Look around. You’ll notice something happening in your Google Analytics – organic traffic from traditional search might be slipping. But here’s what’s really interesting: ChatGPT mentions are probably showing up in your referral sources. Welcome to the next evolution of search.

We’re seeing a fundamental shift in how people find information online. Google’s UK users have dropped year-over-year for the first time ever – and that’s before ChatGPT even had web search capabilities. But this isn’t just about ChatGPT vs Google. We’re entering an era where AI doesn’t just find information – it interprets, recommends, and sells on your behalf.

The Battle for Visibility Has Changed

Remember when getting to the top of Google was enough? Those days are numbered. Google’s AI Overviews are now used by over a billion people worldwide. ChatGPT is crushing Bing’s market share since launch. AI tools are becoming the default way people research products and services. Even Google’s regular search results are now heavily influenced by AI.

But here’s the real kicker: if you’re not optimising for this shift, you’re about to lose big. Just ask Unbounce – they went from owning the featured snippet for ‘how to improve sales conversion rate’ to being buried beneath AI-generated content. Their traffic? Decimated.

The good news? This isn’t the end. It’s an opportunity to dominate – if you know how to play the game.

Is your marketing underperforming?

Request a free website and marketing review and our team will tell you how to improve your marketing.

Request a Free Review

Your Secret Weapon: The GEO Game Plan

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is your key to winning in this new landscape. But forget everything you know about traditional SEO – we need to go deeper.

Think about it: when you optimise for traditional search, you’re trying to rank a webpage. When you optimise for generative AI, you’re teaching AI tools how to sell your business. It’s not just about being found anymore – it’s about controlling the narrative that AI tells about your brand.

The shift is seismic. Where traditional SEO aims to rank pages that answer questions, AI tools want to answer questions directly. Your content isn’t just competing for visibility – it’s teaching machines how to recommend you. Your brand positioning needs to be crystal clear, and your authority needs to be unquestionable. Every piece of content you publish is training AI on how to represent your business.

Most marketers are still catching up. At the recent B2B Marketing Show in London, we heard the same story repeatedly from marketing managers: their bosses are playing with ChatGPT all day and demanding to know how to get ranked on it. While they’re still figuring out what questions to ask, you’re about to learn how to dominate this space.

The hard truth? If you’re not preparing for this shift, your competitors will be.

We’ve already seen businesses lose 30-35% of their traffic overnight when AI Overviews pushed them down the page. But this isn’t just a story of loss – it’s an opportunity for massive gains.

We’re seeing businesses use GEO to leapfrog competitors who rank above the classic first position. They’re getting featured prominently in AI-generated answers and turning informational searches directly into sales. Some have built such strong AI recommendations that they’re seeing consistent traffic from sources that didn’t even exist six months ago.

The future of search isn’t coming – it’s here. And you’re about to learn exactly how to dominate it.

Phase 1: Build Your Foundation (SEO Benchmarking)

Before you can dominate in AI search, you need to understand a crucial truth: most AI tools (except Claude) do background web searches before generating answers. This means your traditional SEO foundation needs to be rock-solid.

You still need strong rankings in Google, Bing, and Brave. Traditional SEO isn’t dead – it’s your launchpad for GEO success. Technical optimisation matters more than ever, because AI tools are even more sensitive to structure and clarity than traditional search engines.

Take Perplexity’s search for ‘best CRMs for software businesses’. Before giving an answer, it runs background searches for terms like ‘Best CRM software businesses 2024‘ and ‘Top CRM software for tech companies 2024‘. If you’re not visible in these underlying searches, you won’t even get a chance to be recommended.

Phase 2: Secure Key Territory (AI Overview Optimisation)

With a billion users worldwide, Google’s AI Overviews represent your primary battleground. Success here requires understanding three key areas:

First, identify your battlegrounds. Different industries trigger AI Overviews differently. Finance and medical queries tend to be more conservative, often limiting AI responses to definitions. But most businesses have significant opportunities, particularly with informational queries.

Next, master content formatting. AI Overviews prefer content that corroborates their generated answers. High readability scores aren’t just nice to have – they’re essential. Your content structure needs crystal-clear headings and a logical flow that AI can easily parse.

Finally, track your visibility. Tools like SE Ranking and Semrush (you can get a free trial using our affiliated partner link: thankyouninjas.com) offer AI Overview monitoring, but remember – these results are more dynamic than traditional rankings. What works today might need tweaking tomorrow.

Phase 3: Intelligence Gathering (AI Sentiment Analysis)

This is where things get fascinating.

AI tools aren’t just searching – they’re forming opinions about your business that influence their recommendations.

When we ask Claude (which doesn’t even have internet access) about the best value skincare brands, it recommends The Ordinary. Why? Because its training data associates the brand with ‘high quality’ and ‘good value’. That’s the power of strong AI sentiment.

You need to understand what AI tools ‘know’ about your business. Are they accurately representing your services? What do they think about your pricing and quality? How do they compare you to competitors? Most importantly, what misconceptions need correcting?

This isn’t just about correcting errors – it’s about controlling your narrative. We recently discovered an AI tool thought one of our clients had ‘high client volume’ and therefore ‘less personalised service’. That wasn’t true – but it was costing them recommendations. A targeted content strategy fixed that perception.

Your Battle Plan for 2025

Month 1: Solidify Your Foundations with Quick Wins

This month is all about ensuring your site’s technical and tracking basics are in excellent shape. By the end of Month 1, you’ll have ironed out any technical issues that could prevent both traditional and AI-driven search visibility. You’ll likely see modest but positive shifts in performance—faster loading times, more accurate analytics, and early signs of improved ranking stability—forming a strong platform for all the steps ahead.

Actions:

• Technical SEO Checks: Improve site speed, fix any crawling or indexing issues, and ensure mobile responsiveness.
• Core Web Vitals Optimisation: Enhance page load times and interactivity to meet Google’s standards.
• Analytics & Tracking Setup: Verify that conversions from both organic and AI referral sources are correctly recorded.

Month 2: Elevate Your Content for AI Overviews

With your technical foundations set, this month you’ll focus on content clarity and structure. Your efforts will start to pay off as AI tools find it easier to integrate your pages into their responses. You should begin appearing more frequently in AI-driven summaries, increasing your reach to potential customers early in their research journeys.

Actions:

• AI-Friendly Content Formatting: Add headings, bullet points, and concise summaries, making your content easily digestible by generative AI.
• Schema Mark-up & Structured Data: Implement structured data (e.g. product schema, review schema) to help AI tools represent your offerings accurately.
• Content Gap Filling: Identify and produce content on topics AI-driven users are searching for but which you currently lack.

Month 3: Reinforce Authority & Brand Positioning

Having laid the technical and content groundwork, this month you’ll strengthen your brand’s authority signals. Featuring in industry publications and gathering positive reviews will help shape how AI models describe you. By Month 3’s end, you should see your brand’s name emerging in AI-powered “best of” lists, recommendations, and expert overviews, ultimately attracting more high-quality leads.

Actions:

• Digital PR & Quality Mentions: Secure coverage in reputable industry outlets to influence how AI tools perceive and recommend you.
• Automated Review Collection: Systematically gather and highlight genuine customer feedback, reinforcing positive brand sentiment.
• Sentiment Corrections: Address misconceptions in AI outputs by clarifying your messaging across your site and external platforms.

Month 4 and Beyond: Ongoing Dominance & Adaptation

By now, you’ll have seen tangible improvements in AI-driven visibility, with more direct referrals and higher-quality enquiries. Your brand stands out as an authority, and you’re well-positioned to adapt to future changes. Moving forward, your focus shifts to advanced content—unique data, thought leadership, richer media—and continuous refinement. This sustained effort ensures that as AI tools evolve, your brand remains a go-to recommendation.

Actions:

• Expanded Content Coverage: Publish proprietary research, data comparisons, and expert insights to stand out in AI-generated answers.
• Thought Leadership: Strengthen your brand narrative through authoritative blog posts, whitepapers, videos, or webinars.
• Continuous Optimisation: Monitor AI platform updates (e.g. Gemini 2.0) and refine your strategy to stay ahead of competitors.

By following these steps each month—strengthening foundations, optimising content for AI overviews, building brand authority, and continually adapting—you’ll secure lasting dominance in the next era of search.

The Future Is Here

Want to dominate in this new landscape? You have two options:

• Get our comprehensive GEO Game Plan – we’ll build you a complete strategy for dominating in AI search
• Request a free website and marketing review – see how your current setup measures up

The next marketing battleground is here. The only question is: are you ready to dominate?

Want to learn more about mastering AI search? Check out our in-depth guides:

• What is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?
• How to Rank in Google’s AI Overviews

Or watch one of these videos:

The post How to DOMINATE In The Next Marketing Battleground appeared first on Thinkplus.

TL;DR

Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO, is about getting your content featured in AI responses, like when someone asks ChatGPT a question. Unlike traditional SEO where you’re trying to rank in Google, with GEO you want AI to reference your content as a trusted source. It’s becoming crucial because more people are using AI for search, and if you’re not optimising for it, you’re missing out on massive visibility.

What is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?

Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO, is a technique for optimising website content so it’s referenced and prioritised by AI platforms like ChatGPT and Claude.

Think of it this way: When someone asks ChatGPT a question about your industry, you want your content to be one of the sources it uses to craft its response.

The Difference Between GEO and SEO

Here’s what makes GEO different from traditional SEO:

Traditional Search Engine Optimisation is about ranking in a list of search results – you’re either position 1, 2, or (hopefully not) on page 2. Pretty straightforward.

GEO is completely different. Instead of ranking in a list, you’re trying to get your content quoted within AI-generated responses. It’s more like being referenced in a conversation than appearing in a directory.

Why You Need a GEO Strategy

Look, I get it. Another thing to add to your marketing to-do list. But here’s why this matters:

AI search is growing rapidly, and it’s changing how people find information. Produce and service discovery is happening across multiple platforms and the number of touchpoints required to convert someone is tripling.

Remember when businesses thought they didn’t need social media? This is that moment for GEO. Early adopters will have a massive advantage as AI continues to grow as a primary search method.

How Generative AI Works

Without getting too technical, here’s what you need to know:

Generative AI works by collecting massive amounts of data, processing it, and learning how to understand and respond to questions. When someone asks a question, it creates a new response by pulling information from multiple sources it trusts.

This is why authority and accuracy matter so much in GEO – AI systems are designed to reference content they consider reliable and trustworthy.

How To Measure Generative Engine Optimisation

Measuring GEO is trickier than traditional SEO. Instead of just checking your Google rankings, you need to track:

• Actually ask AI platforms about your brand (yes, really – it’s like interviewing them)
• See how often AI mentions your brand or product/service
• Check whether it’s quoting your information accurately
• See whether you have referral traffic from AI platforms in your analytics
• Watch for increases in branded searches (people often verify AI recommendations through Google)

Pro tip: Do that first one now. Ask ChatGPT what it knows about your brand. The answers might surprise you.

The catch? There’s no centralised tool for this yet. You’ll need to actively (and manually) test and monitor AI responses in your industry.

How To Optimise for Generative Engines (like ChatGPT)

Let’s keep this practical.

First thing you need to do? Interview the AIs about your brand. Sounds bonkers, but trust me on this. Ask ChatGPT and Claude what they know about your business. If they’ve never heard of you (and this happens more than you’d think), you’ve got work to do.

Here’s what actually works:

Create High-Quality Content

Not just for humans, but for AI too. Your content needs to be crystal clear and properly structured:

• Clear, descriptive headings (not clever ones)
• Short paragraphs (think 2-3 sentences max)
• Proper image captions (yes, really – AI reads these)
• Summaries at the start of your content
• Lists when they make sense (like this one)
• FAQs that actually answer real questions

Manage Your Reputation

This is massive for GEO. AI systems don’t just read your website – they look at everything about your brand online:

• Got negative reviews? Deal with them properly
• Respond to every review (good and bad)
• Be active on social media
• Monitor what people say about you on Reddit, Quora, and industry forums
• Keep your business listings up to date everywhere

Only Create Expert-led Content

Here’s the thing about AI – it’s getting scarily good at spotting when you’re winging it. So:

• Stick to what you genuinely know
• Back up claims with real data
• Reference other experts (even competitors)
• Update your content regularly (AI loves fresh content)
• Write informational content that actually helps people

Position Your Brand Clearly

This is where Generative Engine Optimisation gets really interesting. You need to be crystal clear about:

• What makes you different
• Who you actually serve
• Where you operate
• What you’re the expert in
• What problems you solve

Why? Because if you’re not clear about these things, AI won’t be either. And if AI’s not clear, it won’t recommend you.

Earn External Validation for Your Expertise

Unlike traditional SEO, with GEO you want to spread your expertise around:

• Write for industry publications
• Get quoted in the press
• Share your knowledge on other platforms
• Collaborate with other experts
• Build genuine relationships in your industry

Tackle the Essential Technical Bits

Yes, there are some technical things to consider:

• Use proper structured data
• Make sure your site’s easy to crawl
• Keep your XML sitemaps up to date
• Use clear, descriptive URLs
• Make sure your site’s mobile-friendly (still matters)

The really important bit? Test everything.

Ask AI platforms specific questions about your brand and industry. See what they say about you. If they’re saying the wrong things (or nothing at all), you know what you need to work on.

Remember: unlike traditional SEO where you’re fighting for the top spot, with GEO you’re trying to be seen as a trusted source of information. It’s more like building your reputation than winning a race.

That’s the thing about GEO – it’s not just about your website anymore. It’s about your entire online presence.

The Future of Search

Gartner (the tech research and consultancy company) have predicted that traditional SEO traffic could drop by up to 50% by 2028. That’s massive. Even if they’re being dramatic and it’s only 25%, that’s still a quarter of your organic traffic potentially disappearing.

Why? Because people are shifting to AI search tools like ChatGPT and Claude instead of scrolling through Google results.

We’re watching search behaviour change in real-time. More people are turning to AI for answers.

This doesn’t mean traditional SEO is dead – far from it. But it does mean you need both strategies working together.

Is your marketing underperforming?

Request a free website and marketing review and our team will tell you how to improve your marketing.

Request a Free Review

Next Steps

Start by testing how AI platforms currently reference your content. Ask ChatGPT questions about your industry and see if your content shows up.

Once you have an idea of how much coverage your brand is getting, it’s time to improve your content. You don’t need to rewrite your entire website tomorrow. Start small:

1. Pick 3-5 key pages on your site (yes, that’s all you need to start with)
2. Ask AI platforms what they know about those topics
3. Look for gaps between what you offer and what AI says about you
4. Fix those gaps

Here’s a real example: we recently found that an AI platform thought one of our clients only served a specific type of customer. Complete nonsense, but because some old reviews suggested it and nobody had corrected them, the AI was confidently telling people this rubbish.

Then, review your existing content. Is it authoritative? Clear? Backed by data? These are the foundations of good GEO.

In Summary

GEO isn’t just another marketing buzzword – With traditional search traffic potentially dropping by up to 50%, this is something you need to take seriously. It’s a fundamental shift in how content gets discovered and shared. The good news? The core principle is simple: create genuinely helpful, authoritative content that answers real questions.

The businesses that adapt to this change now will have a significant advantage as AI continues to reshape how people search for information. It’s like SEO in 2010 – the early birds got the juiciest worms.

Want to stay updated on all things GEO? Subscribe to our YouTube channel and podcast to stay in the know as this field evolves.

