The expectation is that we’re preparing for a downturn and a recession is on its way. As companies scramble, many will make business decisions that could bury them for years to come, while others will capitalize on timely opportunities and well-designed brand fortifications. 

How you spend your remaining 2022 marketing budget could determine the health of your company in 2023.

According to the Willis Towers Watson 2022 Salary Budget Planning Report:

• 75% of survey respondents stated that they’re having problems attracting and retaining talent; at the same time, 12% said they are planning company restructurings and layoffs
• In response, companies are boosting 2023 salary budgets to a 20-year high (4.6%)
• A red-hot labor market and wage pressures have complicated preparation for a possible downturn. Demand exceeds supply, so competition is still fierce

How enterprise budgets will be affected in 2023

We see more companies reducing headcounts and preparing to decrease their marketing budgets. 

• Snap (of Snapchat) announced in August that it would “lay off 20% of its staff and cut money-losing projects, blaming a deteriorating economy.”
• Amazon laid off 10,000 employees (3% of its workforce)
• RingCentral laid off 400 employees 
• Meta let go of 11,000 employees 
• Salesforce laid off hundreds of employees 
• Twitter let go of 3,700 employees
• Intel is expected to lay off 20% of its workforce

This isn’t limited to a single industry or vertical either. 

Companies in a variety of industries are pulling back. They’re increasing salaries, laying off employees, and slashing budgets to prepare for a possible recession. 

Ebiquity’s 2023 Media Budgets survey of 43 multinational companies, including five of the world’s top 10 advertisers found that:

• 29% of the world’s largest advertisers plan to slash ad dollars next year
• 74% of respondents agree or strongly agree that the recession influences their ’23 budget decisions
• 48% plan to decrease their offline media budgets in ’23
• 42% plan to increase their digital media budgets in ’23
• 40% say their budget will remain the same in ’23
• 28% plan on increasing their total marketing budgets in ’23

This is a mistake. 

When budget cuts are on the table, marketing is often the first to receive the chop. However, Bain found that “hasty or blanket cuts can severely damage sales and the brand’s stature.

In the 1990–91 recession, McDonald’s decided to drop its advertising and promotion budget, but Pizza Hut and Taco Bell didn’t follow suit. As a result, those chains both saw double-digit sales growth, while McDonald’s sales declined.” 

McKinsey found the same thing. 

Their research found that “while cost-reduction opportunities are real, they don’t all pack the same punch. Scale back too aggressively, in the wrong areas, and you may wind up sacrificing long-term value for short-term earnings.”

Barbie Mattie, VP, and Principal Analyst at Forrester, agrees. She writes: “cuts to satisfy current pressures could easily hinder long-term competitiveness. An advantage that marketing leaders have this time around is that they can draw from lessons learned over the past two years. For instance, companies that have thrived during that time (growing by more than 20% year over year) have invested more heavily than their peers in postsale customer engagement. They also have placed greater emphasis on brand perception.”

Pull back, and you may struggle to recover. 

Funnel your end-of-year marketing budget towards advertising, and you may have little to show for it. 

The same can be said for search engine optimization. We’ve seen firsthand how many companies bungled their SEO programs when the pandemic hit. They slashed budgets and competitors that stuck with it came out ahead. 

iPullRank found and CEO Michael King shared his experience with a client on Round 3 of SEO Battlezone: Slashing Your SEO Budget:

“I’ll give an example from a client that we have been working with for a number of years. They’re specifically in the home lending space and at the end of 2019, they came to us. They’re like, ‘Things are going really well, but we need to figure out how we can expand this.’

We went back to them and said, let’s expand the keyword coverage and effectively create more content so that we’re up and down the journey in more redundant ways.

We laid out this bigger keyword strategy, this bigger content plan, and we actually got started on it at the end of 2019.

Then 2020 hits and then the pandemic hits. We had already laid this foundation with all of this content. They were already ranking for all of these keywords once the rate environment got so much better for people looking to buy houses.

If you are thinking about doubling down or even if you’re not thinking about doubling down, like maintaining your existing investment, I would say, how do you expand your keyword footprint?

Because the reality of it is, a lot of behaviors are also changing as a result of the ‘recession.’

It’s worth revisiting your audiences. It’s worth revisiting your keyword research and targets. It’s worth updating existing content and also expanding that. There are two benefits to that:

1. You’re gonna meet the audience where it is right now.
2. You’re gonna be in a better position as compared to your competitors that are cutting back.”

The proof is in the revenue. One iPullRank client in the mortgage industry doubled down on SEO and content during the pandemic, and when market conditions changed, they added $2.4 billion in incremental revenue.

How enterprises handle end-of-year marketing budgets

It’s common for enterprises (e.g., Accenture) to take an up-or-out approach to their business. It’s no surprise that many enterprises take a use-it-or-lose-it approach to budgeting as well. 

Let’s be honest. 

Departments and business units are in constant competition with each other. There’s an internal struggle for resources that drives department spending. 

• Retaining their current budget. If your end-of-year budget is unused, you’ll lose it. It’s also likely that next year’s budget will be lower; it becomes difficult to justify an increase when your department failed to use last year’s budget productively. 
• Increasing their current budget. A budget increase means your team has to deliver more value. Your team’s amazing results during the pandemic may cost you your job today. Departments that are hungry for growth will need to (a.) justify their current budget, delivering more value, and (b.) produce a strong justification (via forecasts, projections, surveys, etc.) outlining why your budget needs to be increased.
• Defending against internal competitors. The internal conflict between departments (e.g., sales and marketing) is a common issue. The sales department thinks marketing isn’t producing enough leads; they feel they can do a better job, so they ask for a bigger budget. These internal conflicts are often the results of operational silos and turf wars, but this kind of competition produces rivalries and turf wars all on their own.   

CMOs are always under an enormous amount of pressure. 

Thanks to our economic climate, and the uncertainty in the coming year, that pressure has only grown. 

How do CMOs distribute their end-of-year excess marketing budget?

Gartner released The State of Marketing Budget and Strategy 2022; there were some surprising insights in their report, insights that showed us CMO’s approach to budgeting. 

“The Majority of CMOs Shrug Off Fiscal and Geopolitical Uncertainty Consumer goods may represent the canary in the coal mine — an early indication of budgetary challenges that are coming down the line for other industries. If this is the case, it appears that CMOs are not heeding the warning signs. Despite inflation, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, supply chain issues exacerbated by China’s lockdown measures and unprecedented talent competition, CMOs appear sanguine.

In the face of a barrage of bad news, CMOs hold on to a belief that their own economic outlook is strong. For example, the majority of CMOs surveyed thought inflationary pressures hitting their business and their customers will have a positive impact on their strategy and investment in the year ahead.” 

It’s no surprise that CMOs aren’t worried. 

Source: Gartner.com

Gartner disagrees with CMO’s optimism.

“These results reveal a potentially dangerous state of marketing cognitive dissonance. Those distanced from the epicenter of geopolitical and fiscal upheaval feel impervious to its potential impacts. However, the shockwaves

of disruption and uncertainty will be experienced by all, and a recession looks increasingly likely.”

So how will CMOs adjust their budget planning? 

You know the answer. 

They’ll work to increase their budgets. 

If these CMOs are bullish on their ability to generate results in a down market, they will move forward. They’re going to invest their marketing dollars aggressively. Smart CMOs will place their dollars in channels that produce strong short- and long-term returns. 

Empathy Inc. found that “73% of marketers believe that they will increase budgets in the next fiscal year. And a whopping 86% of CFOs agree with that statement despite economic uncertainty.” (emphasis added)

What about distributing their end-of-year budget?

Smart CMOs will spend their end-of-year budget on initiatives likely to produce long-term value, giving them a jump in the upcoming year. They’ll focus their attention on the channels that will help them to produce more with less. 

Should you throw your excess budget toward advertising? 

It’s easy, low-hanging fruit.

A shot of advertising would immediately drive traffic to your offerings and produce quick, short-term gains. That’s part of the problem, though. Everyone will see this effort for what it is, an attempt to exhaust your budget before it expires. 

So, what’s the problem with that? 

If you’d like to persuade the C-suite to increase your budget, advertising comes with a list of problems.  

Well, why not? 

1. Customers don’t like advertising
2. Customers don’t want to see advertising
3. Customers don’t trust advertising
4. Customers don’t need advertising

We use paid media because it’s effective in the right hands, but marketers still waste 21 cents of every media dollar spent. It’s an indispensable part of a balanced marketing plan, but a haphazard approach is throwing money away.

