to connect with you, share their feedback or seek customer support. Always link to your active social media profiles from your website. If you streamline the accounts and stop activity on one or more platforms, make sure you pin a post explaining this and point users to where they can find your activity instead.

From a social media marketing point of view, your activity can be a vital part of your wider strategy, but purely as a trust-builder, your profiles can also be used to:

  • Share user-generated content (UGC) about your products and brand
  • Engage with customer questions and comments

Display media mentions and PR coverage logos

We’ve all probably noticed when a website visually claims ‘As seen on TV’ for one of their products or their brand. Gaining coverage from media outlets or publications adds a layer of credibility to your brand, especially if you’re fairly new to the market.

A section on your website that includes logos of where your brand or products have been covered in the media, along with links to the original pieces, can act as another trust signal that you are a legit retailer and safe to buy from.

Utilise UGC

UGC is one of the most powerful trust signals because it indicates ‘social proof’ that your products are what you claim they are. Real customer photos, unboxing videos, and social media shoutouts help prospective buyers envision themselves using your products. Encourage UGC through post-purchase emails or hashtags, and feature this content across your site and channels.

Working with content creators and influencers on paid UGC can also be beneficial from a trust point of view, with all relevant ‘ad’ labels used to stay transparent

Tell your brand story

A compelling brand story can turn casual browsers into loyal fans. Share why your company exists, your values, your mission, and some of the faces behind the brand. Storytelling humanises your business and builds emotional connection, which enhances trust.

Use your ‘About Us’ page as more than a placeholder—make it part of your customer journey.

A great example of this is Grind, a coffee company based in London. Their ‘about us’ page explains their ethos, their history, puts faces to names and actually has several supplementary pages too in this section. No shady fly-by-night scammy retail site is going to go to this level of effort – making this a trust signal in its own right.

Grind Coffee About Us page

Privacy policy

In an era of increasing privacy concerns, a clear and comprehensive privacy policy is a must. It’s not just a legal requirement—it’s a trust builder. Make it easily accessible and explain how customer data is used and protected. 99.9% of people are not going to read it, but it still needs to be there and shouldn’t just be an afterthought.

Prioritise customer service

Great service earns great loyalty. Offer multiple ways for customers to get in touch—live chat, phone, email—and make your support hours clear. Quick response times, helpful service, and a friendly tone all contribute to a more trustworthy experience.

Consider adding:

  • A live chat feature
  • A help centre or knowledge base
  • FAQs that address common concerns

Additional trust signals worth considering

While the above are some of the biggest impact signals for ecommerce brands to have on your website, there are many more small ways to build confidence and boost conversions. Our top tips include:

  • Implement real-time purchase popups (e.g. “John from Leeds just bought this!”) to create social proof.
  • Incorporate confidence-building microcopy during the checkout process (e.g., “Secure checkout with 128-bit encryption”).
  • Display clear shipping info (including costs) and delivery timelines before checkout.
  • Introduce membership or loyalty programs that show your commitment to repeat customers.

How to build trust in ecommerce with search engines

Building trust with your website visitors is of vital importance in getting transactions over the line but showing search engines that you’re a site which can be trusted is also pivotal in maximising your online visibility and sales.

While many of the trust signals already mentioned are beneficial in SEO as well as with your customers, there are some additional elements you can also consider.

Prioritise E-E-A-T

Google’s E-E-A-T framework focuses on rewarding websites through their organic performance when they demonstrate:

  • Experience – with the writer showing their real experience of the topic.
  • Expertise – with the writer displaying in-depth knowledge about the topic.
  • Authoritativeness – with the writer being considered an authority in the field relevant to the topic.
  • Trustworthiness – with the credibility of the website being taken into account, including site security and the factual accuracy of content, as well as the above factors also contributing to this.

For things such as ecommerce site content, make sure you run everything you publish past the helpful content guidelines, to make sure that it contributes towards your site authority rather than detracting from it.

Build backlinks

The power of backlinks in SEO is long-established, with each link from a relevant and  authoritative website to yours acting as a vote of confidence in your favour. If lots of other websites, including news and media publishers, trust you, then it tends to follow that search engines do too.

Get your technical SEO ducks in a row

Keeping on top of your site’s technical SEO is a great idea on many levels, but it can also help search engines see how trustworthy your website is too, as many of these elements affect the user experience as well. Look at areas such as:

  • Ensuring fast load times (especially mobile)
  • Mobile-friendly design
  • Clean URL structure
  • Proper crawling/indexing: Use robots.txt and XML sitemaps wisely.
  • Fix broken links and eliminate duplicate content.

Implementing new trust signals on your ecommerce site

The good news is that most of the trust elements we’ve covered in this article are fairly easy to implement and have long-lasting benefits. While some of them will certainly take some time and effort roll out and keep going, the fact that your ecommerce brand is willing to do this is another trust signal in itself.

Our recommendation is that you start small, with the signals that you think are most important to you customers at the top of the list, and keep testing as you go. A/B testing can bring valuable UX insights as well as providing proof that newly added trust signals are genuinely making a difference to your bottom line.

If you’d like help with any element of your ecommerce SEO, content, link building or marketing strategy, we’d love to talk! Get in touch using the form below.

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]]> Ecommerce content strategy fundamentals in 2025 https://www.nobraineragency.com/content/ecommerce-content-strategy-fundamentals/ Mon, 31 Mar 2025 14:01:16 +0000 https://www.nobraineragency.com/?p=24428 Content strategy is an essential piece of the marketing jigsaw for any sector, but for ecommerce brands, it’s often necessary to take a slightly different approach to get the best possible results and drive maximum revenue. In this guide, we’ve brought together some of the fundamental elements that we believe will help you achieve ecommerce […]

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Content strategy is an essential piece of the marketing jigsaw for any sector, but for ecommerce brands, it’s often necessary to take a slightly different approach to get the best possible results and drive maximum revenue.

In this guide, we’ve brought together some of the fundamental elements that we believe will help you achieve ecommerce content strategy success in 2025 and beyond.

What is an ecommerce content strategy and how is it different?

The main focus of an ecommerce content strategy is to help drive sales, which means it needs to directly align with the purchasing journey, product discovery, and customer decision-making processes.

It’s essentially a structured way to approach planning, creating, optimising and distributing content that ladders up to the primary goal of generating more sales revenue.

Some of the differences to other types of content strategy include:

  • Transactional focus – While content marketing often aims to educate or inspire potential customers, ecommerce content must also guide users towards making a purchase.
  • Search intent alignment – Content needs to match user search behaviour, balancing informational, navigational, and transactional intent, so that people can find the most useful content at the right part of their journey.
  • Product-centric approach – Whether it’s product descriptions, category pages helpful blogs or buying guides, content should be optimised to improve discoverability, show how the product solves specific problems or serves a purpose and move users towards a conversion.

The importance of getting your content strategy right in ecommerce

A well-defined ecommerce content strategy ensures that every piece of content serves a purpose that works towards the overarching goals, whether it’s driving organic traffic, improving conversion rates, or enhancing brand credibility around a particular topic or niche.

When planned and implemented effectively, a great ecommerce content strategy can:

  • Increase organic visibility for relevant searches – Search engine-optimised content helps ecommerce brands rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs), driving cost-effective traffic for the long-term.
  • Enhance the user experience – Well-structured content supports seamless navigation and guides customers smoothly through the buying journey; making it as easy as possible for them to find the information they need and move on to the next stage.
  • Build brand trust & authority – High-quality, informative content, combined with on-site trust signals, reassures potential buyers and reduces hesitation before purchasing.
  • Boost conversions – Clear, persuasive, and engaging content directly impacts conversion rates by answering customer concerns, reinforcing product value and making the purchase journey as straightforward as possible.

