Marketing Agency St. Louis

Social Media Audit: Simple 7 Step Guide

Henry Right — Mon, 02 Feb 2026 13:00:46 +0000

We’ve all seen it: a brand with 50,000 followers and about three likes per post. Or worse, a company’s LinkedIn page that hasn’t been updated since 2022. In digital marketing, if you aren’t moving forward, you’re being left in the dust.

A social media audit is more than just a routine checkup of your social media profiles; it is one of the best ways to ensure your brand is represented well online. A social media audit is a structured review of your brand’s social media platforms to assess post performance, overall audience engagement, and brand representation. A thorough social media audit helps businesses understand what’s working, what’s not, and where to focus social media efforts. The main goals of an audit are to identify areas for optimization and realign posts with the current brand image.

Think of an audit as looking under the hood of your online presence. Is everything working as intended, or are there parts that are outdated or need to be removed?

Key Takeaways:

If you’re short on time, here is the high-level strategy for a successful social media audit:

Audit for Intent, Not Just Likes: A successful audit measures brand sentiment and business-focused key performance indicators rather than just vanity social media metrics like follower counts.
Benchmark Current Progress: To see where you stand, perform a competitor analysis on 3–5 direct and aspirational rivals to identify gaps in their strategy that you can exploit.
Consistency is Key: During the audit, ensure your writing style and visuals are consistent across all platforms to build brand trust with your audience.

1. Take Inventory: Evaluate Your Social Media Presence

The first thing you are going to want to do is simple, but vital. You can’t start optimizing if you don’t fully understand the current state of your profiles. During this step, you will want to take stock of every part of your social media presence. You will want to look at what social media accounts you already have, how many followers you have, and what posts you currently have. During this step, there’s really no wrong answer; the main goal is to give you a starting point to grow your social brand and following.

The main things you will want to do during this stage are:

Catalog Your Assets: List every active and inactive account. Don’t forget those “ghost” accounts created for a specific campaign three years ago.
- It is important to note that if you find “forgotten” social accounts with your brand name that you no longer operate or use, either revive them or shut them down completely. It is important for building trust that when people search for your brand through social channels, they find a consistent message.
Check for Consistency: Are your handles the same across X, Instagram, and TikTok? Does your profile image match your current brand messaging?
Log the Baseline: Use a spreadsheet or a social media audit template to record current followers, engagement rates, and posting frequency.

2. Select Tools to Assist Your Audit

During this process, you will need to analyze and make decisions based on data. Here are some tools designed to make the audit process easier:

Meta Business Suite: This analytics tool helps you gather analytics for both your Instagram and Facebook pages. The great thing about this tool is that the data comes straight from the source, so you know it is reliable. This tool also lets you schedule posts in advance.
LinkedIn Analytics: This tool is similar to the one above, just for LinkedIn. The cool thing about this tool is that it gives you in-depth audience demographics data (like job title and company), so you can track B2B performance. Again, the data is coming straight from the source here, so you can trust what you see.
Hootsuite & Sprout Social: These 3rd-party tools are great at showing you competitor insights and overall customer sentiment. These tools are great for social listening and let you schedule, publish, edit, automate, and manage all your posts across platforms.
Canva or Google Slides: When it’s time to present the findings of your audit, these tools are great for visualizing your data in a way that makes sense and appeals to different stakeholders. Both of these apps have great templates that let you add your data and create a great-looking slide deck without doing any graphic design.

3. Competitor and Market Analysis: See Where You Stand

Once you have taken stock of your own social media presence, you need to see how you stack up against your competition. During this step, you will want to identify 3-5 competitors to compare your social media performance with.

The three things to look at when analyzing your competitors are:

Benchmarking: Use tools to track how often your competitors post and what their top-performing posts look like. See which post types and cadence work well, and apply them to your accounts.
Content Mix: Look at how often competitors post videos vs. pictures. If your competitors are posting video content twice as much as you are and getting 3x the engagement, it’s time to adjust your social media content mix.
Sentiment Check: Analyze how followers engage with their posts. If the engagement is relatively positive, take notes on how you can emulate it. If the engagement is largely negative, find out why the type of content is eliciting a negative response and learn from it to improve your content.

4. Listen Closely: Track Audience Sentiment and Trends

Social media isn’t just a one-way medium where you put your message out to the masses like a billboard. Social media is a two-way conversation where users actively engage with you and your brand. The best way to develop a social strategy for interacting with your customer base is through social listening.

Social listening involves monitoring and analyzing mentions, hashtags, and trends to understand how your target audience feels about your brand. These two steps will help you turn this data into insights for your future content strategies:
Monitor Mentions: Use social media management tools like Hootsuite or Sprout Social to track brand mentions and specific hashtags to see what people are saying about your brand. These tools give you a good sense of your brand’s overall audience sentiment.
Detect Trends: What are people in your industry talking about right now? By tracking sentiment, you can pivot your content to address current pain points before they become old news.

5. Check Content Performance and Brand Consistency

This stage of the audit is to do a deep dive into the content you have posted. You are going to want to analyze your previous posts to see whether your brand is consistently represented the way you want.

Consistency is the key to building trust with your audience. When analyzing your content, you are going to want to use these three tips:

Visual & Voice Audit: Review your visuals and captions against your internal brand guide. All of your content should align with your brand guide. If posts don’t align with the brand guide, evaluate whether they are worth retooling to fit it.
Format Effectiveness: Are your videos outperforming your images? If so, stop wasting resources on graphics that no one is swiping on.

6. Measure, Benchmark, and Set Goals

Now that you have a pretty good idea of how you will run your accounts moving forward, it is time to establish goals for them. When crafting goals, be honest with yourself and assess where your accounts stand compared to competitors and industry averages. During this step in the audit, you should:

Define KPIs: Align KPIs with your overall business goals; don’t just track likes. If your goal is to grow your brand awareness, track followers, and engagement metrics. If your goal is to grow website traffic, track CTR from posts. You can pick whatever KPIs you want, as long as they align with your greater business goals.
Set Actionable Goals: These goals need to be actionable and trackable; instead of saying “get more followers,” say “increase LinkedIn engagement rate to 4.5% by Q3.”
Align Teams: Make sure that all the different teams involved in social media, marketing, content, and creative are all bought into the goals.

7. Present and Act on Audit Findings

Now that you have all your social media analytics, benchmarks, and actionable goals, it is time to present the audit findings to the appropriate stakeholders. This audit report should be a clear, actionable roadmap for the next quarter that outlines how you plan to achieve your social media goals.

The key to this presentation is to create a story from the findings, give them reasons to care about the action plan, and explain how it helps the company achieve broader business goals. If you present a plain PowerPoint with all your data, with no clear story or rationale behind it, they will not care. Make the presentation more engaging by creating a visually appealing slide deck in Canva Docs or Google Slides, and give the audience a reason to care about your audit.

Here are some key things to cover during the presentation:

Create a Dashboard: Organize your analytics and insights into visual dashboards so stakeholders can see the data at a glance. This makes it easier for your audience to digest the “why” behind your plan.
Identify “Quick Wins”: Maybe it’s updating all your bios or pinning a high-performing post. Start with the easy stuff to build momentum. Show your audience that you are actively working toward the bigger goals through small actions.
Next Steps: Define a clear timeline for implementing the audit changes. Explain your actionable goals and why your plan will achieve these goals.

FAQs

What is included in a social media audit?

AI Tools Similar to ChatGPT: Find the Best Tool for You

Henry Right — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 18:08:47 +0000

It seems like AI is all the rage these days. From emails to TV commercials, this new technology is slowly taking over our lives. None of the AI assistants is more famous than OpenAI’s flagship product ChatGPT. While ChatGPT is the household name that started our obsession with LLMs (large language models) and generative AI tools, it may not be the best fit for you and your projects.

There are plenty of AI tools out there, and they all have different strengths and weaknesses. Here is a breakdown of popular free ChatGPT alternatives, including pros, cons, and what each pricing plan includes.

ChatGPT’s Flaws

You wouldn’t be looking for ChatGPT alternatives if you didn’t think the tool had flaws. Here are some of ChatGPT’s shortcomings to keep in mind when looking for a replacement.

