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SEO Audits: Building a Website Recovery Roadmap After Google Updates
Hey there, Reddit’s largest Marketing community! Given that most of you work with clients’ websites, we believe that insights into website audits would be super valuable here. Today, we’re going to share some highlights from our conversation with Olga Zarr, the Founder & CEO of SEOSLY. She’ll be sharing her expertise on performing SEO audits for digital businesses and agencies, especially in light of recent Google updates. Off we go!
Host:We know that Google updates (like the recent helpful content updates, spam, and two core updates that were rolled out within the last two months), are really shaking things up for different websites. What would you tell to people who are wondering how Google updates can affect their website’s performance? Guest:There are three types of scenarios. 1.) The first one is you aren’t affected at all, which I noticed in the case of websites where I really don’t do any tricks. I just publish content based on SEO fundamentals. Those types of websites usually are not affected by core updates. 2.) There is of course the possibility of a very positive effect, which means that Google changed something they value and now you have this thing present. You are using it to like 100%. And then you can experience a traffic spike. 3) There can also be a negative outcome where you basically lose traffic because Google is now valuing something you don’t have.
Host:What if we go for the second scenario, and you see a traffic drop or ranking decrease and you know that a Google update was just recently released? What is the first thing you suggest to do to figure out what went wrong for your specific website? Guest:The most important thing is to not do anything. Wait until the update is finished and then take a close strategic approach in really assessing who is now ranking above you and how they differ from your site. [Look at] what they have that you don’t have.
Host:Do you analyze on page, off page, technical… what do you look at? Guest:When I land new clients, or when someone comes to me because they lost traffic and they need a traffic drop analysis, what I always suggest doing is a full SEO audit. Analyze the site from all possible angles, meaning on page, off page, technical, content… Everything. [I look at] the full package.
Host:Is there anything that you do to automate the process? Guest:For example, when I start the audit, I spend 30 minutes or so just playing with the website; opening it on my phone, browsing it, clicking, trying to add things to cards, adding some filters, just seeing how the site works. And there’s an automatic part where I have to crawl the sites. So that I have all the URLs, all the images extracted, everything, JavaScript executed… So that I can see everything from the technical side. I can see the size of the site, the status codes… all those types of things. You have to use the tools intelligently but still rely on your own human element, the human brain.
Host:Could share your experience in terms of what you look at specifically? Guest:I have my own template (It’s public, I share it on my website). I think there are 288 points or something… then I go into Google Search Console and review every report there (and also Google Analytics). And these are the first three things I do, and then I follow the checklist which usually then starts with technical things like robots, text, sitemaps, titles, and other things like that.
Host:How do you decide the priority of which issues need to be fixed? Guest:Generally, you want to divide the issues; like their priority, and their urgency, and how easy it is to implement them. Because sometimes it may, in the case of a huge e-commerce site, getting one small thing done, which is not really that important, may take months. But there may be smaller things you can do, which will take a shorter period of time, and they can have a bigger impact. So you need to assess what issues are critical, and are harming SEO right now. So this usually has to be taken care of in the first place. Then I always try to identify some quick SEO wins (as a bonus) so that potentially the client can see some positive results sooner than later, because usually SEO takes a lot of time. […] I got clients saying that they are not visible in Google for their brand name. They wanted me to do branded type of research: what’s going on, why their brand is not showing up, etc. And the first thing I do, I realize that they have no index tag on their site. It is not the problem with their brand, but their site is blocked from indexing. So without solving this one thing, there is no point in doing anything else.
Host:I wanted to get your thoughts… For example, you have 10 clients, you have your own website, and you need to take care of everybody’s audit. How do you manage that process? Guest:You have to use a task management program. You can create those processes there; what step needs to be taken as the first one, the second one, and you simply train your SEOs. Simply follow them, and this way, you can just review their work instead of doing it by yourself. It’s scalable. And don’t forget about automatically reviewing and alerting using specialized tools.
And there you have it. These insights should help your SEO agency thrive and improve your processes with clients. Each of the points presented above were handpicked specifically to help you build your website auditing and prioritization workflow. I hope you guys also enjoyed these highlights. And don’t hesitate to share your thoughts in the comments section below. Our team wishes you a profitable Q4 and the best of success in all your marketing projects!
15 powerful “psychological tricks” to increase your sales💰
Sell your freemium as LTD. If your audience is price-sensitive like SMBs or freelancers, you might want to convert your freemium into LTD where they have to pay for lifetime access once, and once they’re in upsell them a subscription.