Start by watching this video about how to create a high-impact, revenue-driving digital marketing strategy for 2025:

The post What is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)? appeared first on Thinkplus.

Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) is the process of optimising a website to rank in AI search results. GEO includes optimising content to gain features in AI Overviews, the current AI-generated feature on Google Search, and getting your business referenced and recommended in AI-generated chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google Gemini.

This guide will break down the jargon surrounding GEO, explain where it came from, and what you need to do to rank effectively in AI-driven search. We’ll cover practical steps you can take to optimise your website and search strategy to ensure maximum visibility even when users bypass traditional search engines.

What Is Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO)?

Generative Engine Optimisation, or GEO, is a technique to optimise website content so it’s referenced and prioritised by AI-driven search engines. Unlike traditional SEO, which focuses on ranking in search engines, GEO helps generative models understand and highlight your content when crafting their outputs.

AI is generating answers, articles, visuals, and more. Generative models don’t rank content in a list like current Google search results; instead, they generate a rich response by incorporating multiple sources. If you want your website to be among the top sources AI presents, GEO is where to invest your marketing budget.

GEO focuses on increasing visibility within these generative responses instead of aiming for a higher rank on a search results page. It prioritises factors like succinctness, relevance, factual accuracy and authority to rank and reference products, services and businesses.

The Origins of the Term ‘Generative Engine Optimisation’

The term “Generative Engine Optimization” (or “optimisation” if you’re on the British side of the pond) evolved naturally from SEO. With the rise of tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, Claude and Perplexity, the need for a new type of optimisation emerged. GEO takes the basics of SEO and adapts them to the requirements of AI-driven search.

The term “Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)” was first used in an academic paper published on arXiv and has started to be used among marketers, content creators, and AI enthusiasts to describe this new style of SEO. It’s a bit jargony, in our opinion, and is not to be confused with “geo” as in “geographical” locations, but it gets the job done.

How Generative Engines Work

Generative models use vast datasets to create responses to user prompts. They don’t rank content in the traditional sense but prioritise the most relevant, credible, and fluent data.

For example, if I ask ChatGPT for a recommendation on the best coffee makers, it will prioritise content that includes direct product comparisons:

Instead of using keyword density or backlinks, generative models focus on contextual relevance, user intent and the ability to fulfil the user’s query. The way AI evaluates content is different from traditional search engines like Google. It’s all about usefulness and context.

If I give ChatGPT more information about how I like to brew and drink coffee, it uses this context to provide more tailored recommendations:

More detail is needed in website content now to maximise the likelihood of these generative models understanding the specificities, nuances and relevance of your product or service to different types of users.

Struggling to know how to use AI with your marketing?

Download a free copy of AI Marketing: Everything You Need to Know and get immediately up-to-speed

Download my free copy

GEO vs SEO: Similarities and Differences

SEO, AI Overviews (previously SGE) and GEO are the three organic search terms that we are hearing a lot about, but they serve different purposes and use different strategies.

• SEO (Search Engine Optimisation): SEO is the traditional approach to ensuring your content ranks well on search engines like Google. The goal is to rank on search engine results pages (SERPs) when users search for related topics.
• AI Overviews: AI Overviews are the AI-driven summaries directly at the top of search results (previously called SGE or Search Generative Experience). It provides users with quick overviews of information sourced from various web pages.
• GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation): GEO takes optimisation further into the AI realm, focusing on referencing content within generative models like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. GEO is not just about search rankings; it’s about becoming a part of the AI’s knowledge base so your content is favoured during answer generation.

How Is GEO Similar to SEO?

• Visibility Goals: Both GEO and SEO aim to increase the visibility of your content, whether it’s in traditional search engines or AI-generated responses.
• Content Quality: High-quality, authoritative content is crucial for both GEO and SEO. Search engines and generative models favour content that is reliable, informative and well-structured.
• Keyword Strategy: Just like in SEO, GEO involves identifying relevant keywords and phrases to make content easily discoverable by search engines or AI models.
• Technical Optimisation: Both GEO and SEO benefit from a technically optimised website, including proper use of schema markup, metadata and fast page loading times.
• Importance of Backlinks: Backlinks remain important for establishing authority and credibility in both GEO and SEO.

How Is GEO Different from SEO?

• Target Audience: SEO focuses on improving content visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs), whereas GEO aims to have content referenced in AI-generated responses, such as by ChatGPT, Google Gemini and other generative engines.
• Content Presentation: SEO focuses on ranking on search pages where users choose which link to click. GEO aims to have your content directly included in an AI-generated answer, eliminating the need for users to click through multiple links.
• Authority Signals: While SEO relies heavily on keywords, backlinks, and on-page signals, GEO also depends on brand mentions and having information available in trusted aggregators or directories that AI models may prioritise.
• User Intent Handling: SEO focuses on optimising for a wide range of search intents, from informational to transactional. GEO, on the other hand, focuses on optimising for AI-generated answers, which tend to be more informational and less about driving direct traffic.

“SEO and GEO share a lot of similarities and they pretty much both use all the same building blocks but they put them together in a slightly different way, improving one almost always improves the other as well. You do need to start with a solid foundation of SEO though. SEO is about getting your website found by people, and bots. If the AI bots can’t find and, accurately, index your website, then they can’t evaluate it properly to use in its answers, and that’s where the SEO comes in.”

Andrew Tuxford
Head of SEO

Comparing SEO, AI Overviews and GEO

Let’s get some more details on SEO, AI Overviews and GEO. Here’s how they stack up:

TL:DR:

• SEO is about ranking well on Google and other search engines.
• AI Overviews (previously known as SGE) is about being visible in AI-driven search result summaries.
• GEO is about being recommended by AI tools and generative engines that provide answers or generate content directly. This includes AI chatbots and covers AI Overviews.
• To succeed, you need a mix of all three. You need traditional SEO to build a strong foundation, AI Overview tactics to gain top placement on certain Google searches, and GEO techniques to rank highly within AI-generated outputs.

How to Rank in Generative Engine Optimisation

Want your business recommended more often in generative AI models? We’ve spent a whole lot of time hypothesising, testing and experimenting across industries to understand how to optimise for generative engines. Here are the current theories of how to make it happen:

1. Optimise for Web Search: Many AI tools perform a web search in the background to generate their responses. GEO is built on traditional SEO (yep, spoiler: SEO isn’t dead yet). This means you need to rank in traditional search results to be then picked up by generative models. Essentially, you need to rank well in the old SEO game to be able to play the new GEO game.

Get to the top of Google

Learn how to get your website to the very top of Google (and turn that traffic into revenue).

Download my free copy

2. Optimise for AI Overviews: Google’s AI Overviews summarise content from web searches to deliver users an answer more quickly. These answers dominate the top of the search results page, though the latest figures show that 7% of searches feature AI Overviews. You want your business to be featured in relevant searches where an AI Overview is present. Read our detailed guide here on how to optimise content for AI Overviews

3. Optimise Your Prompts: Be clear and direct in your content. Craft prompts into your content that make it easy for AI to understand what you’re aiming for. Different types of prompts work well:

• Question-Based Prompts: Asking questions like “What is the best strategy for X?” tends to get specific, in-depth answers.
• Instruction-Based Prompts: Content explaining “How to do X step by step” is highly valuable for AI-generated summaries.

4. Use Relevant Keywords: Forget keyword stuffing (hopefully, you forgot this in 2011). Instead, naturally include relevant terms that help AI see the value and purpose of your content. Use latent semantic indexing (LSI) keywords* to improve content accuracy and help the model form associations.

* What’s an example of LSI keywords? If you’re a personal injury law firm, your primary keyword may be “Personal Injury Lawyer”. Some LSI keywords would be: “Accident Attorney,” “Legal representation for injury,” “Car accident claim lawyer”, “Compensation lawyer for injury” and “Slip and fall lawsuit.”

5. Get Mentioned Across the Web: The more your business or content is mentioned online, the more likely it is that generative models will pick it up.

• Brand Mentions: Digital PR and Content Marketing are key here. Getting brand mentions on other websites ensures AI (these LLMs) has plenty of data about your business during its training phase.
• Recommendations from Influencers: Consider setting up affiliate schemes or having influencers test your product/service and share their thoughts on their websites and/or social media.
• Reviews: It’s not just brand mentions that matter, but reviews, too. Getting first-hand customer reviews on your website and third-party platforms like Google Reviews, Trustpilot, Feefo, Reviews.io and other feeds AI answers. You want both quality and quantity here. If reviews are specific, even better.

6. Show Authority and Authenticity: AI values well-sourced, factually correct content. Back up your information with reputable sources to establish authority and ensure it’s written (or at least reviewed) by an authority on the topic. Essentially, follow the principles of E-E-A-T. If the information you are communicating is based on data you have created yourself, provide the data itself (not just the conclusions from it) in the content. This way the AI can read the data directly and combine it with other datasets it knows, extending your GEO reach.

7. Make Short, Helpful Videos: People want answers, not jargon. Quick, informative videos and shorts addressing popular questions like “How do I apply for a mortgage?” can improve the quality of your content (embed them in your blogs) and also have the potential to rank on SERPs and video platforms in their own right.

Best Practices for Implementing GEO

It’s not just what you do but how you do it. Increasingly, we’re seeing GEO prioritising content that follows these best practices:

• • Good Quality: Nobody wants to read crap content. Be detailed, factual and cover topics comprehensively. Include statistics and data points to reinforce credibility. Write a good author bio and include it in the blog post.
  • Consistent Brand Voice: A consistent brand voice helps AI recognise your authority and credibility. We’ve found the best way to do this when generating content through AI tools or to even out tone consistency is to feed it a full Brand Accelerator report that includes tone of voice, copy examples and customer personas.
  • Simplifies Complex Concepts: Make your content easy to understand. Generative models value fluency and readability, so aim to simplify complex topics while keeping key information intact.
  • Skimmable Content: Make your content easy to skim by using headers, bullet points, and visuals. Generative models prefer skimmable content that can be easily summarised.

Is your marketing underperforming?

Request a free website and marketing review and our team will tell you how to improve your marketing.

Request a Free Review

Integrating GEO with SEO

GEO and SEO work hand-in-hand to increase your content’s visibility across both traditional search engines and AI models. By combining these strategies, you ensure your content ranks well in search engines and is referenced by AI models.

Strategies for Effectively Combining GEO and SEO

To get the best of both worlds, we recommend combining GEO and SEO. Here are the strategies we recommend to effectively integrate GEO and SEO into your marketing strategy:

• Optimise for Both Web Search and AI Context: Focus on ranking well in traditional search engines while ensuring your content is detailed enough for AI models to understand its value and relevance.
• Content for Humans and AI Readability: Create well-structured content that is easy to skim by using clear headings, bullet points and concise paragraphs. This helps with traditional SEO while making your content easier for generative models to summarise and reference.
• Backlinks and Brand Mentions: Go bigger and broader with Digital PR, focusing both on building backlinks and gaining brand mentions across many different websites.
• Monitor Visibility in Both Channels: Track your visibility in and traffic from both traditional SERPs and AI-generated responses.

Does Implementing GEO Actually Work?

Research on the effectiveness of implementing GEO is limited, as it is still a new and emerging field. From our experience at Thinkplus, we’ve found that it is effective. We’ve been pioneers in this new type of optimisation, helping clients rank in AI Overviews and teaching other agencies to do the same.

Through using the GEO techniques we discussed above, our Ninja team has secured a whole heap of AI Overview spots for clients across industries. Here’s one example of an AI Overview we’ve secured (and held) for a client in the cleaning sector. This page is consistently the number 1 traffic driver to this client’s website, overtaking the homepage by a lot.

However, we also know that these AI search features and AI chatbots are evolving, and fluctuations happen. Just as with getting the top of Google’s search results, securing AI Overviews or ChatGPT mentions doesn’t mean you’ll maintain them. What marketers can and should do is experiment: figure out how to get them and try different ways to maintain those positions.

We’re not the only ones seeing this. A recent research paper set the SEO world ablaze with its data, finding that implementing GEO techniques can increase visibility in GE responses by up to 40%. The table below from the same paper shows the percentage increases in visibility after making changes to website copy. Greens are new additions, and reds are deletions. Take this relative improvement data with a grain of salt as improvement measures are limited.

Table from GEO: Generative Engine Optimization by Aggarwal et al.

How Can You Measure Results from GEO?

Tracking AI Overviews

SEMrush’s Position Tracking tool tracks AI Overview features for keywords tracked for your campaign. Within the Position Tracking tool, navigate to SERP Features and this will display keywords from your campaign that triggered an AI Overview and whether your website was highlighted.

Tracking Visibility

The primary measure currently being used to track generative engine results is overall visibility. This includes general online visibility metrics like backlinks and brand mentions. You can check your backlink profile using SEMrush’s Backlink Analytics tool. These measures are based on the assumption that the more you’re talked about online, the more likely it is that generative models will include your brand in their responses.

AI Sentiment Analysis

HubSpot has introduced an AI Search Grader tool that measures brand presence by analysing results from GPT-4o. This tool provides a helpful overview of brand sentiment and share of voice.

In practice, the tool runs a series of queries based on the business information you provide, meaning its analysis is limited to the terms you input. However, it can be used repeatedly to evaluate different products or services, giving a more comprehensive insight over time.

Measuring Traffic Referral

The most useful current measure of GEO results are traffic, sessions and conversions on your website that have come through generative engines. At Thinkplus, we set up custom reports using your GA4 data to show GEO results. These reports include AI platform traffic over time, AI platform sessions, AI platform conversions, top GEO landing pages and AI platform traffic and conversion splits.

Tracking Mention Frequency

There is no clear way to track mentions and recommendation frequency within AI chatbots. Currently, the only other way to measure mentions is through manual searches on AI engines. This process is time-consuming and — with the rapid evolution of AI search tools — the gathered data can quickly become outdated.

Challenges of GEO

GEO has its own challenges. One major issue is AI’s inherent bias — generative engines are only as good as the datasets they’re trained on. Bias in those datasets can affect which content is generated. So, content should draw on a diverse range of reputable sources and include information representing different perspectives to mitigate bias.

There are also ethical concerns around misinformation and over-optimisation and ensuring factual accuracy in your content is key to avoiding these pitfalls.

AI is evolving rapidly, and staying up-to-date on algorithm changes and new capabilities is crucial to keeping your content visible. Additionally, the winner-takes-all nature of generative models means that only a handful of top responses get the bulk of visibility, making it essential to ensure your content is as authoritative and high-quality as possible.

That’s where Thinkplus comes in: we’re pioneers of AI search, having led the way in uncovering ranking factors for and getting our clients featured in AI Overviews and on AI chatbots. We keep on top of all the AI search updates so you can focus on other important stuff in your business. Get your free website and marketing review and find out how we can do the same for you.

“Traffic from these generative engines is increasing rapidly, so although they are very new and currently small fry against traditional search, smart marketers are putting in the groundwork now to build visibility in anticipation of the continued consumer shift towards AI.”

Tim Cameron-Kitchen
Founder

The Future of Generative Engine Optimisation

While only a fraction of searches are carried out on AI chatbots and Google still has the vast majority of search market share, some marketers are viewing this moment as a land grab. Integrating GEO into your marketing strategy now puts you ahead of competitors. Many have not yet understood the shift that’s happening.

We Ninjas don’t have a crystal ball here. Still, it’s not absurd to think that generated AI answers could become the primary method for content discovery, especially with its integration into search engines and virtual assistants. If you’re serious about dominating your marketplace, then GEO should be in your game plan.