Frequent Hallucinations

Hallucinations are outputs from AI models that contain errors. These errors could stem from several sources in the models, but the two main ones are inaccurate training data and a lack of built-in truth-checking of outputs. These hallucinations can range from a small typo to a blatantly incorrect answer to a query.

While with every update, ChatGPT has gotten better and better about its hallucinations, hallucinations still occur regularly. It is important to note that hallucinations can occur with any AI tool, but ChatGPT appears to be more prone to hallucinations than others.

AI Writing Style

If I gave you two pieces of writing, one that a human wrote and one by ChatGPT, I’m confident you could pick out the ChatGPT one. This is because the model sounds robotic, is long-winded, and uses em dashes (–) often. This writing style makes it hard to use any ChatGPT outputs without first rewriting them.

Lack of Integration

ChatGPT is a great overall tool that can complete many tasks, but it has no integration with the apps people use to get work done. The lack of integration requires users to manually move outputs from the ChatGPT app to their other apps, and vice versa.

Claude

Developed by Anthropic, Claude has quickly become the go-to for users who find ChatGPT’s writing style predictable and robotic. If you are looking for an alternative that feels more human and less “AI-generated,” Claude is the right tool for you.

Pros:
- More human-like reasoning when compared to other AI tools
- Avoids the “repetitive” tone of other AI models, providing more natural-sounding outputs.
- Massive memory capacity, which allows you to upload a large amount of documents at a time.
Cons:
- The free tier is limited during peak hours.
- No image generation.
- Poor integration with live web data, which means that outputs could be out of date.
What the Free Plan gets you:
- Access to Sonnet, the mid-tier model that balances high-level reasoning with speed.
- Standard AI chatbot functionality with a daily prompt cap (around 15-20 messages).
Paid Plan Benefits:
- Access to the high-performance “Opus” model
- The ability to save “Projects” to keep your brand assets and templates organized
- Exclusive early access to experimental features like “Extended Thinking mode”.

Google Gemini

If your business runs on the Google ecosystem (Google Docs, Sheets, Slides, etc.) Gemini is the tool for you. Integration with the other Google apps is effortless, allowing beginners to utilize the tool quickly. Since Google Search powers Gemini, it has access to the vast data library the Google search engine has built over the last 3 decades, giving it a major leg up on other tools.

Pros:

Seamless integration with Gmail, Docs, Slides, and Sheets, which allows for instant data retrieval and referencing.
Powered by Google Search, giving users the most up-to-date outputs among AI tools.
Image, text, and video content generation.

Cons:

Uses your data to train future models, which could pose privacy concerns for some users.
Struggles to replicate a specific writing style as effectively as Claude, leading to some outputs sounding robotic.

What the Free Plan gets you:

Access to the “Flash” model, which is optimized for speed and high-volume tasks.
Basic ability to pull information from your personal Google apps.

Paid Plan Benefits:

Access to the 3 Pro model, which does better with complex tasks.
Access to “Deep Research” mode that offers real-time browsing and analysis of hundreds of websites for in-depth reports.
10x more AI credits to use on image and video generation.
AI drafting tools built directly into the interface of Google Docs and Gmail.

Microsoft Copilot

If your company runs on the Microsoft Suite (Excel, PowerPoint, and Word), Copilot is the AI tool built for your workflow. Copilot is powered by Bing search, enabling it to retrieve up-to-date information from web data. Copilot uses the same technology from OpenAI, so the tool is similar to ChatGPT, just backed by the search power of Bing.

Pros:

Microsoft Office integration makes Copilot the only tool that can build a full PowerPoint deck or Excel spreadsheet from a user’s text prompt.
High-level data protection to ensure your data stays within your organization and isn’t used to train future models.
Powered by Bing search to ensure outputs are up-to-date and include proper citations.
Image generation through the DALL-E 3 model.

Cons:

Must be 100% committed to using the Microsoft Office workspace to get the full value.
Some users report that the integration within Office apps can be overwhelming and the interface cluttered.

What the Free Plan gets you:

Standard AI chat and web search capabilities during non-peak hours through the GPT-4 model.
Basic image generation with a limited number of “boosts” per day, AI-powered by the DALL-E 3 model.

Paid Plan Benefits:

Priority Access to the latest GPT-4 models.
Unlocks the Copilot AI features inside Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.
Access to Copilot studio, which allows users to create custom AI agents that can automate tasks and answer questions using your company’s data, systems, and processes

Perplexity

Perplexity is the best AI tool for brainstorming and summarizing research. Where the other AI models listed will first turn to the data they have been trained on, Perplexity will pull real-time data from reputable news sites, blogs, social media, academic databases, and industry reports to provide users with up-to-date answers in concise summaries.

Pros:

Every output includes citations to the source, allowing users to fact-check everything the model says
Each query is paired with the AI model best suited to address the user’s questions and follow-ups.
Essentially, there are no hallucinations that other tools can produce because every output is backed by a source.

Cons:

The model struggles with creative content creation.
Greatly limited image generation for free plan users.

What the Free Plan gets you:

Unlimited quick searches with real-time web data.
5 Pro searches per day, with access to the tool’s deeper research capabilities.

Paid Plan Benefits:

Unlimited Pro Searches.
Unlimited file uploads for deep data analysis of your assets.
AI Image Generation with access to DALL-E directly within the interface.

Meta AI

Meta AI is the tool designed to streamline your social media efforts. Meta AI is integrated directly into WhatsApp, Instagram, and Facebook. Meta’s tool helps users through features such as DM tools, story content editing, and AI image generation.

Pros:

No current “Pro Plan” is required for most of its powerful features.
Creates high-quality AI-generated images in seconds using their EMU model.
User-friendly and accessible inside the apps you already use on Android and iOS.

Cons:

Not designed for complex business workflows, more geared to one-off tasks.
Lacks the memory found in other AI tools.

What the Free Plan gets you:

Unlimited chat, real-time search, and image generation across Meta platforms.
High-quality conversational AI for hands-free queries utilizing voice interactions.

Paid Plan Benefits:

(At the time of writing this, the free version is the only option. Meta is still testing a paid service, with rollout expected to begin in 2026.)

Key Takeaways

Now that we’ve covered the best ChatGPT alternatives and their pros, cons, and what each tool offers, I hope you have a clearer idea of which tools to use for which projects. Note that developers regularly fine-tune these tools, so stay up to date on new features to see whether they better address your needs.

While all of these tools are great in their own way, it is important to remember they are tools, so use them as such. All of the models can produce hallucinations, so you must take any outputs with a grain of salt.

As more users adopt these AI tools, it is important that your business remains visible. Staying visible in the age of AI is complicated. If you don’t want your business to get left in the dust as users migrate from traditional search to AI search, connect with us. Digital Strike – Targeted Marketing has the solutions your business needs to stay in front of customers in this new age of search.

Best SEO Websites [Updated for 2026]

Kristen Greif — Mon, 05 Jan 2026 16:33:25 +0000

Best SEO Websites to Boost Marketing Efforts [2026]

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a cornerstone of digital marketing strategies for businesses large and small. It positions brands as the answer to users’ queries and pain points, with well-optimized brands appearing higher in search engine results pages (SERPs) like Google, Bing, and Yahoo.

SEO (and digital marketing in general) is constantly evolving. That means staying on top of SEO trends, algorithm updates, and more is critical for success in today’s digital landscape. Some of the best ways to stay on top? Knowing the right resources, including the best SEO websites for research and website building, as well as the best SEO tools.

5 Best SEO Website Examples to Get Inspired & Grow Your SEO Knowledge Base

The following websites are winning on two fronts: they’re well-optimized for SERPs (so you can see first-hand what SEO done right looks like) and they help digital marketers get valuable insight into ever-evolving industry trends.

5. Semrush

Website: https://www.semrush.com/

Is it a tool? Is it a resource hub? It’s both! Semrush offers AI-powered marketing tools as well as an in-depth blog covering topics from SEM to PPC to beyond. Free offerings include SEO audits and keyword research tools. Paid plans offer functions like ChatGPT Search Tracking, competitor analysis, GBP optimization, campaign launching, and more.

