With Google’s recent Helpful Content algorithm updates, it is more important than ever to write content primarily for the user. Producing content that will perform well on search engines now comes down to creating genuinely valuable content.

As SEO content writers, it’s vital to understand your intended audience, and their user intent. If you create content for the user you’ll see the nice added benefit of high ranking positions.

The good news is that the SEO team at Cedarwood Digital knows the exact framework to make your content more cost effective than ads – writing content that your readers and Google will love. Keep reading for our tried and tested top tips for expert SEO content.

Why Content For SEO Matters

Is optimising your content really that important? We’re here to tell you that yes, you really should care about content and consider SEO best practices when creating content.

Once you rank on the first page of Google you’re more likely to receive heaps of relevant and traffic to your website. And, as paid advertising costs rise and social media engagement gets increasingly hard to acquire, organic traffic is more important than ever.

As a business owner, the best decision you can make right now is investing time and energy in organic search. Make sure your site’s content is written with SEO firmly in mind and you’re guaranteed to increase visibility, and users finding your services.

Our Top Tips

So, you know you need to tailor your content for your users and search engines, but how exactly do you go about this? 

Here are the tactics which have seen our clients’ websites shooting up the ranks…

Keywords:

Whilst there’s no big secret formula for ranking in the SERPs, understanding your target keywords and using them correctly will make a huge difference.

It’s essential to do your research, so you know what words people are using when looking for the services your company offers.

You’re going to want to get these keywords naturally embedded in your content, and it’s also a good idea to use related words. The fancy word for this is latent semantic indexing, but it basically comes down to using words that go well with the keywords you’ve researched.

A hack for finding these words is simply to enter the main term into Google search, and noting down the related keywords that Google lists:

But be careful not to get so caught up with these keywords and related keywords that you lose track of keeping your writing user-friendly! There’s nothing more off putting than a paragraph of content where every other word is the same. As an SEO copywriter, it’s important to strike a balance.

Another top tip is to choose your keywords wisely.  Keywords that have a lower search volume can be just as valuable – as you have more opportunity here to rank high. A good content writer should assess the amount of competition around each keyword 

Content Readability:

Another thing to consider when optimising your content for SEO is its readability. This idea is pretty self-explanatory. Readable content is very easy to understand and written simply, using short words and sentences.

A fact you might be surprised to learn is that the average reading age in the UK is only 9! (According to the National Literacy Trust). Remember that your audience will include people with dyslexia, and people with english as a second language etc.

Google particularly cares about this readability because it affects user experience. Since 2021, Google’s algorithm has been specifically prioritising sites with a strong user experience. So this comes down to a website’s visual design, technical architecture and readability of its content.

The good news is there’s a bunch of great softwares available to give you a helping hand with readability. Some of our favourites to check out are:

>Readable

>Semrush Readability Assistant

>Hemingway

If uploading your content through WordPress, it’s also good to know that there is an SEO plug-in for WordPress (Yoast) which will assess your readability, amongst other factors.

Write helpful content:

Earlier this year, Google updated its helpful content system algorithm. This update allows Google to “more deeply understand content created from a personal or expert point of view”.

There’s now a focus on ranking content with “unique expertise and experience”. Equally, content that appears to have been primarily created to rank well is targeted and downgraded. So. creating content that your users will actually find helpful is more important now than ever

This is in order to help Google show more “hidden gems” in its search results. So, the question you might now be asking is whether your content is a hidden gem? Well, is it actually useful? Written for your users ? Predominantly focused on helping users, and just recycled information? These are the qualities to strive for next time you start typing.

Quantity *and* quality

We’ve seen in the past and the present that Google algorithms tend to reward informative content that fits its purpose and penalises thinner content. 

‘Thin content’ is the term Google uses to describe ‘low-quality or shallow pages’. These pages offer little value to a user and are not ‘substantially unique’. Content that could be hit by a thin content penalty includes things like entirely AI-generated content, and content scraped from other sources.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that a shorter word-count will prevent your site from ranking. Rather than aiming for a specific ‘magic formula’ word count, just focus on making sure your content sufficiently answers the users’ intent.

It can be the case then that longer content is better simply because you can share more information. Length also gives you the flexibility to present your information in varied ways – your readers and Google love headed subsections, lists and tables. However, a shorter piece of content can be equally as valuable, providing you’ve thoroughly researched your target audience, and what they are looking to find out.

When ensuring your content is high-quality, you’ll also want to bear E-E-A-T in mind. This acronym stands for ‘experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness’ and these are the criteria Google uses to assess your website. Demonstrating these qualities in your content will provide your users with helpful and reliable information and this has the side effect of helping your search engine performance. New to E-E-A-T principles?  Check out our in-depth rundown of how to make your content align.

Use Varied Content Types

On this point, displaying content in visually appealing ways is a bright idea for SEO. Using helpful videos and pictures is fab for readers. In the age of TikTok and ever-shortening attention spans, no-one wants too much grey text. Images make your content more appealing and can help make your ideas more understandable.

Breaking up your content with infographics and charts is also a good idea because these have the extra advantage of securing you backlinks. Free software like Canva and Infogram will be your best friend here. Take a look at this infographic we put together highlighting new film releases this month:

Stay On Top of SEO Trends

Our final tip is a self-explanatory one – keep up to date with Google’s algorithms and the latest social trends. Search engines and SEO techniques are constantly changing, and content writers need to keep up!

Adjust your writing in accordance with changes to algorithms, and user preferences. A top tip for staying updated is to subscribe to some SEO newsletters. SEOFOMO and The Moz Top 10 are a couple of the best run-downs of recent news in the SEO world.

Can I Do My Own SEO?

You definitely can – there’s no specific qualification needed to write good content for SEO. Online guides like this one can be a great starting-point. However, an SEO professional, with heaps of experience, will likely be able to produce more effective content for your site.

SEO is a slow and steady process, it can take months and months to see the results of your work. Because of this, the trial and error approach could see you wasting lots of time and effort. As SEO experts, we have the know-how on how to execute a good content strategy. By employing the help of an SEO agency, you have the assurance that you will see results by a set time.

How Cedarwood Digital Can Help With Your SEO Content Creation?

Our SEO team at Cedarwood have years of experience helping clients write content with SEO in mind. We know Google’s search guidelines like the back of our hand and how exactly to drive up your visibility and sales.

Contact us today to find out how we can help you write content your users (and ultimately the search engines) will love.

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is a fundamental aspect of your digital marketing strategy, it involves many different techniques and strategies that are aiming to improve your visibility in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). However, implementing these strategies is only half of the battle. To successfully implement an SEO strategy, you need to constantly monitor and track your SEO performance. 

In this blog we will be discussing the most important aspects to track, how to track and monitor them over time and why it is so important to track and monitor your SEO performance. 

Why Is Monitoring Your SEO Performance So Important? 

Tracking and monitoring your SEO performance can be important for many reasons: 

1. It allows you to monitor your progress 

Monitoring your SEO performance will allow you to assess the impact of your SEO strategies and efforts. Are you moving in the right direction, increasing your rankings and organic traffic? Or, have you regressed and you need to adjust your strategy? Either way, it is important to know what is working and what isn’t so that you can plan for the future of your SEO performance. 

2. It allows you to identify opportunities 

By analysing and monitoring your organic performance data, you will be able to identify new opportunities, keywords to target and areas that need improvement. 

3. It allows you to benchmark against your competitors 

When analysing your performance, it will allow you to see how you are performing against your competitors and understand where you sit in the market. You will then be able to analyse what your competitors are doing better than you and where you can improve to compete with them in the SERPs. 

4. It allows you to see the effects from algorithm updates 

As SEOs, we know that search engines, like Google, frequently release algorithm updates and these can affect the performance of your website, and can therefore affect organic traffic. Monitoring your SEO performance will allow you to see if you have been hit by an update, and you can then see what you need to improve based on the update that has affected your site. 