What’s a better option? 

Follow this three-step process to maximize the value you receive from your end-of-year budget.

1. Assess your goals, current projects, and portfolio
2. Ensure that your investments are linked to the company/marketing strategy
3. Optimize your projects and campaigns to maximize returns 

What opportunities can be maximized? 

The opportunities from end-of-year Content and SEO 

Paid media works. 

It’s alluring due to the near-immediate response and reliability. That’s also the problem; it’s necessary, but there’s no compounding. When you turn it off, everything stops. 

Then there’s owned media. 

Content and organic search are wonderful because the rewards compound. The value we receive today continues indefinitely into the future, frequently with minimal maintenance requirements. 

Here’s an example. 

Let’s say you create one 10x post. 

This single post generates $750 of value each month. 

Your team capitalizes on this and produces a series of ten posts, each earning $100 per month. 

At this point, your monthly total is $1,750 per mo. 

You reinvest, generating 50 posts that earn $100 per month. ($6,750  per month)

You repeat the process, producing 500 posts that earn $100 per month + 20 10x posts earning $750 per month

At this point, your monthly total is $65,000 per month or  $780,000 annually. 

These small numbers demonstrate the point. 

Here’s the thing. 

This doesn’t include the value you receive from organic search. If you maximize your profit per keyword, the value compounds quickly again. 

Ahrefs shared data on this. 

“The average #1 ranking page will also rank in the top 10 for nearly 1,000 other relevant keywords (while the median value is more than two times smaller – around 400 keywords).”

And high-volume keywords? How many of those can a single page rank for?

Source: Ahrefs.com

There are some exciting insights here. 

“It turns out that ranking for 2-3 keywords with over 1,000 searches per month is quite common. While ranking for more than one 10k+ keyword with a single page is very rare.”

What does this mean? 

If you can optimize your existing content, you’ll find the value continues to compound as you squeeze more value out of each post and keyword.

That’s the goal.

Here’s the big problem staring you in the face. 

You may not be getting the right users (i.e., customers!) from your organic search campaigns. Believe it or not, your customer’s keyword phrases communicate intent, oftentimes indicating the kind of customer you’re attracting. 

Here’s what I mean. 

Imagine that you’re in the market for a Peloton exercise bike. You know, this thing: 

Source: Wikimedia Commons

If you’re an ideal customer you may use keywords like: 

[peloton] bike 

[peloton] shoes

[peloton] accessories

Is it worth getting a [peloton]? 

[peloton] bike vs. bike plus

[peloton] dimensions

[peloton] elliptical

[peloton] financing

[peloton] membership 

[peloton] membership cost

Now compare that list to the one below…

[peloton] alternative

[peloton] coupon code

[peloton] for less

coupon code [amazon]

coupon code [peloton]

competitor (a low-cost competitor)

[peloton] price

Can you ride a [peloton] without a subscription

[peloton] no subscription

See the difference? 

One customer has their mind made up, the other is looking for a low cost option to get the same result. Believe it or not, these keyword clusters have a significant impact on your revenue.  

Are you targeting the right people? Not sure?

This probably means you’ll need to examine your keyword portfolio closely.

You should be able to examine and prioritize the available keyword opportunities available to your business via search. If you’re going to examine your keyword portfolio, you’ll want to do it across these five dimensions.

1. Persona-Based: A close look at your current and prospective customers to discover the products, services and information they’re looking for. 
2. Content-Centric: An analysis of your current content, distilling (topically and thematically) the key phrases that are relevant and crucial to your business.
3. Analytics-Based: Hard quantitative data (search volume, CPC, CTR) from advanced tools and your in-house analytics to truly quantify (traffic, leads, revenue) the opportunity available to you.
4. Competitive: An examination of the ranking data and the precise difficulty of each ranking zone, presenting a picture of your current performance against the competitive landscape. Can you achieve the results you want, is it a worthwhile investment for you to make at this point? 
5. Directional: Have you mapped each keyword to a potential target page? How is that keyword performing on that specific page?  This analysis is essential as it allows your copy teams to easily optimize content and develop new content based on keyword gaps.

…

Update your keyword portfolio (with help)

We’ll help you execute a targeted content strategy with a data-backed keyword portfolio that:

• Drives revenue down the organic search funnel
• Builds authority across your topic clusters
• Serves as the foundation of your integrated marketing

Get a portfolio of keywords that shows you where your most profitable opportunities are, segmented by funnel stage, personas, value.

Learn more

…

CMOs are under a lot of pressure to perform. Marketing teams need to demonstrate that they’re producing value with the budgets they already have. The compounding value of content and organic search gives you a clear way to demonstrate your value. 

Properly structured organic search campaigns can deliver value in the short and long term. 

Using your end-of-year marketing budget productively

What can you do to maximize the value you receive from your end-of-year budget? Is there a simple way to determine where you should focus your attention first? 

As a matter of fact, there is. 

Here are five options to maximize the gains you receive from your end-of-year budget. 

Improve page performance via the content rebalancing framework

If you’re investing the resources needed to produce rankable content, you’ll need to address the inevitable downside of all marketing. 

Decay. 

Content decay refers to a consistent decline in organic traffic, rankings, and visibility. Every piece of content goes through a specific lifecycle (e.g., momentum, growth, maturity, and decline). Content rebalancing allows you to refresh your content, improving performance, rankings, and revenue. 

The options are as follows:

1. Refresh the content
2. Merge content and redirect
3. Redirect the URL entirely
4. Keep the content as is

Content rebalancing also improves internal linking opportunities. 

What you need: 

• Content audit: This should be a qualitative and quantitative look at all of the existing content on your site, with recommendations on how each content piece can be improved to achieve business goals. You can’t rebalance, optimize, or improve your content if you don’t know what’s there so a content audit is an important first step.
• Production brief: This is a package for projects that include keyword research, technical direction, and content optimization. Your brief should include elements of your keyword portfolio, as well as the items mentioned above. Your production brief should be treated as a foundational document that enables your in-house or agency team to move rapidly into production, generating quick (but notable) wins before the end of the year. 
• Content plan: A cross-channel strategy for content development, maintenance, and governance. This plan should clearly delineate your target audience, core strategy, brand voice and tone, content calendar, structure, and governance.  This plan should come before any actual content development is done. 
• Content promotion: You’ve created 10x content, what happens next? Your content will need a jump start to achieve its true potential. We’ll place your content in the right hands, ensuring that influencers seed the internet with your thought leadership, sharing (and linking to) your content aggressively. 

Improve crawl budget (large sites)

If you’re part of an enterprise, your website probably has lots of pages. Large websites can struggle with technical SEO challenges that feel overwhelming.

Your crawl budget refers to the number of pages Googlebot is set to crawl over a period of time. 

Google is the only one who knows how much budget is allotted to your site. Google looks at crawl health, popularity, staleness, links, and limits set (via robots.txt). 

Why your crawl budget matters. 

Googlebot wastes more time on low/no-value pages and less time on pages that searchers find valuable. This leads to poor rankings and a dramatic decrease in search visibility. Fixing this means addressing these problem pages – restoring deleted pages or creating 301 redirects pointing to the page(s) most relevant to your searcher’s query. 

There’s a limit to Google’s patience. 

“If the site responds really quickly for a while, the limit goes up, meaning more connections can be used to crawl. If the site slows down or responds with server errors, the limit goes down, and Googlebot crawls less.” 

Addressing crawl budget issues is a straightforward way to boost organic search performance. 

What you need: 

• Log file audit: How is Googlebot crawling your site? Are they running into trouble? Crawl budget not what it should be? This audit should provide you with a detailed look at search engine activity, with an eye for spotting opportunities to improve accessibility that may not be found via a standard crawl. 
• SEO site audits: This is a detailed examination of the technical, content, link, and page speed issues limiting your site’s visibility, traffic, leads, and revenue. If you don’t have the in-house expertise you need, work an agency partner *cough* who can provide you with in-depth and prioritized recommendations outlining where and how you should focus your attention. 
• Technical recommendations: A detailed set of technical recommendations that maximizes your visibility in search and social media. These audits are primarily focused on technical performance and responsiveness, not on marketing or promotion. 

Eliminate duplicate content

When your web pages fight for the same keywords, your rankings, visibility, and revenue suffer. Duplicate content stunts the growth of your web pages. You receive a smaller portion of the traffic and conversions you’re supposed to receive. 

Duplicate content issues include URL variations, incorrect prefixes, content scraping, and crappy CMS.  