There’s no doubt that marketing is changing at pace currently. The influence and use of AI and other automation technologies, whatever your opinion on them, is growing all of the time. Shopping and online search behaviour is also evolving, which means that marketers have a lot to balance when trying to develop a content strategy that really works, within their budget and resource constraints. We’ve compiled some key fundamentals that can help you maximise value and results in 2025 and beyond.

Ecommerce content strategy fundamentals

ecommerce conversion

Get to grips with your audience and their user journeys

It’s certainly not new, but understanding your audience is still very much the foundation of any effective content strategy. In 2025, ecommerce brands must go beyond simple demographics and dig deep into:

  • Behavioural insights – Use analytics to track customer interactions, preferences, and purchase patterns.
  • Intent-based segmentation – Identify audiences based on their stage in the buying journey (awareness, consideration, decision, retention).
  • Pain points and overcoming barriers to sale – Understand what questions, problems and barriers your audience has that is a) giving them a need for what you sell and b) stopping them from buying from you.

By better understanding your audience, their motivations, the ways that they search for solutions and the kinds of content they want, you can create content that resonates with their needs, reducing friction along their journey and ultimately increasing conversions.

Prioritise your content strategy goals

Setting clear content strategy goals ensures that your efforts are aligned with broader business objectives and makes sure that you’re putting your time, effort and budget into things that will move the needle for your brand.

 These will vary, but typical ecommerce key goals for 2025 may include:

  • Driving Organic Traffic – Improving search engine rankings with well-optimised and useful content that aligns with your target audience’s search intent.
  • Enhancing Conversion Rates – Creating persuasive content on transactional pages that helps users make that purchase decision.
  • Increasing Customer Lifetime Value – Developing post-purchase content to encourage repeat sales and long-term brand loyalty.
  • Boosting Engagement Across Channels – Integrating content into social media, email marketing, and paid campaigns.

Prioritisation helps ensure resources are allocated effectively, maximising ROI from your content efforts and keeping things focused on the bottom line.

It can’t end at the planning stage though – tracking performance in relation to your goals as you go is key to improving results over time. Setting your KPIs as you plan your content and making regular reports a part of your ongoing process is essential.

Assess your current content

Before launching into planning and developing shiny new content, conduct a thorough content audit to assess what you currently have and how well (or otherwise) it is working for your audience, based on any new insights you’ve gained already in this process. This typically involves:

  • Evaluating performance quantitively – Use analytics tools to assess engagement, conversions, and rankings. Are organic users landing on the page for the search terms you would expect?
  • Evaluating performance qualitatively – Manually assess content to see how well it meets the needs of your audience, including UX considerations and whether it’s the most useful example of this kind of content available.
  • Identifying gaps – Determine which areas of your content need improvement or expansion. Looking at what your competitors are doing can be a good place to start, along with checking that you have useful content for every stage of your potential customers’ buying journeys.
  • Updating and/or consolidating – You may have several pieces of content that seem to serve a similar purpose and could be competing with each other in organic search. Consider consolidating good content to make it super-content – offering more value for users on a single page. Refresh outdated content and repurpose high-performing assets across different channels to maximise the reach.

A well-informed audit provides a strong foundation for content improvements and ensures efforts are data-driven.

Map content ideas to customer buying journeys and search behaviour

To ensure your existing pages and any new content you plan supports the buying process, align them with customer intent and search queries they are likely to make. This helps ensure you’re covering all the bases and often includes:

  • Awareness stage – Blog posts, guides, and explainer videos to introduce products/solutions to potential customers.
  • Consideration stage – Comparison articles, reviews, and case studies that highlight product benefits.
  • Decision stage – Optimised product pages, testimonials, and FAQs that remove purchase barriers.
  • Retention stage – Loyalty programs, email marketing, and post-purchase content to maintain engagement and increase the chances of return business and brand advocacy.

By creating content tailored to each stage, brands can nurture potential customers more effectively and drive higher conversions.

Check out our guide to keyword mapping for SEO, with free template.

Improve your main transactional pages

Your transactional pages (e.g., product pages, category pages, checkout pages, campaign landing pages) are the backbone of your ecommerce business. Optimise them by ensuring that on-page SEO best practice is followed, along with building relevant links to these pages as part of your wider SEO strategy.

You can also:

  • Improve copy and UX – Ensure product descriptions are clear, persuasive, and informative. Follow content design principles for less friction on key pages.
  • Enhance the mobile experience – Prioritise mobile-friendly design and fast loading times to reduce customer frustration and drop-offs.
  • Leverage social proof and other trust signals – Incorporate user-generated content, reviews, and testimonials.

A well-optimised transactional page can significantly impact revenue and customer satisfaction.

Dedicate enough time to content ideation and planning

Improving and better utilising existing content is great, but new content will also need to be incorporated into your strategy to have maximum impact.

It’s common to try and come up with exciting new ideas and get on with it as quickly as possible in ecommerce content strategy. But experience tells us that taking a bit of time to sense check your ideas and make sure they tick all of the boxes in terms of having relevant keyword volume with intent that matches a stage in your audience journey, are unique and offer something of true value etc, is always worthwhile.

Measure your ideas against Google’s helpful content update advice to make sure you’re not wasting time and effort on content that will struggle to rank or doesn’t meet known needs for your audience.

Utilise tech to increase efficiency

Leverage the latest technology to streamline content processes, giving your team more time and support to focus on the creativity and human connections needed in great content:

  • Advanced SEO tools – Use SEO platforms such as Semrush or Ahrefs to identify keyword opportunities and content gaps, helping with the auditing and planning processes.
  • AI-powered content proofing – Use AI tools to ‘mark your homework’ and help ensure that your content meets any specific brand requirements, tone of voice and consistency etc. Don’t let AI remove all personality from content though – it’s what helps makes you stand out and forms part of your brand identity.

By integrating tech-driven solutions, ecommerce content marketers can help make the most of the time they have to focus on the unique elements that make content as valuable as possible to the target audience.

Prioritise authoritative content

In an era of increasing misinformation and generic AI-generated content, publishing authoritative content that shows you really know your subject matter is crucial for building trust and credibility. Strengthen your content by:

  • Expert contributions – Include insights from industry experts, influencers, and thought leaders.
  • Providing reliable evidence and sources – Support any claims with reputable research, statistics, and case studies.
  • E-E-A-T compliance – Ensure content aligns with Google’s Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trustworthiness (E-E-A-T) guidelines.
  • Strong internal linking – Build a logical site structure that reinforces credibility and improves user experience as people navigate around various content.

Prioritising authoritative content enhances brand reputation and improves search rankings.

Maximise content impact with a cross-channel strategy

Many ecommerce brands focus primarily on website content for their strategy, for good reason; it’s where you want potential customers to land and convert. But that doesn’t mean that other channels can’t work alongside this to make the most of your content assets and increase your reach.

A cohesive cross-channel strategy ensures that content reaches and engages audiences across multiple touchpoints. Key considerations can include:

  • Omnichannel planning – Ensure your content is consistently used across the website, email, social media, and paid channels.
  • Content repurposing – Transform blog posts into videos, infographics, and social media snippets if you know that your audience values these formats too.
  • Performance tracking – Use analytics to measure the effectiveness of content across different channels and tweak your strategies accordingly to do more of what works.
  • User-Generated Content (UGC) – Encourage customers to create content (e.g., reviews, testimonials, social media posts) that enhances brand authenticity.