Now that we understand why tracking and monitoring SEO performance is so important, let’s get into how you can do it.

Monitoring and Tracking Your SEO Performance 

When you are tracking your SEO performance, there are many different metrics which you can look into, and it is important that you look at a combination of metrics so that you are getting an overall picture of your SEO performance. In this blog, we will be discussing the 6 metrics that are extremely important to constantly monitor in order to stay on the top of your SEO game! 

Keyword Rankings 

One of the first things to consider when tracking your SEO performance is keyword rankings, where is your website ranking in the SERPs for the keywords that you are targeting? 

A keyword ranking is where your website is positioned in the SERPs for a specific keyword. However, rankings can often change for a number of reasons. This could be due to an algorithm update, a change in user intent, a competitor updating or publishing new content or many other reasons. It is therefore essential to track your keyword rankings. 

Monitoring your rankings is extremely important because the position of your website in the SERPs can have a significant impact on your organic traffic. According to Backlinko, the lower you are in the SERPs, the lower your Click-Through Rate will be. 

Source: Backlinko 

The graph above shows the full Click-Through Rate for Google’s organic results, it shows that if your website is organically ranking in position 1, it will get a 10x higher CTR compared to if your website was in position 10, therefore showing the importance of ranking in those higher positions. 

It is extremely likely that your keyword rankings will significantly affect your CTR and organic traffic, it is therefore vital to keep track of these rankings so that if you do lose rankings and drop down to a lower position in the SERPs, you can figure out why and put your efforts into regaining those rankings. 

So, how do you actually monitor your rankings in the SERPs? Well, there are many different tools to use including SEMRush, Moz and Google Search Console, but the tool we will be looking at today is Ahrefs. Ahrefs is a tool that easily allows you to track your rankings for all of your targeted keywords. 

Above is an example of how Ahrefs displays their keyword rankings. When you first start tracking your website in Ahrefs, you will enter all of the keywords you wish to track for your website. Ahrefs will then display all of your targeted keywords alongside the position that your website is ranking in for that particular keyword. It will give you a thorough overview of the volume, traffic and keyword difficulty of the keyword, alongside this will be the particular URL of your website that is ranking for that keyword. It will give you information about whether your rankings have improved or declined, what the SERP is currently returning for that keyword and how you have ranked for that keyword over the past 12 months.

All of this information is truly vital when you are monitoring your SEO performance as it will give you insights into the history of your rankings, therefore allowing you to further look into what has caused your website to either gain or drop rankings. This can then help to inform your future SEO strategy and how you can maximise your organic traffic. 

Monitoring and tracking your keyword rankings should be a daily occurrence due to the volatility of the SERPs. The SERPs are constantly changing and it is important that you are staying up to date with this so you can focus your SEO efforts effectively. 

Organic Traffic 

Another key metric to track for your SEO performance is organic traffic. Organic traffic refers to the number of users that are visiting your website from the search engines organically (without clicking on an ad).  

Organic traffic can be one of the main ways to monitor and track your SEO performance as you will be able to see exactly how many users are landing on your website organically. 

In order to measure your organic traffic, you can use Google Analytics 4. 

By navigating to the User Acquisition Report within GA4, you will be able to see how many new organic users have visited your website and which particular page they have landed on. In GA4, you are able to change the date range, compare time periods and add filters so you can thoroughly see how your website is performing organically. 

This will give you a clear overview of how your overall website is performing in the SERPs, which pages are performing well, which pages need improvement and how your organic traffic has changed over time. This can be extremely insightful for informing your SEO strategy and seasonal changes in data will also allow you to spot trends and how you can cater to your users. 

Impressions and Click-Through Rate

Impressions and Click-Through Rate (CTR) are also two metrics that are important to measure when you are monitoring your SEO performance. 

An impression is counted every time you show up in the SERP for a keyword or search query. 

Click-Through Rate is the percentage of impressions that resulted in a click. 

To track the amount of impressions and clicks your website is getting, you can use Google Search Console (GSC) which is a free tool which lets you monitor your sites total clicks and total impressions and will give you a percentage of your website’s average CTR.

GSC will also give you a breakdown of the queries that users are searching for and how many clicks and impressions those particular queries are getting. You are then able to look into your average click-through rate for your overall website and individual click-through rates to see how well you’re performing in the SERPs. This will give you an insight of how many users are seeing your website on the SERPs and then actually clicking through. 

It is a good idea to monitor your CTR as part of your SEO performance because when users are seeing your website on the SERPs, they will be looking at your Title Tag and Meta Description for that page. This will be the only thing enticing users onto your page and if your CTR is low for certain pages, it can show that you may need to edit these in order to improve the amount of clicks to your website.

Engagement rate 

Engagement rate is also extremely important to monitor, this measures the percentage of users that are interacting with your website and this will be based on whether they have stayed on your website for more than 10 seconds, clicked on a link within your website or submitted a form. 

Engagement rate is extremely important as it shows whether users are interacting with your website and finding it helpful, or if they are just clicking off your website as soon as they land on the page. If there is a low engagement rate, it shows that the users have not found your website helpful, and they did not feel as though their intent was satisfied. 

A low engagement rate can potentially affect your position in the SERPs and is therefore an extremely important metric when you are measuring your SEO performance. If you have a low engagement rate, it is important to analyse your website and see how you can improve the experience so that user engagement improves. One of the ways to do this would be to review your website against competitors who are performing well and update your website to better match the user intent and increase the engagement rate. 

To monitor your engagement rate, you can again use the User Acquisition Report in Google Analytics 4. This will provide you with the amount of engaged sessions that have occurred and the engagement rate for your overall website and also individual pages. This will provide you with a great insight for which pages need improving.  

Conversion rate 

Conversion rate is the percentage of users who complete a desired action, this can include subscribing to a newsletter, completing a form, adding a product to the basket, or making a purchase. 

Monitoring the conversion rate for your website can give you valuable insights into the behaviour of your users. It can tell you which pages are performing well and driving conversions, the demographics of the users which are converting and what you can do to better serve your users and improve the amount of conversions. 

Conversion tracking also ensures that you know where conversions originated from, which pages your users landed on in order to complete the user journey, this will help you to determine the quality of your landing pages, and which ones need optimising in order to help the user journey lead to conversions. 

In order to track the amount of conversions you are receiving organically, you can go to the User Acquisitions Report in GA4 and filter by ‘Organic Search’ and ‘Landing page + query string’. This will then give you the amount of conversions that each landing page has received. You can also compare this to different time periods in order to see whether your conversion rate has increased or declined, this will then help you to inform your future SEO strategy. 

Key Takeaways 

Tracking and monitoring your SEO performance using the above is an ongoing process. It is important to regularly review your metrics and adjust your SEO strategy accordingly. Remember that SEO is not a one-off project, it is an ever evolving process that will need adapting regularly. By following the steps outlined throughout this blog and utilising the right tools, you can ensure that your website remains competitive and visible in the ever changing landscape of the SERPs. 

By consistently monitoring your SEO performance and staying committed to improvement, you will see the long term benefits of tracking your SEO. If you require any assistance with monitoring your website for SEO and coming up with a suitable SEO strategy, get in touch with us today and our team of SEO experts will be able to help.

In the ever-changing landscape that is digital marketing, staying ahead of the competition and spotting valuable opportunities requires up-to-date knowledge but also actionable insights that can push you and your business forward in the market. 

The key to driving actionable insights for your SEO strategy lies in understanding your users, their behaviour and the impact that your current efforts have on them. 

We’re now a few months into using GA4 and each month we’re noticing and learning more and more ways to use the different reports to find insights that can help with these key points. From on-the-job learning to gaining knowledge from industry experts, we have compiled some of the most valuable use cases of GA4. So, we wanted to share this knowledge with you and outline key ways you can use GA4 to drive actionable insights for your SEO efforts. 