You also have a revenue leak when you have issues with duplicate content. Your conversion rate is lower than it should be because all other metrics (traffic, visibility) are lower than they should be. 

Addressing duplicate content is an essential detail that impacts revenue directly. 

What you need: 

• Content audit: This should be a qualitative and quantitative look at all of the existing content on your site, with recommendations on how each content piece can be improved to achieve business goals. You can’t rebalance, optimize, or improve your content if you don’t know what’s there so a content audit is an important first step.

• Backlinks audit: An in-depth look at every internal link in your site’s link profile. This audit should immediately identify potential problems, as well as opportunities where your site is leaking link equity (and revenue). Do specific pages need to be deleted? Which pages need a 301 redirect to better content? What needs to happen with pages that are competing for the same keywords?
• Log file audit: How is Googlebot crawling your site? Are they running into trouble? Crawl budget not what it should be? This audit should provide you with a detailed look at search engine activity, with an eye for spotting opportunities to improve accessibility that may not be found via a standard crawl. 

Boost rankings with internal links

Good internal linking allows link equity to flow from one page to another. It’s the strategy Wikipedia uses to achieve the stellar rankings they do. You’ll want to identify the top-performing pages on your site (tier one), then rank to tier two and three pages, spreading your link equity around. 

If you have internal links buried inside plugins or applets, tucked away in JavaScript, hidden inside forms, or behind internal searches, you have a problem. 

What you need: 

• Backlinks audit: An in-depth look at every external link in your site’s link profile. This audit should immediately identify potential problems, as well as opportunities where your site is leaking link equity (and revenue). 
• Domain acquisition support: Link acquisition and content marketing work like gangbusters but sometimes, the process takes too long to mature. If you’re a large brand with resources, you’ll need to know how to identify, vet, and acquire domains rapidly, redirecting the link equity from these sites to your brands to rapidly grow authority and rankings. 
• Log file audit: How is Googlebot crawling your site? Are they running into trouble? Crawl budget not what it should be? This audit should provide you with a detailed look at search engine activity, with an eye for spotting opportunities to improve accessibility that may not be found via a standard crawl. 

Optimize Core Web Vitals

Page load speed and mobile friendliness are important ranking factors. 

Google tells us a little bit about their plans. 

“We’re combining the signals derived from Core Web Vitals with our existing Search signals for page experience, including mobile-friendliness, HTTPS-security, and intrusive interstitial guidelines, to provide a holistic picture of page experience. Because we continue to work on identifying and measuring aspects of page experience, we plan to incorporate more page experience signals on a yearly basis to both further align with evolving user expectations and increase the aspects of user experience that we can measure.”

What does this mean? 

Core Web Vitals will continue to grow in prominence. The user experience goes hand-in-hand with content marketing and organic search. It’s an important step that helps to maximize the rankings, traffic, and visibility you receive from searches. 

If your content is king, the user experience is queen. 

What you need: 

• SEO site audits: This is a detailed examination of the technical, content, link, and page speed issues limiting your site’s visibility, traffic, leads, and revenue. If you don’t have the in-house expertise you need, work an agency partner *cough* who can provide you with in-depth and prioritized recommendations outlining where and how you should focus your attention. 
• Technical recommendations: A detailed set of technical recommendations that maximizes your visibility in search and social media. These audits are primarily focused on technical performance and responsiveness, not on marketing or promotion. 
• Implementation audits: A spreadsheet that enables you to monitor and gauge the performance of third parties implementation recommendations. This will tell you what to look for, where to look, and provide you with important questions that you’ll need to ask to stay on top of your project/campaign. 

Why you need an agency to maximize your opportunities

Companies are preparing for an economic downturn. They’re laying off employees, reducing their marketing budgets, and increasing salaries to retain key people. Even if they weren’t, the scope of this is typically too much for an in-house team to handle on their own. 

This is exactly why you need an agency. 

So let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way. When you work with an agency, you get a team of complementary specialists ready to go from day one. There’s no one to onboard and no one to train. You get a mature and experienced team focused on your account and loyal to your team (not the C-suite) for the price of a single employee. 

You know that. I know that. 

What you may not know is the fact that your agency team has specific resources and skillsets you do not. If your agency knows what they’re doing, it should have the following: 

• A battle-tested process for each of the services they offer
• Response plans that guide its decision-making (e.g., recovering from search penalties, crisis management, negative search, etc.) and aid with the recovery from a variety of worst-case scenarios
• Overlapping, T-shaped specialists (e.g., local, organic, and paid search specialists) who can manage their portion of the campaign on their own, but integrate and harmonize with a team
• A proprietary suite of tools that gives them (and you) an unfair advantage 
• The ability and willingness to do what other agencies can’t or won’t do

These details make all the difference. 

Imagine walking into your budget meeting with compelling data showing everyone why expanding your marketing budget is the smart play. Management’s decision is obvious if your results continue to compound year-over-year.  

Use your end-of-year marketing budget to win

Marketers will have less to work with this next year as budgets are being slashed across the board. Your end-of-year budget can set your organization up for success in the new year. 

But you have to start now. 

The expectation is that we’re facing a downturn – a recession is on its way. Interesting changes are on the horizon as companies scramble to prepare for what’s coming. The competition for budget will become more aggressive. Use your end-of-year budget to maximize the results you receive from your content and SEO campaigns. 

Create value that compounds. 

As we’ve seen your content and search campaigns can produce exceptional rewards, thanks to compounding. Apply your end-of-year marketing budget to the right projects and you’ll find the value you receive from content and search compounds indefinitely into the future. 

Do you have an SEO or Content Project that you’d like to invest in with your remaining 2022 marketing budget? Set up a call with iPullRank and earn billions in incremental revenue.

The post Strategic Ways to Use Your End-of-Year Marketing Budget appeared first on iPullRank.

The online world is busy, and we’re all looking for an edge to outrank our competitors. As you search for ways to help your business stand out, you might have run across a strategy called topic modeling. 

And maybe, like me, you got sucked into an internet blackhole of content about machine learning, programming, Python, and TF-IDF. 

Topic modeling is used heavily in scientific circles, but there are applications in SEO and content marketing. 

Here is what you need to know about topic modeling, including what it is, how to use it to drive your SEO or content strategy, and how to perform topic modeling using Python or no-code tools. 

What is topic modeling?

Topic modeling is an analysis that establishes content’s relevance across a selection of semantically related keywords. 

Essentially, topic modeling answers the question, “What topics are frequently mentioned in relation to this main topic?” 

It can be used to analyze search results, customer reviews, social media posts, or any other digital conversations. 

Do you remember those word clouds popular on social media a few years ago? That is a form of topic modeling. 

The topic modeling of today, however, uses machine learning to analyze massive amounts of data and deliver deeper insights into what related topics are most popular for any given topic. 

Why does topic modeling matter for digital marketing? 

Search engines like Google determine relevance by analyzing the content and looking for related keywords and keywords they would expect to find in other similar documents. 

If your content does not meet the statistical expectations for a given topic, your content won’t be considered relevant.

Sounds super exciting, I know. 

In more basic terms, topic modeling analyzes content to determine if it’s relevant based not just on the inclusion of a main keyword, but also related keywords and topics. 

This matters because Google uses Topic Layering to rank content, which they describe as:  

“We’ve taken our existing Knowledge Graph—which understands connections between people, places, things and facts about them—and added a new layer, called the Topic Layer, engineered to deeply understand a topic space and how interests can develop over time as familiarity and expertise grow.”

Let’s say you want to write the best piece of content about German Shepherds. Using topic modeling, you analyze thousands of pieces of content about German Shepherds and track which related topics are mentioned the most. 

Based on that data, you might see people also want to learn about taking care of German Shepherds, how much they cost, and how to choose a breeder. Covering those topics is likely to help you rank better. 

(Probably. It is Google, after all.)

Topic modeling and machine learning

There are two ways to perform topic modeling analysis—manually or with machine learning. 

If you like pain, you can create a spreadsheet, pull the top 100 or so pieces of content on a topic and analyze them to see which sub-topics are mentioned the most. 

If you prefer doing things the easy way, I suggest letting machine learning do the heavy lifting. 

One of the main modeling techniques is BERT ( Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers.)

This is beyond the scope of what most marketers need to know, however, there is some value in understanding how this works. 

If BERT sounds familiar, it’s because it was created by Google. There may be value in using a tech Google created to analyze your data (because it’s probably what Google uses, too.) However, BERT wasn’t originally designed for topic modeling and can be more complicated to use. 