4. Search Engine Land

Website: https://searchengineland.com/

Search Engine Land is firmly established as a trusted industry resource for all things digital marketing. That means plenty of news about the latest Google updates, tips for cost-effective changes for Google Ads campaigns, and much, much more. Articles from industry experts are published every day, so you can always count on up-to-date, authoritative information.

3. Search Engine Journal

Website: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/

SEO, tutorials, and search marketing news… oh my! All this and more can be found on Search Engine Journal, another industry giant for information resources like step-by-step technical SEO guides and Gemini updates.

2. HubSpot

Website: https://www.hubspot.com/

HubSpot has it all for digital marketers: software, tools, a blog, AI-powered assistants, and more. Popular products include scalable content marketing and customer service software. Paying customers aren’t the only ones who get goodies, though. HubSpot offers plenty of free tools to users, including an AI Search Grader and Email Signature Generator.

1. Digital Strike – Targeted Marketing

Website: https://www.digitalstrike.com/

For expert insight into search engine optimization, content marketing, and more, there’s no better place to go than Digital Strike – Targeted Marketing. We’re dedicated to delivering real results to clients with data-driven strategies customized to fit each one’s unique industry, vertical, and target channels.

5 Best SEO Website Builders for Beginners

You don’t need to be a web developer or have knowledge of Javascript to create a new website (at least when you use the following SEO-optimized website builders).

5. Webflow

Website: https://webflow.com/

Webflow is the tool helping visual creatives create websites that look great while still implementing best SEO practices. It’s a great way to keep real people and search engines happy.

4. Wix

Website: https://www.wix.com/

Wix is easy to use and can create visually stunning sites that perform well in SERPs. Best of all, it offers a free plan that helps small business owners with shoestring budgets get up and running.

3. Squarespace

Website: https://www.squarespace.com/

Squarespace is another user-friendly site builder that offers an incredible variety of website templates, most of which offer great integration with social media, Google Business Profile (GBP), and other channels and software.

2. Shopify

Website: https://www.shopify.com/

If you’re an ecommerce business, Shopify makes it easy to create well-optimized product pages that are easily shared across all channels—all without sacrificing site performance or search engine result rankings.

1. WordPress

Website: https://wordpress.com/

There is perhaps no more user-friendly website builder/content management system available than WordPress. Content creation? Easy. Social media? Incredible integration options. Plugins? You’ll never want for lack of options.

5 Best SEO Tools & Software for Your Toolkit

Success online depends in part on the tools at your disposal. The following are great additions to your SEO toolkit.

5. Moz

Website: https://moz.com/

For large and small businesses alike looking for an accessible all-in-one tool, it’s hard to beat Moz. Popular tools that are part of the Moz Pro plan include keyword research tools, rank-tracking tools, and on-page SEO content graders. Moz API also makes software integration easy and SEO-friendly.

4. Google Analytics

Website: https://analytics.google.com/analytics/

All website owners need to make use of Google Analytics; there is no better source of authority for Google Search result metrics (organic search and paid traffic alike).

3. Ahrefs

Website: https://ahrefs.com/

When it comes to in-depth research, Ahrefs can’t be beat. Tracking organic traffic, website rankings, and keyword ranks along with finding relevant keywords and gaps in content (along with much more) is where Ahrefs shines, offering tools for quick comparisons and finding data points to develop and implement a comprehensive SEO strategy.

2. Screaming Frog SEO Spider

Website: https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/

I scream, you scream, we all scream for Screaming Frog. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a technical SEO website crawler tool that helps users fix technical issues like broken links and find other places to grow, like link-building opportunities.

1. Yext

Website: https://www.yext.com/

Yext is the tool for local business listing and multi-location business management. It allows you to keep a consistent brand message across all channels, including AI tools. That’s right: Yext ensures that not just traditional business directories have your information right, but AI tools too.

Website SEO FAQs

Which type of website is best for SEO?

How to Rank for “Near Me” Keywords and Boost Local SEO

Henry Right — Mon, 24 Nov 2025 17:29:35 +0000

Have you ever been tasked to answer the dreaded “what should we do for dinner” question? A conversation that seems never-ending because every participant either has no opinion or shoots down any suggestion. This conversation usually ends with someone suggesting a type of food, like Mexican or Italian, and everyone agrees they could eat that option. Then you whip out your phone and search “Mexican food near me“, find a restaurant everyone agrees with, and go on your merry way.

The key to solving the “what should we do for dinner” question is actually a “near me” search, also known as a local search. These searches are essential to business owners because users are close to making a purchase. In fact, 76% of consumers who search “near me” visit a business within a day. These searches have high intent because they occur so close to the moment of purchase.

This guide will break down the tactics you will need to rank for “near me” keywords. You’ll get simple local SEO checklists, practical advice on Google Business Profile, link building, review strategies, and real-world tips for tracking and improving results over time. By the end, you will have actionable steps and clear wins in local search results!

Local SEO Fundamentals

To rank well for “near me” keywords, you first need to understand the force behind ranking for these terms, and that force is local SEO. Local SEO is the process of optimizing a business’s online presence to attract more customers from relevant local searches. In this process, you are trying to capture as many searchers in your area as you can. In general SEO, you compete for broad terms and searchers who could be anywhere, whereas in local SEO, you compete for slightly more specific terms and searchers in your local area. To have a complete digital marketing strategy, you need to be optimizing for local search.

There are three main ranking factors that the Google algorithm uses when serving local search rankings. The first factor is relevance, or how well your business matches the user’s search query. The second one is distance, or how far your business is from the searcher. The third factor is prominence, or how well-known the business is in the surrounding area. When trying to capture “near me” searches, you need to optimize for these three factors, starting with your Google Business Profile.

Google Business Profile: The First Priority

Your Google Business Profile (GBP), previously known as Google My Business, is the most essential thing you can control when trying to rank for “near me” searches. Your GBP acts as a digital storefront for your business, displaying key business information such as location, hours, photos, and reviews. Here is an example of how GBPs appear in search results:

Your GBP allows you to appear in Google Search and Google Maps. Your GBP is where you can update all the information needed to rank for “near me” searches. Here is a checklist of things to do to optimize your listing:

Claim and verify your GBP listing: First, make sure you have claimed your business profile. Google creates business listings from local directories and public records, but it is of no use to you until you claim the profile and verify that your business is legit. If you have multiple physical locations, be sure to claim the profiles for each location.
Important Update: Ensure your business name, address, phone number, and hours are correct. Be sure to update this information whenever it changes; for example, if you have special holiday hours, be sure to update them so users are aware. Making sure your business hours are correct is extremely important. If your hours are listed as 9 am-5 pm but you are actually open 9 am-7 pm, you will miss out on searches from 5 pm-7 pm because Google won’t serve closed businesses when others are open.
Select relevant categories: When choosing your primary category, pick one that represents your niche. A common error business owners make is picking a broad category like “Restaurant” instead of a specific one like “Mexican Restaurant”. The theory is that you will catch more searchers with the broader category. Still, the reality is you won’t rank as well in the broad category because there are so many businesses in this category.
Include all your services and products: Be sure to add them to your GBP. Once you add your products and services, be sure to complete the descriptions, adding any local search terms where they naturally fit.
Add detailed business descriptions with localized keywords: It is essential when you are writing your business description to use a lot of the local keywords you are hoping to rank for. Be sure to add location-based keywords like “Mexican restaurant in St. Louis” and “Mexican restaurant with delivery” to rank well for local searches. It is important to note that you shouldn’t stuff as many keywords as possible, as that can come off as spammy and could get your account suspended.
Upload high-resolution photos and videos showcasing your business. Photos will make your profile more engaging by showing potential customers what they can expect when visiting your business. These photos will also help Google better understand your business type and atmosphere.
Encourage and respond to customer reviews regularly: Reviews are one of the three key ranking factors for local search: prominence. Be sure to encourage customers to leave a review after each transaction, and respond to all reviews (positive and negative) to show Google and users that you care about your customers.
Post updates, offers, and Q&A content directly on GBP: Share regular posts, special offers, and timely information to keep your profile fresh. Active engagement will encourage clicks, help convert searchers into customers, and keep your community updated on new business developments.