In a world of data-driven decision making, harnessing GA4 and the information it holds about your users is a necessity. To make informed decisions on where to pivot your strategy, remaining agile and optimising in line with market shifts, GA4 is the digital compass that can help to guide the way. 

Whether you’re a seasoned SEO professional or new to digital marketing, it’s crucial to have GA4 expertise in your tool kit. This blog is your comprehensive guide to driving insights from GA4 for SEO and below we will discuss the steps on how you can use GA4 to drive valuable organic insights.

1. Make Sure You Have The Basics

First things first, you need to make sure that your GA4 property is set up correctly. There are several changes that need to be made on top of the default reporting and conversion tracking that’s already in place. Areas where you can customise your property to fall in line with your business goals include Enhanced Measurement, creating custom parameters and customising your event tracking. 

We actually wrote a blog on setting up your GA4 property prior to the onset of GA4 becoming the default analytics platform for Google: Introduction To GA4 – An SEO POV so it’s worth a read if you’re just setting up your GA4.  

Following the steps to setting up your property correctly and in line with your business goals will help you to drive valuable insight in the long run as you won’t be wasting time making amendments and the data you need will be up and running straight away. 

Once you have the basics set up and you’re happy that your property is customised to your business’ needs, you can manipulate and organise the data to draw out valuable information that can inform your digital marketing strategies. For the purposes of this blog and so that I do justice to my expertise, I’ll be focusing on how you can draw insights for your organic channel.

2. Learn How GA4 Can Drive Valuable Insights

Historically, Universal Analytics has provided us with plenty of insights and helped to guide strategies for years but GA4 offers a whole new, user-focused perspective that can really drive insight and give a deeper understanding of your audience.

GA4’s enhanced metrics such as engagement rate, user engagement and depth of scroll allows us to clearly see how users are interacting with our content, spotting high or low engagement pages and, where there is merit in optimising these for your users. After all, GA4’s data model is centred around user tracking rather than session tracking as UA was.

We have another blog on the Five Great Features of GA4 For SEO which gives an overview of some of these useful features, but our favourites for driving actionable insights include the following:

📌 Explorations 

One of the key features on GA4 is the ability to create custom reports. This allows us to explore data in a more interactive and flexible way than the default reports. This feature can be used to tailor your reporting to your specific business needs, allowing you to customise dimensions, metrics and segments related to your business. 

Building custom reports and dashboards with specific SEO metrics can help to streamline your data analysis processes and give a clear overview of organic performance. Whether you want to use a custom report to spot trends in organic traffic (seasonality, device type) and other variables that could impact organic performance; analyse the performance of specific pieces of content across a period of time; combining Google Search Console data to gain insights into search queries driving organic traffic and which landing pages are most visible which can help you to prioritise or even highlight new keyword opportunities.

A few use cases of the explorations tool include: 

• Informing Content Strategy 

• Highlighting 404 Error Pages

• Tracking The Impact of Featured Snippets on CTRs

• Discovering New Content Opportunities 

• Assessing User Behaviour On A More Granular Level

• Segmenting A/B Testing

The Explorations report allows SEOs to dig deeper into the data, uncovering meaningful insights and informing future strategy decisions showcasing the evidence clearly to stakeholders.

📌Machine Learning-Powered Insights

GA4 offers the use of integrated machine learning insights models that automatically identify trends, insights and anomalies in the data presented. These can act as a starting point for you if you’re feeling overwhelmed with the data or if you’re looking for something specifically within the data but cannot find it e.g., trends of users throughout the month: 

You can find these insights on the right hand side of a report, for example on the User Acquisition report:

 

📌 Integrating Search Console Data

Once you have integrated Google Search Console data into your GA4, you will be able to use this additional data to identify opportunities and highlight trends in user behaviour such as what search terms are leading users to your website and which landing pages are receiving this traffic. 

Not only does this help you to spot trends and topics, but connecting your Search Console account to GA4 can present a unified approach to your data and allow you to understand on a deeper level how your users are behaving, which search terms are driving valuable traffic or conversion and which areas need some TLC. 

You can utilise Search Console data in the Explorations tool to uncover key insights such as the relationship between organic traffic and conversions, zooming in on keywords driving conversion to help inform and prioritise high-conversion keywords. Identity which keywords have the highest click-through-rates and where there is room for improvement. You can then focus on optimising content to match user intent for these search queries.

3. Test It Out For Yourself!

Once you have your account set up and are ready to go, try out some of the reports for yourself and see what you can find!

The above are by no means the only ways to find valuable insights on GA4 and this can vary from business to business and from channel to channel. There are a whole host of reports that can provide value from Cross-Device tracking data to Predictive Metrics. The best way to utilise GA4 as a tool to discover new insights and opportunities is by playing with the data and creating custom reports that are specific to your business. 

At Cedarwood Digital, we are confident in using GA4 to report on our clients organic performance and analysing these reports to highlight organic insights to improve not only the user experience but also pivot strategy where needed which can help to drive more revenue or more leads for your business. 
If this is something that we could help you and your business with, why not check out our SEO services or contact us to find out more.

In a commercial landscape in which 76% of consumers look at online presence before physically visiting a business, your digital presence is essential for business growth.

Prospective clients and customers are spending more time online than ever before, using search engines to find the products and services they need. To scale our businesses, we need to enhance our online visibility, and work on reeling in more traffic. But how can this be done without spending a fortune on ads? The answer is SEO. 

Search Engine Optimisation is an effective and inexpensive way to create more prospective clients, and grow your business in the long-term. With 46% of Retail Customer Journeys starting with a Google Search, the e-commerce space is becoming increasingly competitive. In this climate, you cannot underestimate the value of a robust SEO strategy. We’ll take you through an explanation of how exactly SEO can help you grow, if executed correctly. Listen closely and you should pick up some top tips to increase your online visibility.

Brand Visibility and Organic Traffic

Effective SEO can be leveraged to build brand awareness. A properly implemented strategy will assist you in ranking high in the SERPs, and this increases your brand visibility. Customers will be able to identify your business because of the relevant keywords and searches you will be ranking for. 

Increasing your brand visibility through SEO can subsequently increase your web traffic. This is the crucial objective of an SEO strategy, as increasing the quality and quantity of your organic traffic can lead to an increase in conversions if you’re targeting quality traffic. 

When your business name is seen frequently, users will be more inclined to believe that you have the service or goods they are searching for. They’ll then be more likely to click on your website and over time this could lead to a new conversion, and cha-ching, that’s a sale on the way for you! But how can you get yourself up those ranking spots and hopefully landing in Google’s featured snippets? 

The key is in the keywords. Research the right long and short-tail keywords to be implemented in your website, so that the search engine can recognise what your site is all about. Get them into your title, meta-description, and body of text. However, be careful not to keyword-cram – this will simply put a user off your product. Your content needs to use keywords but remain user-friendly and actually helpful.

Improve User Experience 

SEO can also help improve the user’s experience on your site. This can potentially lead to returning customers, and an increase in time spent on the domain.

User experience refers to how easily your customers can navigate your website – it’s the product of branding and web design choices. When people search for queries related to your company, we want them to find your website and enjoy their time on it. It needs to be well-designed, easy to navigate and have a respective load speed in order to be user-friendly, and this is achieved through SEO support and auditing.

Improving a website’s usability will result in more traffic, clicks, and eventual conversions. Plus, remember to prioritise not only technical SEO, but also the website’s content. Provide relevant and high-quality content, and you’re giving the user a reason to stay on the site for longer, and have a proper look through the services you are offering.

Also, good user experience makes people more likely to link to your website. And, as we know, backlinks are an  ever-important means to grow brand awareness and conversion rate.