Want to learn the Xs and Os of Machine Learning? Check out our comprehensive guide.

How to perform a topic modeling analysis

So, how do you make this magic work? 

There are two main ways to do topic modeling—using Python is the most common. If you’re not into coding, I’ll cover a few no-code tools as well. 

Python for topic modeling 

The most popular application of topic modeling uses Python to gather, clean, analyze, and display the data. 

If you’re comfortable with Python (or have someone on your team who is), I’ll give you a quick rundown. 

This post on GitHub walks you through the entire process, which includes: 

1. Inputting data from different sources. 
2. Cleaning the data to focus on topics and remove punctuation and capitalization differences.  
3. Perform an analysis to understand the most common words used. 

Finally, you can analyze the data to see which topics are related, what type of keywords are mentioned in relation to each other, and spot gaps in your current content. 

No-code topic modeling tools?

What about those of us without a computer science degree? Are we stuck creating mediocre content as the world of AI takes over? 

Luckily, no. There are several methods to leverage the power of topic modeling without learning a whole new language. 

First, you can hire an agency to do the work for you. If the idea of mucking in code makes you want to curl up in a ball and cry, this is likely your best bet. (No judgment.) 

Alternatively, you can download this TopicModeling tool from Google Archive. (This video walks you through how to use the tool.)

For a slightly less scientific approach, you can use a word cloud generator to get a general idea of related topics, though they don’t allow you to upload as much data or analyze as deeply. 

How can topic modeling improve your SEO strategy?

Topic modeling improves SEO by increasing the relevance of your content. 

When your content isn’t considered relevant, it’s unlikely that search engines will consider it the best answer for your targeted keywords. 

No matter how hard you work to build backlinks or improve page speed, without relevance, you’re unlikely to rank for your keywords. As a result, you’ll lose traffic across an entire topic. 

No good. 

Here are a few specific applications of topic modeling for SEO: 

• Entity SEO: Topic modeling can improve entity SEO by helping you cover a topic more fully. For example, you might add headings or include landing pages for topics related to your core term. 
• Optimize for semantic search: Topic modeling can highlight related terms that make it easier for users to find the sites they’re actually looking for. 
• Improve product descriptions: Ecommerce businesses can use topic modeling to see which features users care about and use those features as headings or even landing pages. 
• Uncover new longtail keywords: Keyword tools lists might provide ‘related’ keywords, but topic modeling provides data-backed topics you can add to your SEO strategy.   

Proper topic modeling also helps establish your business as an authority on a specific topic, increasing visibility, and organic search traffic. Ranking well for terms high in the funnel also improves your ranking for more lucrative keywords further in the buyer’s journey.

How can you use topic modeling to inform your content strategy?

One of my favorite applications of topic modeling is using it to inform your content strategy. 

Remember, you can use topic modeling to analyze any type of content or conversation. For example, you could analyze every tweet for the past 12 months on B2B marketing and use that data to write a complete guide to B2B marketing.

You can analyze your own content, competitor’s content, and even customer reviews. 

So how can you use the data?  

• Find content gaps: Analyze your current content and compare it to the search results to find content gaps—and fill them. 
• Update old content: Got older content that just isn’t ranking anymore? Use topic modeling on the top search results to find related topics you can add. 
• Create topic clusters: Topic clusters are a great way to organize content and drive organic traffic by publishing several related pieces of content and interlinking them. Topic modeling can highlight subtopics for topic clusters. 

Topic modeling helps people find the most relevant content 

Topic modeling is, essentially, throwing all the content on a topic into a bag and then seeing which related topics are used the most. For users, this means they are more likely to find the most relevant search results faster. 

For marketers, it’s an opportunity to gain deeper insights into what users want to know so you can deliver the exact information they want.

The post How Topic Modeling Can Improve Your Organic Growth appeared first on iPullRank.

Both perspectives are true: NLG can help marketers with their workloads, but also requires heavy involvement from its users to take the content from ideation to a version worth publishing. No matter how content is created, marketers still need to implement SEO best practices into every step of the process. NLG will adjust the workflow of marketers and writers to improve their efficiency. In short, human intuition, heart, and creativity can never be completely replaced by technology. 

This article will cover natural language generation for SEO and how to fully utilize both to create high-quality content, usually faster and more creative than ever before.

What is natural language generation?

Natural language generation, sometimes referred to as NLG, is the process of taking data points, such as a location, topic, and event, and turning it into a piece of content.

AI Multiple identifies this process with the following six steps:

1. Content Requirements: What kind of content will the AI be creating? The program needs the requirements for the type of content. For instance, if you wanted the software to write tweets, they’d have to know about Twitter’s character limits.
2. Data Interpretation: In essence, the system takes the ‘content brief,’ analyzes the examples, and starts building out the AI-generated content. In a news story about a donut shop opening, for example, the software would need to know the name, location, hours, and any other information about the opening in order to write the story.
3. Content Planning: The software must process how the piece of content needs to be structured. If you need blog posts, the software needs to know there is a beginning, middle, and conclusion with a call-to-action.
4. Sentence Creation: Time to write sentences. The AI takes the inputted story details along with the desired keywords and uses available context training data from relevant articles through the web to create unique sentences.
5. Spelling and Grammar: Most AI content generation tools can use spelling and grammar rules (similar to how Microsoft Word or Grammarly corrects spelling errors in documents) to ensure their generated content is free of grammar and spelling errors.
6. Content Output Review: The final step ensures the final output meets the preferences of the user that was specified in the first three steps of the process. This means that the software runs through a “checklist” that includes the intial paraments and main points in steps 1 and 2, that it’s in the correct format as specified in step 3, and then the content is spelling and grammatically correct, as mentioned in step 5.

A 2019 Gartner report predicted that in 2022, about 25 percent of enterprise businesses will be using NLG in some capacity. While we can’t prove this statistic has met its expectation, we do know that the NLG market has continued to grow. Coherent Marketing Insights estimates that this market will grow to almost $2 billon by 2027:

What is the difference between Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Natural Language Generation (NLG)?

According to IBM, NLG is a subcategory of NLP, along with natural language understanding (NLU). 

NLP essentially allows computer algorithms and artificial intelligence to process content, break it down into pieces, categorize it, organize it, and find patterns in it.

“Natural language processing works by taking unstructured data and converting it into a structured data format. It does this through the identification of named entities (a process called named entity recognition) and identification of word patterns, using methods like tokenization, stemming, and lemmatization, which examine the root forms of words.”

NLU is the next step in the process, where AI begins to understand the context and meaning of the text and inputted content. Is AI sentient? Like does it truly understand the content? Unlikely. But it’s getting significantly better at understanding concepts and relationships.

Finally, NLG is the act of creating net-new text content based on a prompt from the user. 

How does natural language generation play into SEO? 

As available AI content generation tools continue to improve, SEOs and content marketers can create more content, faster.  With that type of resource, content can scale. Imagine being able to write 1000s of unique eCommerce product pages or franchise location pages in a week.

However, since AI still cannot write like a human can, the content creation process requires humans to grow, improve, and review content that was written with NLG. We still need some serious oversight and quality assurance.

Caveats aside, let’s map out the NLG benefits and processes to use while also incorporating SEO.

What are the benefits of using NLG for content?

NLG incorporates the best of machine learning into actionable content generation. You can tap into AI content generation tools or build your own python scripts. These tools help you create the early drafts of many types of content, from outlines to blog title ideas and social media posts. 

For marketers and content creators tasked with ongoing content generation, using NLG tools as a part of their process can, at the very least, help jumpstart the research and development. 

While these tools will not fully replace content created by a human, they are valuable partners that may generate ideas, content structures, or text that we wouldn’t have thought of on our own.

5 Ways to Use of NLG for SEO

Meta Descriptions

As mentioned in a previous blog post, you can use NLG to create meta descriptions for SEO at a larger scale. This requires a Python script, which does require some programming knowledge. There are various courses and guides available online (such as this one from Real Python) on how to use OpenAI’s open-source NLP tool to build tools for natural language generation Python scripts. 

Essentially, the script tells the AI to take an existing document (the page or blog post you need a meta description for) and summarize it. From there, you can edit the summary as needed to make sure it is concise and fits within the set length of meta descriptions.

Blog Post Title Ideas

If you need more ideas for what blog posts to write or need to make your blog titles more engaging to use as meta titles for the SERPs, NLG can often give you the headstart you need. Using NLG in addition to keyword research and your own creativity can give you data-backed recommendations for blog post title ideas that you might not have thought of single-handedly, especially if you’re already tired of writing. 