Move beyond SEO as we know it and get to grips with GEO techniques to future-proof your business

Get GEO insights from our Ninjas by requesting a free website and marketing review. Contact us directly to discuss our Generative Engine Optimisation services.

Listen to Our Podcast on GEO

Join Charlie, Tim and Jess for our podcast on GEO and the future of search. They talk about the rise of GEO and why it matters to marketers.

Written by Charlie Marchant and first published on 15th October 2024. Updated 4th November 2024. Expert review by Andy Tuxford on 11th November 2024.

Charlie Marchant is the CEO of Thinkplus. With over a decade of experience in organic search and content creation, Charlie has driven the growth of the agency’s Content Marketing, Digital PR and Branding services. She is co-author of the book The Ultimate Guide To Content Marketing & Digital PR.

Andy Tuxford is the Head of SEO at Thinkplus. Andy has over 8 years of direct SEO experience and over 20 years in various marketing and management roles. He has driven significant organic growth for businesses of all sizes, from local plumbers to multi-national eCommerce websites. He has played a leading role in AI search experimentation and rankings at Thinkplus.

The post Generative Engine Optimisation: How to Gain Visibility in New AI Search appeared first on Thinkplus.

May 2024 Update – Google has officially released its Generative AI feature for its search engine, called AI Overviews (formerly the “Search Generative Experience” covered below). You can learn how AI Overviews work in this post: How To Rank in Google’s AI Overviews.

Something HUGE is coming. You’re probably no stranger to AI and have seen its increasing integration into marketing life. Google’s AI integration into SGE (Search Generative Experience) is likely to impact ALL businesses significantly with a reduction in organic website traffic of between 15 and 64%!

At Thinkplus we win business (and awards) for our clients through digital marketing. It’s our job to be ahead of the search game – read on to learn more about the future of search or request your free digital marketing and website review video.

Search in 2024: Businesses Could Lose As Much As 15-64% Of Website Traffic

In May Google started testing one of the biggest changes in Search Engine history. As an award-winning global digital marketing agency, we’re used to big changes – but this one takes the cake.

We’ve marketed through some of the most radical moves Google has made. We’ve rescued businesses from the wrath of Panda, the clutches of Penguin, and the interrogation of Medic. Yet even through all of this, Google’s new AI-powered search engine, SGE, is set to take the crown for unprecedented changes to how businesses make money online.

The move to SGE is modelled to be significant with many businesses being heavily impacted. Although Google are yet to give a launch date, Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s announcement to investors in Q2 and an ‘end date’ for the test of December 2023, let us know that the launch of SGE (or its bigger brother or sister) are not many steps into our future.

What is it?

Google’s SGE (search generative experience) is the integration of generative AI into Google’s search engine.

Why will SGE mean my website traffic decreases?

Google’s SGE provides answers to a visitor’s search directly on the search engine results page. Using generative AI, Google can present a fully formed answer, using websites only as a means of ‘corroboration’. This changes the way that visitors interact as Google’s goal is no longer to send its visitors to the best-fit page. Instead, it provides the answers directly.

The potential impact of this on businesses is huge. With a steep reduction in the number of visitors needing to click on a website for their information, businesses will experience drops in their page visits when this rolls out. Analysis suggests that the drops could be anywhere between 15 and 64%, depending on the type of search, the industry, and how many key searches SGE shows up for.

Traffic drops of this magnitude will not only put marketers in a tricky position, but also will likely impact the number of visitors who convert on websites from a very ‘top of funnel’ informational search. Fewer visitors will need to visit a website to get the answer to their questions, and so fewer visitors will be exposed to the calls to action businesses rely on to collect leads and nurture new sales.

Struggling to know how to use AI with your marketing?

Download a free copy of AI Marketing: Everything You Need to Know and get immediately up-to-speed

Download my free copy

The looming launch of SGE is likely to mean stark reductions in traffic for many businesses, less business generated from informational terms and a ‘shake up’ in which businesses are winning in the search engine results. 

Marketers are left with a choice: prepare or risk the impact.

At Thinkplus we have been preparing our clients for SGE’s launch and we have tested and identified how to rank in SGE. Though we anticipate that SGE will continue evolving before its launch, there are steps you can take now to help prepare. The first is to register for your free digital marketing and website review where one of our marketing consultants will assess your digital marketing and where your focus should be. They’ll assess your site’s preparedness for SGE and let you know what you should do next.

If I rank well currently, I’m safe – right?

Although businesses who are currently well placed on search engines seem to be referenced more in the SGE results, it is by no means a guarantee that the bot will reference them. 

In our experiments we have found that in some cases even websites who hold the Featured Snippet and Position 1 in the ‘classic’ listings, were not referenced by SGE’s answer. So despite the classic algorithm seeing a website as an authority on a particular topic, it is not at all a guarantee that SGE will make the same calculation. 

This extends even to searches for some brand names not ensuring that SGE uses the brand’s website as the corroborating link.

How do I rank on SGE and Bing Chat?

The good news is that our experiments so far suggest that the work you do to help SGE understand and cite your website, also positively impact how you rank in Bing’s Chat.

Just like classic SEO, there is no ‘one size fits all’ but there are a number of things we have discovered about how to rank in SGE. At Thinkplus, we are one of the few agencies that has both played with and understood how SGE works. We’d even go so far as to say we’ve cracked it! We’ve identified several ways to rank in SGE and have shared this piece on how to do it. We anticipate that it will continue to evolve as it is tested further and as with all Google products, there will be iterations. 

At Thinkplus we set out to be the leading example of how a digital marketing agency should be. For us, this definition includes staying ahead of the trends, sharing what we know and preparing our clients for changes before they land. 

If you are looking for help with your SEO and to be in the arms of an agency who knows how to prepare you for this, the first step is to request your free digital marketing and website review. One of our Marketing Consultants will analyse your website and will share the priority actions needed to get your website on top, if it looks like we’re a match, they’ll share with you how we might be able to work together.

The post The Future of Search: Ranking in the Next Generation of AI Search appeared first on Thinkplus.

On May 14th 2024, Google released AI Overviews, which is their version of AI search.

We’ve been waiting for this moment for about a year. Since Google announced they’d be adding AI search features to search, we’ve been playing with the precursor to AI Overviews called SGE (Search Generative Experience) in Google’s testing mode inside Search Labs.

Now Google AI Overviews has launched, it has become apparent that there are some key differences to what we had been used to experimenting with in SGE.

Struggling to know how to use AI with your marketing?

Download a free copy of AI Marketing: Everything You Need to Know and get immediately up-to-speed

Download my free copy

Briefly, we have found the keys to ranking your website in Google’s AI Overviews are:

• Extremely closely matching the information you publish with the phrase you are trying to rank for.
• Providing simple information with high readability.
• “Getting to the point” and giving the user the information they need very quickly on the page.
• Already ranking in the “regular” organic search results.

This guide will share a comprehensive breakdown of these factors, with examples.

What Is Google’s AI Overview?

The AI Overview is a new type of search engine from Google that uses generative AI to answer the searcher’s query, in addition to providing links to websites that “support” or “corroborate” the answer the AI gives.

It was in testing mode for much of 2023 under the name SGE, and was launched as AI Overviews in May 2024. At the time of writing it is only available in the USA, but can be accessed from other countries using a VPN set to the US.

An AI Overview search results page looks like this at the time of writing:

If you’re used to SGE, you’ll notice that AI Overviews is a bit of a scaled-back or throttled version of SGE.

The AI Overview sits above the “regular” organic search results.

The key components of an AI Overview result are:

1. The answer provided by the generative AI
2. Links to some websites that show related info
3. Dropdown links to websites that corroborate the information in each part of the answer

Which Searches Trigger an AI Overview Result?

Currently, the AI Overview answers appear in various forms for different types of searches. Sometimes, the AI Overviews panel can be seen with a link to Show more buttons. This seems to be the current “default” way:

For some queries, an AI Overviews panel is visible by default. In this case, Google has created AI images to answer the searcher’s query:

In some cases, Google opts not to show an AI Overview answer or even give the searcher an option to create one, even if the old SGE did trigger an AI-generated result:

It’s common for Google to use this approach for searches relating to financial recommendations. Initially, Google said that AI-generated responses wouldn’t be available for “Your Money or Your Life” (YMYL) searches. In our testing though, we’ve found plenty of SGE responses given for health and medical-related search queries. For example:

It is perhaps worth noting that Google has developed a medical-specific version of PaLM 2, the large language model powering the AI Overviews. This medical-specialist LLM (known as Med-PaLM 2) has been trained to give accurate medical advice.

It’s possible that Google is relying on this specialist version to provide answers to medical-related questions, which would explain why Google has the confidence to allow AI Overviews answers to questions which, if incorrectly answered, could lead to Google being guilty of sharing bad medical advice.

Is your marketing underperforming?

Request a free website and marketing review and our team will tell you how to improve your marketing.

Request a Free Review

How to Get Traffic from SGE

There are a couple of ways to get visibility for your business in Google’s AI Overviews. One of them can be seen in this search, featuring Thinkplus client CHAS:

You can get your website listed in the “carousel” links. We’re expecting these to receive the lion’s share of the organic traffic produced by SGE, as they are the only ones shown when the SGE answer loads.

The second way to benefit is to be listed as a link in one of the AI Overviews dropdowns. We’ve found that in the majority of cases, the websites listed in the carousel are the sites listed in the individual dropdowns.

Now, before I carry on, I want to preface this by saying that (at the time of writing) AI Overviews is still claiming to be in an experimental stage and is likely to improve and change as it progresses out of testing. The results of my tests (which are very positive, as you’ll soon read) are based on existing ranking factors.

Should the factors change, the team and I will continue to innovate and iterate our tests to ensure we’re ahead of the game and consistently ranking our clients in the AI Overviews results.

Step 1: Start from a Strong Base

Our tests have found that ranking in AI Overviews is much easier if you are already ranking in the “regular” organic results. This implies that AI Overviews use some of the same ranking signals as marketers and SEOs have been providing for many years.

Things like:

• High-authority topical backlinks
• Decent website speed
• Content quality
• Strong user experience.

… all seem to help here.

However, ranking in the “regular” organic results is NOT sufficient to necessarily get coverage in the AI Overview results, as you can see for this search, where the Thinkplus website was ranking #1 in the organic results but had no visibility in the AI Overviews results (this screenshot was taken back when we only had SGE to play with):

Following the changes described below, however, we were able to correct this:

But it’s important to note that AI Overviews ranking – particularly picking up the all-important first three carousel slots that are visible — can’t be relied on, just from doing “regular” SEO.

Get to the top of Google

Learn how to get your website to the very top of Google (and turn that traffic into revenue).

Download my free copy

Step 2: Providing Simple Information with High Readability

When you click on a website linked from AI Overviews, you’ll often notice the URL contains a hash (this is called a Text Fragment and currently used within regular Featured Snippets):

If you can’t read it, the above hashed URL says:

https://exposureninja.com/blog/nofollow-sponsored-ugc-tags/#:~:text=a%20Sponsored%20Tag?-,A%20sponsored%20tag%20is%20link%20attribute%20that%20indicates%20that%20a,avoid%20potential%20link%20scheme%20penalties.

The most interesting bit is the bit that goes (with %20, the HTML code for “space” removed): text=A sponsored tag is a link attribute that indicates to avoid potential link scheme penalties.

This tells the browser which part of the page to highlight:

And this section of the page seems to inform the AI Overviews answer. In this particular case, the first paragraph of the AI Overviews answer is a direct rewrite of the highlighted passage:

One thing I noticed as I was studying AI Overviews results was that the passages highlighted in the linked websites were always short. This is because, even in a longer AI Overviews answer, the linked website was being used to support one particular point.

Having studied dozens of AI Overviews search results, I realised that these linked paragraphs seemed to predominantly be written in short sentences and straightforward language. AI Overviews also seemed to favour sentences and paragraphs that made a single point, rather than more complex paragraphs.

My working theory is that because AI Overviews is designed to provide short, easy-to-read answers, it needs to reference short, easy-to-read sentences to decrease the chances of summarising inaccurately or taking the point out of context.

Step 3: ‘Getting to the Point’ and Giving the User the Information They Need Very Quickly on the Page.

I previously hosted a webinar sharing a series of AI Overviews ranking “before and afters”. These are searches where the target website was ranking organically but wasn’t featured in the AI Overviews results.

In addition to the other steps mentioned here, the one thing I made sure of in every case was that the opening paragraph of the blog page neatly summarised the answer to the question or topic, as I had noticed many AI Overviews-ranking pages did.

We started doing this when featured snippets first appeared in the search results, so it felt like a blast from the past.

In this example, the Thinkplus website wasn’t ranking in the AI Overview result for the search “sponsored tag”, despite ranking at position one in the regular organic results.

To attempt to correct this, I added the following paragraph at the top of the blog post. I wrote this to try and neatly summarise the answer to this question and give Google/AI Overviews the “support” it needed for its answer:

Within 12 hours of submitting this page via Search Console for re-indexing, we picked up a supporting link in the first paragraph of the AI Overviews answer and a coveted carousel spot:

In one test case, I noticed after adding a new summary paragraph at the start of the article that AI Overviews was still hashing and referencing a paragraph further down the page. This page was ranking in the AI Overviews carousel, but outside the top three.

It was annoying that AI Overviews was referencing the old paragraph, as I really didn’t feel that it was as good a summary as the new one I had written.

Our CEO, Charlie, suggested removing the old paragraph altogether in case it was “confusing” AI Overviews. That worked. Within a matter of hours, the new paragraph was being referenced, and our AI Overviews carousel ranking went into the first three positions.

Struggling to get all your marketing done?

Download our marketing priority planner and get your marketing back on track.

Download my free copy

Step 5: Submit Changes via Google Search Console

All of the tweaks and adjustments I’ve suggested can be ranked in AI Overviews in a matter of hours if you request re-indexing via Google Search Console. In my tests, unless I did this, I saw no improvement in the first two days. However, after requesting re-indexing, improvements were seen in some cases within five hours.

Just drop the URL into your Google Search Console inspect bar at the top of the page:

Then, once it’s loaded, tap Request Indexing.

Thoughts on AI Overviews Ranking

As you can see, AI Overviews ranking can be fairly simple to influence. Not easy, because it’s not easy ranking in the first place. But simple because there is a process to follow.

In researching the AI Overviews ranking factors, I tried looking for all sorts of correlations including the authority of the authors, volume and quality of inbound links, content length, page load times, presence of images and videos…

In the end, it seems to be more about the structure of the content on the page, combined with some “regular” SEO ranking factors. Thus AI Overviews is more like an evolution of the search engines we are used to working with than an entirely new beast with unrecognisable rules.

Google’s next-generation LLM Gemini, due any day now, is the elephant in the room. Google may be waiting for Gemini to power SGE before rolling it out to the public, in which case we may see a radically different (and hopefully even better) experience.

But will the ranking factors of Gemini-powered AI Overviews be any different? I’m not so sure. Google’s search ranking algorithm is the primary source of the fortune that it has built, and if they could think of better ways to rank information shared on websites, they would probably be using them already for the 8 Billion searches processed every day.

Is your marketing underperforming?

Request a free website and marketing review and our team will tell you how to improve your marketing.

Request a Free Review

Thoughts on AI Overviews more broadly (and my big concern)

It seems obvious to me that AI Overviews uses a similar approach to Bing Chat when it’s compiling its answers:

1. Parse the searcher’s query into something simple
2. Run the search in the background, with some slightly different ranking criteria
3. “Rewrite” the top results and provide links to the sources of the information.