On-Page Optimizations for Your Website

Once you have your GBP optimized for local searches, it’s time to optimize your website for local searches. Your website content will give Google context for all the services you provide and the area you serve. Here are a few things you can add to your website to help you rank better for “near me” searches:

Build location and service pages that address local intent: Your site should include pages for the locations you serve, along with subpages for each service area that list the services you provide. For example, suppose you are a Texas-based plumber who services Houston, Dallas, and Austin. In that case, you should build location pages for each city and subpages for each service you provide (e.g., Houston Plumbing, Houston Drain Cleaning, and Houston Water Heater Installation).
Maintain consistent business name, address, and phone number (NAP) across all website pages: Ensuring your name, address, and phone number are consistent across all your webpages will build trust and authority with users and Google.
Use local business schema markup: Properly adding this structured data ensures your information appears correctly in search engine results pages. Schema will also help you rank in different features on SERPs.
Optimize meta titles and descriptions for “near me” intent: Use “near me” and other local terms, such as neighborhoods, naturally in your meta descriptions to give Google and users clear context about where you are located and what you do.

Optimizing for Mobile Searches

Most “near me” searches, a whopping 84%, are done on mobile devices. This means that mobile optimization is crucial for ranking for these searches. The key to mobile optimization is user experience. Every aspect of your site should translate to mobile and provide a positive mobile user experience. The better the user experience, the lower your site’s bounce rate, which signals to Google that your site is relevant and user-friendly.

To ensure a mobile-friendly user experience, include responsive design and easy navigation to accommodate all screen sizes; click-to-call buttons; integrated maps for quick actions; fast page load times aligned with mobile Core Web Vitals; and location-based content that dynamically adjusts to user location and preferences.

Building up Your Local Reputation

Your business’s reputation is one of the key aspects of the prominence ranking factor for local SEO. There are two essential aspects of your online reputation: reviews and local visibility.

Review Management

Reviews both on your GBP and directories like Yelp have a significant impact on your rankings for “near me” keywords. Here are three actionable things you can do to improve your rankings and reviews:

Request reviews at key customer touchpoints (post-purchase, follow-up emails).
Respond promptly to both positive and negative feedback.
Highlight positive reviews on your website and social media.

Increasing Your Local Visibility

The best way to increase your local visibility is through social media. Here are three ways you can utilize social media to help improve your local visibility:

Share local content. This can be content about your business participating in local events, updates about your different locations, or employee and customer spotlights.
Use local geotags and hashtags. Tag your posts with relevant hashtags and geotags to help users associate your content with those locations.
Partner with local influencers to expand reach. Partnering with local influencers is a great way to get your name out to more people and increase your local visibility.

FAQs

What is local SEO?

How to Track SEO Effectively: Metrics, Tools & Tips

Henry Right — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 21:55:56 +0000

Are you investing in a search engine optimization (SEO) strategy for your website, but wondering if all the time spent researching keywords, link building, and writing optimized content is actually moving the needle? Well, you’re not alone; every marketer and manager wants to see concrete results that they can measure. The good news is that tracking SEO performance isn’t impossible or as complex as you may think. To measure success accurately, you’ll need the right mix of tools and performance metrics.

Today, we’ll go over the tools you should be using to measure your SEO efforts, the metrics to look at when defining success, as well as the metrics to ignore.

Why Tracking SEO Matters

Before we delve into how to track your SEO efforts, it’s essential to establish why this is necessary. Tracking your SEO strategy is crucial for identifying which efforts are practical and which ones are not. You could conduct extensive keyword research and create high-quality content, but if you are not tracking the results of your efforts, it could all be for nothing.

By tracking your SEO strategy, you can establish proper goals and benchmarks for your efforts. Without monitoring the campaign, you will be left to guess which strategies are driving success and which ones are not working. By tracking your campaign, you will be able to derive actionable insights from your efforts rather than just hoping what you are doing is working.

Getting Started

Now that you understand the importance of tracking your SEO efforts, let’s examine what you need to track them effectively.

The first step is to establish your business goals and what you aim to achieve from your SEO campaign. If your business goal is to increase the total number of users on your website, track organic traffic. If your goal is to raise brand awareness, track the number of impressions. Regardless of your business goals, it is crucial to establish KPIs (key performance indicators) that align with those objectives and to track them diligently.

Once you’ve established the KPIs you will track, you will also establish a tracking and recording cadence. It is essential to establish a timeframe for your goals, whether that be monthly, quarterly, or yearly. Establishing a timeline for your tracking and goals will provide you with better insights and enable you to compare metrics from one period to the next.

Now that you have your KPIs and framework in place, you will need a tool to track your progress. There are numerous practical tools available for monitoring your SEO efforts, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Google Search Console (GSC) is a great free resource from Google that will allow you to see most of the metrics you will need, while paid tools like Ahrefs and SEMRush will offer you a more in-depth look at your site’s performance, as well as give you more tools to craft a strategy.

Key Metrics to Track

There are a lot of SEO metrics out there that are related to your search performance, but some are much more important than others. Here is a list of the ones that matter most to your success and why they matter.

Organic traffic and impressions: Traffic and impressions are the engagement metrics that show you a snapshot of your site’s performance in organic search. Impressions will give you insight into your online brand awareness and overall online visibility for branded and non-branded keywords. Search traffic will show you page views, or how many people are interested in and clicking on your site.

Keyword rankings: These rankings indicate how visible your site is in SERPs (search engine results pages). Rank tracking is essential because it indicates how users and the search engine algorithms are responding to your content. The most critical SEO rankings to consider are those in positions 1-10, as these are the positions that typically appear on the first page of Google search results. These are the most important factors to consider, as only 0.44% of users click onto the second page of Google results.

Conversions: These are the desired actions that you want users to take on your site. Conversions are the ultimate end goal for most SEO efforts, whether they are purchases, form submissions, leads, or subscriptions. Conversions are, more often than not, the desired outcomes of any SEO strategy, so the conversion rate of your website is an essential factor when gauging overall performance.

Bounce rate: The bounce rate refers to the percentage of users who leave your site after viewing only one webpage, and it is a valuable metric for tracking user engagement. This metric is a good indicator of whether your site’s content is appealing and effectively matches users’ search intent.

Tools and Platforms to Use

As I touched on earlier, there are a ton of different SEO tools and platforms that you can use to track your SEO efforts. I will break them down by free and paid tools, as well as what each tool can offer you.

Free Tracking Tools

Google offers two great free tools that provide valuable insights into your site’s performance. The first tool is Google Search Console (GSC). GSC will provide you with useful insights into the specific keywords or search terms for which your pages are ranking. GSC will also allow you to view the average CTR, impressions, clicks, and search position for each page on your website. GSC also provides valuable technical SEO insights, including core web vitals and identifying which specific pages are indexing and which ones are not. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is another useful free tool from Google that provides insights into your conversions and website traffic. GA4 provides insights into your customers’ journey, including how they arrived at the website and which pages they visited before converting. These insights will paint a better picture of the overall user experience on your site. Both of these platforms will give you a great starting point for your SEO tracking.

Paid Tracking Tools

These paid platforms will offer deeper insights and more tools to use than the free platforms that Google offers. Tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs, and Moz offer similar traffic and impression data to GSC, but also provide additional tools for keyword research and competitor analysis. Another advantage these tools will provide is insight into your AI visibility. These tools offer you the chance to look at the number of citations you are gaining in AI searches on platforms like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and AI overviews. These platforms and their tools will provide you with a more comprehensive view of your site’s performance.

How to Track Site Performance vs Competitors

Competitor analysis is at the heart of tracking your own SEO success because it shows you how you are stacking up against other sites that are targeting the same users you are. It is essential to examine the performance of different sites in your industry to determine if you need to adjust your strategy.

To start tracking your performance against your competitors, you will first need to establish who your competitors are. These sites might not always be the sites of your direct competitors, but the sites that are ranking for your target keywords. Once you have identified which sites are targeting the exact keywords as your site, conduct a keyword gap analysis to uncover which keywords are driving traffic that you are not currently optimizing for. By completing keyword gap analysis, you will fill in the cracks in your SEO strategy.