A well-executed cross-channel strategy maximises content reach and engagement, supporting your other goals and driving sustained business growth.

Be different…

With an ecommerce market that is ever more competitive and saturated with low-quality generic content, you need to be doing something more meaningful to stand out. 

Taking some time to make sure that your strategy is built on the right foundations will help to drive genuine engagement with your audience at the right stages of their journey and maximise your revenue in the short, medium and long term. 

If you’d like some help with your ecommerce content or wider marketing strategy, we’d love to chat. Get in touch using the form below. 

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]]> SEO forecasting for ecommerce brands https://www.nobraineragency.com/seo/seo-forecasting/ Tue, 28 Jan 2025 15:33:10 +0000 https://www.nobraineragency.com/?p=23846 We look at various SEO forecasting techniques and why accurate, data-driven predictions can be so important in ecommerce.

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There are many aspects to SEO forecasting, and several reasons why you might want to try to accurately forecast future SEO performance if you’re an ecommerce brand.

In this guide, we look at various SEO forecasting techniques and why accurate, data-driven predictions can be so important in ecommerce.

Jump to:

What is SEO forecasting?

SEO forecasting is essentially using one or more techniques to help predict the future organic performance of a website.

Effective forecasting tends to be based on a number of different data sources that include everything from keyword research to analysing past and current organic rankings, traffic figures, user behaviour and value, click-through rates (CTR), sales, revenue and more.

The outcome of good SEO forecasting should be a realistic prediction of organic performance that ladders up to your wider business goals e.g. a percentage increase of sales/revenue. When done right, forecasting SEO performance provides a great guide on where an ecommerce brand should focus organic search strategy to maximise both the impact and the return.

Why SEO forecasting matters in ecommerce

Being able to forecast organic search performance can have a few different purposes, like:

Helps to unlock buy-in for SEO budget from stakeholders

Getting buy-in for SEO at any level can be a challenge, as can securing the budget needed to make a genuine difference to performance and deliver the growth needed.

A data-based SEO forecast that is communicated in the right way can go a long way in helping you get the support needed from decision-makers, providing a strong business case for additional support from an SEO agency or for internal resources to drive the changes needed to make your brand’s approach to organic search deliver results.

Helps to shape SEO strategy

Effective SEO forecasting uses past performance and expected future search trends to help you set achievable targets that are based on data and informed insights.

The process of forecasting will highlight strategic areas such as:

  • Which search terms will attract the most relevant potential customers to your website organically if you improve rankings (and revenue).
  • What search-led content is likely to drive the most conversions.
  • How many more organic visitors you need to achieve your revenue goals (based on conversion rate data).
  • Which competitors you need to gain organic market share from and how to achieve it.

Effective SEO forecasting essentially provides not only targets but, in the right hands, can also deliver the insights needed to develop the roadmap that gets you there.

Gives your brand a competitive edge

While many, if not all, of your competitors will have their own SEO strategy and activity, in-depth SEO forecasting can help to highlight opportunities that others might not be taking advantage of.

You’ll also be analysing what they are doing as part of the forecasting process, which helps you pinpoint areas in which you can surpass their efforts. For example, this could include:

  • Hidden gems e.g, categories, keywords, and products that aren’t performing for your competitors, but have big opportunity to drive additional conversions and revenue
  • Low hanging fruit – keywords that you’re ranking for, maybe within striking distance of page one, but that could be optimised as a quick win
  • Understanding their strategy – learning from their strengths and weaknesses across SEO, from their on-site content to how they approach off-site signals (brand performance and how they’re earning links with digital PR). Understanding them inside-out allows you to see the opportunities to steal market share.

Helps you show tangible and measurable ROI on SEO

Using data-based SEO forecasting enables you to estimate the actual financial return that SEO will bring to the business, which is usually music to the ears of stakeholders.

Understanding the short and long-term value of customers can help ensure you focus your SEO strategy and budget in the areas that will drive the most organic growth and revenue over time.

Provides benchmarks to measure performance and SEO success

SEO forecasts are never likely to be 100% accurate, but they provide a very useful benchmark for comparing actual performance, along with a range of other SEO metrics.

An effective forecast sets expectations based on what’s happened in the past, seasonality, market trends and some informed assumptions about the future. If your real-world outcomes are close to the forecast, it shows how the data-based SEO strategy is working as expected.

On the other hand, if your organic performance isn’t close to the forecasted levels, it can highlight areas of your strategy that may need to be reviewed and tweaked to achieve full potential – or even uncover barriers or challenges that your brand needs to overcome before those numbers can be achieved.

Challenges in SEO forecasting for ecommerce brands

SEO forecasting isn’t without its challenges, which include:

  • Search engine algorithm updates – All of the major search engines are constantly evolving, for example, the last 18 months has been increasingly volatile, with 13 updates. This can sometimes mean that SEO forecasts need to be revisited after every Google core update.
  • Other players in the market – If your competitors change their SEO strategy, it can have an impact on your forecast too. So it’s vital to constantly monitor your market and direct competitors.
  • Changing user behaviour – The terms that people use to search in your specific niche can change over time, which has an impact on keyword search volumes and how visitors may or may not engage with your content.
  • External factors – Anything from trends (like social media and celebrities) and the state of the economy, to inflation rate changes or new regulations that affect online shopping can have a major impact on buyer behaviour. This may mean you need to tweak the SEO forecast at some points to keep it as accurate as possible.
  • Internal factors – From challenges around your CMS and current tech-stack, to prioritisation and available internal resources. All of this can impact your ability to deliver against the forecast, but that forecast can also help overcome these challenges by offering a clear view of revenue opportunity – Giving you the perfect business case to drive change!

Techniques for SEO forecasting

There is no one true path when it comes to SEO forecasting, but it often comes down to a combination of keyword research, analysing historical data, competitor comparison and utilising SEO tools and expertise to help bring all of the first-party and third-party info together.

If you’re trying to forecast for a totally new website, it will be a very different process to SEO forecasting for an established site. New websites don’t have the past performance data to leverage, so forecasting for them relies more heavily on competitor research and potential audience size.

We’ve summarised two of the most common ways of forecasting for SEO, which are:

1.    SEO keyword forecasting

This is a way of estimating how much organic traffic a website will get using keyword search volumes (i.e. the potential audience for a specific keyword) and the current rankings and click-through-rate (CTR) from organic search results.

The formula for this is to multiply the search volume by the average CTR of the SERP positions you’re aiming for.

For many websites, using this method for SEO forecasting means calculating the estimated traffic for every page (or at least every important transactional page) based on the keywords being targeted by that page and current rankings.

You can use Google Search Console (GSC) to pull the data relating to average rankings and CTR, along with your keyword research tool of choice to find volumes.

You can include keywords that you already rank for as well as new ones you may be targeting within the forecasted period.

As an example of how the formula works, let’s take a page on your website:

  • Targeting two keywords that have a combined monthly search volume of 10,000.
  • The page is currently ranking in position 11 for both terms, with a CTR of 0.5%.
  • Your current organic traffic if nothing changes would be forecasted at around 50 organic visitors a month to that page via these two keywords.
  • If your SEO strategy can help move those rankings to position 4, which historical and industry benchmark data tells you could hit a CTR of at least 5%, that traffic forecast jumps to 500 organic visitors a month.