This process is very transparent in Bing Chat:

But with AI Overviews, Google has rather obviously shied away from referring to the links as “citations” or “references”. Instead, they always speak about the websites “supporting” or “corroborating” the answer given by the AI.

The implication to me is that the AI produces an answer first, which it then seeks to verify and provide links that back up what it has said, NOT that it is taking or rewriting content from the websites it links to.

I can understand why they’d want to avoid the perception that AI Overviews is rewriting or even copying text from websites. After all, Google is frequently in legal hot water with publishers and is subject to various antitrust lawsuits.

But, from my observations, at least, copying and rewriting is EXACTLY what Google’s AI Overviews is doing. The websites listed don’t just corroborate the AI-written answer — it seems clear to me that they are the source.

Three pieces of evidence lead me to this conclusion:

1. The frequency with which parts of the AI Overviews answers match exactly – or very closely – to the text on one of the linked websites
2. The demonstration I detailed where it was possible to change AI Overviews’ answer with a single blog post. If AI Overviews was not copying the information from this page and was using a more traditional LLM to create these answers from scratch, a new blog post would surely not have been sufficient to change the answer like this
3. The speed at which these changes happen. LLMs take days, weeks, or months to train. AI Overviews responses can be altered in a matter of hours.

Thus it seems likely to me that this version of AI Overviews is going to prove problematic for Google in the courts unless it drives significant organic traffic to the websites it links to. Publishers won’t be happy with Google scraping and sharing their content if this behaviour coincides with a precipitous drop in organic traffic.

Download our AI Overviews checklist to make sure you’re doing everything you should be to rank in AI Overviews. (There’s a printer-friendly version in the download, too.)

The post How to Rank in Google’s AI Overviews appeared first on Thinkplus.

An SEO audit is like a health check for your site. It’s your chance to see what’s working, what’s not and where you can make some game-changing improvements.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through an agency-style SEO audit.

Don’t worry — we won’t overwhelm you with every nitty-gritty detail.

Instead, we’ll focus on the most crucial elements, all laid out in a logical order that’ll make your audit process smooth and effective.

By the time you’re done, you’ll have a clear picture of your site’s SEO health and a roadmap for boosting your visibility in search results.

So, grab a coffee (other beverages are available), roll up your sleeves, and let’s dive into the world of SEO audits!

What Is an SEO Audit?

An SEO audit is a thorough analysis of all parts of your SEO — on-site, off-site, technical — everything.

This audit aims to take stock of how your search engine optimisation is performing and where it can be improved. As a result, you can make changes to help:

• Improve organic search rankings
• Increase relevant traffic.

This will lead to greater visibility for your business and more conversions.

Why Do You Need an SEO Audit?

Even if you think your SEO is good, an SEO audit can still help you find gaps that could get you even more visibility on search engines.

You might find new opportunities or identify a low-converting SEO channel that you’ve been putting too much time into.

Part 1 — Technical SEO Audit

We’re starting with technical SEO. If you don’t have a solid foundation to build on, then any content work or off-site SEO you do won’t be as effective.

Technical SEO is crucial for several reasons, including:

• Ensuring search engines can effectively crawl, index and understand your website’s content, giving you more visibility in search results
• Enhancing website performance metrics like page speed, mobile-friendliness and interactivity, making it easier for potential customers to use.
• Allowing search engines to accurately interpret and display your content in the search results, meaning more clicks to your site.

Technical SEO ensures your website is optimised for search engines and the people who land on your site.

Is your marketing underperforming?

Request a free website and marketing review and our team will tell you how to improve your marketing.

Request a Free Review

Finding and Fixing Issues Using PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights is a tool from Google that measures more than just the speed of your site. It also measures performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO, giving you pointers on what to change and explanations on how to make those changes.

PageSpeed Insights is a great place to start with your SEO audit, as it shows you how your site is performing right now, meaning you can check these numbers alongside other SEO measurements like search ranking and traffic.

Website Speed/Performance

This section shows you how long it takes for different elements of your site to load. Elements in red are ones you may want to improve the speed of. You can do this by compressing the file sizes using a lightweight file type like WebP — this will reduce the amount of code on your site that’s no longer being used.

Accessibility

The accessibility section highlights parts of your website that are hard to use. This could be due to poor text contrast making your site difficult to read (for example, grey text on a black background) or images not including alt text that can be read by screen readers.

Accessibility is important to Google, and websites that are more accessible will rank higher.

Best Practices

The “Best Practices” report on Google’s PageSpeed Insights evaluates whether your website adheres to industry-standard web development best practices for creating a secure, accessible and optimised user experience.

It includes security, accessibility, Progressive Web Apps, performance optimisation, use of proper browser features (for example, asking permission before enabling notifications) and checking that you adhere to modern web standards.

SEO

This section rates how well you’re following basic SEO advice, which we’ll cover in the rest of this guide.

While achieving a perfect score of 100 in each category of Google’s PageSpeed Insights might be a goal of yours, it’s important to remember that it’s not the only way to improve your website’s SEO.

In fact, attaining a flawless 100 score across all areas can be quite challenging.

Instead of just focusing on perfect scores, it’s better to make changes that enhance your website’s overall SEO and usability.

By prioritising improvements for humans rather than only optimising for search engine bots, you’ll see a positive impact on your PageSpeed Insights scores.

Remember, search engines ultimately aim to provide the best possible experience for users.

Mobile-Friendly Website

Your website needs to be mobile-friendly. Google only crawls your mobile site when deciding where to rank you, so it needs to be fully optimised for SEO. It can’t be an afterthought.

The first way to see how your mobile website is performing is the PageSpeed Insights test we just talked about.

Check you’ve got the mobile tab selected to see your mobile results. This is the default tab PageSpeed Insights displays when you run a test.

The next metric to review is in Google Analytics 4.

If you visit the “Tech Overview” report, you can see how much of your traffic is coming from mobile devices. 54% of all website traffic comes from mobile devices, so if you see that your mobile traffic is really low, it could be an issue with your mobile site.

But, it’s important to be aware of the habits of customers in your industry. Some demographics don’t use mobile devices as much as others. In other cases, they do use mobile devices but prefer to use a desktop to buy products or services like yours.

Deleting Old Pages

If you haven’t deleted old pages from your website for a while, an SEO audit is the time to do it.

These could be pages you archived but didn’t delete just in case you needed them, but that was six months ago, and you haven’t thought about them since. It could also include outdated studies or information that isn’t getting you any traffic.

This is important because search engine crawlers have limited resources to crawl websites. By removing unnecessary pages, you ensure the crawler focuses on your most important content, improving indexing and rankings for those pages.

It also helps you avoid duplicate content issues and means fewer of your pages will be competing to appear for your target keywords.

Get to the top of Google

Learn how to get your website to the very top of Google (and turn that traffic into revenue).

Download my free copy

Finding and Fixing Issues Using Google Search Console

Google Search Console is another helpful tool from Google that can help you with your SEO audit.

Some of the ways it can help with your audit are:

• Conducting indexing and crawling analysis helps you find any problems Google is having with crawling and indexing your site that could limit your search engine reach.
• Checking the SEO of individual pages to see where you could be making improvements.
• Auditing your technical SEO through the “Core Web Vitals”.
• Analysing internal links and backlinks, showing you which pages are linked to the most externally and internally and which sites link to you most often.
• Checking for security issues and manual actions so you can improve the safety of your website.

It’s also where you can check and submit your sitemap. If you haven’t already, you should submit your sitemap to Google to help it crawl your site. If you’re making changes to your site to improve your SEO, you can submit your sitemap to speed up the indexing process.

Review Your Website’s Architecture

Reviewing your website’s architecture is an essential part of an SEO audit for a few reasons.

Firstly, a well-structured website helps search engines crawl your site and, more importantly, helps people navigate it.

A search engine doesn’t like being greeted with too many 404 messages, and neither does a human.

Internal links help search engines crawl your site and help website visitors learn more about topics or relevant products/services.

Secondly, a well-structured site architecture speeds up your site. It’s like the difference between a bunch of wool tangled up together and the wool being organised neatly. Servers and web browsers can load your site faster if they don’t have to unravel the architecture first.

Thirdly, a well-structured site helps you to optimise your internal linking. Internal links distribute link equity and help search engines understand the relationship and hierarchy between your pages.

Part 2 — On-Page SEO Audit

Now that we’ve covered the technical aspects, let’s move on to the on-page SEO audit.

From reviewing title tags to enhancing image SEO, we’ll cover the key components that make your pages more appealing to both search engines and users.

Review Competitors’ On-Page SEO

Competitor pages can give you great insight into what to do — or sometimes what not to do — when optimising pages for SEO.

We complete competitor SEO research for all our SEO clients.

By starting with competitor research, you can see what’s working well for those in the top spots on the search engines and then replicate that in your SEO.

Look at their title tags, meta descriptions, headings, content length and overall structure.

How is this different to what you’re doing on your site?

Another part of doing competitor on-page SEO research is reviewing if there are any gaps or opportunities where you can create better, more comprehensive content.

Analysing Your Organic Traffic

We use tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console and Semrush to understand which keywords drive the most organic traffic to our clients’ sites.

This can help us see which keywords are valuable and which are less so.

For example, you might have spent lots of time optimising a page for a keyword that gets lots of traffic but not many conversions. You can then use this information to check that the CTAs on that page suit the search intent.

If searchers are looking for information and your CTA is asking them to book a demo, you won’t get many conversions. If your CTA is inviting them to sign up for a mailing list that you can then use to nurture them, you’ll get more conversions.

Use this data to optimise high-traffic pages or create new content around popular topics.

Improve Metadata

Next, you need to give your metadata a little spring clean (or summer clean, or autumn — you get the picture).

Starting with your key pages (homepage, product/service pages, high traffic pages and high converting pages), check your title tags and meta descriptions are compelling, accurate and include relevant keywords.

If your homepage’s name is home (we’re looking at you, BBC), then it’s hard for search engines to understand what your website is about.

Remember to keep title tags under 60 characters and meta descriptions around 155-160 characters.

Any longer, and search engines can cut them off awkwardly.

Use unique, descriptive metadata for each page to improve click-through rates from search results.

Struggling to get all your marketing done?

Download our marketing priority planner and get your marketing back on track.

Download my free copy

H1s

Each page should have one, and only one, H1 tag (main heading) that accurately describes the page’s main topic.

Search engines use the H1 tag to understand what your page is about, as do visitors to your website.

Use H2 and H3 tags to structure the content and create a logical hierarchy, rather than H1s, even if the H1s look nice in your website’s design.

Also, don’t forget to check that you’re incorporating relevant keywords into your heading tags where appropriate.

Internal Links

Internal links are one of the ways search engines understand which pages on your site are connected to each other. They’re also useful to visitors who want to learn more about the topic they’re reading about.

For example, in a blog post, you can naturally link to a product or service you offer that’s relevant to the content of your blog.

Check that you’re linking to other relevant pages on your site using descriptive anchor text. Don’t use “find out more” or “click here” as anchor text. Integrate it into a sentence, for example:

“Our helpful SEO team can answer any questions you have about internal linking.”

Creating a logical internal linking structure helps search engines understand your site’s architecture and improves user experience.

Optimise Images

Reviewing the images on your website is another way you can improve your SEO.

This can feel like a mammoth task if you have a lot of images, but as with other parts of this guide, you should start with your most important pages.

If you see significant results from the changes, then you can go back and update more images. If not, then it’s best to focus on optimising new images going forward.

There are three ways you can optimise your images for SEO.

1. Improve Alt Text

Alt text has long been seen as an SEO “hack”, but stuffing it full of keywords won’t help you rank.

The reason alt text is good for SEO isn’t just because it helps Google understand what the image relates to, but it also shows that you care about accessibility.

Your alt text should be a short description of the image, which can include keywords.

2. Image Names

As with alt text, adding keywords to your image names can help with SEO. It’s another way that Google connects the image with the content on the page.

For example, in this blog, we’ve started each image name with “how-to-do-seo-audit”, resulting in file names that read, for example, “how-to-do-seo-audit-accessibility-psi”.

3. Image Size

Image size ties in with our earlier conversation about Google’s PageSpeed Insights. It can be annoying for site visitors if images won’t load, so Google will potentially rank your page lower if the images are large and take a while to load.

You can make your images smaller by using tools such as TinyPNG or by exporting them or converting them to webP.

Check Readability

• Content readability is important for SEO for several reasons:
• User experience: Readable content keeps visitors on your site longer, reducing bounce rates and potentially improving search rankings.
• Comprehension: Easy-to-read content helps users understand and engage with your information, which can lead to better metrics like time on page and return visits.
• Accessibility: More readable content is accessible to a wider audience, including those with lower literacy levels or non-native speakers.
• Search engine preferences: Search engines like Google favour content that is easy to read and understand, as it likely provides a better user experience.

Google’s Helpful Content Update made it clear that Google prioritises content that is easily accessible and, well, helpful to the reader.

Ensure your content is written in a way your audience understands, using terminology they understand or explaining complex terms.

Imagine they’re trying to find an answer to a question, but all the content explains it in a really complex way while trying to pitch their product or service.

Then they read your guide written with them in mind, using the terminology they understand and giving them an accessible answer to their question, with a few relevant CTAs thrown in.

They’re going to be more likely to convert with you because you’re the one that helped them.

Optimising for AI Search

We’re getting closer to AI search becoming the norm, meaning we’ll need to optimise to get our businesses seen in AI-generated answers in search engines.

In this video, Tim explains how Google’s AI search, AI Overviews, works and what digital marketers can expect to change in the world of SEO.

Part 3 — Off-Site SEO Audit

We’ve talked about the areas on your website you need to audit, but you also need to audit your off-site SEO, starting by reviewing your backlink profile.

Review Your Backlink Profile

Analysing your backlink profile will help you see which types of websites often link back to you and what types of content get the most links.

Understanding these things will help you find new publications to get featured in and create new content that’s likely to get links.

Start by using tools like Semrush, Ahrefs or Moz to get info about your backlinks.

Review the quality of the websites linking back to you, as well as the anchor text they’re using. The more variety in the anchor text, the better it is for your SEO.

Review Competitors’ Off-Site SEO

Reviewing your competitor’s off-site SEO can open a new world of opportunities.

It’ll give you an idea of the type of content your competitors are sharing that gets linked back to, as well as the publications that are linking back to them.

You might discover an opportunity to create a more thorough piece of content that would be more useful to the publication.

It’s also a great way to find inspiration for sponsored content or guest posts. See what’s worked for competitors and then pitch something better.

What about Local SEO?

If your business has a local focus, it’s important to review what you’re doing to rank locally.

Check out our detailed guide on ranking in local SEO.

Hiring an Agency to Do an SEO Audit

Have you finished reading and are thinking, “That sounds like a lot to do”?

Well, you’re in luck. We complete SEO audits for all our clients, so we really know our stuff.

Our SEO team has specialised knowledge and experience in the ever-evolving field of SEO. They are equipped with the latest best practices and trends (like AI search), which can be challenging for an in-house team to keep up with.

This expertise allows them to identify issues and opportunities that might be missed by someone without specialised training. It’s also helpful to get feedback from people who aren’t fully embedded in the business, as we’re likely to spot something you haven’t.

Underwhelmed by your digital marketing agency?

Learn all the signs that it might be time to change

Download my free copy

How to Complete an Agency-Style SEO Site Audit

From technical SEO and on-page optimisation to off-site strategies and local SEO considerations, you now have a solid framework for conducting a comprehensive SEO audit.