Price Anchoring: Use comparative pricing to show the value of your offer, making your product more attractive price-wise.
Leverage Social Proof: People base their purchasing decisions on others’ experiences. Highlight reviews and testimonials in your marketing to show that your product is trusted and valued by people similar to your ICP.
Solicit Genuine Reviews: Encourage your satisfied customers to leave honest reviews. This not only provides social proof but also counters any skepticism about the authenticity of the reviews.
Offer Free Trials or Demos. PLG for the win. Let customers to test your product without commitment can be a major a decisive factor in their decision to purchase.
Offer Limited Choices: Too many options will overwhelm your prospects. Limit their choices just enough so they feel like they are making the decision.
Address the Fear of Making the Wrong Decision: Providing options like money-back guarantees can reduce the perceived risk and encourage purchases, despite the actual usage of such guarantees being low.
Utilize Scarcity and Urgency(but don’t fake it). Indicate limited availability or time-sensitive offers to create a sense of urgency, prompting quicker purchasing decisions.
Brand Familiarity: Build brand awareness through repeated exposure. Familiar brands are often trusted more, leading to higher chances of purchase.
Reduce Cognitive Load: Simplify information and choices to avoid overwhelming potential customers, making it easier for them to decide.
Create a Ceremony Around Pricing: For B2B or high-value products, making customers wait for a quote can signal quality and thoughtfulness, as well as increase perceived value.
Use Clear Calls to Action (CTAs): Guide customers on what to do next with clear and specific instructions.
Target a ‘Starving Crowd’: Identify and cater to a market with a strong, existing need for your product or service.
Tailor Messaging to Audience Expectations: Understand the stereotypes or assumptions your target audience might have about your product or industry. Craft your marketing messages to align with these perceptions positively. For instance, if you’re marketing a luxury product, your audience might assume high quality and exclusivity, so your messaging should reinforce these ideas.
Challenge Negative Perceptions: If your product or industry suffers from negative stereotypes, use your marketing to challenge and change these perceptions. For example, if you sell a product that’s traditionally seen as low quality or cheap, focus on showcasing its unexpected durability or high-end features.
Marketing begins and ends with measurement. Here’s how to make sense of it all
We’re in a watershed moment for advertising.
Expanded regulations are shifting the privacy landscape, as consumers demand more transparency and control over their data. And platform updates — like Chrome’s plans to deprecate third-party cookies in the second half of 2024 — require businesses to adopt more durable ways to meet their marketing objectives and drive business growth. Then there’s the rapid evolution of newer technologies, including AI.
Disruption isn’t new to marketers, but this time around, it’s particularly profound. Because, while the fundamentals of marketing haven’t changed, how you achieve your goals is changing dramatically.
At Google, we’re building products and services to help you navigate this transition with confidence, and we believe that confidence begins with measurement. Without a firm grasp of the signals you use to achieve your goals, you’re driving without a map. With the proper data and a strong marketing measurement foundation, you can see clearly what’s working and make adjustments.
In our current context, this can still feel daunting. Here’s the good news: The steps toward a strong measurement foundation enable you to take advantage of AI opportunities. Used together, these components will help you make decisions with confidence and power AI to deliver long-term performance for your business. But taking action is easier when you start by asking the right questions.
We’ve thought through and answered three critical measurement considerations. We hope they provide you with confidence as you prepare for 2024. Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room.
How can I effectively measure my campaigns’ success in a post-third-party cookie world?
Until recently, cookies and other identifiers would automatically capture signals to help marketers better understand their customers. These capabilities weren’t built with privacy in mind, however, and they are gradually being phased out.
While 90% of marketers say that first-party data is important to their digital marketing, just 1 in 3 claim to be using it effectively.
As a marketer, your best response to the departure of third-party cookies is a strong foundation of first-party data. This data, established from meaningful connections you make with your customers, is decisive information for Google solutions. Once you have a strong foundation, Google AI works to deliver insights and find new customers, no matter the kind of data you enter, be it website interactions, purchase history, or profit. This means you can get accurate conversion measurement while also fueling AI with high-quality information.
First, set your goals. Then, as you uncover insights and make adjustments, AI will learn from you. And, because your business owns this data, you have full control over how it’s used and collected. Any collection of data should, above all else, build customer trust in your brand and help you meet people’s needs.
Unfortunately, for many, first-party data is often fragmented, unstructured, and scattered across many different systems within a business, including customer relationship management, data storage systems, and customer data platforms. Indeed, while 90% of marketers say that first-party data is important to their digital marketing, just 1 in 3 claim to be using it effectively.1
Proper sitewide tagging is essential to effectively measure and act on your data.