Now that you have a good idea of your competitors and the words they are targeting, you must establish a benchmark against them that you will use to measure your progress over time. Start by comparing your current metrics and those of your competitors to establish a baseline. Set realistic targets for your site to achieve and monitor all progress. This baseline will help you maintain realistic expectations and goals. Measuring progress against competitors will also alert you to any sudden moves they make, allowing you to adapt your strategy to keep your own progress.

Challenges that Might Arise

Data Problems that Might Arise

When tracking your SEO success, a few common challenges may arise. One common challenge is data fragmentation, where your data is scattered across multiple platforms. This means that some of your KPIs could be in GA4 while others are in Ahrefs. This fragmentation makes it harder for you to piece the data together into a cohesive report. Data fragmentation can also lead to errors, duplicate data reporting, and a lack of context for specific pieces of data. To overcome this challenge, you can utilize a centralized dashboard, such as Looker Studio or Power BI, to extract essential metrics from various platforms, enabling you to view and analyze all the data in one place. These platforms offer dozens of dashboard templates that allow you to view all your data in one place.

Another common challenge is determining which digital marketing initiatives contributed to a specific outcome. For example, a user first interacts with your website through an organic blog post, then comes back later through an ad, and converts after seeing the ad. In this situation, it can be hard to attribute which touchpoint actually caused the conversion. To overcome this challenge, use a model that attributes credit to touchpoints through a system that weighs actions based on the influence they had on each user. This attribution will give each touchpoint proper credit and clear up any attribution confusion.

Technical Problems that Might Arise

There are a few technical SEO issues that may arise in addition to the data issues. Technical SEO is imperative to your overall SEO success. If you are writing the most optimized content and have the nicest-looking website, but your site is not technically sound, it will all be for nothing. Some common technical issues that you may encounter include slow load speed, canonical linking issues, pages not indexing, or incorrect XML sitemaps. All of these issues can limit your site’s visibility in search and impact your overall SEO performance.

It is essential to utilize Google Search Console for conducting regular technical site audits. Regularly check GSC to ensure your pages are indexing correctly, that all your Core Web Vitals are in good shape, and that there are no other outstanding issues with your website that could impact your search visibility.

Reporting SEO Progress

Now that you know how to track your SEO progress, you’ll need to learn how to share progress in a way that is digestible to an audience. SEO progress can sometimes be complicated to explain and report, but it doesn’t have to be!

The first step in SEO reporting is to identify the KPIs that your audience will care about the most. There is a wealth of data that can be presented from any SEO campaign, but not all of it is relevant or important to specific audiences. For example, if your managers only care about sales numbers from the SEO campaign, it would be inappropriate to show them how your impressions have increased YoY. That metric has nothing to do with what they want to know. Instead, show them that organic conversions have gone up 10% this year.

Once you select the metrics that matter most, you will need to find the proper format to present them. SEO data is best visualized through dynamic dashboards, performance trend graphs, or KPI scorecards. Visuals like these help portray progress quickly and are easy to digest.

What matters most when reporting your progress is that you are not just dumping data on your audience. It is crucial to tell a story with the data by putting the metrics into context and recapping what is working and what is not. Storytelling will keep your audience engaged and provide them with the whole picture behind why the metrics appear as they do.

Tracking SEO Progress in the World of AI

As you are likely aware, AI is rapidly transforming the world of search. Since users interact with search differently, you will need to adjust the metrics you use to measure success. In this new era of search, users are increasingly obtaining most of their information through zero-click searches. A zero-click search occurs when a user searches for something and finds the information they need in AI chat, AI overviews, featured snippets, or other SERP features without having to click on a website. An example of this could be a user searching and finding information in an AI Overview from Google or a response from ChatGPT. So, how can you measure your SEO success in these instances? Well, it’s simple, but it might require more analysis.

When a user obtains information from an AI Overview or AI chatbot, such as ChatGPT, small icons called citations appear. These icons represent the logos of the sites from which the AI sourced the information to answer the user’s query. Look at these two examples below:

Google’s AI Overview:

ChatGPT Citations:

In both of these searches, I obtained the information I was looking for without having to click on any website. However, I noticed the icons for ESPN and the Missouri Secretary of State when reviewing the sources from which the AI pulled the information. These sources will serve as a basis for evaluating these websites and help build their brand awareness. The more users see your logo in these searches, the more familiar with your brand they will be, and the more authority they will attribute to your site. This means when it comes time to convert, they will search for your brand directly because you are already top of mind to them, and they have already associated authority with your brand name.

To properly track your site’s wins in AI search, you will want to examine two key metrics: visibility and brand searches. Tracking visibility will show you all the times when you appear in AI search. Couple that metric with branded searches, which show you how many people have your brand top of mind. These two metrics will provide a comprehensive picture of how your site is performing in AI search.

FAQs

What key metrics should I focus on when tracking SEO?

How to Drive More Traffic to Your Website: 5 Proven Steps

Kelly Hebron — Mon, 03 Nov 2025 17:20:36 +0000

You could have the nicest-looking and most expensive website ever, but if no one is ever using it, it’s worthless. Website traffic is a key component of your online brand presence. Obtaining website traffic nowadays is significantly harder than it used to be, with the rise of zero-click searches and the increasing volume of content being published daily, making it increasingly challenging to stand out. Over 4.4 million blog posts are published daily, making it incredibly hard for you and your website to cut through the noise.

But wait! There are some very effective strategies that you can employ to cut through the noise and earn organic traffic for your website. In this blog, I’ll give you 5 strategies you can use to optimize your website and start getting the traffic your brand and website deserve!

Understanding and Measuring Traffic

Before you can optimize your website to get more traffic, it’s important that you know how to measure traffic and what metrics matter most. First thing you’re going to need is a place to measure your site’s performance. There are a few sites out there that will help you measure your site’s performance, including paid options like Ahrefs and SEMRush, as well as free tools from Google like Google Search Console and Google Analytics.

Once you’ve connected your website with any of these great tools, it’s time to figure out what metrics to track when gauging your site’s performance.

Key Metrics to look at:

Engagement Rate: This is a metric in Google Analytics that tracks the number of “engaged sessions” each page has on your site. An engaged session is one where a visitor stayed longer than 10 seconds, viewed 2 or more pages, or completed a conversion event. This is a great metric to determine the quality of traffic your site is receiving. Engagement rate helps you determine if the visitors to your site find your content relevant to their needs.

Traffic by Source: This metric in Google Analytics shows you where your traffic is coming from. This allows you to see what channels are working for your website and which ones are not, so you can dedicate resources accordingly.

Unique Visitors: This metric shows you how many individual people visit your site within a certain timeframe. Measuring unique visitors is better than measuring sessions because one user could visit your site 10 times and count for 10 sessions, but they are only one visitor. Unique visitors give you the actual size of your audience and your site’s reach.

Top Pages: In Google Analytics, you can filter top pages by engagement or conversions, depending on your goals. Top pages will show you what content on your site is the most engaging to users. This will help you find your most valuable pages and take what is working on those pages and apply it to the rest of your site.

5 Effective Steps To Drive More Traffic to Your Site

Here are 5 things you can start doing to optimize your website for more traffic:

1. Create Helpful and Meaningful Content

To drive more traffic to your site, you are going to need to rank higher for more keywords. The best way to rank higher for keywords is to create content that is helpful and engaging to users and your target market.

The way that Google evaluates sites is through its EEAT guidelines. Basically, to rank well on Google or any other search engine, you must prove that you are trustworthy and an authority in your industry. To establish yourself as an authority figure in Google’s eyes, you must have a library of helpful and engaging content on your website.

The best way to create this content for your website is by establishing a blog for your site. There are tons of benefits from blogging, but the main benefit is directly improving your overall search rankings. Your blog should cover different topics in your industry and should be a helpful resource to your target market.

The best way to find the topics you should cover is to do some keyword research to find out what users are searching for. Look for keywords that have a decent amount of search volume and are question-based. An example of a keyword that would be a good blog topic for a financial firm could be “when should I start planning for retirement?”. A blog optimized for this keyword would effectively show search engines the firm’s authority in the industry because it showcases its expertise on an industry-related topic. Once you show the search engines you are an authority through helpful content, they will start to rank you higher for keywords because they have more confidence that users will enjoy your site and find it helpful.

Make sure that your content is always relevant to your business, your brand, your target market, and your business goals. Don’t just write a blog because a keyword has high search volume if it doesn’t align with your business and your target market.