Building Trust

SEO  focuses on pushing the E-E-A-T component of Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines. This means, optimising a website to demonstrate your proven Experience, Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness. Trust is the most critical component of this, with Google stating that “untrustworthy pages have low E-E-A-T no matter how Experienced, Expert, or Authoritative they may seem.”

Therefore, a trustworthy business is going to be hitting those top spots on the SERPs. Additionally, demonstrating clear trust signals through SEO strategy is critical for business success because, when your company is credible and trusted by clients, they are more likely to buy your products or services. They will also be more likely to then recommend you to other potential customers. 

Prove that you’re a trusty source in your content through including reviews, demonstrating first-hand experience, and making it easy to contact your company. This will generate more and more leads for your business. See a Guide to E-E-A-T from the SEO experts at Cedarwood for an in-depth run-down on how to hit each element of the acronym.

In Summary

SEO is a long-term marketing tactic which, when implemented effectively, will see your website continually ranking well, receiving heaps of site traffic, and consequently scoring conversions.
Looking for some help running an SEO campaign to boost your business? The SEO team here at Cedarwood Digital have a mass of experience developing tailored, results-driven strategies for companies. Contact us today to start the journey of scaling your business.

We’re guessing you’re here because you own or work within a B2B business. If this is the case, you might be wondering how to get your fantastic services in front of as many customers as possible.

This is where B2B SEO takes centre stage. In today’s digital world, where competition is fierce, developing a foolproof B2B SEO strategy is absolutely crucial to succeed. Simply targeting keywords is no longer enough to reach your audience and secure conversions.

Research carried out by GrowFusely found that 34% of B2B marketers said that SEO was responsible for most of their leads and sales and they also discovered that 41% of B2B buyers go through at least three websites before approaching for sales.

In this guide we’ll cover what exactly B2B SEO is, how it differs from B2C SEO, and finish with a simple but effective strategy for you – you’re welcome.

What exactly is B2B SEO…?

So, let’s start with the B2B part. B2B is the name for a business offering goods, services or softwares to other businesses (like we do here at Cedarwood Digital). This isn’t limited to Marketing agencies though; a B2B company is everything from a back office solution provider , to shipping companies like Fedex, even through to platforms like LinkedIn.

B2B SEO then, stands for business-to-business search engine optimisation This is the process of creating and optimising pages on your company’s website to answer your audience’s questions and match user intent to subsequently aim to rank for keywords on search engines like Google. It includes a variety of techniques, related to both the actual content on the website, and the technical layout of the site. 

The aim is to appeal to your intended audience and provide helpful, unique information as industry experts. By doing this, you are more likely to fall in line with Google’s ranking algorithms and Quality Rater Guidelines. Not only will this improve the quality of your site but it could lead to an increase in organic visibility and better positioning in relevant SERPs. The best case scenario is that when people search for terms related to your business, they’ll see your site right at the top, and visit to learn more about your brand.

SEO for B2B companies differs slightly from B2C (business-to-customer), and we’re going to get into these differences now…

Is B2B SEO all that different from B2C SEO?

Plot twist, it’s actually not! While the target audience may be different – an audience of executives and managers, rather than the general public – the process is pretty similar. In both cases, you’re going to want to develop an SEO strategy involving the fundamentals of keyword and user intent research, content optimisation, and link-building.

However, the different audiences of B2B and B2C does make the specifics of SEO strategy a bit different. Whilst people are at the heart of both strategies, when it comes to B2B, they have different expectations and a more complex approval process. In contrast to Business-to-Customer marketing, where individuals often make the purchasing decisions, B2B transactions usually involve multiple stakeholders.

We’ve drawn up a little table for you here to make things easier:

B2B SEO	B2C SEO
Publishes content aimed at decision makers, and senior team members/managers	Publishes content aimed at a broad demographic group like ‘first-time buyers’ or ‘pregnant women’
Therefore, stick to your lower volume keywords, that key decision-makers within companies search for while at work. These might only be getting 50 searches a month but are important for us	Therefore, target high-volume keywords (the ones that thousands of people are searching for each month)
Content is very tactical	Content can be fun, friendly and emotional – to appeal to the general public
Social media marketing doesn’t make much sense in B2B, you’re going to want to stick closer to things like blogging	Focus on social media marketing because your audience is more likely to find what they’re looking for through a TikTok video

A strategy for B2B SEO

We’ve done the hard work for you and pulled together a nice comprehensive plan to get your B2B business soaring up those SERPs. Let’s take a look at this step-by-step guide…

Research the keywords your target customers are searching for

As said, when it comes to B2B SEO, we really want to drill down on the low-volume or ‘bottom of the funnel’ keywords that company executives are looking for. But how do we go about finding them? Well, good keyword research is the difference between getting a smashing ROI, and wasting time and money.

The simplest starting point is to start with ‘seed keywords’. Have a good old brainstorm about what you think your customers might be searching for. For example, if you sell software  that helps business owners create website designs, you might start with keywords like ‘website builder’ ‘graphic design’ ‘ecommerce site developer’.

This is also the point at which it’s worth scouting out your competitors’ keyword usage. Find competitors specifically invested in SEO and research the keywords that they are ranking for.

You’re then going to want to plug all these keywords into a keyword explorer software. (We’d recommend something like Ahrefs or Semrush).Using these tools, you can then see a list of all the keywords that your competitors’ websites rank for, but your website does not. This is called your website’s ‘content gap’.

Based on this information, you can then add these keywords to your list of potentials to target. It will also be worth creating a list of low importance keywords, and link building keywords (ones that receive a lot of natural links, e.g. statistical keywords).

For further insight into the best keywords for your B2B business, here’s a couple top tips from the Cedarwood team:

📌Make use of CPC rates – a high CPC signifies that this might be a potentially high-profit keyword to target

📌Google Autocomplete suggestions will really help you out with finding long-tail keywords. This is super easy – just start typing a relevant term into Google and check out the suggested keywords that come up below. 

It’s now time to optimise your content

You want to optimise each page around the keywords that you found in step 1. This is where you’re really going to get tactical with your on-page SEO, here are a few things we’d suggest implementing:

1. Make your content unique

Your pages won’t rank if they’re duplicate. Write it organically, and feel free to use an AI assistant for help researching, but don’t let them write the whole thing! I know it takes time and can be tricky, but it’ll be worth it I promise.

2. Beef up your pages

Fill out your key landing pages and blogs with over 1000 words of content. Take a look at this research from BacklinkO, which claims the best content length for SEO in 2023 is bang on the 1,500 word mark.

Source: BacklinkO

3. Be smart with your keyword usage

Don’t keyword-stuff, but include the target keyword several times on your landing page. Mention it in your page’s H1 title, title tag, and page URL. Also, use synonyms and variations of your main keyword, and try to include your keyword in the first 50 words of each page.

4. Don’t skip out on the blogging

Having a blog or insights folder on your B2B site will help establish your company as a helpful resource in your industry, and will build trust with your target audience. Making these blogs high quality will also help you out because people will want to link back to it. But more on backlinks later. 

Go for the shoulder topics, writing only articles about your specific services is a mistake. For example, here at Cedarwood, we write blogs about everything from the latest Artificial Intelligence assistants to our experience at an SEO conference.

Lastly, think about your writing style – professionality doesn’t have to mean dry, stiff writing. An executive is more likely to want to work with you if you can come across as approachable, even whilst getting your services across succinctly. In B2B we still want to create content that people want to read.

Outreach and Link-building

A backlink is a link from another website pointing to a page on yours, and once your new and improved pages are published, you want to try and build as many links to these as you can. This is one of the best ways to tell Google your content is worthy of organic traffic. (Your content must be good if all these people are willing to send their readers over to another site!)

There are numerous ways to build links. Here are some of our favourite tried-and-tested methods at Cedarwood:

>Thought leadership – this provides a great opportunity to increase referral traffic, and to establish your business as an authority

>Conduct original research and publish statistics—these are the things that journalists and bloggers love to link to!