Effectively capturing first-party data and organizing it to work for specific business needs can be challenging to do on your own. That’s why we’ve introduced solutions like Google Ads Data Manager, which simplifies data management, making it easier to measure conversions and reach people with relevant ads.
Beyond prioritizing a first-party data strategy, what’s the first privacy-preserving tool I should adopt?
Sitewide tags are fundamental to a strong measurement foundation. They help marketers ingest high-quality first-party data to understand how customers are interacting with their brand online.
Historically, it’s been difficult to set up and manage website tags without technical expertise or a tag management platform, like Google Tag Manager. To address this, we introduced a single, reusable Google Tag that helps marketers do more across different Google products and accounts without changing their website code. Since then, we’ve rolled out additional tagging capabilities that simplify a website’s setup and provide more visibility into the measurement coverage.
Whether it’s through the Google Tag or Tag Manager, proper sitewide tagging is essential to effectively measure and act on your data. One company that has shown measurement excellence through tagging is The North Face.
The North Face uses Google Tag Manager to capture the full spectrum of consumer behavior, turn those signals into insights, and then measure the behavior. This enables the company to adjust its marketing in near real-time and better serve customers. It’s driving conversions and growing revenue as a result.
Bethany Evans, The North Face’s VP of Americas marketing, explained how Tag Manager helped her team keep up with the latest emerging search terms for products they sell. Armed with that information, the team would rename their products to ensure consumers could find what they are looking for online. “We were able to quickly rename our products and make sure that our search functionality was working on the website to serve up that information, and we saw, essentially, a tripling overnight in both conversion and revenue, because people were able to find what they were looking for.”
Beyond website tags, there are several other existing tools ready to be put to work. Explore our AI Essentials for a comprehensive list.
What is the relationship between my first-party data and AI, and does it prioritize privacy?
AI technologies are only as good as the information they’re fed. The higher quality the information input, the better the output. For some, this information could be time spent on your website and app installations; others may focus on revenue and purchase history. And since you know your customers and campaign goals best, training AI on those insights means connecting the signals that matter most to your business — whether that’s an increase in conversions or acquiring high lifetime value customers.
First-party data acts like premium fuel for AI tools — a high-quality input that generates better output. And while some advertisers worry that fueling AI with their first-party data will result in them losing control over both, that’s not the case.
Here’s why. We do use aggregated conversion data for the overall benefit of advertisers, such as to understand whether a customer is more likely to convert. This aggregated data plays a crucial role in improving bidding and detecting spam and fraud. We ensure that individual advertiser data remains fully protected, while employing durable measurement and audience solutions.
First-party data acts like premium fuel for AI tools — a high-quality input that generates better output.
All AI algorithms train on large data sets, which is what, given the right information, makes them so reliable. But remember, it takes time for AI to learn. The sooner you begin working with AI, the sooner it can benefit your bottom line. Already, we are seeing many companies thoughtfully assess their business performance indicators to deliberately build their organizations in a way that enables agile work geared toward specific-business needs.
A powerful example of an advertiser using the strength of first-party data together with AI to achieve impressive results is Dutch bicycle company Swapfiets. A subscription-based business, one of Swapfiets’ biggest challenges is growing a new customer base. To address it, the company tapped into Google AI by combining Performance Max’s new customer acquisition goal with its online and offline Customer Match data. Swapfiets saw a 36% increase in new customer transactions. Because of this result, the new customer acquisition goal is now part of Swapfiets’ always-on campaign across all of its markets.
Prepare for tomorrow, today
It’s easy to feel overwhelmed in today’s marketing ecosystem, but building a strong measurement foundation — by prioritizing high-quality data, leveraging durable tag solutions, and embracing AI — can increase your confidence and put you on the path to better business outcomes. If you haven’t started adopting AI, check out the AI Essentials. Then prepare for a future without third-party cookies to protect your measurement and drive business growth in 2024.
How Subway maximizes the impact of marketing mix modeling to drive growth
Just a few years ago, marketing mix modeling seemed to be fading in importance. Many considered it a relic of predigital times, with a limited ability to generate actionable insights and recommendations. But recent innovations have made marketing mix models (MMMs) far more nimble. When taken together with the inherent privacy durability of MMMs and their ability to measure all marketing spend on a level playing field, these innovations suggest marketing mix models have a bright future in our industry.