Remember, SEO isn’t a one-and-done deal — it’s an ongoing process of learning, adjusting and improving.

As search engines evolve and user behaviours change, so should your SEO strategy.

Regular audits like this one will help you stay on top of your game and keep your website competitive in the ever-changing digital landscape.

If you’re feeling a bit overwhelmed by all this information, don’t sweat it!

SEO can be complex, and there’s no shame in seeking expert help. Whether you decide to tackle this audit yourself or bring in the pros, the important thing is that you’re taking steps to improve your site’s performance and visibility.

So, what are you waiting for?

It’s time to put this knowledge into action and give your website the SEO boost it deserves.

Happy auditing, and here’s to climbing those search rankings.

The post How to Do an Agency-Style SEO Audit appeared first on Thinkplus.

Winning the Business Game with a Ninja Touch!

Welcome to the B2B marketing dojo: the place to become a Ninja in B2B marketing strategies.

We’re here to prepare you for the year 2024 and beyond, where high-performance B2B digital marketing strategies will be vital to winning you more clients.

From mega-effective tips and tricks to real-life examples of business-to-business success stories, you can rest assured that we’ll have you dancing circles around your competitors in no time.

So buckle up and prepare for a wild (but entirely safe) ride in the B2B marketing world!

Content Marketing Is Mandatory

Content is an essential B2B digital marketing tool for businesses of all sizes.

From blogging to creating social media posts and videos, it’s all about creating high-quality, relevant content that draws in the target audience and builds strong relationships with them.

B2B marketers know that high-quality, valuable content can help bring in leads and drive profitable customer actions. By creating captivating content, B2B companies can showcase themselves as industry leaders and remain top-of-mind for key players in their field.

There’s no denying that content marketing takes a lot of work, but the end result is worth it! Here’s why.

• Attracting the right crowd: By creating targeted content that addresses your audience’s specific needs and pain points, you’ll draw in the folks who are most likely to benefit from your products or services.
• Showcasing expertise: High-quality content allows you to demonstrate your knowledge and position your brand as a thought leader in your industry. That’s instant credibility, folks!
• Building trust: Consistently delivering valuable content helps you establish trust and loyalty with your audience. When they see that you’re invested in their success, they’ll be more likely to choose your brand over the competition.
• Driving conversions: Content marketing is fantastic for nurturing leads and guiding potential customers through the buyer’s journey. By providing helpful, informative content at each stage, you’ll increase your chances of turning prospects into paying customers.
• Long-term gains: Unlike paid ads that vanish once the campaign ends, content marketing keeps working its magic long after you hit “publish.” It’s the gift that keeps on giving, with lasting SEO benefits and the potential for evergreen content that remains relevant over time.

Unlocking the Power of a Content Marketing Strategy

Now that you understand the value and importance of content for your B2B marketing let’s dive into what a content marketing strategy is and explore some examples that can fuel your success.

A content marketing strategy is simply a comprehensive plan outlining how your business will create, distribute, and promote content to attract, engage, and retain your target audience.

It focuses on consistently delivering valuable, relevant, and engaging information to drive measurable results, such as increased brand awareness, lead generation, and customer loyalty. A well-crafted content marketing strategy is the cornerstone of an effective B2B marketing campaign.

Here are some examples of different content marketing strategies to inspire your own:

• Thought Leadership: Position your brand as an industry expert by creating insightful, authoritative content that addresses current trends, challenges, and innovations. Share your expertise through blog posts, whitepapers, webinars, or podcasts to build trust and credibility with your audience.
  • Example: A cybersecurity company produces a series of in-depth articles and webinars discussing the latest threats and best practices in the industry.
• Case Studies & Success Stories: Showcase your product or service’s effectiveness by highlighting real-world examples of how your solutions have helped clients overcome challenges and achieve success. These stories provide social proof and also demonstrate the tangible benefits of working with your company.
  • Example: A marketing automation software provider publishes case studies detailing how their platform has helped clients streamline their marketing efforts and boost lead generation.
• Educational Content: Provide valuable, informative content that addresses your audience’s pain points, answers their questions, and helps them make informed decisions. This type of content positions your brand as a helpful resource and encourages potential clients to engage with your company further.
  • Example: A B2B SaaS company offers free eBooks, webinars, and blog posts covering topics such as software implementation, best practices, and industry trends.
• Interactive Content: Engage your audience with interactive content that encourages participation and fosters a deeper connection with your brand. Quizzes, polls, surveys, and interactive infographics are excellent tools for capturing attention and gathering insights about your audience.
  • Example: A B2B financial services company creates an interactive calculator that helps businesses estimate their potential cost savings by using its services.

Is your marketing underperforming?

Request a free website and marketing review and our team will tell you how to improve your marketing.

Request a Free Review

One of the most important things to remember about an effective content marketing strategy is the value of repurposing a single piece of content into multiple formats. For example, you can write a blog post and then leverage it to create a podcast, video, webinar, social media posts, and more.

This means you can reach a wider audience and maximise the value of your content while providing your audience with diverse ways to engage with your brand.

Remember, a well-crafted content marketing strategy is an essential component of your B2B marketing success.

By understanding your audience, providing value through various content formats, and consistently delivering high-quality content, you can achieve your marketing goals and differentiate your brand from the competition. Let’s take a look at what that looks like in practice with a real-world example of an organisation that excels at content marketing — HubSpot.

Content Marketing Example

HubSpot is a shining star in the content galaxy. Their tantalising mix of blog posts and whitepapers has clients buzzing around like bees on a honey mission.

HubSpot’s blog is a treasure trove of fun, easy-to-digest nuggets on inbound marketing, sales, and customer service. They dish out useful tips and tricks that businesses of all sizes can’t resist. Their posts are well-researched, engaging, and so practical you’ll want to high-five the screen!

And let’s not forget those scrumptious whitepapers, research reports, and eBooks. HubSpot serves up deep dives into hot topics, with a side of case studies, data, and action-packed strategies.

It’s like an all-you-can-learn buffet for hungry business Ninjas!

By dishing out irresistible content in all shapes and sizes, HubSpot has become the life of the inbound marketing party. Grab a plate, join the fun, and watch your business groove to the rhythm of success!

In a nutshell, content is a powerhouse B2B marketing tool as it helps attract the right audience, showcase your expertise, build trust, drive conversions, and offer long-term gains.

By creating top-notch content that resonates with your target audience and addresses their needs, you’ll position your brand as a go-to source of valuable information – and that, my friends, is a recipe for B2B marketing success!

Lesson learned: Give ’em valuable content in multiple formats, and they’ll give you their business. Consistently offer quality, and you’ll become an industry leader.

Social Media, Supercharged

Get your digital mingle on! Social media is where connections and conversations happen, so jump in and make a splash.

B2B marketers looking to maximise their digital presence should consider a social media marketing strategy. Social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok are invaluable for building relationships with your target audience and boosting visibility.

B2B companies can use this powerful combination of content sharing, community interaction, and real-time engagement to craft effective B2B marketing strategies that deliver an unbeatable competitive advantage.

With its highly targeted approach, social media marketing is the ideal way to show off your brand’s value while increasing your chances of success in the B2B digital marketing space.

But why is social media marketing such a game-changer for B2B brands? Let’s break it down:

• Targeted outreach: Social media platforms offer advanced targeting options that allow you to reach the exact audience you’re after. Zero in on industry professionals, job titles, and even specific companies to ensure your message hits home.
• Two-way communication: Social media enables real-time interaction with your audience, fostering genuine relationships and allowing you to gather invaluable feedback directly from your target market.
• Expanding your reach: Social media platforms have massive user bases, so there’s ample opportunity to connect with new audiences, influencers, and potential partners in your industry.
• Boosting brand awareness: Maintaining a consistent presence on social media will increase your brand’s visibility and recognition, making it easier for potential customers to find and engage with your business.
• Establishing thought leadership: Share valuable content, join industry discussions, and showcase your expertise on social media to position your brand as a thought leader and go-to resource in your field.
• Driving website traffic: Sharing content, promoting events, and offering exclusive deals on social media can help drive traffic to your website, ultimately leading to higher conversion rates.

Mastering Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

A well-crafted social media marketing strategy enables you to reach a massive audience and engage with them meaningfully. Here are some tips for developing a successful social media marketing strategy:

• Define your goals: Start by defining your social media marketing goals. Do you want to increase brand awareness, generate leads, drive traffic to your website, or boost sales? Clearly defining your goals will help you create a targeted strategy that aligns with your business objectives.
• Know your audience: Identify your target audience and tailor your content to their preferences. Understand their demographics, interests, and pain points to create content that resonates with them.
• Choose the right platforms: Determine which social media platforms your audience frequents and focus on creating content for those channels. Each platform has a unique audience and user behaviour, so choosing the right platforms that align with your goals and audience is essential.
• Create engaging content: Develop high-quality content (yep, it always comes back down to the content you create) that encourages your audience to interact with your brand. Mix up your content formats and use various media, such as images, videos, infographics, and live streaming, to keep your audience engaged.
• Optimise for engagement: Use tactics like hashtags, polls, and questions to boost engagement and encourage conversation. Respond to comments and messages promptly to foster a sense of community and build brand loyalty.
• Measure your results: Use social media analytics tools to track your performance, identify areas for improvement, and adjust your strategy accordingly. Keep an eye on metrics like engagement, reach, conversions, and ROI to measure the effectiveness of your social media marketing efforts.

One simple but highly effective strategy is repurposing your existing content specifically for social media. Highlight key points from your blogs, infographics, and webinars in attention-grabbing social media posts to maximise your reach and engage a wider audience.

With these tips and the power of social media on your side, you can create a dynamic, results-driven social media marketing strategy that elevates your brand.

Looking for inspiration? Stay tuned as we take a closer look at Salesforce, a brand that’s mastered the art of social media marketing.

Social Media Marketing Example

Hold onto your hats, folks, because we’re about to unveil a B2B social media wizard: Salesforce! This trailblazer has turned social media into a customer connection wonderland.

Salesforce sprinkles magic on its LinkedIn page, turning it into a bustling engagement hub. With a mix of informative posts, quirky visuals, and industry insights, they’ve got B2B professionals hooked like kids in a candy store.

But wait, there’s more! Salesforce’s Twitter game is on fire, too. They serve up bite-sized tips, news, and shout-outs that make their audience feel part of an exclusive club. And with their lively conversations and timely responses, they’ve built a tight-knit community that keeps coming back for more.

So, what’s the secret behind Salesforce’s social media success? It’s simple: be authentic, be approachable, and never stop dazzling your audience. Follow in Salesforce’s footsteps, and watch your B2B social media strategy soar to new heights!

By embracing social media as part of your B2B digital marketing strategy, you’ll tap into a world of opportunities to connect with and impress potential customers, partners, and industry influencers alike. Now go forth and conquer the social media realm!

Your mission is to be the life of the social media party, and clients will come flocking.

Lesson learned: Approachability and authenticity win hearts.

Personalisation Power!

Know your audience and speak their language. Personalisation is the key to winning hearts and minds, so take the time to understand what makes your clients tick.

So, what’s personalisation all about? Simple! It’s the art of making your customers feel special and unique. Because, let’s be honest, who doesn’t like feeling like a VIP?

B2B marketing strategies have come a long way in the past few years, and personalisation helps B2B marketers keep up with the fast-paced and ever-evolving digital world by tailoring their campaigns to meet each customer’s preferences, interests, and needs.

By utilising B2B digital marketing strategies such as creating segmented customer journeys, collecting customer data from various channels, and leveraging AI technologies, B2B marketers can bring their brand closer to their customers than ever before.

This results in meaningful relationships that result in more leads and loyal partners eager to do business with them.

Get to the top of Google

Learn how to get your website to the very top of Google (and turn that traffic into revenue).

Download my free copy

Personalisation: The Key to Unlocking Your Marketing Success

Personalisation has become a buzzword in the marketing world, and for good reason. By tailoring your marketing messages and experiences to individual customers, you can increase engagement, loyalty, and sales. Here are some tips for personalising your marketing strategies:

• Leverage data: Collect data on your customers’ preferences, behaviour, and purchase history to create personalised messages and experiences. Use tools like customer relationship management (CRM) software, web analytics, and social media listening to gather valuable insights about your audience.
• Segment your audience: Divide your audience into groups based on shared characteristics, such as age, location, interests, or behaviour. This allows you to create targeted messages and experiences that resonate with each group.
• Personalise your content: Create content that speaks directly to your audience’s interests, needs, and pain points. Use their names, provide personalised recommendations, and tailor your messaging based on their previous interactions with your brand.
• Automate your campaigns: Use marketing automation tools to deliver personalised messages at scale. This can include triggered emails, personalised offers, or targeted ads based on customer behaviour.
• Offer personalised experiences: Personalise the customer experience by providing tailored product recommendations, custom landing pages, or personalised offers. This can help build brand loyalty and increase customer retention.

Incorporating these personalisation strategies into your marketing campaigns can create a more engaging, relevant, and memorable experience for your customers. Remember, personalisation is not a one-size-fits-all solution. It requires careful analysis of your audience and an ongoing effort to create tailored experiences that resonate with them.

Looking for inspiration? Check out how one of the world’s most recognisable brands used personalisation to drive their marketing success.

Personalisation Example

You’ve probably seen those Coca-Cola bottles with names printed on them, right? Well, that’s personalisation in action! By putting a name on a bottle for their legendary Share a Coke campaign, Coca-Cola transformed a simple beverage into a meaningful, shareable experience.

Suddenly, customers weren’t just buying a Coke; they were sharing a moment with friends, family, and even total strangers.

Source

You might be thinking, “That’s cool, but how do I add that personal touch to my B2B digital marketing strategy?” No worries, we’ve got you covered! Here are a few fab ideas to get you started:

• Name-dropping never felt so good: Be like Coca-Cola and personalise your products or services with your customers’ company names. It can be as simple as adding their name to your email subject lines or incorporating their logo into your presentations.
• Be the (data) detective: Use analytics to uncover your customers’ preferences, pain points, and interests. Then, create targeted marketing campaigns that address their unique needs.
• Personalised content is king: Create tailored content that speaks to your customers’ specific industries or roles. Think case studies, whitepapers, or webinars that address their pain points and showcase your expertise.
• Become a social (media) butterfly: Engage with your customers on social media by responding to their comments, sharing their posts, and celebrating their achievements. Show them you’re not just a faceless corporation but a real human who cares.

So, there you have it! B2B marketing strategies in 2024 will become increasingly reliant on personalisation to meet and exceed the expectations of clients. Taking the time to understand and cater to specific customer needs will be one of the best B2B digital marketing strategies out there.

By truly getting to know your clients, you’re giving them a customised experience that puts their satisfaction first and helps you build trust — a surefire way to win hearts and minds! Don’t hesitate — start personalising today, and watch the sparks fly in 2024.

Lesson learned: Customisation fosters connection.

Video Verve

A picture’s worth a thousand words, but a video? Priceless!

It’s no secret that people love watching videos, whether it’s cute cats, epic fails, or mouthwatering recipes. But here’s the kicker. Video marketing is a game-changer for businesses, and here’s why.

First off, video marketing is like a superpower for grabbing attention. For B2B marketing strategies, videos are the bomb. Not only do they have that special sauce that captures and holds folks’ attention in a world oversaturated with content, but videos can also powerfully express messages with visuals and audio working together like PB&J.