Content Outlines

Copy.ai offers blog outlines, complete with suggested topics to cover and research links to get you started. Similar tools that dive even deeper into the research side (complete with competitor analysis) include MarketMuse, Clearscope, and Frase.io. These tools are a good marriage of NLG and SEO, as they include keyword research data and competitor estimates within their tool sets.

Competitor Analysis

As mentioned above, you can use SEO and content marketing-specific tools to run a more detailed competitor analysis for topic keywords within your desired niche. The tools mentioned do a great job of this, but SEO tools like Ahrefs and Semrush also use NLG to give recommendations on what keyword to use or what topics to include in your content based on competitor research. 

The tools look at existing content that is already ranking so you can figure out quickly how to get an advantage by making your content more inclusive and useful than content that’s already ranking.

Content Repurposing

We know that reusing your existing content to create something new and unique has SEO benefits, as it allows you to make more content in different formats, which might appeal to different users. For instance, using NLG to write a YouTube video script or summary from an existing blog post opens your content up to a new audience through video. 

Similarly, you can use NLG tools to write Instagram captions or other social media posts from our existing content, which is indexed by search engines.

How to get started with NLG

Even though the term “natural language generation” sounds intimidating, the actual tools that put it into practice don’t have to be!

While you can create tools and scripts to take advantage of machine learning and NLG, there are several no-code tools that let you create AI-generated content in minutes. 

Many offer free trials or user levels that let you try their tools before deciding to subscribe if you want additional features or monthly content pieces. 

What (no-code) tools can you use to create NLG?

There are several tools already available for users that don’t require any knowledge of code or the mechanics of machine learning. Some of these in the previously mentioned article by AI Multiple include GPT-3, Google’s LaMDA, Gmail’s included smart compose feature, and Google Docs’ included text prediction tool that attempts to predict what you’ll be typing next.

Marketing-specific tools like Copy.ai, Jasper.ai, Simplified.co, and many others offer NLG software to give marketers and writers AI-generated content for a variety of different formats. 

Some include ad copy, blog posts, and social media copy ideas. Marketers are finding that they can use AI-generated content as a “jumping board” to start their writing or content projects. For assistance with writing already in progress, Grammarly uses NLG to recommend sentence rewrites, tone changes, or removal of words for conciseness.

What should you not do when using NLG for content?

The biggest thing to remember when using natural language generation for SEO and content creation is that it’s not going to ever be a complete piece of content that’s ready for publishing. This is NLG’s biggest limitation.

As the algorithms continue to evolve and learn more about content and language through more data analysis, machines will become better at “writing.” But human marketers and SEOs are still needed to fill in the gaps. 

As you experiment with AI content-generation tools, you’ll learn what needs to be edited after the content is generated. Using these tools also helps you understand how to tailor your inputs to create better content. 

Take this unedited example from Copy.ai, using the “write blog outline” template structure. I used the keyword “natural language generation for SEO” and a paragraph from the first draft of this article as a prompt:

• Section: Using AI for SEO
• Section: Embrace NLG, AI, and Machine Learning as tools to help you generate more content.
• Section: Using AI to Generate All Types of Content and Content Assets
• Section: Use your own data and content as a foundation and starting point for creating new content.
• Section: Partnerships with companies that work in this area to understand the potential.
• Section: Focus on creating valuable assets and metrics to track impact on SEO, traffic, and conversions.
• Takeaway: There is a lot of opportunity with using NLG, AI, and Machine Learning in helping us create more content at scale.

This outline gives us a valuable starting point, but it’s not as in-depth as a human-generated outline may be. It also includes information that may not be relevant to what we want the content to include, such as “Partnerships with companies that work in this area to understand the potential.”

While using these tools, you better understand what inputs are useful to create more specific content to match your needs. Your AI content generation projects and briefs can evolve as you learn how the tools work. 

While natural language generation for SEO doesn’t signify a huge shift in how content is written for human users, it’s important to understand how natural language processing and machine learning works to make content generation easier.

FAQ About Natural Language Generation for SEO

Will your rankings on Google decrease for using NLG?

No, think of NLG tools as any other SEO tool you have in your arsenal. As long as the content is unique, well-researched, easy to read, and provides value for the user, Google won’t decrease your SERP rankings for using NLG content.

How does AI write content?

Natural language generation is the process in which AI can create and publish its own original content based on previously existing content. This form of technology allows for more data-driven content creation, making your content more relevant to the reader.

What is an AI content generator?

These tools use OpenAI or other algorithms to pull existing content and turn it into something unique and readable, based on user input parameters.

Does Google use NLG?

Yes, Google Autocomplete, Google Docs, Gmail, and Google’s smartphone keyboard are examples of tools that use NLG to help users write content faster.

The post 5 Ways to use Natural Language Generation for SEO appeared first on iPullRank.

** This article was originally published on October 29, 2020. Due to the constant changes in search with the advent of AI, we have updated this article to reflect the current state of the industry. 

After over a decade of supporting enterprise clients in their search engine optimization and AI efforts, I’ve had the opportunity to interface with many procurement professionals across all categories. Recently, it dawned on me that these wonderful folks often don’t have much of an understanding of what it is we do or why any given company may be better at it than another.

Much of our work in this space is educational, so we figured that it would be good to give a high-level overview of SEO, Relevance Engineering, and AI search that would clarify value and where it all plugs into an enterprise organization.

Please understand that this overview is quite opinionated and reflective of the things that we’ve done to drive over a billion dollars in incremental revenue via Organic Search across our client portfolio. As you might imagine, I’m certainly not going to shy away from suggesting that we may be the right fit for your enterprise SEO needs. However, I intend to clarify the lay of the land on the way there.

First, What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization, or SEO, is a marketing activity wherein websites are altered to generate more visibility for their content within search engines from the Organic Search channel. In other words, people don’t naturally build their websites and content in such a way that it automatically ranks in Google; search engines need a little help. We augment content as well as the site’s technical structure and configuration with the goal of driving a higher quantity and quality of traffic.

This is explicitly different from the paid media side of Search, Paid Search (SEM), wherein advertisers select keywords and bid in an auction on the placements of their content in search engines. Studies have shown that 6% of searchers now click the ads, and 94% of searchers click the Organic listings.

Notably, Google is far and away the largest search engine. Depending on whose stats you go by, the chasm between them and the next search engine is quite large. So, unless there is a specific use case or an international need for a country-specific search engine like Baidu (China) or Yandex (Russia), SEOs focus on optimizing for Google.

In practice, everything in SEO is done with respect to the relationship of a keyword to a webpage. While there are many advanced approaches that may involve data science and machine-learning capabilities, the core efforts are generally segmented into five buckets:

1. Market Research 
   
   • What is it? Typically this involves identifying keywords that people are searching for that align with business objectives and reviewing competitors to determine what it is that they are doing to be effective. Google and the SEO industry provide a variety of tools and datasets that allow us to get visibility into this information and explain it through the lens of a client’s need. 
   • What teams does it interface with? SEO firms are usually dealing with marketing, strategy, or brand teams for this work. 
   • What SEO Staff Does This? Data Analysts and SEO Managers
     
     
2. Technical 
   
   • What is it? The technical aspects of SEO involve the “under the hood” components of the website. SEOs alter various configurations of the front-end code, content management system, server, and content delivery mechanisms to ensure the site is accessible to search engine robots. Google and the SEO industry provide a variety of tools for examining the website in the way that search engines experience it to determine what these issues are. 
   • What teams does it interface with? This work is usually done by interfacing with internal or external engineering teams that manage the site and its operations.
   • What SEO Staff Does This?  SEO Managers, SEO Engineers, and Technical SEO Analysts
     
     
3. Content 
   
   • What is it? Developing a relevant content strategy, optimizing existing content, and creating net new content in support of visibility in LLMs in alignment with business objectives and attraction of inbound or external links. 
   • What teams does it interface with? Many teams tend to have a hand in content, so it may involve interfacing with brand, content, strategy, compliance, media, public relations, newsroom, or teams by any number of other names.
   • What SEO Staff Does This? SEO Managers, Relevance Engineers, and Content Strategists
     
     
4. Off-Page
   
   • What is it? Establishing a strong brand online with positive digital PR as well as building external links to the content. It’s important to examine any previously built and attracted links that may yield penalties or demotions in Google’s search results. When doing SEO, this is the area where the most risk lies because Google actively polices the links across the web and may demote or remove sites from its rankings for not adhering to its guidelines. Many enterprise companies avoid link-building as a result.
   • What teams does it interface with? This is generally done by interfacing with brand, media, public relations, partnership, and internal SEO teams.
   • What SEO Staff Does This? SEO Managers or Content Strategists do the strategy work. SEO Coordinators or Outreach Specialists do the outreach.
     