You can take this further than organic traffic alone, by calculating how the forecasted traffic would translate into sales/revenue or leads (using your site’s historical conversion rate (CVR) data and average order values (AOV) as well as lifetime values of customers/clients), giving you an estimated ROI for each transactional page.

2.    Historical and trend data SEO forecasting

This type of SEO forecasting involves analysing your website’s historical data to predict future results. Using past data can help to highlight any patterns and seasonal fluctuations that seem to affect organic performance, either positively or negatively.

This insight can help you to estimate organic performance in the coming period, especially if you take current trends into account.

For example, many keywords have fluctuating demand throughout the year, and some keyword volumes can grow quickly over time due to increasing demand. Google Trends can provide a top level view on this, but for a more tangible monthly/yearly breakdown of keyword volumes historically, you’ll usually need a paid subscription to a tool such as Keywords Everywhere or Semrush. 

This screengrab from Google Trends shows that “Air Fryer” search demand peaks every late autumn/early winter. For small kitchen appliance retailers, this indicates that you can maximise the potential SEO results by prepping earlier in the year, so peak performance hits at just the right time to capitalise on demand.

Utilising data from the past can help you to develop informed forecasts for upcoming organic performance that better reflect both past performance and predicted changes in user behaviour throughout the year.

How accurate is SEO forecasting?

There is no 100% accurate way to conduct SEO forecasting because there are many things that are out of our control as marketers and businesses.

We can use the data and formulas we have to make informed estimates about organic traffic, conversions and revenue, but they will never be exact metrics.

Markets change, search engine algorithms evolve and many other factors can affect SEO performance, but forecasts can still be a very useful benchmark to indicate achievable organic growth and highlight really strong indications when based on real and reliable data.

How do we forecast SEO performance?

At No Brainer, we have various ways of SEO forecasting, depending on your objectives and the metrics that matter to your specific business.

The most accurate approach for ecommerce (and most loved by our clients) is via our proprietary tool ‘Navigator’, which enables us to identify projected revenue from organic search, rather than just estimating traffic or rankings.

By reviewing thousands of keywords, then using Navigator on the data, we generate a clear plan and a forecast that is based on the revenue opportunities available.

Our forecasts offer additional insights and data on search volume seasonality and more. This brings real clarity to our ecommerce clients on when to prioritise optimisation on key focus areas in order to unlock peak levels of organic traffic and revenue.

If you’d like to talk to us about ecommerce SEO forecasting or want other support with your organisation’s SEO strategy, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch using the form below.

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]]> Content Marketing Planning Tips for Maximum ROI https://www.nobraineragency.com/seo/content-marketing-planning-tips-maximum-roi/ Wed, 27 Nov 2024 17:01:01 +0000 https://www.nobraineragency.com/?p=23165 Content is an essential part of every marketing strategy. It’s the thing that attracts and connects with the audience, informs and moves people down the funnel towards making a purchase decision and convinces users to convert. However, because the user journey isn’t always linear, and sometimes happens over a long period of time, the importance […]

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Content is an essential part of every marketing strategy. It’s the thing that attracts and connects with the audience, informs and moves people down the funnel towards making a purchase decision and convinces users to convert. However, because the user journey isn’t always linear, and sometimes happens over a long period of time, the importance of content to actual ROI is something that is often overlooked.

In this guide, we look at how you can plan your content strategy to tie in directly with business revenue and maximise the value it delivers.

Plan before action

It’s easy to jump the gun with content marketing and start creating before you’ve properly planned out the full strategy and the KPIs and benchmarks that you can use to measure success. The danger with this is that you’ll end up spending time and resources on content that isn’t fully aligned to your business goals and may also miss opportunities to maximise the impact and return.

You know that you want to increase ROI, but in order to do this consistently and sustainably, you need to make sure you’re looking at your return in several ways.

Assess your ROI

To get a good handle on the ROI of content as part of your wider marketing strategy, you need to ensure you look at lifetime value (LTV) for your customers as well as the more direct average order values (AOV) and the performance of specific campaigns or individual pieces of content. This will help you to put a more accurate value to certain metrics.

You need to ensure that you have an accurate record of the costs involved in the content, which includes ideation, planning and strategy time as well as content creation and promotion. If you’re also building links to your content through digital PR or outreach, the resource used for this also needs to be factored into costs.

You also need to bear in mind that content isn’t just a short-term strategy, so ROI needs to be given an appropriate amount of time to materialise. For example, if you’re trying to measure performance for search-driven content, you need to factor in that the content will take time to start ranking in the SERPs and driving organic traffic. Measuring ROI after a month isn’t a fair assessment for this type of content. Depending on your starting point (domain authority, how well it meets the E-E-A-T framework, which other websites/content are already ranking for what you’re targeting etc), it could be 6-9 months before you start seeing tangible results.

Attribution also plays a major role in how you calculate ROI from content. Finding an attribution model (or several) that works for your business and audience journeys can be tricky and you may end up going through several iterations before you land on a solution that is a good match.

Successful attribution starts at understanding your audience and their buying journey.

Explore audiences for content marketing

 

Understand your audience

Understanding your audience sounds like a straightforward idea, but the reality is that you need to dig so much deeper than top-level personas to really get under the skin of your target market.  Some of the many areas to consider for each distinct audience segment include:

  • What are their ultimate goals?
  • Where they go to find reliable information?
  • What challenges do they face in reaching their goals?
  • What motivates them?
  • What frustrates them?
  • What are their main pain points?
  • What types of content resonate best with them?
  • What platforms do they use?
  • What do they need to know in order to make a buying decision?
  • How can you make their life easier?
  • What do you need them to do in order for you to meet your business goals?
  • How can you inspire them to spread the word about you once they have purchased?
  • What does their buying journey and timeline look like?

Determine your content marketing attribution model(s)

Attribution is a huge topic in its own right that we can’t cover in its entirety here, but it’s an essential part in understanding content ROI and benchmarking to help show growth.

Assigning credit, and a tangible monetary amount, to various content touchpoints along the customer journey will provide you with a wealth of information to help refine your content strategy as you go.

Different types of content and user journeys often better suit a certain attribution model, so the chances are that if your content marketing strategy includes a wide range of pieces with different objectives, designed for various parts of the funnel, you’ll need to apply more than one attribution model to get the most useful data and insights into performance and ROI.

Types of digital marketing attribution models

As a very top-line overview, the models you may want to consider and test could include:

  • Single-touch (or first-touch) attribution – where 100% of the credit for the conversion is given to the first content the user interacts with.
  • Last-touch attribution – where the final content touchpoint gets all of the credit for the conversion/sale.
  • Linear attribution – where the credit is spread evenly over all touchpoints leading up to the conversion.
  • Time-decay attribution – where more credit is given to touchpoints closer to the conversion point.
  • Position-based attribution – where the most credit is given to the first and last content touchpoint, with 20% spread across the content viewed or interacted with in the middle of these.
  • Multi-touch attribution – where various percentages of credit are given to multiple content touchpoints along the customer journey, as determined by you.

As with any of your content marketing planning and strategy, the most important factor when choosing an attribution model is making sure it’s aligned to the business goals you have for your content activity.

For example, a first-touch attribution model can be a good fit for top-of-the-funnel content that introduces your target audience to your brand. However, for content intended to drive conversions over a longer timeline, multi-touch attribution can give a clearer picture of how the audience engage with content throughout their journey.

If you don’t already have one, you’ll need a third-party attribution tool to help you track and distribute credit to different content touchpoints, which you can set up to report automatically, using the model or models of your choice.