At Subway®, MMMs are integral to our cross-media measurement strategy and help us to evaluate the effectiveness of our marketing and media investments. In an effort to further hone our approach, we enlisted our partners at Ipsos MMA and Google to help us navigate an increasingly complex consumer landscape and allocate spend accordingly.1 Here are some of our key learnings.
With the fragmentation of digital advertising across media and ad formats, devices, market areas, and bid strategies, marketers must be cautious not to oversimplify their measurement frameworks. At Subway, we have recommitted to capturing granular insights in order to figure out which channels and ad types represent the smartest investment and to make more informed decisions.
Layering bumper ads on top of TrueView ads drove 2X higher ROI than running TrueView alone.
Thankfully, digging into these details is easier than ever. We can now understand important drivers of platform performance and evaluate the role of new channels and formats in a way that wasn’t possible in the past.
In partnership with Google and Ipsos MMA, Subway has been able to isolate the impact of various types of campaign-level marketing data and integrate those insights into our model. For example, we learned that layering bumper ads on top of TrueView ads drove 2X higher ROI than running TrueView alone, and that sequencing video ads proved 20% more effective than YouTube’s average performance metrics.2
These measurement strategies and capabilities, once unthinkable in marketing mix modeling, have helped Subway see both the forest and the trees when allocating marketing investments.
2. Consider long-term effects
MMMs typically account for the effects of advertising months after initial exposure. But what about measuring its compound effect over a period of years? Many marketers will prioritize quick wins and short-term gains when money is tight, but it’s critical not to lose sight of your brand’s long-term health.
While collaborating with Google and Ipsos MMA, we wanted to examine the impact of advertising over a lengthy time period. So we ran a long-term effects model that applied key brand health metrics, such as unaided awareness, consideration, and familiarity.
The results were clear: Investing in digital is an effective way to increase brand health metrics. Due to our strategic adjustments, Subway’s return on ad spend for online video has increased 1.8X since 2021.3
3. Lean into multiple data sources
Data is essential for driving meaningful organizational change. We use multiple data points to make informed decisions about our marketing strategy and achieve better results for our franchisees.
For example, we used Google’s Reach Planner to understand the reach and frequency dynamics of our advertising on YouTube and linear TV. Reach Planner revealed that we were reaching our target audience 3.5X more per month on TV relative to YouTube.4 This insight into relative frequency played a pivotal role in shaping the qualitative metrics that guided our interpretation of our MMM results.
Then we uncovered another astonishing insight: YouTube on connected TV (CTV) was 2X more effective than other devices.5 These complementary data points gave us the confidence to increase Subway’s YouTube, streaming, and overall digital presence by more than 50%. The business results spoke for themselves. By leaning into these learnings, our business saw 10 consecutive quarters of sales growth.
While we’ll always value TV’s role in our media plan, the data we uncovered helped us better understand its contribution relative to other channels.
An actionable marketing mix model requires organizational readiness
Of course, implementing all of the above into your marketing strategy is easier said than done. Feeding nuanced insights into your MMM and acting on its output may require significant organizational changes at your company.
This is exactly the challenge we faced at Subway, and we tackled it one step at a time.
First, we aligned stakeholders on KPIs and our measurement strategy, ensuring everyone was on the same page for consistency and efficiency. While this may seem straightforward, achieving cross-functional alignment can be daunting.
MMMs will be a critical tool in helping brands to understand the micro and macro shifts that impact performance.
For instance, while some decision-makers evaluate operating costs and efficiencies across the marketing organization, others must prove the impact of their budgets. If they want to make the best decisions for their business, both must align on their objectives and believe in measurement and data. Achieving this alignment means ensuring stakeholders are comfortable with how a marketing mix model works and overcoming any fears they may have. It’s important to explain what MMMs can and can’t do for your team.
We also realized that we needed a more holistic approach to measurement. In the past, traditional media and digital media were often siloed, with different teams responsible for measuring and analyzing each. After breaking down the silos, we better understood how these channels complement each other. While having a single team evaluate every type of media may seem incredibly complicated, in reality it’s simple. No matter the medium, we see what works the best, maximizing ROI, traffic, and revenue with the budget we have.
At Subway, we’re always trying to answer one question: How do we take our franchisee’s dollars and invest them in media that will drive money back to the franchisees? Rethinking our MMM strategy has helped us get closer to that goal. As a brand with 60 years of experience, we know that consumer trends and consumption habits are constantly evolving, especially among younger generations. Going forward, we believe that MMMs will be a critical tool in helping brands to understand the micro and macro shifts in marketing behaviors that impact performance on any time horizon.
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