And, backed by your overall B2B digital marketing strategy, you can leverage video to make the kind of impact that just isn’t possible any other way. Whether you’re looking for recognition or ROI, including video as part of your B2B marketing strategy is a surefire way to get noticed in an ever-competitive market.

But wait, there’s more! Videos are crazily shareable. When your audience digs your content, they’ll want to spread the love, and before you know it, your brand’s reach has gone through the roof. It’s like a giant game of telephone, but way more effective and less garbled.

And let’s not forget the human touch. Videos give your brand a personality and help you connect with your audience on a deeper level. You know that warm, fuzzy feeling you get when you see your favourite brand’s latest vid? That’s the power of video marketing, baby!

So, to put it simply, video marketing is the ultimate tool for capturing attention, boosting engagement, and creating genuine connections with your audience. If you’re not already riding the video marketing wave, it’s high time you hopped on that board and started making marketing magic!

Unleashing the Power of Video Marketing Strategies

Video has become an increasingly popular and effective way to engage with your B2B audience and drive results. By incorporating video into your marketing strategy, you can improve brand awareness, generate leads, and increase conversions. Here are some tips for creating a successful video marketing strategy, and you’ll notice that some of these tips are going to be working across whichever B2B marketing strategy you embrace.

• Define your goals: Like every marketing strategy, always start by defining your video marketing goals. Are you looking to increase brand awareness, drive sales, or educate your audience? Defining your goals will help you create targeted videos that resonate with your audience.
• Know your audience: To create effective videos that engage your audience, it’s crucial to understand their preferences and pain points. Develop audience personas and use surveys or social listening tools to gather insights into their needs and interests. This data allows you to tailor your videos to meet the specific needs of your audience, resulting in more impactful and engaging content.
• Choose the right format: There are many different types of video formats, including explainer videos, product demos, testimonials, and live streaming. Choose the format that aligns with your goals and audience preferences.
• Create compelling content: Develop high-quality, engaging video content that captivates your audience and delivers your message effectively. Use storytelling techniques, humour, and emotion to make your videos memorable and shareable.
• Optimise for distribution: You can optimise your videos for distribution by creating attention-grabbing titles, descriptions, and tags. Share your videos on social media platforms, email campaigns, and your website to increase visibility and engagement.
• Track your performance: Use video analytics tools to track your performance and identify areas for improvement. Monitor metrics such as views, engagement, and conversions to measure the effectiveness of your video marketing efforts.

By following these tips and leveraging the power of video, you can create a compelling video marketing strategy that engages your audience and drives results. Next up, let’s take a closer look at a company that’s using video to fuel its marketing success in a unique way.

Struggling to get all your marketing done?

Download our marketing priority planner and get your marketing back on track.

Download my free copy

Video Marketing Example

Patagonia might not be a B2B firm, but its savvy marketing squad have flipped the script for video marketing. They’re all about that long-form video content, with many of their online vids clocking in between 10 and 20 minutes.

Whoa, right?

It just shows that so-called “video best practices” don’t always cut it if they’re not right for your brand. Usually, we’d suggest clients keep their videos under two minutes since that’s what seems to work for most people. But Patagonia knows its audience inside out, and they’ve taken a different path. A path that’s paying off!

The video length is just one way Patagonia stands out from the crowd, but there’s more. A lot of their videos don’t even focus on products. Instead, they dive deep into crucial environmental and conservation topics that are super important to their audience.

These videos feel less like your typical marketing spiel and more like documentaries with a purpose. You probably noticed that vibe in the video above.

Heck, they even have a whole section on their website called “Films,” with the tagline, “We are a collective of storytellers who make films on behalf of our home planet.”

Not exactly your everyday video marketing approach, but hey, it’s working wonders for Patagonia!

So remember, sometimes it’s all about knowing when to break the mould and go beyond standard marketing tactics — especially if your customer research tells you your audience wants something different.

The secret to video impact is visual storytelling that tugs at the heartstrings. Give ’em the feels, and they’re all yours.

Lesson learned: Emotions drive engagement.

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) Awesomeness

Zoom in on the big fish with a laser-focused ABM strategy. Identify high-value accounts and tailor your approach to their unique needs. ABM is like a secret weapon for B2B marketers, and we’re gonna spill the beans on why it’s so cool.

Picture this. Instead of just hoping to snag some good leads, B2B organisations can use ABM to strategically target specific high-value accounts, allowing their marketing and sales teams to work together more effectively like a superhero team.

It’s an important part of any B2B digital marketing strategy and requires specialised expertise to craft effective campaigns that cut through the noise. Gathering data on prospects and customers can put your team in a better position to develop creative strategies that will get results and help reel in those dream clients.

But why is ABM so amazing?

First off, ABM is all about personalisation. When you’re focusing on a select group of accounts, you can tailor your message to fit their unique needs like a glove. And let’s be real, who doesn’t love feeling like they’re the centre of the universe?

But there’s more! With ABM, your marketing and sales teams are BFFs, working together in perfect harmony. This means they share info, align their goals, and collaborate like nobody’s business.

The result? A streamlined process that’s more efficient than a well-oiled machine.

And, of course, we can’t forget about the ROI. ABM is like a laser-guided missile for targeting high-value accounts, so you’re not wasting resources on low-priority leads. More bang for your buck? Yes, please!

Crafting a Winning Account-Based Marketing Strategy

You can improve lead quality, increase conversion rates, and drive revenue growth by aligning your sales and marketing efforts around specific target accounts. Here are some tips for creating a successful account-based marketing strategy:

• Identify your target accounts: Don’t just scream into the void. Start by identifying the high-value accounts that align with your business goals. Use criteria such as company size, industry, or revenue to create a list of target accounts.
• Develop account personas: Develop personas for each target account that represent their unique characteristics, challenges, and pain points. This helps create tailored messaging and content that resonates with each account.
• Create targeted content: There’s that content again. Develop content that speaks directly to the needs and interests of your target accounts. Use personalisation and customisation to create messaging that is specific to each account.
• Align sales and marketing: Work closely with your sales team to align your marketing efforts with their sales goals. Develop account-based marketing campaigns that support their sales efforts and work to engage and nurture target accounts.
• Track and measure results: Use data and analytics to track your account-based marketing efforts and measure their effectiveness. Monitor metrics such as engagement rates, conversion rates, and revenue growth to identify areas for improvement.

By following these tips and leveraging the power of account-based marketing, you can create a targeted and effective B2B marketing strategy that drives results. Now let’s take a look at one of the best ABM examples of recent years from a firm that’s nailed its account-based marketing strategy.

ABM Example

When GumGum, a company specialising in computer vision, set its sights on winning over T-Mobile’s business, the CMO went full Sherlock Holmes, investigating the buying committee from the top down.

It turns out, T-Mobile’s CEO, John Legere, is a huge Batman fan. So, GumGum cooked up a genius plan that put Legere smack dab in the middle of their story. They crafted a comic book (T-Man and Gums) featuring their very own team of writers, illustrators, and other creative gurus. After shipping 100 copies to T-Mobile and its agencies, guess what?

They nabbed the account!

Source

Now, this example might be on the extravagant side, so you could save mega-campaigns like this for your VIP accounts. But don’t worry; you can still make a splash with your personal touch.

Start by digging up as much info as possible on your target account contacts. Then, send out customised direct mail campaigns with goodies that’ll make ’em feel special (like merch from their favourite flick or a bag of their go-to coffee beans) to get the conversation rolling.

As for when to use this approach, it’s perfect for kickstarting a relationship with a brand-new account (like GumGum did) or reaching out to fresh buying committees within an existing account. In short, it’s all about making that first impression count!

To sum it up, account-based marketing is your secret resource for scoring those coveted clients with personalised campaigns, teamwork that would make Captain Planet proud, and an ROI that’ll have you dancing all the way to the bank.

So, if you’re a B2B marketer looking for the next big thing, ABM is your ticket to success!

Your task is to concentrate firepower, maximise ROI, and celebrate those sweet victories.

Lesson learned: Prioritise quality over quantity.

Underwhelmed by your digital marketing agency?

Learn all the signs that it might be time to change

Download my free copy

SEO Smarts

The digital spotlight awaits! Get your content in front of the right eyes by optimising it for search engines.

Alrighty, let’s chat about the awesomeness of SEO for B2B marketing and why it’s a total game-changer.

First things first, SEO is like the secret weapon that makes your B2B digital marketing strategy hit its target. It helps your brand rise to the top of search results, so potential clients can find you in a snap.

And let’s be real. Being the first name that pops up when someone’s looking for a solution is like winning the B2B marketing lottery!

Now, for those hot tips to make your B2B SEO strategy shine:

• Know your audience: Before you can dazzle them with your content, you’ve gotta know who you’re talking to. Identify your target audience and learn their pain points so you can create content that truly resonates.
• Do your keyword research: Uncover the magic words your audience is using to find solutions. Use tools like Google Keyword Planner or Semrush to dig up your industry’s most relevant and high-traffic keywords.
• Craft killer content: Once you’ve got your keywords, it’s time to create content that’s engaging, informative, and valuable. This will help you rank higher in search results and keep visitors coming back for more.
• Optimise your website: Ensure that your website is well-structured, user-friendly, and mobile-responsive. Use relevant keywords in your meta tags, headings, and content to help search engines understand the context of your pages.
• Create high-quality content: Develop high-quality, informative content that speaks directly to your audience’s needs and interests. Use a variety of content formats, such as blogs, whitepapers, infographics, and videos, to increase engagement and improve search rankings.
• Leverage link building: Build high-quality backlinks from reputable websites in your industry. Use tactics such as guest blogging, broken link building, and social media to attract links and improve your website’s authority.
• Monitor your performance: Use analytics tools to track your website’s performance and identify areas for improvement. Monitor metrics such as traffic, rankings, and conversions to measure the effectiveness of your SEO marketing efforts.

One effective SEO marketing strategy to consider is local SEO, which involves optimising your website and content for local search queries. This can include creating local landing pages, optimising your Google My Business profile, and building local backlinks to improve your visibility in local search results.

And it’s not difficult to find B2B brands excelling at SEO marketing. It’s one of the main B2B battlegrounds, and competition can be fierce.

So are you ready to be blown away by a B2B brand that’s crushing it with its SEO game? Hold onto your hats, folks — this one’s gonna be wild.

SEO Marketing Example

Fasten your seatbelts marketers. We’re about to take a thrilling ride into the high-octane world of SEO (alright, calm down).

Our travel companion for this trip? None other than MasterClass.com, a business that’s revving the engine of SEO like no other.

The folks at MasterClass.com have done something truly smart. They’ve tuned into the radio frequency of their audience’s curiosity and identified hundreds upon hundreds of questions that people are asking about a whole galaxy of topics.

The work doesn’t end there. They’ve spun an absolute web of knowledge, crafting over 1,300 articles that tackle those questions head-on. In doing so, they’ve built an intricate matrix of information, effectively turning their site into a question-answering powerhouse.

The result of this clever manoeuvre? They’ve hoisted their SEO flag on thousands of keyword territories. It’s like they’ve built an SEO lighthouse that beams brightly whenever someone’s searching for answers online. More often than not, you’ll find MasterClass.com on the shore of your search results, welcoming you into a haven of knowledge.

Want to be an SEO guru just like MasterClass.com? Don’t just answer the expected questions about your product or service. Dig deeper. Unearth those not-so-obvious enquiries, the kind that show real curiosity. Then, craft detailed, SEO-friendly articles that serve up answers on a silver platter.

By doing this, your business won’t just be a flicker in the vast SEO universe but a dazzling star that attracts attention from all corners. So, strap on your SEO jetpack and prepare for an exhilarating journey to the SEO stratosphere, just like the experts at MasterClass.com.

Lesson learned: Visibility equals opportunity.

Find out a bit more about how MasterClass.com uses SEO to generate such whopping traffic volumes in our more in-depth discussion of what masterclass.com is doing to excel in optimising for search engines.

Webinar Wisdom

Teach, impress, repeat! Hosting webinars allows you to demonstrate your expertise and connect with potential clients on a personal level.

Webinar marketing is all about creating live or on-demand online events to educate, engage, and connect with your audience on a more personal level. It’s a powerful B2B marketing strategy that makes it easy to host educational and engaging online events with your target audience — whether live or on-demand.

You can use webinars to give your audience an inside look at what your brand has to offer, present your products and services in a new light, or even host real-time Q&A sessions as if they were a virtual masterclass!

There’s no better way to make real connections with your customers than by bringing them together in an interactive space like this.

So, why is webinar marketing a must-have in the B2B world? Here’s the inside scoop:

• Hyper-targeted content: Webinars let you create content tailored to specific segments of your audience, addressing their unique pain points and interests. This level of personalisation makes your message more impactful and relevant.
• Global reach: With webinars, you can connect with your audience from anywhere worldwide, breaking down geographical barriers and expanding your brand’s reach.
• Time-sensitive topics: Webinars are perfect for discussing current trends, new developments, or industry updates, ensuring your content is timely and relevant to your audience’s needs.
• Measurable results: Webinar platforms often provide detailed analytics and reporting, allowing you to measure engagement, track leads, and optimise your marketing efforts.

Maximising Your Marketing Impact with Webinar Marketing

You can establish your brand as a thought leader and attract high-quality leads by providing valuable information and insights. Here are some tips for creating a successful webinar marketing strategy:

• Choose a relevant topic: Select a topic that aligns with your business goals and addresses a specific pain point or challenge your audience faces. Use surveys, social listening, and industry research to identify topics that resonate with your audience.
• Develop compelling content: Create engaging and informative content that provides value to your audience. Use a mix of formats such as presentations, interviews, and case studies to keep your audience engaged.
• Promote your webinar: Promote your webinar through multiple channels, such as email marketing, social media, and paid advertising to maximise your reach. Use a mix of pre-recorded and live webinars to cater to different audiences.
• Encourage engagement: Encourage audience engagement during the webinar through interactive features such as polls, Q&A sessions, and live chats. This helps create a more personalised experience and can increase the likelihood of conversion.
• Follow up with leads: Follow up with leads after the webinar to continue the conversation and nurture the relationship. Use email marketing, personalised landing pages, and targeted content to keep the conversation going and convert leads into customers.

By following these tips and leveraging the power of webinars, you can create a dynamic and effective marketing strategy that engages your audience and drives results. So who’s doing webinar marketing well?

Webinar Marketing Example

Now, let’s take a close look at Gartner’s winning approach to webinar marketing:

• Wide-ranging topics: Gartner covers a diverse array of subjects, catering to the interests of professionals across various industries.,This ensures they consistently provide valuable content to a broad audience.
• High-calibre speakers: By inviting top industry analysts and experts to present, Gartner ensures their webinars are packed with authoritative insights and credible advice.
• Practical takeaways: Gartner’s webinars go beyond theory, offering actionable, data-driven strategies that attendees can implement in their own businesses for tangible results.
• Regular cadence: Gartner maintains a consistent webinar schedule, keeping their audience engaged and fostering a sense of anticipation for future events.
• Promotion and follow-up: Gartner effectively promotes their webinars through multiple channels, such as email marketing and social media, and follows up with attendees post-event to reinforce key takeaways and maintain engagement.

Webinar marketing is a powerful strategy for B2B brands looking to deliver targeted, relevant content, expand their global reach, address time-sensitive topics, and measure the success of their marketing efforts.

Gartner’s approach to webinars exemplifies how to create a winning combination of diverse topics, expert speakers, actionable advice, and consistent scheduling, all while effectively promoting and following up with their audience.