     
5. Reporting 
   
   • What is it? As with any digital marketing channel, SEOs report on the impact of their efforts on the channel and ultimately the business. In the enterprise context, it is often difficult to prepare business intelligence-level reporting because legal compliance issues don’t allow external partners the correct level of access. It can also be difficult because many current SEO tools are unable to measure the relevance of content. External partners are often left to determine creative ways to report on channel metrics to indicate business value of the effort.
   • What teams does it interface with? All teams tend to have a vested interest in the reporting of the SEO program.
   • What SEO Staff Does This? Account Manager, Data Analyst, SEO Manager, or SEO Engineer

How is SEO done?

I suspect any agency that you speak to will have some sort of wheel that shows the process of how they do SEO. These frameworks are a great way to communicate the cyclical process of optimization, but can often be thrown out the window based on the needs and makeup of a business. They also don’t cover all aspects of Relevance Engineering. 

Many SEO firms limit their work to these items, but this oversimplifies how SEO is done in the enterprise since implementing these tactics requires cross-functional alignment as well as a new focus on AI search.

This is why it is often difficult to make SEO happen. So, the best way to explain it is to break down a specific workflow. Consider a situation wherein a page’s content is to be optimized, but the site is composed of a variety of different systems tied together. In this instance, the page is not on a content management system, rather it is a legacy page that needs engineering resources to edit.

1. Request/Brief from client or Identification by the SEO 
2. Keyword Research
3. Competitive Research
4. Content Optimization
5. Brand/Line of Business Review
6. Legal Compliance Review
7. Technical Requirements Scoping
8. Ticket Generation
9. Code Editing
10. Code Testing
11. Code Deployment
12. SEO Implementation Review

Even without going into more depth as to what these steps represent, it is easy to see that a simple SEO implementation can go back and forth between various people in the SEO firm, the business unit, legal, and engineering multiple times before it gets deployed.

What Is Relevance Engineering?

Relevance Engineering is the intersection of information retrieval, user experience, artificial intelligence, content strategy, and digital PR to give visibility in any form of search.

Relevance Engineering makes relevance measurable and quantifiable. Traditional SEO often drifts into guesswork or vague interpretations of Google’s behavior, but this approach treats search as a science. Since relevance isn’t subjective, the tools we use need a way to generate relevance scores.

Conversational search, at its core, is about relevance, and it can be evaluated mathematically. Just like in traditional search, queries and documents exist in a multidimensional vector space, and the closer they are to each other, the more relevant the match.

SEO professionals know best practices and essentially act as power users of search engines. But SEO itself is loosely defined. Relevance Engineering reframes the field, offering a structured framework that pulls together elements from multiple disciplines. It applies engineering discipline and scientific rigor to what has long been an improvised craft:

• Information is organized so users can intuitively understand it.
• Content decisions follow measurable goals.
• Outcomes are evaluated with systematic analysis, not anecdotes.
• Proven success patterns are built to scale.

What is required to get SEO results in the enterprise?

A site has an enterprise SEO need for one of two reasons. Either the site is large and complex or the organization is large and complex. In either case, the implementations are all about scalability and navigating an organization with many competing needs, priorities, and time-consuming processes. This requires that an SEO firm have a level of executive sophistication to continually drive results.

What about niche-specificity? 

It’s important to note that a niche-specific SEO agency does not inherently yield better outcomes. They will certainly already know your industry’s terminology and may be better prepared to generate content for your space, but a strong SEO agency should be able to uncover these elements and acclimate quickly as part of their discovery and strategy processes.

Your company’s transferable knowledge is more than enough to get a great SEO agency up to speed and productive quickly.

Why is it difficult to find a good SEO agency?

It’s difficult for the same reasons that SEO itself is difficult. SEO is an unregulated industry; there are no official standards and no rules aside from Google’s own Search Essentials.

There’s no governing body. It’s an industry built on top of a series of proprietary algorithms that are increasingly complex and nuanced. Methodologies that worked yesterday may not work today, so experience can be both an asset and a liability.

Google has also continually eroded the keyword-level performance data, so SEO doesn’t have the level of measurability that paid channels have. And with the addition of LLMs and AI search channels, the focus is more on visibility and being cited in AI answers rather than keyword ranking.

What types of companies do this work?

Lots of companies say they do this work. Depending on your specific use case, one type of company may be a better fit for your organization. Here’s an overview of who we often compete with:

• Network/Holding Company Agencies – Brands are often after a global footprint or the consolidation of a variety of marketing services, so holding company agencies will often offer SEO as a service. As a previous employee of two holding company agencies, I can tell you that SEO is not a profit center for these organizations and it’s the last thing that someone on a media or creative team wants to integrate into their work. In most cases, holding company agencies sell it as part of the bundle and don’t staff it correctly. This is not true of every holding company agency as there are a handful that do build complete SEO teams. However, it is rare for SEO in these organizations to get access to robust tooling, capitalize on innovation, or be staffed effectively to deliver on all components of SEO such as link building.  For the most part, these organizations are good at delivering polished reports and documents based on safe thinking, but they often struggle at generating results, especially in highly competitive spaces.
  
  • Big Consultancies – Some people like to make the distinction between holding company agencies (Publicis, WPP, Omnicom) and the big consultancies (Deloitte, Accenture, etc.). The latter has made a strong push into digital channels as of late. We have not come against them in competition yet, but I’ve heard of these organizations making a play for media engagements as well. For the purposes of this discussion, I will treat these organizations interchangeably.
• Boutique SEO Agencies – Agencies that focus exclusively or almost exclusively on Organic Search. These organizations tend to have deeply focused teams that are built around this capability. Boutiques tend to be the best suited to delivering actual results rather than just delivering reports. However, these organizations tend to be deficient in creative execution and account management. Oftentimes, these types of organizations believe the account management layer is superfluous and it makes it difficult for enterprise clients to get the level of service that they are accustomed to.
• SEO Software companies – Enterprise SEO software companies not only provide automated solutions for monitoring SEO performance and identifying issues with websites. They understand that knowing issues is not enough to drive results, so these organizations often build professional services teams of former agency employees. While the software itself may always be the right fit for a brand, the services organizations at these companies are often not the right fit if a brand has difficulty with content creation, deployment, link building under-established workflows and/or cross-channel optimization.

So, where does iPullRank fit?

We are a boutique SEO agency with features of both holding company agencies and SEO software companies. I say this because, as the founder, I’ve baked everything I learned about strategy, relationship management, polished deliverables, and thorough analysis from working at ad agencies into what we do. Also, due to my Computer Science background and proclivity for all things technical, we also build customized software solutions and integrate them with best-in-class SEO software and datasets to solve our clients’ problems. I like to think we are on our way to being a big boutique agency.

What should procurement professionals look for in a strong SEO agency?

It is certainly not my place to determine the needs of an organization sight (or maybe site) unseen. Naturally, the procurement professional knows far more than I may ever know about their organization. However, I had been employed at five different agencies (2 holding companies, 3 boutiques) before I started my own and I have competed and won clients against dozens. What follows is a series of aspects that tend to resonate with enterprise organizations:

• Results-driven – Organizations hire agencies to achieve a specific result. Some agencies are better for showing activity since the standard time and materials billing model rewards that. Other agencies are focused on specific deliverables and/or outcomes.
• Agility – Business objectives and environmental factors. Enterprise companies often need a group that moves faster than they can. An effective SEO agency needs to be able to quickly pivot and adapt.
• Ability to Effectively Prioritize Recommendations – There are often a wealth of issues that are impeding Organic Search visibility on an enterprise website. An agency needs to be able to identify business impact and develop business cases to drive buy-in for execution. 
• Ability to Stay on Top of Google’s Rate of Change – Google makes algorithm updates every single day. Some are minor and unreported, others are major shifts in how they are examining and ranking web pages. An agency needs to stay up to date and continually present POVs to help contextualize opportunities for the enterprise.
• Strong Understanding of SEO Technologies – While the SEO software industry struggles to keep pace with Google, the community rapidly rolls out open-source tooling to help close the gap. The ideal SEO firm is actively monitoring and capitalizing on these innovations.
• Content/Creative Capabilities – Historically, SEO has been guilty of generating poorly-written, keyword-laden content in support of attracting search engine robots. Since Google’s Panda algorithm update in 2011, that method is no longer effective. SEO firms have to have content and creative abilities similar to that of a Creative agency. The ideal SEO firm has a strong handle on content strategy and content marketing.
• Ability to Fit into the Marketing Mix – Since SEO often requires sites and pages to follow specific structures, it has historically been a disruption to the marketing mix. The ideal SEO partner for the enterprise understands when to push and pull and how to acclimate recommendations to achieve the most harmony within the marketing mix.
• Ability to Weigh UX in Decisions – SEO generally requires content to be more text-heavy than design teams would prefer. As such, SEO teams need to have a strong understanding of how to balance the user experience with the need to pepper pages with content and links.
• Ability to Interface with Development Teams – Enterprise SEO is largely about developing scalable solutions. Most of the scale is achieved through technical implementation. However, there is often a gulf between an SEO’s ability to identify a problem and their ability to communicate the solution to an engineer. The ideal SEO firm has the ability to deliver recommendations with the same precision as a product manager.
• Innovation and Thought Leadership – The digital space is in constant flux which yields a lot of pockets of opportunity. Due to the nature of chasing algorithms, SEOs are known for their ingenuity and creative solutions. There is a wealth of people in the SEO community who are constantly challenging the status quo and identifying innovations at the intersections of media, machine learning, and SEO. You won’t find these people at holding companies. 
• Deep Understanding of the Web – The Web is a highly technical environment with underpinnings that have a direct impact on the performance of a website in Organic Search. The people layer of the web is also built on 25 years of shared cultural experience that should inform content. SEOs need deep knowledge of both layers in order to be successful.
• Strong Data Capabilities – From terabytes of server logs to telemetry extracted from pages to standard analytics, SEOs manage a wealth of data and require strong data mining skills in order to identify and report on pockets of opportunity.
• Strong Account Management Capabilities – Enterprise companies have a service level expectation that includes a layer of relationship management. Smaller organizations, both supplier and client-side, do not believe in the value of this layer of account management. This is a mistake when dealing with large organizations. In an SEO organization, the Account Manager is perhaps the most important team member in that they are continually working on both sides of the equation to ensure that all parties are maintaining alignment with each other and the business objectives. This is a non-negotiable requirement for the enterprise.
• Ability to Build Site Authority Through White Hat Methods – Building links is difficult due to Google’s requirements and it’s even harder due to the legal limitations of enterprise companies. Only boutique SEO firms truly have the staffing and creativity to navigate this component of the work. Holding companies always outsource it.

How do these types of companies stack up?

Again, this is just my opinion based on 14 years in the SEO industry and working at five agencies. The strength breakdown is as follows:

In short, you should hire a holding company to do your SEO when you want to get a good deal as part of a bigger ask, check the SEO box, but only if/when results are not a critical measure of the program. Hire a boutique firm when results are the primary need. Hire a software company when your internal SEO team is already strong and you just need to supplement their busy work. Hire iPullRank when you want the best of all things.

What are common misconceptions that enterprise companies have about SEO?

• We Should Automatically Rank Because We’re ________ – According to Google, their Organic Search algorithm is powered by various complex systems that are weighted by an unknown number of ranking factors. While the strength of a brand in the real world may be reflected in some of those factors, a brand does not inherently rank in Google just because it exists. However, brand is becoming more important due to AI search systems decreasing traffic to websites by providing zero-click answers. Your personal brand can help drive traffic to your site.
• Our Category Competitors Are Our SEO Competitors – Maybe, but probably not. For example, if you’re Target, your category competitor is Wal-Mart offline. Online, your main competitor is Amazon. If you’re Delta, your category competitor offline is American Airlines. In Organic Search, your competitor is TripAdvisor. Suffice it to say, you are competing with content brands that have stronger online footprints and have more latitude to execute.
• SEO is a One-Time Thing – Even if you achieve number one rankings today, Google may make a change, and your competitor does not stop optimizing. SEO requires a continuous effort to be effective long-term.
• SEO is Just Technical – SEO is improving the visibility of content. The technical aspects are combined with strategic content and outreach execution to drive results. You cannot do SEO effectively without aligning it with a content effort.
• SEO Traffic is Free – Organic Search as a channel is only as free as the site you build, the content you put onto it, and the authority you build to that content through links. Effectively, the cost of SEO is a function of the efforts that went into it. It is certainly not the same as a Paid Media channel where you are directly purchasing an impression or click, but it is not free.
• It Takes Six Months to See SEO Results – This may have been true 15 years ago, when Google was a younger company with less computing power at its disposal. However, it is completely untrue in 2024. Google does not take six months to react to the changes that a website makes. Rather, it generally takes six months for an enterprise company to deploy enough changes to see a result.
• You have to make “SEO Content” – In 2011, Google launched the Panda algorithm update, which demoted and devalued content that did not have utility for actual users. Since then, SEO has had to realign its efforts with content that people want. No longer is there “SEO Content,” rather, there is only content that sits at the intersection of user needs, business goals, and search engine expectations.
• SEO is just metadata – Aside from a page title, metadata is generally not weighed in evaluation for rankings. Metadata is really just an opportunity to make a good first impression on a user and encourage them to click your result.
• All You Need is Content – You definitely need content; however, Google is not sophisticated enough to penetrate the idiosyncrasies of poorly designed, configured, or built websites. Due to the explosion of newer technologies in recent years, the technical aspects have become more and more important. I call this the Technical SEO Renaissance.
• You Don’t Need Links – The reason why Google outperformed all the search engines that came before it (e.g., Excite, Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo) was because they devised a mechanism called PageRank. This value computes the quantity and quality of links pointing to a given page on the website. Google’s algorithm has become more sophisticated, but PageRank is still at its core, and links will always be an important factor for ranking.

What is iPullRank’s approach?

Well, I warned you that every SEO company has a wheel of some kind. Here’s our version of it.

I know I’ve taken up a lot of your time already, so I’ll just focus on what is unique about our approach.

1. Strategic Planning – We approach planning similarly to a media agency, and we include methodologies that we pioneered, such as persona-driven keyword research.  As early as our kickoff discussion, we are looking to understand what makes your organization tick, who the key stakeholders are, and what their needs are. We look to understand the business objectives, the media mix, and look to determine how we fit in. At that point, we build out personas and user journey maps based on the key insights. Our personas then inform our keyword research, which then informs competitive intelligence and helps us nail down our strategy.
2. Content Strategy – Content is always a sticky issue within an organization because everyone owns it, which means no one owns it. It is difficult to get content pushed through at the enterprise level, so it requires that we embed ourselves in the organization to be successful. In other words, we don’t just throw out a few creative ideas; we look to understand existing workflows and governance models within the organization so we can align with them to get content done. We review and internalize brand messaging architecture, audit existing content, and then use all the insights from our strategic planning to inform what content will be created to support the growth of the keyword universe. We also use artificial intelligence to optimize existing content against the statistical expectations that search engines have based on what currently ranks for the target query.
3. Technical Development – We engage the engineering teams as early as possible to get a true understanding of the site’s composition. It is our goal to deliver only recommendations that make sense for the technical architecture of the site. From there, we dig into the site to identify and prioritize issues and recommendations. When we deliver those recommendations, they are explained with context so the various stakeholders can understand what we are doing and why. Once the recommendations are accepted, we convert them into user stories and tickets for execution by the engineering team.
4. Promotion – We have various approaches to content promotion, but what is most important at this stage is that we are integrated with the other Paid, Owned, and Earned promotion programs. We integrate with Media to execute SEO efforts that perform in alignment with branded and unbranded media campaigns. This takes shape in the form of Integrated Search programs. We also integrate PR teams to execute scalable link acquisition campaigns.
5. Measurement – Since everything we do is persona-driven, our measurement is as well. We work with enterprise brands to configure their analytics to align with their segmentation or the segmentation that we’ve built. In addition, we work with brands to build multi-channel funnels and execute Search Lift studies to determine how the interplay of channels is yielding results.
6. Optimization – We continually look to improve our work by surfacing new opportunities on the back of our reports. Where possible, we do SEO split testing to validate our recommendations and mitigate the risk of large-scale solutions.

What are some resources to learn more?

There is no shortage of content about SEO. In fact, if you peruse our site, you’ll see plenty of it from several members of the team. Here are a few items that I think may be valuable to build context for a procurement professional. 