Define your content goals clearly

As previously mentioned, content planning has to be centred around your business goals to ensure your efforts are focused on things that will bring a meaningful return for the business.

You’re likely to have different goals associated with different content activity, which moves the audience down the funnel towards a conversion and beyond. However, all of this needs to tie into the overarching goals and metrics too. Having clarity on what those goals are will help your planning process, as all elements of your content strategy will need to contribute towards them to make the cut.

For example, wider marketing goals for the year might include a metric for an increase of online sales. Your content strategy will need to ladder up to this goal, with your content activity supporting the various stages of that journey. You’ll need to look at things such as:

  • How your content is found (e.g. SEO, promotion on other platforms etc)
  • How your content moves the audience along the buyer journey
  • How you can convince the user to convert through the content
  • How your content strategy caters for previous customers who may buy again

Benchmark metrics for best content marketing

 

Benchmark your metrics

Understanding what ‘good’ or great’ looks like, in terms of content marketing performance, is essential.

You can apply KPIs and metrics to your content strategy as a whole as well as the individual components that make up your activity.

For example, if you want to increase online sales by 30% as a business goal, looking at how you have achieved the current level of sales is important for helping direct your strategy. Look at the channels that brought converting users to your website and the pages they landed on.

Look at your conversion rates (CVR) on various areas of the website and do the sums on what a small increase in CVR could do towards your 30% uplift goal. You can also look at how many new users you would need to bring to the site to hit your goal if the CVR stays the same. Should part of your content strategy be focused on improving the conversion content on your site as well as attracting new relevant visitors?

Of course, the specific content marketing metrics will vary, depending on what your goals are and the types of content you want to use for your target audience.

Benchmarking various metrics to understand your starting point before you fully plan a new content strategy will make it easier to see strategic opportunities for improvement and give a great foundation for tracking and reporting on performance.

It goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway), that your content should fulfil the framework that Google has provided for helpful content. This will help it to reach its potential in organic search.

Plan your content marketing budget

Planning a content marketing budget can be tricky, as it will tie into your specific goals and your overall marketing budget. The reality is that the most effective content marketing doesn’t have short cuts – producing great content that meets its objectives takes time, specialist skills and a well-executed plan. 

The pay-off is that great content marketing will bring long-term rewards, often for a longer period of time than your current budget covers, as it continues to contribute to site success and performance into the future.

How much budget do you need for content marketing?

There isn’t a one-size-fits-all rule for this, and there is often crossover between channels when it comes to content. Assets used as website or blog content can also often be utilised in terms of SEO, social media and digital PR, as well as email marketing and advertising, but having a standalone content marketing budget can be helpful in measuring ROI.

The components you’ll probably need to factor in to your content marketing budget include:

  • In-house staff salary costs for your team if they are using their time to plan, create, implement, promote and report on your content marketing strategy
  • Any freelance content, video, PR or design or development costs
  • Any paid software or tools used in planning, creation and tracking/reporting
  • Any advertising costs if you’re using paid promotion for your content
  • Influencer costs if you’re going to be working with any as part of the strategy.

A rough rule of thumb (which can certainly vary by industry and audience) is that spending up to 40% of the wider marketing budget on content marketing is a good starting point. For brands and businesses that rely heavily on content to attract, nurture and convert users online, this may need to increase.

Allocating budget to specific content activity and campaigns

So, you now have your wider content marketing budget, but how do you know how much of it to allocate to specific campaigns or activity to bring the best return?

You have to check out what I call the ‘ROI feasibility’ of a specific content marketing activity or campaign before you commit to it. Essentially, you’re looking into the realistic potential it has to bring a return to the business.

  • You’ll need to work out roughly what it will cost you to produce, publish and promote that content as per your main objective for it and the strategy you have to attract people to it.
  • Then look at any different channels you can use that content on, aside from the main objective e.g. is it something that you can promote as part of your email marketing strategy too, to a slightly different audience or segment?
  • For every channel you’re planning to use, check out your analytics data to view the average conversion rate and the financials associated with conversions from them.
  • That will give you an idea of how many users you’ll need to convert in order to bring in more than the content costs you to develop – and how many you’ll need to attract in the first place for each conversion.
  • Your content marketing activity will need to stand a good chance of achieving this figure in order to make it worthwhile as an ROI-driver. You’ll need to evaluate this feasibility based on the data you have and your attitude to risk.

By running a quick ROI feasibility check on your content ideas, you can determine which of them stand the best chance of bringing a tangible return that contributes towards your wider marketing and business goals – as well as roughly budgeting how much it will cost to achieve that. You can then allocate your content marketing budget accordingly.

It can be very tempting to put the bulk of your budget into the flashy and exciting creative content ideas (it’s only natural, because it’s what usually makes us tick), but that might not always be the best use of the money available. Finding a balance between proven activities and some testing of new content types and ideas can be the better option maximising ROI while also trying to innovate, stand out and break new ground.

In summary

Maximising the ROI from your content marketing strategy is as much about your planning as it is the actual content itself. Using audience information, analytics data and past performance can inform your decisions around the most effective content types to incorporate in order to achieve your marketing and wider business goals. Also looking at how to best attribute conversions to your content, what other metrics to track and investigating how to spread your budget for the best return will give you a great foundation for lasting success.

If you’d like to find out about how our content marketing services can help your business to hit your goals, or chat to one of our experts, get in touch using the form below.

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]]> YMYL: What it Means for Healthcare Ecommerce Brands https://www.nobraineragency.com/seo/ymyl-for-healthcare-ecommerce-brands/ Wed, 30 Oct 2024 15:59:58 +0000 https://www.nobraineragency.com/?p=23032 What is YMYL? Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) is a term from Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines, that refers to webpages that cover topics that could potentially impact on a person’s happiness, health, financial stability or safety. Google has a group of people that they call Quality Raters, based all over the world, who […]

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What is YMYL?

Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) is a term from Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines, that refers to webpages that cover topics that could potentially impact on a person’s happiness, health, financial stability or safety.

Google has a group of people that they call Quality Raters, based all over the world, who complete evaluations set by the search engine on the web pages that search results lead users to. The feedback from this group helps to shape changes and algorithm updates in Google Search to make results continually more accurate and useful. Google gives this group of raters very structured guidelines on how to evaluate results and YMYL forms part of this.

YMYL is not new. Google first introduced it as a category for raters in 2014, and rolled out a YMYL core algorithm update in 2018 (nicknamed the ‘Medic Update’ at the time). Google’s search engine is always evolving and there have been many updates since which aim to offer users continually more accurate and relevant results in YMYL topics.

Some examples of what kinds of content might be classed as YMYL include:

  • Healthcare, fitness and nutrition
  • Safety advice
  • Financial services or advice e.g. investing, pensions
  • Civic matters, such as voting and public services
  • Legal services
  • Politics, science, international events or news

Essentially, Google treats these kinds of pages differently because they could potentially cause harm to people in various ways, so there are higher standards that need to be met.

Healthcare is one area in which there is a lot of scope for potential harm if the Google search results lead people to poor information. It stands to reason that Google want to ensure that only trustworthy and reliable websites appear in health-related search results.

How does YMYL tie in with where websites rank in search results?

To get to grips with what YMYL has to do with the way Google ranks search results, you may find it useful to read our guide to Google E-E-A-T. This overviews the framework Google has put in place to signal that a web page contains quality content that is written by someone who genuinely knows about the topic and the information can therefore be trusted.