By implementing these best practices, your brand can also reap the rewards of a successful webinar marketing strategy.

Your game plan should be to offer irresistible value and nurture those leads like a true B2B sensei.

Lesson learned: Education builds trust.

Influencer Ingenuity

Two heads are better than one, especially if one’s a top industry expert! Influencer marketing is all about partnering with influential folks in your industry – the movers and shakers, if you will – to create authentic content and promote your brand. These influencers have a strong following, oodles of credibility, and the power to sway opinions.

But why is influencer marketing a big deal for B2B brands? Let’s break it down:

• Authenticity: By collaborating with influencers who genuinely use and love your products, you create content that resonates with your audience and builds trust.
• Expanded reach: Influencers help you tap into new audiences and amplify your brand message.
• Expertise: When you partner with industry experts, you boost your brand’s credibility and authority.
• Relationship building: Working with influencers can lead to long-term partnerships and a network of advocates for your brand.

Influencer Marketing Example

Now, let’s talk about Adobe’s approach to influencer marketing:

• Star-studded partnerships: Adobe’s B2B digital marketing strategy strikes a chord by partnering with typically untapped creative professionals — leading designers, photographers, and other creative professionals who are already fans of their products.By leveraging star-studded endorsements from these industry leaders, Adobe can gain awareness and recognition in the B2B market, helping them stay on top with one of the best B2B marketing strategies around. Their team-ups have been strategic and well-timed, providing benefits to both sides while driving innovation and creating an explosive atmosphere of collaboration within the B2B digital marketing space.
• Creative content: Influencers have the power to captivate audiences through creative content, and B2B marketers are using this to their advantage. With Adobe’s tools, they can craft stunning visuals and share their creative process in real-life scenarios that show off the product’s capabilities. This B2B digital marketing strategy is an engaging way to reach new audiences and establish brand loyalty. From memes to videos, influencer B2B marketing strategies help businesses bring their content to life and connect with people on a deeper level.
• Word of mouth: Word-of-mouth endorsements from influencers are a powerful tool for B2B marketers, allowing them to bring positive experiences and successes using Adobe products to the attention of their target audience. Influencers can showcase products in entertaining and relatable ways while inspiring their followers, bringing true social proof to campaigns. B2B digital marketing strategies focused on influencer outreach can generate huge gains in brand exposure, trust and loyalty with minimal effort due to the already-established connection between the influencer and the target market. Ultimately, B2B marketers must capitalise on this growing opportunity to ensure success within an ever-changing digital landscape.

The secret to influencer marketing success? It’s all about finding the perfect fit:

• Size vs relevance: When it comes to influencers, audience size matters less than audience relevance. Sure, a large following can help with reach, but it’s crucial to find influencers who have genuine credibility and expertise in your industry.
• Quality over quantity: Focus on partnering with a handful of key influencers who truly resonate with your target audience rather than chasing big numbers.

Influencer marketing can be a powerhouse tool for B2B brands looking to create authentic, engaging content and expand their reach. Adobe’s approach demonstrates the power of partnering with influencers who genuinely love their products and can showcase their capabilities in real-world settings.

By finding the right influencers and focusing on relevance over sheer numbers, you, too, can hit the influencer marketing jackpot!

Lesson learned: Leverage others’ influence to expand your reach.

Lead the Way in 2024

So there you have it — the best B2B marketing strategies to keep you ahead of the pack in 2024. These tactics are your golden tickets to winning the business game, from video marketing and SEO to account-based marketing, webinars, and influencer collaborations

Remember, the secret to success lies in understanding your audience, staying true to your brand, and never being afraid to think outside the box. After all, fortune favours the bold!

As you embark on your B2B marketing journey, consider these winning strategies and take inspiration from the trailblazing brands we’ve discussed. Embrace innovation, be adaptable, and don’t forget to have a little fun along the way!

Because when it comes to B2B marketing, the only limit is your imagination.

Here’s to a smashing 2024 – may your marketing efforts be fruitful, your leads be plenty, and your business will thrive like never before!

If you want some help with your content strategy, we have a team of digital marketing specialists at Thinkplus. Learn more about our digital marketing services here.

What to Read Next

• Looking to rev up your marketing strategy and skyrocket your brand’s reach? Read our Ultimate Guide to Connecting with Influential Bloggers in Your Niche and unlocking your full potential!
• Eager to boost your website’s visibility and attract more visitors without spending a dime? Discover How to Increase Organic Traffic for Your Website in Ten Steps and transform your online presence today!
• Struggling to find the perfect social platform to grow your brand and engage your audience? Learn How to Choose the Social Network That Works for Your Business and make the most of your online presence!
• Unsure about allocating funds for your marketing strategies in the coming year? Dive into How to Plan Your Marketing Budget for 2023 and master the art of strategic budgeting to elevate your brand’s success!

Ready to ignite your online presence and outshine the competition? Request your FREE website and marketing review from Thinkplus, your trusted digital marketing ally, and prepare to be amazed by your brand’s potential to grow!

The post The Best B2B Marketing Strategies in 2024 appeared first on Thinkplus.

Ranking in local search results is crucial for driving online traffic to your website and foot traffic to your brick-and-mortar stores.

However, optimising your SEO for multiple locations can be tricky.

You essentially need to create a local SEO strategy for each location you want to target.

Doing keyword research, creating content, and building links for 10, 20 or even 100+ locations can sound overwhelming.

But don’t worry, we’ve got you covered.

We’ve done multi-location SEO for a number of our clients, so we know the ins and outs of this process.

This comprehensive guide breaks down key local SEO tactics in simple steps so you can effectively promote each of your locations online.

With a tailored strategy for each of your locations, you can stand out in local search and map listings across multiple cities and regions.

This means more quality traffic finding your business locations near them, more customers walking through your doors, and more local SEO success.

Our actionable local business SEO tips will help you:

• Create dedicated and optimised location pages
• Produce locally-focused content
• Build local links
• Claim and manage listings
• Get more positive local reviews
• Appear prominently in local pack results.

But before we start — are you stuck with local SEO? Request a free website and marketing review from the team at Thinkplus, and we’ll untangle your SEO and help you rank in multiple locations.

Is your marketing underperforming?

Request a free website and marketing review and our team will tell you how to improve your marketing.

Request a Free Review

We’ve helped several businesses rank for more than one location.

Here’s how we helped Patino Law Firm dominate the search results for a location important to their business.

Create Location Pages

Creating individual pages for each location and service/location combination you want to target is a must if you want to do successful local SEO for multiple locations.

These pages signal that your business is relevant to searchers in those locations and offer a more personal experience to site visitors from that location.

This Texas location page from Patino Law Firm references stats specifically from Texas, making it more relevant to the reader. It also signals to Google that this business is based in Texas.

This page from our client, Regain Hearing, takes a slightly different approach, which is just as effective. It includes a photo of the staff from the specific branch being discussed on the page, and further up, includes the address and phone number for that specific location.

The location keyword of “Eltham” is naturally used throughout the text. It’s not shoved in there clumsily or used too many times.

The page also links to the location on Google Maps, giving Google even more information about the place this page is connected to.

How to structure a URL for multiple locations

URL structure doesn’t need to be a complex topic.

In its simplest form, a well-structured URL for local SEO would be business.com/location.

This is clear to Google and to the website visitor.

Even if you have multiple locations in one city, you can create pages for each without complicated URLs.

Take the supermarket Tesco as an extreme example. It will have multiple stores in one city but still manage to keep the URLs straightforward. Here are some different URLs for its stores in Nottingham.

tesco.com/store-locator/nottingham/19-20-upper-parliament-st

tesco.com/store-locator/nottingham/2-carlton-hill

tesco.com/store-locator/nottingham/515-alfreton-rd

Each one links from the store locator page, followed by the city, followed by the first line of the address.

These URLs are simple, and using the address means that two locations on the same road (yes, it happens) will easily have separate URLs.

The “folders” of the URL must be in the right order. Each “/” represents a new subfolder, and the next “subfolder” belongs to the previous one.

So, in this example, all these pages belong to the “Nottingham” location.

You also need to consider if you have service and location combination pages and in what order you need to build the URLs. Do you put the service first (location belongs to the service) or the location first (service belongs to the location)?

Service/location is the most common, as the service is the same, and the change is the location it’s being done in, but if your service offering differs in different locations, you may want to do them the other way around.

An example of this would be:

/locksmith/london

/locksmith/manchester

/locksmith/birmingham

/plumbing/london

What about “near me” searches?

Image Source

Google’s algorithm is smart.

It understands that if a person with their location set to Exeter searches for “Thai food near me”, they want to see Thai restaurants in Exeter, not the ones on the other side of the country that have optimised for the search term “near me”.

Even better than that, it shows them places that are physically closest to them. If you have the best SEO but are located 20 minutes away, then the business that’s five minutes away is more likely to rank higher for that specific search.

As long as you’re doing the work to rank for your specific locations, Google will handle the “near me” searches when someone near one of your locations makes a vague search.

Target Location-Specific Keywords

Location-specific keywords are another crucial part of local SEO.

They can be more challenging to find than keywords that don’t focus on a location, as they’re likely to be searched less. But this doesn’t mean that they’re not worth targeting.

Some keyword tools might even tell you that no one is searching for your local keywords, even if you know that people are.

Each location-focused page needs to target keywords based on the location covered on the page.

It can be tempting to try and target broader keywords with these pages. This might help you get traffic but could result in low conversions if visitors aren’t located in the area the page is focused on.

Local Content Creation

Creating local content tailored to each location helps to boost relevance and engagement.

This could involve writing a blog post highlighting community events or local news relevant to your business and each specific location.

For instance, if you run a cafe, you could create a guide to “The Best Local Coffee in [Locality]” for each city where you have a location, like this one from Bridge Coffee Roasters.

A lot of people have incorrect assumptions when it comes to duplicate local content.

Google determines duplicate content based on the intent, not just the copy, so using the same copy for different locations, with the location name changed, will work and will not be penalised.

This is because it’s for a different audience (location) so it is not duplicating the purpose of the pages.

This can help you get content up if you have a lot of locations/services to cover, but they should be updated when possible to include location-specific content.

How to find local content topics

Creating local content might be daunting to start with, but it’s not that different to choosing more general topics.

If you’re stuck finding topics to springboard off, then follow this video guide:

For the most part, adding a local angle to your content will help you connect with local people.

For example, if you have a guide that ranks well, you may want to create a localised version of it.

Let’s say you’re a nationwide self-storage company with a successful guide to choosing the right self-storage option for you. You could create local versions of this guide.

These guides shouldn’t be carbon copies of one another. You need to use aspects of the local area to make the guides different.

• “Looking for a self-storage company in a quiet part of [location]? Storage4U is based in the X estate, which is away from the main roads and traffic.”
• “If your business is storing a lot of items, then Storage4U is the best option in [location] as we have the biggest storage units in the area.”

Another route you can take is reviewing local competitor content.

Type your local search term into Google and review the content that appears for that search.

Take inspiration from this content, but make something better. Make it more useful to potential local customers than the other local search content out there.

Social media for local SEO

Although social media doesn’t directly impact your local SEO, it can help you connect with people based in your locations, boosting website traffic to local pages and helping you climb the ranks.

Use local hashtags and share useful or entertaining content, depending on your audience and their preferences.

Some businesses also opt to have separate social media accounts for their different locations, which gives viewers a fully local experience.

The Gym Group is an example of a business that does this on a huge scale. Below are two different accounts for two separate The Gym Group gyms in the same city.

The information in the bios is similar but includes different addresses and contact options. The images and videos shared are of each gym, meaning users can see what they’ll get at the gym local to them.

Optimise for the Google Map Pack

Every business wants to appear in the map pack for local searches. It’s often the first place searchers look to see how close your business is.

To appear in the map pack, you must have a solid Google Business Profile.

Can I have more than one Google Business Profile for my business?

If you have multiple physical locations, you can have more than one Google Business Profile, meaning you have more chances to appear in the map pack for local searches.

If you service a local area but aren’t based there, you can’t create a Google Business Profile for that location. You’ll be less likely to appear in the map pack.

That’s why you must have a solid local content strategy in place for each location you’re targeting.

Google Business Profile insights

Your Google Business Profile (GBP) is for more than just ranking. It also helps you get some great insights, which can help you rank even higher and help you improve your profile so that potential customers can find you more easily in search.

The most important GBP metric you need to pay attention to for SEO is searches.

These are the searches your Google Business Profile appeared for. Using this data, you can check if you appear for the correct keywords. If you’re appearing for keywords you don’t want to be, you can make adjustments.

The importance of other metrics is very dependent on your business. If you offer bookings and the other business profiles appearing in the map pack for your target searches have the booking option enabled, you need to do this, too.

Customer reviews and their impact on local SEO

Customer reviews are an important element of local SEO.

Google wants its users to have a good experience, so it’s going to send users to sites with lots of good reviews.

It’s important for businesses with multiple locations to actively manage and respond to reviews across all of your locations and the various platforms on which you are listed.

Positive customer reviews on sites like Google, Yelp, and Facebook also act as social signals that can boost a local business’s rankings in local search results. And, of course, negative reviews can have the opposite effect.

By monitoring and responding professionally to customer feedback on all sites and for all locations, you can reduce the impact of negative reviews, show customers you value their opinions, and ultimately build a strong online reputation that will benefit your local SEO.

Regularly asking for reviews for each location also helps generate more positive customer testimonials.

Keeping a close eye on reviews for all your business locations is essential for local SEO and can have a big impact on your conversion rates, too.

Link Building for Multiple Locations

Link building in any relevant, quality publication is useful to your business, but you will get even better results if you build links to sites that serve the same areas as your business.

Having your business name and location mentioned and linked from trusted sites focusing on that specific city or region shows Google that your business actively operates and serves customers in that area while also proving that authoritative publications want to link to your awesome website.

Backlinking doesn’t just impact local SEO. It also helps you reach local people who are reading these publications, which could lead to business.

When it comes to local link building, our SEO and Digital PR teams look at popular local publications. Towns and cities often have local news websites — sometimes more than one. They may also have city guides, regional magazines, local radio station websites, directories and more.

The example below shows multiple car rental companies with locations across the UK being linked to by the University of Leeds micro-site dedicated to helping those relocating to Leeds for university.

This is a very high-value domain which will help with SEO, and the links are likely to get clicks from people interested in hiring a car. Double win.

You can also get links and exposure to local people through sponsoring local sports teams, theatre productions or events.

Digital PR and link-building outreach isn’t easy. You need to be persistent and find ways to stand out from all the other businesses getting in touch with the same publications.

To help you get started, you can download our free outreach templates or request a free website and marketing review to get pointers on how to scale your local link-building strategy.

Is your email outreach getting zero replies?

Download our free email outreach templates and get better outreach results.

Download my free copy

Mobile Optimisation

Mobile optimisation is an important aspect of all SEO, not just local SEO.

Ignoring it could mean you drop in the search rankings.

Why? Mobile usage exceeds desktop usage. More searches now happen on mobile devices than on desktops, so Google favours mobile-friendly sites in rankings.

It favours them so much that Google only uses the mobile version of a site’s content to index and rank pages. They don’t look at your desktop version anymore.

Also, most searches for local businesses and services happen on mobile. Mobile optimisation helps make local content more accessible to these searchers.

So, how can you optimise for mobile?