Running a content library has a lot of benefits, but it is an ongoing effort. It is important that you update your content library regularly to make sure your content is up to date with what is going on in your industry. This involves writing new blogs that cover any advancements in your field, and updating any older blogs that are out of date or have lost rankings.

2. Optimize Every Page on Your Site for Keywords

If you want people to come to your site, you must optimize your site to rank for commonly searched keywords. Every page on your website should be optimized for a main keyword that is relevant to the content on that page.

The first step in the keyword optimization process is keyword research. During keyword research, you should be looking for keywords that are related to your brand and your services. When deciding what keyword to go after, it is important to look at three things: search volume, keyword difficulty, and intent. Search volume is the average times a month a keyword is searched. The higher the search volume, the more users searching that keyword, meaning the more opportunity for your site to get traffic. Keyword difficulty is a number between 1-100 rating how difficult it is to rank on the first page for that specific keyword. When deciding what keywords to target, you must evaluate both the search volume and keyword difficulty. Keyword intent is what type of content the user is expecting when they search for that keyword. The intents are commercial, transactional, informational, or navigational.

When deciding on what keywords you will want to target, it is important to factor in all three factors: keyword difficulty, search volume, and intent. You should pick keywords that have a decent keyword volume, but are relatively easy to rank for on the first page. You should have a mix of commercial/transactional and informational intent keywords so you can rank for a wide range of keywords. Some tools that are great for keyword research are Ahrefs Keyword Explorer, SEMRush’s Keyword Overview, or Google Ads’ Keyword Planner.

To optimize your pages, start by including the target keyword in the title tag, the H1 heading, and the URL. Next, you should write high-quality copy on each page while incorporating the target keyword and related secondary keywords. Be sure when writing copy to match the content to the user intent for the target keyword to reduce bounce rate. For example, if your target keyword was “financial advisors near St. Louis,” which has commercial and transactional intent, meaning that the user is likely looking for or evaluating products or services. The content on this page should include in-depth descriptions of services, reviews, or comparison charts to assist the customer through the evaluation stage of the purchasing process.

The last thing you will need to do is place your target keywords in the meta description and alt text of the images on the page to reinforce relevance to users and search engines. The target keyword in the meta description will reassure the user that your page is relevant to their search. Putting the target keyword in the alt text of some of the images on the page will help search engines understand that the page is relevant to the keyword.

3. Build Out Your Link Profiles

Building both internal and external links will help you increase your organic traffic.

Internal links are links on your site that point to other links on your site. These will help you get more traffic in a couple of ways.

The first way is that they will show Google what the most important content is on your site. The more links a page has, the more important Google will view it.

The second way internal links can help improve your organic traffic is through spreading the ranking authority to poor-performing pages. If you have a page that is performing really well in search rankings, adding links to a few poor-performing pages will help apply the positive authority from the successful pages to the poor-performing pages. In addition to the added authority, you might also get more traffic to the poorly performing pages from people clicking on the links and visiting those pages.

External links from other sites pointing to your website. External links, also known as backlinks, serve as endorsements from one site to another. When a high authority site links to your site, you will gain authority in Google’s eyes. There are a few ways to gain backlinks, like guest posting, sharing research or case studies, or collaborations with other businesses and websites.

4. Regularly Audit Your Site

Google’s main goal, besides world domination, is to serve users the most relevant and reliable search results possible. Being relevant to the search is only half the battle. You could have the most relevant page with the best content in the world, but if your site takes forever to load, you will be buried in the rankings. This is why the technical health of your site is so important.

Performing regular audits on your site health will help ensure that your site is fully optimized. Some of the most important aspects to look at when performing a site audit:

Page indexations
Page redirects
404s
Orphan pages
Server errors
Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS Issues)

Regularly checking and fixing these parts of your site will ensure that your site is user-friendly and loads quickly. It is also important to make sure your site is mobile-friendly, with 64% of web traffic coming from mobile users. You can perform a site audit with a free Google Search Console account.

5. Enhance Your Pages with Schema

Adding schema markup to your pages will boost your overall discoverability with both search engines and AI. Schema Markup is code that you put on different parts of your website to label them. This allows search engines and AI crawlers to understand what the different parts of your site are and what they mean to users.

Schema will help drive more traffic because it will allow your website to appear in different SERP features called rich results, like AI overviews, featured snippets, product results, and people also ask. These will help to improve your traffic quantity and quality. Schema will help improve your traffic quantity because you will be more visible, and the more visible you are online, the more traffic you will receive. Appearing in these rich results will improve your traffic quality because the users clicking onto your site will be clicking on with more information, meaning that they have already decided that your site and brand align with their needs.

FAQs

How long does it take to see results from my driving traffic efforts?

Brand Mentions for SEO: Boost Rankings & Online Reputation

Henry Right — Tue, 28 Oct 2025 19:50:43 +0000

In the modern age of search, anything that is said online about your brand matters to your overall visibility and search performance. Anything that potential customers can see about your brand online, search engines can see too, whether it be on a blog talking about your products, a Reddit thread talking about an experience with your brand, or a customer talking about your brand on social media. All of these digital shoutouts, known as brand mentions, have an impact on your visibility in general, but also on your organic search performance.

What are Brand Mentions?

Brand mentions are essentially every time your brand name, your products, your services, or any phrase related to your brand appears online. Brand mentions are how you stay top-of-mind for customers and potential customers online; they are essentially digital word-of-mouth. The same way brand mentions help you stay top of mind with customers, they also serve as signals to search engines that your brand exists.

There are three different types of brand mentions:

Linked Mentions: Any mentions of your brand that include a clickable link directly to your website.

Unlinked Mentions: Any mention of your brand that uses your brand name but does not link to your website.

Implied Mentions: Anytime that someone refers to your brand without saying your brand directly. An example of an implied mention would be someone writing the following about Lays potato chips: “I really enjoy the potato chips that come in the yellow bag with the yellow and red label”.

The Difference Between Backlinks and Brand Mentions

Brand mentions and backlinks both impact SEO in similar, but different ways. Brand mentions are any references to your brand online, linked or unlinked. Backlinks are hyperlinks that lead directly to your site from another high authority site in the hopes of improving your site’s authority.

The two are pretty similar, but have key differences. The first difference is their impact on your SEO. Brand mentions improve your brand recognition and trustworthiness in the eyes of the search engines, whereas backlinks improve your domain’s authority “score” with the search engines.

The second difference is the measurability of each of them. The impact of brand mentions is harder to quantify because they require tools that measure the sentiment and context of each mention. Backlinks can be measured through any traditional SEO tool, and impact can be seen by looking at the improvement in your domain rating.

The third and final difference is the value that each brings to your site and brand. Brand mentions strengthen your brand’s reputation for both potential customers and search engines, which indirectly will boost your search rankings. Backlinks boost your rankings directly, serving as votes of confidence for search engines.

Where Brand Mentions Show up Online

There are a few different ways that these brand mentions can appear online, and they all provide a different benefit for your SEO.

News Mentions

This could be any mention of your brand in a press piece. Even without a link to your site, this brand mention from a high authority source, like a news outlet, still provides SEO value. News outlets have a lot of authority in the eyes of search engines, so when they mention your brand, it serves as a vote of confidence for your brand with search engines. Here is an example of a brand mention for Nike in a news article:

Social Media Mentions

These are any mentions of your brand on social media. While Google and other search engines are not able to see every post on every social media outlet, these posts still help build up digital word of mouth and solidify your brand presence online, even without links to your site. Posts on social media can also lead to more conversations on blogs or forums, which Google and other search engines can crawl, leading to your brand gaining trust with search engines. Here is an example of a social media brand mention for Brooks on X:

Blog and Forum Mentions

These could be product reviews on blogs, someone adding your brand to a top ten list on their blog, or even people discussing your brand casually on Reddit. All of these mentions, even without direct links to your site, build up contextual authority about your brand in Google’s eyes. Here’s an example of a brand mention on a Reddit thread:

Testimonials and Reviews

These are any online reviews or testimonials that mention your brand, products, or services. These could be reviews directly on your Google Business Profile, reviews on directories like Yelp, or reviews directly on your website. All of these serve as brand mentions, linked or unlinked. These are some of the most powerful brand mentions because potential customers use reviews and testimonials during the purchasing process when deciding where to take their business. Reviews and testimonials also improve your SEO performance by serving as trust signals to search engines, improving your overall organic rankings.