From a healthcare industry perspective, it essentially means that if a brand publishes content that they want to rank well in organic search, the webpage will need to provide strong evidence of the below:

  • Experience – showcasing the writer’s own experience of the topic.
  • Expertise – displaying depth of knowledge on the topic.
  • Authoritativeness – highlighting the reputation of the writer in this topic area.
  • Trustworthiness – being transparent about the content, your reason(s) for publishing it and using credible sources.

Websites that publish content demonstrating a high level of E-E-A-T are significantly more likely to perform better in organic search than those which display low (or no) E-E-A-T characteristics.

How does YMYL apply to healthcare ecommerce?

If you have a website in the healthcare ecommerce niche, you may think that YMYL isn’t likely to have an impact on your rankings, because you consider yourself a shopping website rather than an information website.

The reality is that the user journey for online shopping often includes browsing several pages of a website before making a purchase. Most successful healthcare ecommerce websites understand the value of content marketing and create useful resources such as blogs, guides and other content that informs the target audience and helps to drive sales too.

Having useful and relevant content ranking well for terms that your audience are likely to search, because you’ve taken YMYL and E-E-A-T into account, can make a tangible difference to your organic visibility and the online revenue you generate.

E-E-A-T and YMYL are not direct ranking factors, but taking steps to demonstrate experience, expertise, authority and trustworthiness in your content and SEO strategy tends to correlate with improved organic performance.

The potential consequences of getting your YMYL strategy wrong

The Google ranking algorithm is constantly evolving as the search giant aims to deliver more and more accurate and reliable results for users, which means that the ‘medic’ update of 2018 was just the beginning. Since then, Google has released dozens of ‘core updates’, many of which have included tweaks to the ways in which YMYL pages are assessed or treated.

Alongside this evolution, healthcare ecommerce brands that have failed to demonstrate high levels of E-E-A-T in their website content, as well as following many other areas of organic search best practice, may find that their organic visibility (and thus traffic) takes a significant hit. While it’s impossible to attribute 100% of drops in organic performance to a consequence of not approaching YMYL in the right way (as Google don’t give that much info away about their algorithm), the correlation of drops with algorithm updates is usually a pretty reliable sign.

As an example, looking at the nutrition brand ZOE, the SEO tool Sistrix indicates that their organic visibility took a huge hit in summer 2024, just as the August 2024 Google Core Update completed its roll-out. At the time of writing, it doesn’t look like they have yet started to recover that visibility and resulting traffic.

ZOE.com has implemented some things that could demonstrate E-E-A-T on their website (more on this later), but the level of this is nowhere near some other healthcare ecommerce brands.

Another example is online pharmacy brand, Pharmacy2U, who also experienced a drop at the same time (although not as drastic).

At the other end of the scale, another online pharmacy, Chemist4U, has seen no such drops. In fact, their visibility has noticeably grown since the August 2024 core update.

With high levels of E-E-A-T demonstrated throughout their content and wider site, it’s probably fair to assume that they are taking a more proactive approach to pages that fit the YMYL criteria.

What does good E-E-A-T look like on healthcare ecommerce websites?

There are a few different ways to highlight how your ecommerce healthcare brand fits into the E-E-A-T framework, but some of the most common implementations include:

Authorship

A way in which websites in the healthcare ecommerce space can demonstrate that the individual responsible for writing YMYL content has experience, expertise and authority in a particular area/field/topic is through implementing authorship on published content.

This usually involves creating author pages, with detailed information about the individual’s relevant qualifications, experience and links to any papers or published articles on the same topic that can help establish they are an authority in the field.

On the published content page itself, there can be a short author bio citing relevant information and linking to their longer author page.

Alongside this, and especially in healthcare, it’s useful to have an extra layer of authority and expertise with a ‘checked by’ or ‘reviewed by’ named individual as well. This is important in cases where the actual writer of the piece is someone from the marketing or content team rather than a qualified health professional in their own right.

A great example of this done well in healthcare ecommerce is on Chemist4U, as seen below.

The fact that the page has been reviewed and fact-checked by a Superintendent Pharmacist helps to build trust with the audience and provides a signal for search engines to take into account too.

Product reviews and seller testimonials

Positive product reviews are a great trust signal for potential customers and search engines. They show that you deliver on your promises and sell quality products that meet the needs of your audience.

Positive testimonials about your online store as a whole (rather than about individual products) can also carry plenty of weight in demonstrating that you are a trustworthy company that values customers and provides a good experience for shoppers.

Building up Google reviews on your Google Business Profile, along with a well-known solution such as Trustpilot, can help add to other site-wide trust signals that can feed into your demonstrations of E-E-A-T.

Backlink profile

Links from other relevant websites that point to yours, often called backlinks, can act as ‘votes of confidence’ that your site has useful information and can be trusted. When a website with strong authority in its own right links to one of your pages, it sends a strong positive signal to search engines. Our Digital PR services deliver this and more.

A healthy backlink profile, where great websites that are known in the healthcare space are linking to various content on your website (rather than just your homepage) and citing you in their own content, is evidence that your content is trustworthy, useful and respected by others in the field.

Creating great unique content

Producing truly useful content, which takes Google’s helpful content indicators into account, is the most important factor when you’re publishing on a YMYL topic.

Utilising that experience, expertise and authority can be demonstrated through thought-leadership content and in-depth pieces that are well-researched, reference your (credible) sources properly and bring something a bit different to the table, so it’s not just another version of what everyone else is producing.

Use this quick checklist to ensure you stay on track with the content you create.

Website trust signals

Along with the reviews already mentioned, other website best practices that can help build trust with potential customers and search engines include:

  • A valid SSL certificate – so no warnings appear saying your site might not be secure.
  • A well-designed website with navigation and UX that makes sense to your audience
  • Clear and obvious NAP details (Name, Address, Phone) so you can be contacted if needed.
  • Clearly displayed badges and accreditations that relate to your field and ecommerce essentials e.g. payment types accepted, company registration number and any relevant certifications.

An example of this is Lloyd’s Pharmacy’s online doctor website:

Your approach to YMYL

When it comes to YMYL and healthcare ecommerce, both you and Google want essentially the same things:

  • To provide website users with the most accurate and useful information possible.
  • To avoid spreading misinformation or anything that could potentially harm anyone.

By incorporating the E-E-A-T framework into your SEO and content strategy, you can ensure that you not only provide the high-quality, evidence based and accurate content that your customers need in order to make informed decisions about their health and wellbeing, you also follow search engine best practice for the high standards needed in this industry.

If you’d like to know more about how we can help healthcare ecommerce brands to increase their online visibility through SEO, Content and Digital PR, take a look at how we boosted organic traffic and revenue for Taking Care.

We’d love to chat if you want to find out more. Get in touch using the form below.

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]]> Essential content marketing metrics to measure performance https://www.nobraineragency.com/seo/essential-content-marketing-metrics-to-measure-performance/ Mon, 30 Sep 2024 12:47:58 +0000 https://www.nobraineragency.com/seo/https-www-nobraineragency-co-uk-blog-content-marketing-essential-content-marketing-metrics-to-measure-performance/ Content feeds into every element of marketing and across all channels. It’s the hook that catches people’s attention, the information that answers their questions, contains the solutions to their problems and gives them everything they need in order to make a buying decision. However, content marketing measurement can also seem a bit overwhelming at times. […]

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Content feeds into every element of marketing and across all channels. It’s the hook that catches people’s attention, the information that answers their questions, contains the solutions to their problems and gives them everything they need in order to make a buying decision.