>Digital PR: in B2B your goal should be industry blogs and news sites. At Cedarwood for example, we would try and target marketing publications that we know our prospective clients will be reading.

To Sum Up

You should now be in the know on how SEO can be utilised for B2B, and why it is so important. We hope this guide has given you some inspiration to get started on your own strategy. 

Looking for a head-start? Our team of SEO experts at Cedarwood have a wealth of experience implementing effective SEO for a wide range of medium-sized, multinational, and even international B2B companies. Get in touch with us today to find out how we can drive your business’ visibility.

With terms like ChatGPT being increasingly bandied around and most households now equipped with a virtual assistant, artificial intelligence is becoming more and more prevalent. Just this week, Meta announced the launch of their own AI assistant, to be used on Instagram and WhatsApp, and TikTok introduced a feature for labelling AI-generated videos.

No longer confined to Chatbot customer service assistants and driver assist vehicle systems, AI in 2023 is more capable and ubiquitous than ever before. The UK AI market is worth more than £16.9 billion, according to the US International Trade Administration, and 33% of medium-sized companies have now incorporated one AI technology. 

In SEO and the wider marketing industry, AI is similarly gaining traction. It is transforming both how search engines are powered, and how SEO professionals are optimising their content. Google first turned to artificial intelligence in 2016 with its search engine algorithm RankBrain, and since then, AI has been increasingly incorporated into search experience and SEO strategy.

There is growing discussion about the positive and negative implications of AI for SEO; this blog is going to take a deep-dive into the different forms of AI, and how they affect SEO. The experts at Cedarwood Digital will be offering their predictions for the future of artificial intelligence in digital marketing, and it will finish by explaining why SEO professionals must work to adapt and evolve in line with the trajectory of AI.

Content-writing AI

The use of AI to develop and create content is becoming more and more widespread. In late 2022, Chat GPT was released and has now been followed by countless writing AIs including ChatSonic, Jasper and Claude. The revolutionary impact of these conversational AIs is to the extent that Google Search’s guidance on AI-generated content has changed in recent months to allow for AI content creation, provided it meets the same quality guidelines established for human writers.

It is therefore definitely possible to leverage AI to help you create great content. Google wants humans to write content, but there is no reason why AI cannot help improve your business’s content quality. It seems to make sense as, after all, Google’s ranking system is designed to reward high-quality content, and AI can be implemented to deepen your understanding of a topic. 

However, there are also some concerns surrounding AI’s impact on SEO content writing. It’s important to bear these in mind when turning to a virtual assistant for help on a writing task…

>It is important to bear in mind that all the output of these assistants is based only on the data it has been fed, so, to create truly original and unique content you’re going to want to combine its generated information with your human creativity.

>Another concern is that it could decrease the quality of marketers’ content as they attempt to create content solely optimised for search engines. Note that Google wants content to be helpful and written by humans, for humans. SEO content still needs to provide real value for a reader to rank well.

AI and Search Results

On the topic of SERPs, this is one of the areas where we have seen the most significant impacts of AI. The way search engines understand and rank search results is changing, and AI plays a hefty part in this. Google is now using AI algorithms to analyse a user’s search history, location and behaviour to provide impressively personalised results.

But what does this mean for us SEOs? Well, we need to focus on optimising our content for these Natural Language Processing algorithms. Because Google’s AI can now understand the nuances of human search queries, our SEO strategies likewise need to produce content for the user. Include conversational long and short-tail keywords, and write articles that match user intent. 

Also, the big search engines are going beyond merely using AI to better their results and are now launching their own AI-powered search engines. Earlier this year, Microsoft Bing chat and Google BARD were introduced as answers to the influence of ChatGPT. These developments give us an idea of what we can expect more of in the future, but they are not without their concerns. Queries are being raised as to the privacy of these platforms, and potential of information leaks. Additionally, these large language models run the risk of generating misleading information under an authentic guise – because everyone trusts Google, right?

AI and SEO Analysis

As well as optimising for artificial intelligence, we can also use AI assistants to improve our content. SEO professionals can now utilise data-led AI insights to understand how users interact with search engines and websites. There are artificial intelligence softwares tailored to give you the know-how on everything from link building and keyword creation, to measuring your own traffic and engagement conversions. AI can help you optimise for voice-search, or the latest helpful content update, by scanning existing content and suggesting SEO-related changes.

Here at Cedarwood, we make use of AI softwares such as Ahrefs and Semrush to deliver the most effective SEO strategies for our clients. However, as much as these softwares are very helpful, we would always advise using them with a degree of caution – make sure humans are at the beginning and end of this content – Google can tell!

One drawback is that as these AI-powered tools become more commonly used in the marketing world, the competition for rankings increases. As more and more SEOs discover the softwares to make their content extra-relevant, we all need to work that bit harder to rank.

SEOs must stay updated on AI

Whether you love or hate it, AI is here to stay, So it is really important for SEO professionals to stay up-to-date and somewhat prepare for future possibilities. We can’t be sure what the future looks like for SEO, but it is looking increasingly likely that artificial intelligence will play a massive role.

This means that companies need to look at how they can exploit the growth of AI for their own benefit. We’d advise:

📌Creating content that is optimised for AI-driven search results, see our very own comprehensive guide here

📌Provide clear, factual answers in your content that answer users’ queries (FAQs and how-to guides like this one are great!)

📌It is ever-important to show that real people are behind your content – AI can never completely simulate a human writer, so make sure to get emotions and personal experiences in to your writing

📌Keep an eye on your competitors and observe how they’re using and responding to AI developments to give you that competitive edge

What does the future for AI and SEO look like? 

If the Cedarwood team were to have a go at predicting how AI could change in the following year, we would guess that:

~Natural Language Processing will only continue to get more advanced with search engines getting even better at understanding the meaning behind search queries, and especially voice search queries.

~We may see an explosion in the amount of AI content and automated creation of articles, videos etc. We imagine that this new content will consequently result in even more crawlers and advanced algorithms to dig out the meaningful content. After all, Google is famed for its ability to constantly evolve.

~Search engines will know us better than our closest friend. We predict more personalised search results than ever before, based on search history and behaviours across other platforms.

To sum up

Artificial intelligence is loud and it’s proud in 2023 and whether you like it or not, this is having a notable impact on SEO. As SEO professionals, we need to stay updated and adapt our strategies accordingly to stay ahead of the competition.

Looking for a helping hand with AI for SEO? Our SEO team here at Cedarwood are a whizz at all things artificial intelligence – get in touch with us today to discuss a tailored strategy for your business.

Looking to increase traffic to your financial services company website? You’re in the right place. As a heavily regulated and hypercompetitive industry, putting time and effort into your SEO is key to standing out.

We’re going to take you through the ins and outs of why SEO is unique for this vertical and offer an effective strategy for ranking well in organic search.

What is SEO for financial services?

So, in this blog we’re dealing with the financial services sector. Financial services are best described as a process of acquiring financial goods. The sector covers many types of transactions in areas including banking, accounting, investment funding, pensions – the list goes on.

When it comes to SEO for this industry, we’re talking about developing digital marketing strategies to help drive natural traffic to your website, through tapping into organic searches. The aim is to increase your revenue through making your pages more visible. 

To achieve those top spots on the SERPs you’ll need to offer useful content, ensure your site is healthy and secure, and earn valuable backlinks from high-authority sites.

Financial services businesses are increasingly committing resources to SEO, but why is that….?

The importance of SEO for financial services

The financial services industry is increasingly competitive and constantly changing. The battle between established institutions and new fintech faces pushes on, with the field becoming increasingly saturated. The international market size grew at a rate of 8.8% between 2022 and 2023, with the industry now producing 12% of the entire UK’s economic output. That’s pretty hefty.

