SEO Snack: Week of April 14th
Quick Week Summary
What I worked on this past week
This past week a lot of my workload was centered around new pages that we’re getting live for clients. With this comes reviewing copy written, optimizing for SEO (links, keywords, slug, etc.), and some design suggestions/notes. I also tackled getting documents set up for our work coming up in May and a few reports on both keywords and website analytics for clients to give a gander.
Week Insights
What I struggled with
Unique Industry Keyword Targets
One client that I did a report for is in an interesting/unique industry. At times, I have a tougher time balancing between what keywords MIGHT bring in traffic but are tied exactly to what the company does and keywords that WOULD bring in traffic but aren’t exactly what they offer. It’s something I’m still learning and find important because not every client I ever work with will be in a very well-known/common industry and others might be very innovative with what they offer that there aren’t a ton of "true competitors”. More on this in the key takeaways.
What was a bigger headache than it needed to be
Setting Up Documents For May Tasks
This is one that just takes a lot of time. It’s part of my job that is needed and important but is a bit mundane. There are some SEO-tied pieces to it including selecting what slugs will be, where pages will live, and eventually (not done yet) which keywords were focusing on for these pages. It’s a fundamental piece that I still have to figure out how to efficiently do.
What went well
Page Edit Optimization
With having some amazing content specialists to work with, this has been a lighter load than in the past. I mentioned above a few things that go into this but an important piece that we’ve added is just educating those who aren’t in SEO roles about more “basic” SEO practices on pages. More about this in the key takeaways.
What to look out for or tune into
AI Content “Struggles”
Obviously with this past Google Update, only AI-generated content took/will take a hit. Now that probably impacts teams that were using only AI to have content written but instead of looking at it as a bad thing, look at the potential “mishaps” it’ll save you. There have been a lot of well-known AI mistakes and with continuing to push the human aspect of content, Google is doing you a favor here.
What weird things happened
Working Through “Crappy” GA4 Traffic
One of the reports that I did this past week was for a client who has a lot of crappy traffic in 2023. What I mean by crappy, is just they had email traffic that was from folks unsubscribing that was counted as direct traffic. This is just a reminder to look at those outliers (and just traffic overall) pretty closely to make sure what you’re reporting is accurate.
Key Takeaways
1. Quality Traffic Over Quantity Traffic
I’ve likely spoken on this before, but still feel like I want to hit on it again. Going back to the client that is in an interesting/unique industry, there have been conversations on whether we should work to rank for keywords that might bring in some more traffic but the quality is low.
In SEO, I am a believer that quality should trump quantity. Not that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t run ads or work to rank for related keywords but you shouldn’t be trying to rank for keywords that are pretty far from what you offer/do.
In my head, bringing in a good amount of quality traffic that will have a higher conversion rate compared to being able to show an insane increase in traffic but that being low quality that won’t convert should always win.
2. Importance Of SEO Education (For Non-SEO Roles)
If you’re a one-man show, this won’t apply to you. But if you’re working with a team of content writers, web designers, etc. it’s important to give them some education about SEO best practices when creating blogs, resources, pages, etc.
This doesn’t have to be a lot and they don’t have to become extremely well skilled here but things like link hierarchy, the importance of headers, alt text, and things similar will help your content creation process become a bit more efficient.
From the start, SEO will be at least thought of when creating that content and will only become more optimized the further down the process you get. It shouldn’t be just one step, it should be part of the whole process because one of the big reasons (other than giving users great informational content) you’re creating content is to help with SEO efforts, rank for more (or rank better) keywords, and bring in converting traffic.
Resources To Look At
1. AI Content Resource
This is to help you avoid the “pitfalls” of only using AI content.
2. Looker Studio Google Templates
With doing a lot of research and work on reporting recently, this is one of the better blogs around Looker Studio templates for Google reporting. Might come in handy.