However, content marketing measurement can also seem a bit overwhelming at times. There are so many metrics and things that could potentially be tracked that working out which ones actually matter to your business isn’t always as straightforward as it should be. However, without effective measurement of performance, you can’t know which parts of your strategy are working well and which need to change, so it’s vital to get this right.

Overview of content metrics to measure performance (and where to find them)

Free content brief template - front cover

  • Overall visibility on search (check out SISTRIX or Share of Voice in your SEO tools)
  • Ranking keyword performance has increased (GSC or your SEO tools)
  • People are linking to your great content (backlinks via GSC or your SEO tools)
  • Referral traffic (GA4)
  • Assisted conversions (Google Analytics custom report)
  • Increase in brand search query performance (GSC or your SEO tools)
  • Increase in engagement and repeat visits


Ultimately, great content can and will impact your bottom line – from enquiries and leads, to good old revenue. Which is why it’s vital to make the very BEST content you can, and that all starts with a good brief.

Here’s our FREE content brief template that you can copy and use for yourself!

Let’s explore further what makes particular content marketing metrics useful, how to best set goals for your content that marry up with measurement and provide some examples of important metrics for specific kinds of content marketing types and objectives.

What makes a content marketing metric useful?

There are multiple different ways to track and measure digital content, but the key to effective reporting is to focus on the metrics that really matter to your business and your goals and objectives.

A useful content marketing metric needs to:

  • Be relevant to your wider goals
  • Give you actionable insights
  • Be straightforward to measure
  • Be benchmarked, to show progress

Setting content marketing goals

As part of your content strategy development, it’s important that every content asset and activity undertaken has a purpose that contributes towards your wider marketing goals. If there is no specific outcome that you have determined for a content marketing activity, you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.

As with most things in marketing, setting the right goals in content marketing comes back to understanding your audience and their customer journey well.

Knowing what your target audience segments need content-wise in order to move down the funnel is the crux of it all, and makes it much more straightforward to allocate KPIs to different activities.

Each piece of content and its individual activation needs to tie back to a specific purpose. There may be secondary benefits too, but there needs to be one that’s a priority in terms of the contribution it makes to wider objectives.

Below, we look at a variety of different objectives and some of the content marketing metrics you might find useful to show how well you’re doing in that area.

Content marketing metrics for brand awareness objectives

Brand awareness is one of the areas that can feel quite difficult to measure. But there are plenty of data points you can bring together, which will give a strong indication of whether brand awareness content activity is doing what it should be.

  • On social media, your social shares, impressions and increases in follower counts that correlate with your content activity can all indicate progress on this goal.
  • On your website, checking for increases in Google Search Console (GSC) for impressions and clicks that stem from brand-related search queries can also indicate your brand is becoming more well-known.

Content marketing metrics for SEO performance objectives

Content that brings relevant organic search traffic to your website is incredibly valuable and can contribute to your SEO performance over months and years to come.

It could be blog content, optimised service pages, guides, product pages, explainer or how-to videos, tools or calculators or more. While the specific metrics to most effectively measure the SEO performance of different content formats can vary, some of the most common include:

Organic traffic in GA4:

How many users (unique) visit this specific page via search engines, average engagement time and engagement rate. Turning on ‘enhanced measurement’ in your GA4 settings will mean you can access more data, such as how many users have scrolled at least 90% of the page.

Google Search Console:

  • Impressions and clicks for the page
  • Queries people are using to find your page (are these the keywords you are specifically targeting?)
  • Average ranking position improvements.

Backlinks:

Is anyone else linking to your content? Are links from relevant and authoritative sites? All of these help boost your performance!

Content marketing metrics for ecommerce objectives

While content will play a significant role in product sales, it won’t always receive the attribution it deserves for the part it has played in the customer journey.

That being said, there are some metrics that can help to link content to ecommerce transactions and revenue, which include:

  • Setting up a landing page report in GA4, which can show purchases resulting from a specific page containing your content.
  • Viewing other GA4 conversion metrics that you know contribute to revenue over a longer timeframe, such as newsletter sign ups, whitepapers downloaded, enquiry forms filled in.

Content marketing metrics for lead generation objectives

If you’re a service provider, linking content performance to leads and enquiries that have been generated is essential, so you can see how successful your current and past activity is for future strategy insight, as well as being able to calculate a tangible return from content.

If you’re using email as part of your content marketing strategy, incorporating measurement from these campaigns and ensuring the chain of information doesn’t end when someone clicks from an email to your website is really important.

Tracking what email-driven users do once they reach your website will give you great insight into how successful this particular channel is. Use UTM parameters on every email link to tie site traffic and conversions back to specific emails and stories or CTAs within them.

Tracking various enquiry forms and CTAs related to specific pieces of content can also be very useful. Many websites just use the same form site-wide for simplicity. But even if they look the same to the end user, making sure that they are tracked individually behind the scenes in GA4 can be another helpful metric to tie user conversions back to your content marketing activity directly.

Content reporting

What will have become clear throughout this article is that there are a wide range of different metrics to measure content marketing performance, which are influenced by the wider objectives and the types of content activity you are using. This can feel very difficult to keep track of, especially as the data can come from several different sources.

One solution is to create a custom dashboard in a tool such as Google’s Looker Studio (formerly Data Studio). There is the capability to pull data from several sources into the same report, although third-party (non-Google) tools will need API access to integrate and this can get complicated. Using a paid tool, such as Supermetrics, can usually do a lot of the legwork for you, but there will always be some setup time and effort needed.

Effective reporting on content marketing can make a huge difference to how content is viewed by your organisation and stakeholders, along with future marketing budgets and priorities, so getting this right can be key and certainly worth the resource involved.

If you want specialist assistance with your content marketing strategy, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch using the form below.

The post Essential content marketing metrics to measure performance appeared first on No Brainer Agency.

]]> Should we optimise for Google AI overviews? https://www.nobraineragency.com/seo/should-we-optimise-for-google-ai-overviews/ Wed, 04 Sep 2024 08:42:13 +0000 https://www.nobraineragency.com/?p=22802 If you use Google search with any frequency then you can’t have escaped noticing the steady rollout of Google’s AI Overviews in the last few months. Initially launched for US searches in mid-May 2024, many searches in the UK now also display a Google AI overview showing above the standard search results. This is now […]

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If you use Google search with any frequency then you can’t have escaped noticing the steady rollout of Google’s AI Overviews in the last few months. Initially launched for US searches in mid-May 2024, many searches in the UK now also display a Google AI overview showing above the standard search results. This is now sometimes the case even if you’re not logged into a Google account when using the search engine.

Google AI Overviews example

In this article, we look at what Google AI Overviews actually are, whether businesses should be optimising their websites to try and appear in them and how to do so without compromising on other aspects of SEO performance.

What are Google AI Overviews?

Google’s AI Overviews are essentially a search results feature offering an AI-generated summary of information, based on a number of different online sources, including the likes of Reddit, in response to the user query. 

The idea is for AI Overviews to give users a quick response to fairly complex queries, so they don’t have to click on multiple search results, or make several slightly different searches, to find out what they want to know, especially if they are looking for top-level information. The AI Overview does include links to the sources of the information it uses if searchers want to click through and find more detail or context on the original website.

In theory, AI Overviews could potentially mean that the number of people scrolling down the results page to (and clicking on) actual organic search results could shrink. Leading to what is known as zero-click searches, where users find what they need in Google Search without having to visit any websites at all. 