The industry is also particularly competitive when we consider digital marketing. Unlike other verticals, the financial industry will rarely see free natural links to content, so links are very difficult to acquire. Also, because SEO has proven itself a reliable strategy, lots of the industry giants are now turning to website optimisation. This means that everyone else needs to work an extra bit harder to rank highly.

We need to care about SEO in the financial services because it can see some key benefits. Putting consistent effort into optimising your website will:

📌increase traffic to your site: as you rank higher for important keywords, more and more people will see and click through

📌get you better conversions: the more site visitors, the more paying customers

📌improve your brand image: essentially, more people will have heard of your business and you’ll be on track to being considered a major player

What makes SEO for financial services unique?

It’s important to know that the financial services industry is one of the most heavily regulated sectors. You need to be super cautious about the content you’re publishing because these pages are scrutinised more than the average.

This is because  financial services exist within the ‘Your Money Your Life’ category’.These are pages that can influence an individual’s quality of life – their health, wealth or safety primarily, and these companies have more responsibility when it comes to content. This includes legal and medical information pages, insurance companies, and financial pages.

But why? It comes down to something called E-E-A-T. Google introduced its Search Quality Rating Guidelines for YMYL pages in 2013 and emphasised E-A-T, adding an extra E last year.

The acronyms stands for:

–Experience

–Expertise

–Authority

–Trustworthiness

Whilst these elements are not direct ranking factors in Google’s algorithm , they are still a huge part of the guidelines, and can prevent financial services pages from ranking well. Google defines a high-quality page as demonstrating these four traits and in the SEO strategy later in this blog I’ll take you through how to hit each point.

Not only is Google more thorough when it comes to the financial services vertical, but so are your customers. When researching which service to use, users are more rigorous because their money is at stake. This means that coming across as trustworthy can really help give your business the edge.

The topic of financial services content is also unique because it is unusually complex. Your content needs to really address the customer needs. Things like investing savings, or remortgaging can be complicated and stress-inducing for customers, so your job is to make a tricky topic intelligible. SEO for financial services businesses should involve a knack for explaining difficult concepts in simple terms that a customer can understand, and then want to invest in. Use your site content to demonstrate a deep understanding of the subject matter, and a capacity to make this info user-friendly.

A strategy for SEO in the financial services industry

Okay, we’ve established that SEO is both crucial for this sector and also pretty complex. I’m going to help you out with a nice point-by-point strategy to get you hitting those top ranks.

1. Perform a content and structure audit of your site

First, evaluate each area of your site, checking which existing pages need work and where there’s space for new pages. Is your content meeting the YMYL guidelines? And if it is, is it still simple, clear and actually helpful whilst meeting these guidelines?

Then, make sure your website structure is optimised so that these pages can be easily navigated. Ensure that you’ve got a sitemap listing all your key pages, and good internal links to direct users between related pages on your site. This is your chance to fix any slow-loading pages. (Tip: make sure your site also loads quickly on a mobile device, as traffic from mobile devices now dominates search).

2. You can now move onto optimising and making changes to your site: keyword research comes first

I recommend using a third-party keyword tool like Ahrefs to discover the high-volume and long-tail keywords most relevant to your audience. Identify the keywords that users are actively searching for and that are actually related to the core aspects of your business. Then, map out a content plan in which you are naturally incorporating these words.

You can supplement this with tools like AlsoAsked which identifies question-based searches. This will allow you to incorporate your customers’ specific queries into your content.

3. Analyse your competitors

It is equally important to scrutinise your competitors’ websites in financial services SEO. Are there any keywords that they aren’t addressing? This could be a good opportunity to cash in and rank high. 

Understanding your competition is critical because, through in-depth research, you may discover that it’s not just your direct industry competitors who you need to be worried about. It could be there’s a new niche company on the market selling something similar to one of your services. You can then optimise your page to be the lucky one Google chooses to rank higher.

4. Create high-quality, instructional content 

Source: Luca Mussari

I recommend instructional styles for your financial services content. This way, you can make sure you’re hitting the users’ queries, and providing a clear explanation of those tricky topics.

Guide-style content, like the piece you’re reading now, works to position you as an authority. For example, a ‘a step-by-step guide to online banking’ or ‘how to apply for a loan’. Or, you could even go for an FAQ format which directly answers the queries in search engines, e.g: ‘answering all your questions on conveyancing’.

There’s your authoritativeness demonstrated, but what about making your content fit the rest of the E-E-A-T guidelines? You can show your expertise quite simply, with author bios accompanying your content. It should also be shown through the content itself – do your research, so your knowledge is of a good depth.

The newest element of the YMYL guidelines, experience, requires you to prove that your insights are authentic. Incorporate personal opinions and photos into your content and ensure that you have a good-quality About Us page.

Lastly, financial services sites need their content to demonstrate trustworthiness. You can get this across through having reviews from real-life clients, as well as a clear contact page. Have your customer service info displayed clearly, with accurate phone numbers.

5. Link building and PR

Your authority in your niche of the financial services field can be further enhanced through gaining backlinks. They have always been important for ranking on Google, but the algorithms are now better than ever at identifying paid links versus earned links. 

Writing high-quality content will mean it is sharable and secures backlinks naturally. Focusing on educational and user-centric content like guides and blog posts can help you attract links from other authoritative sources. There’s also the added benefit of then having content to promote on your social media channels, as we do on our LinkedIn:

6. Don’t neglect local SEO

Leave room in your strategy for time spent on local SEO. This is especially important for the financial services sector because many financial services still have physical branches.

Google Consumer Insights show that mobile queries for “bank near me” have grown by over 60% in the past two years. It can be helpful to create a Google My Business listing for each store so that you show up in the search results for customers doing local searches.

A robust local SEO strategy can provide you with a leg-up in the competitive landscape, because it is often easier to rank for local search terms.

How exactly can you optimize for local SEO? It’s important to have individual pages on your website for each location that targets those local keywords. Encourage customers to leave reviews, as this can massively improve your local search ranking and this also shows Google that you’re a business to be trusted.

7. Perform regular visibility checks / keep up frequent analysis

The fundamental thing about SEO is that it is an ongoing process. Trends, algorithms and consumer search behaviours are constantly changing so keep your eye on the key metrics and KPIs.

For example:

-where you’re ranking, per page

-impressions

-organic traffic

-engagement metrics: bounce rate and time per page etc.

-conversions from traffic

-overall SEO score using software like Semrush and Seobility

It’s crucial to keep monitoring your website, and make necessary adjustments. To appear an expert, you’ll need to update your content regularly. The financial services terrain is ever-changing and you need to stay relevant – consistency is key!

In summary

LSA found that 90% of loan and mortgage customers and 85% of check cashing consumers start their journey with an online search. More than ever, we are using local search to find and evaluate financial services providers. Use this guide to kick-start your SEO strategy so that you can tap into this search potential and thrive in this new digital landscape.

It should now be clear to you that SEO for financial services is quite a complex and challenging task, requiring persistence and a strong strategy. If you need a little help, consider enlisting some professionals to get you started. Get in touch with our SEO team at Cedarwood today who can help you create tailored SEO strategies for your financial services site.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that markets like cryptocurrency, sexual wellbeing and vaping are growing in popularity.

With this increase in search, they are also facing more and more advertising restrictions. They are examples of what we call “restricted verticals”, and marketers for these businesses must now create new strategies to reach their target audience.

This blog will explain how restricted verticals can rank highly and increase website traffic, even without PPC, while also covering how SEO is highly effective on these particular SERPs, where the first listing is organic, not an ad.

I’ll finish by suggesting a few top tips for building an SEO strategy if your page falls within the restricted categories.

So, in which verticals can I not use Google Ads?

In their Ads guidelines , Google outlines areas where advertising is either prohibited or restricted. 