How Search Engines Make Sense of Brand Mentions

You already know that search engines assign value to brand mentions, even without links, but how do they interpret these mentions? Well, there are a few different tools that search engines, like Google, use to interpret every time your brand is mentioned online.

Those tools are:

Natural Language Processing (NLP)
Entities
Knowledge Graph
EEAT Profiles

Natural Language Processing (NLP)

NLP is how Google reads and interprets natural language. This technology is trained on Google’s AI tools to understand the meaning and context of content online. This helps Google go beyond just looking for keywords and start to understand the meaning behind the words. NLP helps Google understand the relationship between words and the overall tone and sentiment of the words. Here are a few examples of how NLP picks up on the sentiment behind brand mentions using a metaphorical company, ABC Shoes:

Example 1: Someone writes the following on a blog: “I’ve been using these ABC running shoes for weeks and I’ve improved my mile time by 10 seconds”. NLP helps Google decipher that ABC is the brand name, that this mention is generally positive due to existing knowledge of improving mile times, and that this mention is related to the running shoes category.

Example 2: Someone writes the following in a Reddit thread: “I’ve been using these ABC shoes for a week and have gotten blisters every time I run”. NLP would help Google decipher that ABC is a brand name, that this mention is negative through connecting this mention to existing knowledge of blisters, and that the mention is related to the running shoes category.

Entities

Entities are specific people, places, or things that Google recognizes and stores to be retrieved later. Once your brand is mentioned enough in different places that Google crawls, Google will store it as an entity that will be added to the Knowledge Graph. When your brand is stored as an entity, Google will stop seeing your brand as a keyword and start putting your brand into the different contexts you appear in online. This will help Google trust what is being said about you online and help Google fully understand what exactly it is you do.

Being seen as an entity is incredibly important for linkless brand mentions. Think of entities as files that Google saves and adds to and references every time that it sees your brand mentioned. So, when Google sees a linkless brand mention about your brand, it will add the brand mention and the sentiment to your “file” and references the file when serving results for search queries.

Going back to our ABC shoes example, once ABC brand is mentioned enough to become an entity, Google is able to start serving the brand for searches that are related to its category, that are not necessarily its target keywords.

Knowledge Graph

The Knowledge Graph is a database of everything that Google knows and understands. This is where Google stores all of the different entities and the relationships between them.

Here’s how the Knowledge Graph relates to brand mentions: When Google’s crawlers spot your brand mentioned on a website, it connects that mention to the entity “file” that it has in the Knowledge Graph. This file already contains all the information about your brand that Google currently has, and it adds the new mention to the file. This is how Google can connect a linkless brand mention back to your brand and your website.

EEAT Profiles

EEAT profiles are the main way that Google assigns SEO value to brand mentions. Think of this as your brand’s reputation in Google’s eyes. EEAT stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. These are the guidelines that Google uses to assess your website, and they directly impact your organic search rankings.

All unlinked brand mentions are compiled and added to this profile and to your reputation with Google. When high-authority sources, like news outlets, mention your brand, it signals to Google that you are an authoritative source in your industry, improving your authority and expertise score. When you are consistently mentioned positively in industry blogs or certified reviews, it signals to Google that you are a reputable brand, which improves your trustworthiness score. All of your mentions online are signals that shape the way that Google perceives your brand.

Why Brand Mentions Matter in Modern Search and AI Search

If you’ve spent any time on Google in the past year and a half, you know that AI is taking over the way people search. From AI overviews on Google to Google’s AI mode to ChatGPT, it’s clear that AI has changed the way that users are searching. It is important for you and your business that you are ranking in AI search features like the ones previously listed. Brand mentions are a great way to appear in these new forms of search.

AI overviews and AI mode responses are all built using Google’s Knowledge Graph and referencing the different files it has for every entity. The more your brand is mentioned in a positive, trustworthy, and authoritative way in different sources online, the better your entity’s reputation will be in Google’s eyes. The better your entity’s reputation is, the more Google will reference your brand and website in these AI search features like AI Mode and AI overviews.

Going with our running shoe example from earlier, here’s how brand mentions help you show up in AI search:

Let’s say that someone looks up “how can I improve my mile time”. The AI will go through its Knowledge Graph first and pull all the things that it knows about how to improve a mile time. While looking for all the things a runner needs to improve their mile time, the AI will remember that ABC shoes have been mentioned multiple times, by trustworthy sources like running blogs and Reddit threads, as shoes to help improve mile times. The AI will then take this information and serve an overview that says something like this:

“There are a few steps you must take if you want to improve your mile time. First, you should focus on your training and technique. Second, you should focus on your rest and recovery. Third, you should make sure you have the right equipment. Experts recommend the ABC shoe for improving mile time.”

Strategies to Earn Brand Mentions

Now that you know the benefits of brand mentions, let’s look at a few strategies you can use to start acquiring some brand mentions of your own. Here are just a few different things you can do to get mentioned more online:

Publish thought leadership content

One of the best ways to get mentioned by others in your industry online is to publish content that is at the cutting edge of your industry. Content like case studies, experiments, research, guest posts on blogs, and other thought leadership pieces are often quoted and referenced, leading to brand mentions. Producing thought leadership content is also a great way to display your authority and expertise to potential customers and search engines.

Build relationships with content creators

Having a good relationship with journalists, influencers, and bloggers in your industry is a great way to get brand mentions. If the people who are writing content online enjoy your products and like you, they are more likely to talk about you and your brand.

Engage in community discussions

Wherever people are talking about your products or industry, you should be! It is important to engage in discussions about your industry on forums like Reddit and Quora because AI references these sites often.

Encourage people to leave reviews

Reviews and testimonials are great for your reputation with both search engines and potential customers. You can encourage customers to leave reviews in a lot of different ways, like including a flyer at the point of purchase, sending an automated follow-up email to customers after purchase, or including a link to leave a review on your website or the footer of your email signature. No matter how you do it, just make sure you are encouraging customers to leave reviews because they are important to your overall online presence.

Host or sponsor events

This is a great way to get brand mentions from high authority sites like media outlets. Hosting or sponsoring an event generates a lot of brand mentions because every time someone talks about the event, they will use your brand name, leading to mentions all over the place. These events could be a webinar, a charity event, or a lunch and learn with industry professionals, just to name a few ideas.

Managing Your Online Reputation

Brand mentions form your brand’s reputation online, and it is important to manage your reputation as best you can. An important thing to do when managing your reputation online is to respond to all mentions, especially negative ones. Actively responding to negative mentions creates a caring and personable brand image for customers and potential customers. Here are some tips on how to reply to negative reviews online if you want to read more.

Another great way to manage your reputation online is to use sentiment data to shape your brand messaging. Using a sentiment tool, like ones on SEMRush and Ahrefs, find data on the sentiment of your brand mentions. This data should give you insight as to the sentiment behind your mentions and will help you shape your brand’s messaging going forward.

3 ways to Leverage Brand Mentions

Brand mentions themselves are valuable, but here are a few strategies you can use to get the most out of every mention you receive online:

Reach out to convert unlinked mentions into linked mentions. When you find an unlinked mention of your brand somewhere, reach out to the publisher and ask for them to link directly to your site. If they agree, you will get both the benefits of a brand mention and a backlink.
Repurpose positive mentions into PR and content. Positive reviews and mentions are great, but not in a vacuum. Amplify the benefits of a positive mention by repurposing it into different marketing campaigns across your different channels.
Integrate mention tracking insights into your SEO and content strategies. Use tools like Google Alerts to see any mention of your brand online and use the insights from mentions to inform where you should take your SEO and content strategies.

Key Takeaways

In the modern search world, every time someone mentions your brand online, search engines are paying attention. Whether it’s a direct link to your website, your brand name dropped in an industry blog, or someone vaguely describing your brand in a Reddit thread, search engines are paying attention and building up a file on your brand’s reputation.