While Google taketh away with one hand, they potentially giveth with the other, because AI Overviews do present some opportunities for the websites that appear in them. 

  • The prominent source placement in the Overviews could increase the original content’s visibility and bring more clicks. 
  • Google AI Overviews could also potentially help with pre-qualifying visitors, because they’ll only click on the source link in the Overview if the content they’ve already seen interests them and they want to engage further. The number of visitors arriving via search may be smaller, but they could be more likely to convert.

How do Google AI Overviews work?

Google AI Overviews essentially use their own generative AI technology (which they call Gemini) to populate the content within them from online sources. The AI model used has evolved from Google’s Search Generative Experiences (SGE), which was an opt-in experiment they ran in 2023/24 on how generative AI could assist with search. Google AI Overviews is the result of that experiment.

Google’s system decides when a specific query triggers an AI Overview and will show several pieces of information, usually in bulleted form, in a compact window that can be expanded by the user. 

According to Google, AI Overviews aren’t generating their output from training data like most AI models do, but are integrated with Google’s core web ranking systems so can actually carry out search engine-like tasks. Google claims that AI Overviews will only show information that is ‘backed up by top web results’.

In practice, this is what AI overviews look like:

Taking an example of a desktop search, with someone looking for advice on how to sleep better, they are shown a panel including some visible tips on the left and some heavily truncated sources on the right. 

Above the overview appear related search suggestions for the searcher to drill down further if needed e.g. 

  • How to sleep better with anxiety
  • How to sleep fast in 5 minutes
  • How to sleep at night naturally
  • How to sleep better with sleep apnea
  • How to sleep better with a cold
  • How to sleep better during pregnancy 

These types of suggestions can appear in non-AI Overview search results as well, but these are much more specific and relevant to the original query. 

When fully expanded, the Overview shows more sleep suggestions, before ending on a disclaimer and enabling user feedback with the thumbs up or down icons. 

However, in order to see all of the websites used as sources, the user has to click again on the right panel’s ‘show all’ button, then navigate a scroll box to view the 10x additional source sites not shown above. The extra effort this takes means that users are very unlikely to click on a source website unless it’s one of those shown in the original Overview panel, preferably in first or second place. 

Why isn’t there a Google AI overview for every search? 

Google hasn’t yet gone into a huge amount of detail about what kind of search triggers an AI Overview to appear in the results, but they do maintain that this search feature is meant for complex queries primarily. 

Those behind the SEO tool, Advanced Web Ranking, have done a study based on thousands of test examples. Amongst other findings, the study indicates that:

  • Five-word queries most frequently trigger an AI Overview
  • AI Overviews do not show for brand-related searches
  • Keywords related to health and/or safety are more likely to trigger AI Overviews
  • Keywords with navigational intent are less likely to result in an AI Overview.

The same search on different devices can also have different results in terms of whether an AI Overview shows up. The query ‘how to sleep better’ didn’t trigger an AI Overview on mobile but did on desktop, for example. 

If Google AI Overview essentially generates from scratch each time someone inputs a query, then it could theoretically display different information and sources frequently for the same query.

Is it worth trying to optimise content to appear in Google AI overviews?

Whether it’s worth allocating time and resources to trying to appear in Google AI Overviews will very much depend on your specific business and what you do, as well as balancing this with the wider SEO and marketing strategy.

If your business sees lots of value in traffic that is looking for informational content, appearing in AI Overviews could certainly be beneficial to your business. That said, there are no guarantees that optimising for AI Overview will get you featured in the kinds of results you want, especially if all your competitors are already ahead of you on that. 

However, it’s also worth noting that many of the things that should help you potentially appear in AI Overviews are just great SEO practice anyway, so should have organic search benefits for your website in any case. 

How to optimise content for Google AI overviews

A recent study by the seoClarity team, where they analysed thousands of keywords and search results, including those in AI Overviews, found that 99.5% of the time, one or more of the top 10 web results was included as a source in the Google AI Overview for that query. 

This appears to be something that has changed over time since the rollout began, potentially because of the highly publicised ‘fails’ that swiftly followed the initial launch. 

What it does mean, at the present time, is that optimising your website and content effectively for organic search in general can also help boost your chances of appearing in AI Overviews. 

What Google say about how to rank in their AI Overviews

Google specifically say that “there is nothing special for creators to do to be considered (for AI Overviews) other than to follow our regular guidance for appearing in search”. 

Fundamentally, this means following technical SEO best practice, avoiding spammy tactics, earning good quality backlinks and ensuring all content on the website aligns with Google E-E-A-T principles. 

Other ways to optimise for Google AI Overviews

Along with following good SEO best practice and building site authority that way, we do think that there are some other ways that businesses and brands can stack the deck in your favour when it comes to Google AI Overviews. These include:

  • Identify existing AI Overviews you want to appear in, and cover the topic more thoroughly on your own site than is currently seen in the Overview. 
  • Create new (or update existing) helpful content around long-tail informational queries that are more likely to trigger an AI Overview.
  • Answer the main question or query really clearly and directly, preferably in the first sentence. You can then add more supplementary information in additional paragraphs.
  • Structure your content with clear subheadings, bullet points and concise paragraphs so Google can understand it easily.
  • Revisit existing content regularly and update if necessary to make sure it’s as accurate, relevant and useful to users as possible.

How do I know if my website appears in Google AI Overviews?

Say that you decide to spend some time and effort on optimising some of your content for AI Overviews. How can you tell if your hard work has paid off? Or how can you see whether you already feature in any AI Overviews?

Apart from manually checking your keywords in Google or randomly stumbling on your website appearing in an AI Overview, is there an easy way to tell whether you’re appearing in them and for what query? 

The simple answer is… not really, but kind of. 

Google has said that AI Overview data is available in Google Search Console (GSC), but unfortunately it can’t be filtered or viewed separately from any of your other data. This means that impressions and clicks resulting from appearing in AI Overviews are lumped in with the rest of the page or query data and you can’t be sure which are from search results and which are from Overviews. 

In GA4, any traffic resulting from clicks in AI Overviews will just show as standard organic traffic. 

Third-party tools to track Google AI Overviews

So, if Google doesn’t provide the data, you are left with third party tools to try and track your appearances in AI Overviews. A number of paid tools currently claim to be able to help you track your Google AI Overview appearances and the impact it’s having on your online visibility, although this may not yet be guaranteed on UK data. At the time of writing, rollout of AI Overviews here is still in process and not as widespread as in the US. These tools include:

  • Semrush – this SEO tool includes a SERP features filter in their position tracking tool, which has an option to view AI Overviews, so you can see which tracked keywords are appearing in them. As of early September 2024, you can also view some AI Overviews insights by using Semrush’s organic research function.
  • Ziptie – they don’t currently offer their AI Overviews tracking in the UK, but they’re planning this soon and you can join their waiting list to find out as soon as they expand to cover this. 

Google AI Overviews: What to do next

It’s clear that AI Overviews as we see them today are something that isn’t the finished article. The whole point of generative AI is that it keeps evolving, ‘learning’ and developing, so it’s important to bear that in mind when deciding on any further action you might want to take. 

At No Brainer, we take the view that your entire SEO strategy, including AI Overview activities, should always primarily align with best practice principles and prioritise the informational needs of your audience. By optimising your website effectively with a user-first approach, you can potentially kill all the birds with the same stone and start to improve rankings in standard search results, appear in key AI Overviews and also in featured snippets. 

If you’d like to know more about our approach to SEO and how we can help drive organic growth for your business, get in touch using the form below. 

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