Entirely prohibited verticals include:

📌Dangerous products (this ranges from recreational drugs, to fireworks, to vapes)

📌Counterfeit goods (think that fake gucci purse your Auntie got you from Turkey)

📌Services enabling dishonest behaviour (those sites writing whole essays for you, that you definitely considered once or twice at Uni)

Then, ‘restricted content’ is sometimes allowed. So with these verticals, you might get away with advertising, but only on a limited basis. The ads may not show in every location, or the advertisers could need to meet additional requirements before their ads are eligible to run.

The primary restricted sectors are:

📌Alcohol 

📌Sexual content (ads are pretty much a no-go, even on Google Ads alternatives like Meta and TikTok)

📌Gambling (and this includes, casinos, lotteries, and betting sites)

📌Political Content

📌Healthcare and medicine (in the UK, ads cannot be run for prescription drugs, bulk drug manufacturers, and medical professional suppliers but can be run for over-the-counter medicines)

Other examples of things that cannot be advertised at all in the UK are:

📌Addiction Services

📌Legal Cannabis

How does Google know?

You may be wondering, how does Google identify if my ad complies? Well, in their guidelines they state that “we use a combination of Google AI and human evaluation to ensure that ads comply with these policies”. For most cases, they use technology modelled on human reviewers’ decisions. But, more complex or severe cases are “evaluated by our specially-trained experts”.

Essentially then, it’s pretty difficult to dodge these guidelines. Best to have a thorough evaluation of whether any of your ad content falls within a restriction.

Competition across these sectors 

As well as facing the challenge of Google’s guidelines, these restricted verticals must also tackle the problem of competition. 

Here are some stats showing you just how competitive these industries are:

>The casino industry is cut-throat, with legality constantly changing, and backlinks hard to acquire. Language Bear states that: the term “online casino” returns over 1 billion results on Google. If we look at one of the sector’s biggest review sites, there are close to 1,500 casinos listed.

>It won’t surprise you to hear that the vaping industry is rapidly growing, with a new trend of private-label brands beginning to dominate. This diagram shows how much this vertical is estimated to grow in the next five years:

Source: Technavio 

>Likewise, the sexual health and wellness market is projected to reach an estimated value of $2,100 million by 2030, according to mediainfoline. 

Source: NoGood

Why no ads may work in your favour… 

It’s not all bad news, I promise. When it comes to these restricted sectors, the first listing for a search result is the natural listing. So if your website is ranking well, you won’t have to sit below that pesky handful of ads at the top.

Having a look at the data, we can see how not having ads on search results can get users more clicks to their websites:

Source: Econsultancy

Econsultancy found that the CTR of the first-ranking page on Google SERPs is 17.9% when ads are displayed, but 25.7% in the absence of ads. That’s a whopping 30% increase.

Their research also shows that the number one slot secures the best part of clicks, with little to be gained for everyone ranking below:

Source: Econsultancy

What does this mean for businesses in restricted verticals?

What this means is that SEO is now even more valuable for websites where you can’t advertise. Without ads on your SERPs, you have a far greater opportunity to land that top position. It is now worth investing your time into a robust SEO strategy, or SEO professionals, to make sure you tap into this potential. Position one and that target demographic is up for grabs, and optimal SEO will make sure you grab it.

It is especially worth investing in SEO because traditionally, these verticals would have spent far more on advertising anyway. Traffic from organic search is free (although it will take some time, energy and investment), whilst each impression or click through advertising has a direct charge. And, PPC can get pretty expensive if your ads aren’t achieving a positive ROI quickly.

Even using an SEO agency is far more cost-effective than advertising. While investing in SEO professionals for your business will cost some money, it is a long-term investment.

How can users optimise their website for SEO?

To get you off the ground, here are a few aspects to consider initially.

1. Targeted Keyword Discovery: keywords will form the backbone of your SEO strategy. Do your research into what your demographic are searching for, then fit a mixture of short and long-tail keywords naturally into your content.

2. Website structure: a smooth-running site will rank far higher in the search results, and is more likely to hit that number 1 spot.

3. E-E-A-T: some of the restricted verticals (e.g. pharmaceutical websites) fall under the Your Money, Your Life category which need to hit specific requirements. Work on demonstrating experience, expertise, trustworthiness and authority in your content.

4. Backlinks: something that really helps you meet the E-E-A-T requirements is collecting credible backlinks which show Google you can be viewed as a trustworthy authority. 

Differences between SEO & PPC

I’ve covered the cost, but in what other ways do SEO and PPC differ? 

SEO is the practice of improving your website’s visibility through a myriad of aspects including content, site structure, loading speed and use of keywords. It’s less of a quick-fix, and more a process of optimisation which takes time but gives your page the best chance of being crawled.

PPC on the other hand, is pay-per-click advertising. On Google Ads (the most popular advertising system) this involves businesses bidding on keywords to show ads in Google SERPs. You then pay each time that someone clicks on your ad. PPC comes in many forms, not only as the top listing on Google’s results page. Check out this diagram showing different ad examples:

Source: WordStream

Do you need both?

In a nutshell, yes; they do different things, but both can help your business in different ways. They go hand-in-hand, and investing time into both SEO and PPC is the best way to achieve a well-rounded marketing strategy. PPC lets you customise your ads at any time to reach specific people, or promote a new deal. This is then effectively supplemented by SEO which helps the site show up more frequently in relevant search results.

What does the future look like for ad-restriction?

The current list of restricted verticals is not steadfast. Google states that “if we feel that certain kinds of businesses pose an unreasonable risk to user safety or user experience, then we may limit or stop related ads from running.”

Additionally, they posted just last month that an update to Google Ads policies is coming our way in November 2023. They explained that “Google will update its policies to limit impressions in certain ad-serving scenarios that have a higher potential of causing abuse or a poor experience for our users.” 

It is therefore a good idea to keep track of the fluctuating guidelines for ads, as more vertical restrictions may be on the horizon.

In summary

If your business comes across a dreaded ad restriction, this article should now put you in good stead. Don’t fret, just target that SEO optimisation, because high CTR and busy website traffic is now at your fingertips.

Are you confident that your Insurance page is optimised for Google’s rankings? If not, it’s time to learn how to improve and stand out in the hugely competitive market that is the insurance industry. According to Blue Corona, over 50% of insurance searches are performed on mobile devices. Effective SEO can help you tap into the internet’s potential.

Your page needs to cater to Google’s many guidelines and algorithm updates to stand out. No stress, this guide will help you tackle all the requirements .

This blog will firstly take you through why SEO is unique and important for insurance companies, sitting within the Your Money, Your Life industry. It will then discuss a point-by-point strategy for how to do insurance SEO, with a focus on E-E-A-T.

Why is SEO so important for Insurance Companies?

As we all know, the insurance industry is a large and competitive market, dominated by industry giants. According to ABI, the UK insurance market is the largest in Europe and the fourth largest in the world. This market is predominantly online, so that’s where your potential customers are too. 

SEO, then, is the key to ramping up your website traffic and finding those golden new customers. Good SEO can increase your visibility, get you higher ranks and generate trust in your audience. How exactly can you get your website to the top of the search results, competing with formidable competitors of the likes of GoCompare? Keep reading for the specific SEO strategies that will unlock those top spots.

Why SEO is also unique for insurance (E-E-A-T)

Insurance companies come under the YMYL (Your Money Your Life) category, so Google holds insurance websites to a higher standard. They need to focus on E-E-A-T more than your average, wholesome candle-making blog.

Source: Semrush 

A ‘Your Money or Your Life’ page is a term used by Google for pages that they think could impact “the future happiness, health, financial stability, or safety of users”. Examples include medical advice, information on mortgages, news about ongoing violence and yes – insurance websites.

Google introduced its Search Quality Rating Guidelines for these pages in 2013. Then, in 2014,  it added an emphasis on E-A-T, and last year, added an extra E. So in insurance SEO, we are now catering for E-E-A-T. But, what does this mysterious acronym actually mean for us?