• The AI Search Manual: Official Documentation for Relevance Engineering in Search [GUIDE]
• An Introduction to Relevance Engineering: The Future of Search [BLOG]
• How AI Mode Works and How SEO Can Prepare for the Future of Search [WEBINAR]
• Marketing in the Age of LLMs: From Content Creation to Memory Programming [WEBINAR]
• How AI Mode Works and How SEO Can Prepare for the Future of Search [BLOG]
• Relevance Engineering at Scale: Smarter Content Pruning with Embeddings & SEO [BLOG]
• Engineering Relevant Content: Tips to Get Your Content into LLMs [BLOG]
• How Enterprise SEO Needs to Embrace the AI Movement [BLOG]

And Here’s the Pitch!

I hope this overview helps you understand the lay of the land in the SEO space. If you’re not already considering iPullRank and what they have to offer, we’d love the opportunity to share some of our innovative approaches. From content strategy and technical SEO to Relevance Engineering and visibility in AI search, our team has the knowledge and the tools your business needs. 

Read out today and we’ll chat about what we can do to help you stay ahead of the competition. 

The post SEO for the Procurement Professional appeared first on iPullRank.

But how often does the unpredictable occur? Professor and analyst Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined the term “Black Swan Event.” These are events that are improbably and unforeseeable, but despite their supposed rarity, Black Swan Events have occurred with startling frequency.

All of these vary in scale and area of effect, but all of them caused a big financial shakeup. Let’s see how some businesses handled these sudden crises.

Small businesses and the Great Recession

The Great Recession was a financial crisis lasting between 2007 and 2009. It was caused by the collapse of the housing bubble. A simplified version of the events leading up to the crash is that banks started giving out housing loans to high-risk borrowers. Once the borrowers couldn’t afford to pay back the loans, they abandoned their houses.

The wave of new houses being put back on the market created a massive imbalance between supply and demand, leading the housing market to crash and causing a ripple effect that bled into every industry in the United States. When the dust settled, 8.8 million jobs were lost.

Small businesses were some of the hardest hit. Companies that were just starting to become profitable were hit with an impossible setback. One such small business was Starbright Floral Design, a flower shop in New York City. Their niche was selling to financial institutions, with the founder, Nic Faitos, being a former Wall Street stockbroker. They understood the finance world and offered their clients a unique experience. The challenge during the Great Recession was that financial institutions were some of the hardest hit, and many of his clients had begun to drop out.

Faitos’ response was aggressive. By reducing his prices, he aimed to keep his current clients and gain new ones along the way. This was a dangerous gamble because the low prices weren’t making them enough money to stay in business, and the only way to offset the loss in revenue was to keep gaining new clients.

His team was aggressive in reaching out to businesses, and the new clients they picked up were loyal.

When the market recovered, he pushed his prices back up. Because of their excellent service, their new and old clients were willing to pay higher prices. After the recession, Starbright Floral Design was able to double its revenue from pre-recession.

Major retailers and the Great Recession

On a much larger scale, major retailers also suffered and many of the biggest names at the time went out of business including Circuit City and Borders. The large size that made these companies seem invincible at the time was now what was causing their rapid decline.

One retailer that came out ahead was Best Buy. Today they are a staple across America, but during the Great Recession, they were dwindling just as fast as their competitors. Their business model wasn’t working anymore, and they needed to make major shifts if they were going to survive where their competitors had perished.

A major hurdle for all retailers was the threat of customers going to Amazon for superior prices. A new CEO, Hubert Joly, had just stepped in, and he was ready to take on this impossible challenge. Joly recognized a customer behavior that was detrimental to their business, a concept called Showrooming. This was when a potential customer would go into a store to check out a product they were thinking about buying, then instead of buying it at the store, they would go online and order it for a better price. The online stores were getting the benefits of physical stores (seeing the products in person) without having to pay for any of the locations.

To combat Showrooming, Joly implemented a very aggressive price match policy. If you found any product on Amazon, Best Buy would match the price. It was as easy as showing them a printout or pulling it up on your phone.

At this time, Joly also worked to expand their customer base. With the constant release of new technology, less tech-savvy customers struggled to keep up. Best Buy already offered in-store tech support with their Geek Squad service, but now they would expand it exponentially and give customers something that online retailers never could. Now the Geek Squad wasn’t just in-store, they would also offer a variety of in-home services. Customers could get advice on what products to buy, home installation, and even car device installation.

All of these were changes that couldn’t be found with an online retailer, and they helped Best Buy survive what is now called “The Retail Apocalypse.” When they emerged, they found that many of their competitors were now gone, and they were able to fill an even larger market share.

People made fortunes off of the growth but the economic party ended at the mysterious moment when everyone individually, yet somehow collectively, decided to cash out. Companies began to lose money the entire tech industry saw an equally massive decline. During this time, many rising star companies met their end, including Pets.com and eToys.com

Airlines and COVID-19

The best way to avoid contracting COVID-19 is to socially distance. The CDC recommends staying 6 feet apart from other groups of people. In daily life, this can be a reasonable request, but it is a disaster for airlines.

In an industry that has mastered the art of how to legally fit the most people into a small space, staying 6 feet apart is impossible. The public would not take the risk, and the airline industry is in the middle of what some are calling the worst crisis in aviation history. The TSA reports that check-ins are down about 70% during this pandemic.

Without swift action, every airline is in danger. Unlike after 9/11, when flights were down in the USA, Airlines can’t lean on international fares to stay afloat. The pandemic is global, and airlines everywhere are feeling it. Bloomberg reports that over 400,000 airline employees have either been furloughed, fired, or told they might lose their jobs soon. Layoffs have been happening continuously throughout the pandemic and continue to this day.

This has forced airlines to rethink everything they know about ticket pricing. The traditional method for deciding ticket prices relies heavily on computer algorithms. Computers track price patterns and customer behavior over many years, and then they set an average good price for a plane ticket. What looks to us like unpredictable fluctuations in price are actually predicted and calculated in advance by computers.

During the pandemic, however, all of this data is useless. In a world where today’s news is enough to affect tomorrow’s customer behavior, customers’ buying patterns have become erratic. The algorithms simply don’t work during a Black Swan Event of this scale.

The airline industry has had to resort to tactics that would seem ridiculous at any other time. Instead of relying on algorithms, they’ve gone back to a time before computers ran the world. Prices are now decided with observation, intuition, and experimentation. By looking at the day-to-day buying patterns of customers, airlines are now manually setting prices. 

If a certain route had too many empty seats one week, the prices for that route would go down the following week. Setting prices is no longer a science, but something that must be felt out as time goes on. They have even resorted to scanning social media for clues on which destinations are going to be in demand.

In essence, Airlines are using the retail model. When retailers are selling a product, they don’t concern themselves with what people were buying years ago. Instead, they will do their best to keep up with the now. The latest trends are a better decider of pricing than a history of buying patterns.

Another strategy that airlines are using is to openly show the public the measures that they are taking to clean their aircraft. Many airlines produced online video ads showing their crew spraying disinfectant, collecting trash, and replacing sanitary coverings on seats. These videos helped give customers a greater sense of security, possibly pushing them to fly sooner than they would have otherwise. Sanitary products are also clearly available at airport terminals and throughout the flying experience.

It is a strategy that was shown to work after 9/11, another Black Swan Event. During this time, airlines worked together with TSA to create clearly visible security measures that everyone can see in plain sight. This included new scanning equipment and new measures such as limiting the amount of liquid allowed on the plane per customer. 

Whether or not these new measures actually worked is another matter, but people feel safer when they can see the safety measures. If the goal was to keep the airline industry alive in a time of fear, they succeeded. This same tactic is being used now to help calm fears of contracting COVID-19.

These businesses have all endured tough times and many have come out better for it. They stayed flexible and reactive in the face of certain bankruptcy. Black Swan Events are unpredictable, but their frequency has certainly increased. One way you can prepare your business for the unpredictable is by having a great SEO plan.  When the world around you changes, being ready to pivot your content and online advertising is critical. Maintaining good SEO performance can help put you ahead of your competition at a time when everyone is trying to stay afloat. You have to build your brand, create content, and stay top of mind. During our most recent Black Swan event, COVID-19, more people are more focused online on news, personal connection, and their careers. Some of the strategies we’ve observed to help businesses get through the pandemic are investing in digital marketing, SEO, and Content strategy. In a world that is more online-focused than ever, these things are no longer luxuries but are crucial to your business’s long-term success.

For more on how to improve your company’s SEO, reach out here to schedule a chat.

The post Can Your Business Survive a Black Swan Event? appeared first on iPullRank.