• Improve your page speed. Slow mobile page speeds can negatively impact rankings. Optimising for mobile helps pages load faster.
• Improve your user experience. Poor mobile UX leads to higher bounce rates and fewer pages viewed per visit, which are ranking factors. Good mobile UX improves engagement metrics.
• A mobile site shows authority. Having a dedicated mobile site signals to Google that you understand mobile user needs versus just responsive design.

Optimising for mobile is also important for future-proofing. As mobile continues to dominate, non-mobile-friendly sites will steadily decline in rankings. Building for mobile now future-proofs your SEO.

Check Directory Listings Are Consistent

Checking your directory listings are consistent and fully up-to-date is a quick win when you’re doing local SEO for multiple locations.

You may have added details to a local directory for your main location but recently opened a new location that’s more relevant to that directory. You can also add both locations to the directory if it covers the same area.

Check that your business name, address and phone number (also known as NAP) are consistent and accurate across all directories.

This will help Google connect your business to these directories and locations. It’s another signal that you are located where you say you are and that your business is relevant to people searching in that area.

Structured Data for Local Businesses

Structured data is important for your local businesses’ SEO because it allows Google to better understand your business information and display it prominently in search results.

Here is some of the main structured data you should be using, depending on your business:

Business name, address and contact info — By marking up this info with schema.org, it can appear in knowledge panels in SERPs, helping users easily find and contact you.

• Opening hours — Marking up opening hours allows Google to display live updated business hours in the knowledge panel, avoiding wasted visits if you’re closed.
• Location — Allows you to specify your location to Google. They will read your location from clues on the page, but this allows you to communicate it directly. This can be set either as an address, latitude and longitude coordinates or both.
• Service Area — Allows you to specify the area covered by your service. This can be based on a distance from your location. For example, a 10-mile radius from the office or a pre-defined area, such as Berkshire (a county) or Nottingham (a city). Multiple service areas can be set, such as the counties of Nottinghamshire, Leicestershire, etc.
• Menus — Restaurant menus marked up in schema can appear directly in SERPs, helping users quickly browse your offerings.
• Reviews — Review snippets can be generated from marked-up customer reviews, giving you more credibility.
• Events — Schema for events enables rich event listing in SERPs that users can quickly add to their calendars. This is especially useful for businesses offering classes, activities or events.
• FAQ Page — Marking up FAQs provides users with direct answers to common questions without needing to visit your site.

Structured data can generate rich search features when used correctly. This helps searchers engage with your business and trust you more.

You can set different locations and service areas for different offices if you cover multiple locations; these should be set individually per page.

Structured data can get complex, so if you are unsure, it is best to consult a professional, as data that is misaligned with the content can cause more harm than good.

You can learn more about structured data from the wonderful folks at Google Search Central.

Structured data isn’t straightforward and requires some coding knowledge. If you’re unsure how to get started, have a chat with our friendly dev team.

How to Target Multiple Locations with SEO

Local SEO is key for businesses with multiple locations. Local SEO strategies we’ve explored in this guide include:

• Creating dedicated location pages with geo-targeted content and keywords
• Using location names in page URLs
• Producing locally-focused blogs and social media for each location
• Reviewing competitor content for inspiration
• Building links, especially in local news and directory sites and getting mentioned in local publications
• Optimising for mobile, since most local searches are mobile
• Managing Google Business Profiles and reviews for all locations
• Ensuring consistent NAP in directories.
• Using structured data like opening hours, location(s) and service area(s)
• Monitoring analytics to optimise ranking for each location’s keywords.

With an effective local SEO strategy tailored to each location, your multi-location business can drive more nearby customers to your locations and give a massive boost to your local visibility and conversions.

What to READ Next

• The Ultimate Guide to Local SEO
• How to Do Keyword Research Like a Pro

What to WATCH Next

What to LISTEN to Next

• Is Google KILLING OFF SGE?
• How SEO Works in 2024

The post How to Do Local SEO for Multiple Locations appeared first on Thinkplus.

However, it’s not just about getting any old link — quality is a huge part of it.

Search engines like Google can easily identify spammy, low-quality link-building tactics.

But how can you maintain that quality while scaling your link-building efforts?

That’s exactly what this guide will explore.

What Is Quality Link Building?

Your backlinks’ quality is impacted by how you secure links and the sites you build links to.

If you send out emails in bulk to any website that will listen, you’re unlikely to build quality links.

But, if you send targeted emails to relevant websites with content their audience will read, you’re more likely to get quality links.

The results? Not just better rankings but more exposure to your target audience and the chance to get referral traffic from sites your target audience reads.

So, how do you get these quality links at scale?

It requires hard work, but the results will be well worth it.

Is your marketing underperforming?

Request a free website and marketing review and our team will tell you how to improve your marketing.

Request a Free Review

Building Quality Links at Scale like a Ninja

When you think of building links at scale, you immediately think of those spammy emails that land in your inbox every day asking if you want to pay for links on some random websites.

Once, this might have been a way to trick the search engine algorithms into thinking your website was a quality one, but the algorithms are smarter now.

And, as we discussed above, links are about more than just search engine rankings. Quality links can result in high-value traffic from the websites linking to you.

So, how do we keep this quality while building links at scale?

Build Relationships with Website Owners and Journalists

Building relationships with website owners and journalists is key to successful link-building.

These strategies will help grow these relationships and improve your link-building success.

But before reading these tips, remember that a genuine connection is the best type of connection.

Where you can, try and build a real connection with these journalists and website owners rather than paying them generic compliments. If you’re not genuine, they’ll see right through that.

• Instead of using generic templates, craft personalised outreach messages that show you’re familiar with the website or journalist’s work. Highlight specific content or articles you found valuable, and explain why your content is relevant to their audience.
• Before asking for a link, offer something of value to the website owner or journalist. This could be sharing their content on social media or providing them with exclusive data or insights related to their area of interest.
• Follow and engage with website owners and journalists on social media platforms like Twitter/X, LinkedIn or industry-specific forums. Share their content, comment on their posts and participate in discussions to establish your presence and credibility.

• Offer to write high-quality guest posts for relevant websites or publications. This not only provides value to their audience but establishes you as an authority in your field, too, making it more likely for them to link back to your website or content in the future or reach out to you when they need a comment or story related to your area of expertise.
• Pitch exclusive content ideas, data-driven research or interview opportunities to journalists or website owners. This can make your outreach more appealing and increase the chances of receiving a backlink in exchange for exclusive content.

• If you have existing connections or customers who have relationships with website owners or journalists, leverage those connections to get introduced and increase the likelihood of a successful outreach.
• Attend conferences, meetups and industry events where you can network with website owners, bloggers and journalists in your niche. Building face-to-face connections increases the chances of securing backlinks and fostering long-term relationships.

Building relationships with website owners and journalists improves your chances of acquiring high-quality backlinks and helps establish your brand’s credibility and authority within your industry.

By providing value, engaging consistently and fostering genuine connections, you can turn these relationships into long-term support for your link-building and digital marketing efforts.

You might even make some friends along the way, too.

Create Reusable Content Assets

Creating high-quality, engaging content is key for successful link-building campaigns.

It’s a nice thought, but realistically, producing lots of new content from scratch can be time-consuming and resource-intensive. This is where the concept of reusable content assets comes into play.

Reusable content assets are pieces of content, such as articles, videos, infographics or other multimedia elements, that can be repurposed and utilised across multiple platforms and campaigns.

By creating timeless, evergreen content assets, you can continue to leverage them for link-building opportunities over an extended period, maximising their long-term value.

This will save you time and money while keeping your messaging consistent across various platforms and getting you those all-important links.

Work with an Agency or Expand Your Team

To build quality backlinks at scale, you’ll need more people on your team.

These marketers should have content marketing experience and digital PR experience.

Quality, creative content is the key to building links. The more quality content you have to pitch, the more likely you’ll get links.

If you aren’t in a position to expand your team, working with a digital marketing agency could be a good fit for your business.

There are lots of benefits to hiring additional marketers or working with an agency, including:

1. Increased Capacity: Agencies and larger teams have more resources and manpower to handle link-building campaigns at a larger scale. This means you can pursue more link opportunities and build backlinks faster.
2. Expertise and Specialisation: Digital marketing agencies employ professionals who are experienced in various link-building tactics like guest posting, resource page link building and more. They stay updated with the latest trends and best practices in the industry. The same goes for digital PR or content professionals.
3. Established Relationships: Digital marketing agencies and digital PR or content professionals often have relationships and contacts with high-quality websites and publishers, making it easier to secure valuable backlinks.
4. Diverse Strategies: A team member or agency can implement a diverse range of link-building strategies simultaneously, such as content marketing, influencer outreach, public relations and more, leading to a more well-rounded and effective link profile.
5. Scalable Processes: Digital marketing agencies and larger teams typically have established, streamlined processes for identifying link opportunities, conducting outreach and acquiring backlinks, which helps with the easy scaling of link-building campaigns.
6. Reporting and Analytics: Digital marketing agencies and teams often provide detailed reporting and analytics on the performance of your link-building efforts, including metrics like traffic and rankings, which can help you make data-driven decisions.
7. Freeing Up Internal Resources: By outsourcing link building to a digital marketing agency or dedicated team, you can free up your internal marketing resources to focus on other critical aspects of your business.

It’s important to carefully vet and choose a quality agency or hire experienced professionals, as low-quality or spammy link-building practices can potentially harm your website’s rankings and reputation. Remember — if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Get to the top of Google

Learn how to get your website to the very top of Google (and turn that traffic into revenue).

Download my free copy

Competitor Research

Understanding what your competitors are doing to build links not only helps you see what you’re up against but also shows you what works well in your industry (and what doesn’t).

By carefully analysing your competitors’ link profiles and backlink sources, you’ll get insights to help supercharge your link-building efforts.

Reviewing the sites linking to your competitors will show you which publications are interested in businesses like yours without needing to seek them out from scratch. It’ll also help you see which link-building tactics are successful; for example, one publication often links back to infographics, whereas another uses a lot of expert comments.

Analysing your competitors’ backlink profiles can also help you see where there are content gaps that publications will snap up as guest posts. Perhaps no one is talking about topics that you know are relevant to your audience and the industry, and you can fill that gap.

It’s important to note that while competitor research is invaluable, it should never lead to outright copying. Use the insights gained as inspiration and guidance, but always strive to create unique, high-quality content and employ ethical link-building practices.

AI and Building Links at Scale

AI can assist you with link-building, but it shouldn’t be doing the bulk of the work.

It’s tempting to create loads of content using AI and send AI-generated emails in the hopes you will get more links.

But anyone can do this. It’s becoming easier than ever to create content in bulk in an attempt to get backlinks.

Get inside the heads of the journalists and publications you want to link back to your work or use your expert comment. They want to use quality content, not something they could have generated themselves using AI.

We’re not saying you shouldn’t use AI at all, though.

AI can be used to:

• Help you outline content
• Help you brainstorm content
• Help you draft initial emails to websites, publishers and journalists.

Just don’t rely on it too heavily. Journalists and website owners get hundreds of daily emails about guest posting and backlinking. They’ll be able to spot fully AI-generated emails and content a mile off.

The Quality Link Building Checklist

To make sure that your scaling efforts result in quality rather than quantity backlinks, there are a few points you need to check each time you’re going after a link.

Quality Content

We’ve said it before, but we’ll say it again (and again). Creating top-notch, valuable content is the foundation of any successful link-building campaign. Without compelling, informative, and well-crafted content, you’ll struggle to attract authoritative backlinks. Here’s what you should focus on:

Relevance

Ensure your content is highly relevant to your target audience and industry, as well as the publication you’re trying to get backlinks from.

Conduct thorough keyword research, understand your audience’s pain points and interests and craft content that directly addresses their needs and queries.

Relevant content is more likely to resonate, get shared and earn those coveted backlinks from relevant, high-quality sources.

This point also applies to the publications you want to be featured in. It’s better to build links to websites that are relevant to you. Not only will you get a link, but you’re likely to get referral traffic from them, too.

Authority

Strive to establish yourself as an authoritative voice in your niche. Thoroughly research your topics, cite credible sources, speak to experts and provide unique insights and perspectives that showcase your expertise.

Authoritative content is more likely to be perceived as link-worthy by other industry leaders and influencers and will help you climb the search rankings even if you only have a few links.
Again, this point applies to the sites you’re building links from, too. The publications you target in your link-building strategy should also be authorities in your niche.

Natural Placements

While it’s tempting to seek out every and any link opportunity (especially when you’re scaling), prioritise natural, contextual placements.

Look for ways to seamlessly integrate your links within relevant content on reputable websites. Forced or spammy link placements can harm your reputation and may even lead to penalties from search engines.

Always aim for a natural, organic fit. It will benefit you more in the long run.

Anchor text

Pay attention to the anchor text (the clickable text portion of a link) when acquiring backlinks.

Ideally, you want a healthy mix of branded anchor text (e.g., “YourBrand.com”), naked URLs (e.g., “https://yourbrand.com”), and relevant, descriptive anchor text (e.g., “best content marketing strategies”).

Overusing exact-match keywords as anchor text can be seen as manipulative by search engines and may trigger spam filters, dropping you down those all-important search rankings.

Struggling to get all your marketing done?

Download our marketing priority planner and get your marketing back on track.

Download my free copy

Measuring Success

Measuring success is important when scaling your link-building strategy to ensure your efforts are getting you results. Here are some key metrics to track and analyse:

Backlink Growth Rate

Keep a close eye on the rate at which you’re acquiring new backlinks over time. A steady, sustainable growth rate is ideal, as spikes or sudden drops could indicate issues with your tactics or outreach methods. Use tools like Ahrefs, Semrush, or Moz to monitor your backlink profile.

Organic Traffic Increase

Ultimately, the goal of link building is to improve your website’s visibility and organic search rankings. Monitor your Google Analytics data to track increases (or decreases) in organic traffic over time, segmenting by landing pages to identify which pieces of content are driving the most referral visits.

Referral Traffic Increase

Backlinking doesn’t just help with your organic search rankings but also helps to drive qualified traffic from relevant websites. When link-building is done right, people who come across your brand through a backlink on a site they’re reading are more likely to visit your site, too.

Conversion Rates

While not directly linked to link building, tracking conversion rates from organic search traffic can reveal whether the increased visibility is translating into tangible business results, such as leads or sales.

Remember, no single metric tells the whole story. It’s crucial to look at the bigger picture and analyse these metrics collectively to gauge the true impact of your link-building strategy. Regular data analysis will allow you to continuously optimise your tactics and ensure you’re on the path to sustained success.

Link Building at Scale

We’ve covered various tactics to scale your link-building efforts while maintaining quality — from building relationships with website owners and journalists to creating reusable content assets and leveraging AI responsibly.

Remember, prioritise relevance, authority and natural placements. Search engines and audiences can spot spammy, irrelevant links easily.
Don’t hesitate to invest in expanding your team or partnering with a capable digital marketing agency. Dedicated professionals can significantly boost the execution of your scalable link-building strategy.

Link building requires perseverance. With the right approach, tactics, and commitment to quality, you can build an authoritative backlink profile that drives tangible results.
Stay focused, implement these strategies, and steadily build high-quality backlinks to conquer the digital landscape.

What to READ Next

• How to Get Qualified B2B Leads Using SEO
• How to Triple Your Website Traffic
• How to Optimise Each Page of Your Website

What to WATCH Next

What to LISTEN To Next

• How to Do Local SEO for Multiple Locations
• Copy This UNBEATABLE SEO Strategy in 2024
• Why Digital PR is the FUTURE of Search

The post How to Do QUALITY Link Building at Scale appeared first on Thinkplus.