E-E-A-T stands for:

Experience

Expertise

Authoritativeness 

Trustworthiness

Google’s algorithms will analyse your insurance page with these factors in mind, when it is deciding where to rank you. Pages perceived to have a no or low E-E-A-T can be held back, and a high E-E-A-T website is rewarded. I’ll now run you through exactly how to optimise your SEO for each of these elements:

Experience

The newest element of the guidelines requires an insurance website to demonstrate first-hand experience in a subject. Content needs to prove that its insights are authentic. This is quite easy to adapt to – just make sure you’re getting your personal experiences and opinions in, or providing personal photos. Another way to optimise a website for the experience factor would be to include a good-quality About Us page.

Google explains this more in the guidelines, stating that they ‘consider the extent to which the content creator has the necessary first-hand or life experience for the topic. Many types of pages are trustworthy and achieve their purpose well when created by people with a wealth of personal experience.’

This is key because it differentiates between human and AI-written content. It also helps your brand image by showing the personality of the organisation, and proving that the employees are honest and authentic. This is important specifically in the insurance sector, where users are transferring money and need to feel safe.

Expertise 

This element of the guidelines wants you to demonstrate that you’re a credible source and can be achieved in many ways. Expertise is best shown not told; you want to focus on demonstrating in-depth knowledge in your content. Do your research, and back up your opinions with other reliable sources.

Another effective way to optimise SEO for the expertise guideline is by including writer profiles on your website. This should include formal qualifications and links to their other articles – all helping to demonstrate their skill set.

Here’s an example of an author bio on an Insurance Company’s website which is a gr-E-A-T example of Expertise:

Source: Accenture Insurance

This bio also includes an image of the author, and explanation of their role in the company; these are elements outlined in Google’s guidelines.

Authoritativeness

Author profiles, as well as creating a sense of expertise, will also build your authoritativeness. This refers to your reputation, especially within your sector. It can be developed through case studies which again show what you’re doing, rather than just claiming to it.

For example, CNN would be considered an authoritative source in the online News sector.

Authoritativeness can also be demonstrated through backlinks where other experts are citing you. These can be generated through infographics and content promotions, and are effective ranking signals for Google.

Trustworthiness

Lastly, Google’s guidelines for Your Money, Your Life pages specifies a need for trustworthiness. You can get this across via having a clear contact page, as well as reviews from real-life clients. 

Have your customer service info displayed clearly, with accurate phone numbers.

Alongside this, demonstrating your expertise and authoritativeness will work together to show Google you’re a trustworthy site. 

Source: Aviva Insurance

One last way that SEO differs in the insurance sector is that the sign-off time for content can take longer. This is because it will often have to go through stages of approval, as a result of the extensive YMYL guidelines. As an SEO content writer, you should bear this in mind when managing your strategy deadlines.

A strategy for SEO in the insurance sector

Speaking of strategies, I’m now going to take you through all the key steps to include in your plan for insurance SEO.

1. Do your keyword research

First and foremost, you guessed it – keywords. This is a critical initial stage to any effective insurance SEO strategy. 

Examine the opportunity of keywords and phrases to what you’re targeting, determining which are most searched. Start by brainstorming keywords relevant to your demographic, and supplement this with use of tools like Keyword Planner and Ahrefs. These tools help you both with finding the words, and organising how you are going to map them.

Another key aspect of keyword research is optimising it for local search. In their 2019 insights report, Google shared that customers are increasingly searching locally for their insurance. They reported that mobile queries that contain “insurance near me” have grown by over 100% in the past two years. I recommend optimising your website for local search through using geographically targeted keywords in the page’s content and URLs.

Remember to then prioritise working on getting those keywords in naturally – gone are the days of inorganic keyword-stuffing. Looking for a more detailed run-down of how to find and implement your keywords? Take a look at our blogpost giving you the complete keyword low-down.

Source: Google

Competitor analysis

As part of your keyword research, make sure you understand your competition. This is another great place to start with your SEO strategy as it helps you gain an initial grasp of where you’re sitting in the insurance market.

Tools like Moz and Semrush can be used to analyse your competitors’ website performance, in comparison to your online presence.

2. High-quality content is high-performing

Source: Allianz

It really is all you can E-E-A-T when it comes to insurance SEO. When it comes to writing content for YMYL pages, writing content that’s of good quality is crucial.

Here are some quick tips to achieve that illusive high-quality content:

• Never provide false information, remember Google loves a trusty source
• Keep your content up to date – you’re writing in a sector that changes frequently
• Proof, proof and proof again – expertise isn’t demonstrated through grammatical mistakes!
• Do your research. You want your content to have adequate depth
• Don’t forget the author bio and quotes from experts, for that good old authoritativeness 
• Be descriptive but not flowery. Your writing needs to be clear.

3. Quantity *and* quality

Not only does content for insurance websites need to be high-quality, it is also beneficial to prioritise quantity.

BKA Content found that articles with more than 3,000 words receive an average of 77 percent more backlinks than shorter articles. This might be because good E-E-A-T content includes a certain level of depth and authority, which really needs at least 1,000 words to be achieved.

Also, a longer piece of content will allow you to get your keywords in more naturally, and thoroughly dissect your topic with multiple headings. Side note: this will help it appeal to Natural Language Processing algorithms! 

4. Site structure makes all the difference

Source: Ripe Insurance

In your strategy for insurance SEO, it’s important to include a step dedicated to website structure. Carry out a site audit, checking for broken links and assessing your URL structures. Any broken elements will make for an unenjoyable user experience, and this won’t help your authoritativeness either.

On the other hand, a fully functioning site, with user-friendly design will reduce bounce rate and help the users to navigate through your pages. Also, search engines will find it easier to crawl your pages if the code and architecture is frequently reviewed.

Another top tip is that large images can affect your ranking. Keep them compressed so your website loads quickly. Google takes load speed into account when it chooses which pages to place on page 1. (You can also keep the loading time down by optimising your website’s code).

Have a look at this comprehensive guide for website structure if your pages are looking a little jumbled.

5. Prioritise reviews and a positive online reputation

Reviews are a fundamental part of insurance SEO. They help build up a good reputation, which you’ll remember was key for the T of E-E-A-T. Google specifically states in their guidelines that “for a YMYL website, a mixed reputation is cause for a Low rating.” This also refers to independent rating websites; prioritise obtaining good reviews both on and off your site.

Here’s an example of Ripe Insurance effectively using Trustpilot reviews on their landing page:

Source: Ripe Insurance

Through verified reviews, you will increase your website traffic, and boost your rankings. Reviews are also useful because they increase the amount of content on your page, and, as we know, Google loves quantity. What’s not to like?

Offline reputation is also important!

These online efforts at showing trustworthiness can be supported by Digital PR and outreach. Securing quality links will further ramp up your page traffic. So, make sure to devote time in your SEO strategy to both your online and offline reputation.

6. After implementing these steps … measure and analyse your own strategy

Utilise SEO analytics tools like Google Analytics and Google Search console to frequently assess which methods are improving your site’s performance. Keep tracking your rankings, your metrics like Salience, and which of your pages are most frequently visited. 

Through keeping an eye on your analytics, you will then have a heads up on which tactics are getting your pages crawled, and what needs to be adjusted to optimise your rankings.

A final extra tip

Having an FAQ page on your insurance website is a failsafe way to optimise your SEO. It shows Google that you are doubling down on satisfying user intent, and have a thorough understanding of your subject areas.

Source: MoneySuperMarket 

To sum up

LSA found that for many insurance customers, search is their first step when assessing their options – 69% ran a search before scheduling an appointment. This blog has explained how and why SEO is specifically so important in the insurance sector. With the high level of competition, and YMYL category guidelines, developing a thorough SEO strategy is crucial to improve your rankings and traffic.

Hopefully, this guide will help you build a strong online presence to attract new customers. You’ll be insurance SEO-savvy in no time.