Your brand’s reputation, in turn, has a direct impact on how visible you are in organic search as well as AI search. Google and other search engines use your brand mentions as a “digital word of mouth” to figure out how trustworthy and relevant you are to users’ search queries. Google uses tools like entities, the Knowledge Graph, and NLP to decipher these mentions, build up a reputation for your brand, and serve your brand in search results.

Brand mentions and your reputation are extremely important to your brand’s visibility in AI search. Google’s AI pulls from the knowledge that it has gathered from the different brand mentions you have online. The more you are mentioned positively, the more you will be referenced in AI overviews and AI mode.

To earn positive mentions, create thought leadership content people want to talk about, build relationships with content creators, engage in community discussions, and encourage customers to leave you reviews. Once you have mentions, make sure you are getting the most out of them by reaching out to convert unlinked mentions to linked mentions, repurposing positive mentions into content for your different channels, and integrating the insights from your mentions into your SEO and content strategies.

How to Use Customer Testimonials to Build Credibility

Henry Right — Fri, 03 Oct 2025 15:30:08 +0000

Customer Testimonials: How to Showcase Your Credibility

Whether you’re in eCommerce or industrial manufacturing, establishing credibility is essential to building your online presence. There is a limited number of brands that don’t need to build credibility anymore because they are huge. I’m talking about Nike, Apple, Target, etc. In this day and age, with AI-created content all over the internet and phishing scams running rampant, it’s incredibly important to differentiate your company as a credible and trustworthy business.

Credibility is especially important when trying to rank well on Google. Under Google’s EEAT Guidelines, it is important to have trust signals on your website to showcase your credibility and trustworthiness. Customer testimonials are one of these trust signals that tell Google if you are a credible business or not.

One of the ways in which you can increase your brand credibility is by strategically using and placing your customer testimonials on your website. Incorporating great testimonials from real customers signals to your users that you are a trustworthy brand.

If you’re already doing so, then you’re on the right track. But if you aren’t using testimonials or reviews or all, that needs to change ASAP.

The Purpose of Customer Testimonials

It is important to understand what customer testimonials are and the purpose they serve for your company. Customer testimonials are statements from satisfied customers or clients that tell a story about their experience with your company. Testimonials are usually used by companies in promotional materials to highlight the positive experiences of their clients.

It is important to state that customer testimonials are different than customer reviews. Reviews are typically shorter statements about a product, service, or business that are posted on third-party websites. While reviews can be used in marketing materials like testimonials, they are not usually solicited by the company.

Now that you know the difference, it is important to know the purpose of customer testimonials. Customer testimonials are used to build trust with potential clients and showcase social proof. Social proof is a psychological phenomenon where people look to the actions of others to validate their own choices and actions. Social proof is especially important when people are in uncertain situations and are looking for validation on the choice they are making.

Social proof is an important factor during the purchase process. Customers want to know that others have had positive experiences with products or companies before deciding to do business with them. Put more simply, if someone sees multiple people using a product or service and saying it’s good, that person is more likely to think of your business as credible.

Odds are that you’ve looked for social proof in your life and didn’t even realize it. A good example of this is looking at reviews online about a new restaurant before going to see if people like it. Another time you might have been looking for social proof is when buying something online and looking at the reviews to see if the actual quality matches up with what the company is advertising. In these examples, you needed the reassurance that there are more positive reviews than negative ones, and so do your prospective customers.

To prove the point further, here are some stats on social proof in the purchase process:

98% of consumers say they read testimonials and customer reviews when they are deciding to make a purchase.
72% of consumers trust businesses more if they read positive testimonials about those businesses.
84% of consumers trust testimonials just as much as a personal recommendation.

Examples of Customer Testimonials

There are a few different types of customer testimonials that you can use to showcase credibility and social proof to potential customers

Written Testimonials: These could be either quick quotes or longer success stories from customers. Written testimonials are great at providing social proof and can be used in many different ways in marketing materials and on your website.
Video Testimonials: These are short pieces of video content where a client talks about their experience with your company. Video testimonials are great because they are more personal and authentic than written testimonials, as you are able to see the person giving the testimonial in real-time. If your clients are open to being on camera, these can be a great piece of content for potential customers to see because of the authenticity.
Case Studies: These are in-depth narratives that typically showcase a problem a customer had and what your company did to fix it. Case studies are great at telling a story about your relationship with a customer. These are a great way to show potential clients how you solve problems and what kind of relationship to expect when working with you.
Social Media Mentions: These testimonials come from people posting about your company on social media. These could be a customer giving a review of your product or talking about their experience with your business on any of the social media platforms, and then you reposting it to the company’s social media pages.
Before-and-After Testimonials: These are testimonials that visually demonstrate the transformation the customer experienced. These are most common in the fitness or home improvement industries and are great at visually showing customers the kind of results they can expect from working with a business.

How to Collect Customer Testimonials

Now that you understand the purpose of customer testimonials and the different types of customer testimonials, it’s time to find out how to collect some testimonials of your own. Here are just a few ways to collect customer testimonials.

Directly ask your customers for testimonials. If you have a good relationship with your clients, ask them directly if they would be willing to provide you with a quote or video testimonial. If you have a good relationship with them, the testimonial will likely be authentic and positive, which will be great for building up your credibility and social proof.

Utilize automated systems to collect testimonials. One way to do this is by sending a post-purchase email. You can set up an automated email to be sent to your customers a few days after they receive a product or service. This is a good strategy to employ because you are still top-of-mind with the customer. Another way to automatically collect testimonials is by running a feedback form on your website. Having a feedback form on your website will allow you to address both positive and negative customer experiences. Positive responses from the form could trigger an email being sent to the customer asking if they want to give a testimonial. Negative responses can be sent to a team member so they can reach out to make the situation better.

Incentivize customers to leave testimonials. Offering customers a reward could significantly increase the chances that you receive testimonials. This reward could be a discount on future purchases, a gift card to a popular coffee shop, or an entry into a large giveaway. Just think of some type of reward that your target customer would want and go from there. It is important when incentivizing testimonials to make sure that the testimonials you are receiving are still authentic and genuine, so potential customers trust them.

Repurpose existing content into testimonials. Look at the organic feedback you have already received and convert it into testimonials. Go through your social media mentions and convert the positive ones into testimonials. Be sure to reach out to these customers first for permission to use their words and name. You can also go through third-party review sites and reach out to customers who have left you a good review and see if they would allow you to use it as a testimonial.

No matter how you decide to collect testimonials, just be sure that you are asking at the right time and making the process easy for your customer. Things like providing customers with leading questions or example answers will make the process easier and more enjoyable for them, leading to authentic and genuine testimonials.

Best Practices for Showcasing Customer Testimonials

Now that you have your customer testimonials, here are some tips to make sure you are maximizing their impact.

Be strategic when placing your testimonials. As you’re well aware by now, social proof is extremely important in the purchasing process. Since testimonials are a great way to provide potential customers with social proof, it is important that they see testimonials at different stages in the purchase process. Placing general testimonials on your homepage will establish credibility with the customer in the early, information-finding stages of the purchase process. Placing product or service-specific testimonials on those specific product or service pages will help convince the customer in the purchase decision stage of the purchase process. Placing testimonials on the checkout pages will offer customers reassurance that they are making the right decision and help them through the post-purchase stages of the purchase process. As you can see, it is important to continually provide social proof throughout the entire purchase process to support and guide customers through the process.

Establish authenticity and credibility with customer credentials. You want to use testimonials to build your own credibility, but you also need to make sure the testimonials look and are credible. Because if they aren’t, they’ll do more harm than good. Show who the happy customer is and what they do if it’s relevant to your products and services. Including things like name, job title, and even a photo of the customer are all trust signals to potential customers that the testimonials are authentic.

Keep testimonials up to date. Be sure to rotate older testimonials out and replace them with newer ones to keep content relevant. This is especially important if older testimonials reference products or services that you no longer offer.

Use video or audio testimonials when possible. Visual or audio testimonials are seen as more authentic and trustworthy to potential customers because they are less likely to be faked. If you are able to include these types of testimonials in your marketing materials, you will be able to build even more trust with potential customers.

Focus on specifics. Try to avoid vague phrases like “Good service!” when possible by asking customers to focus on specific benefits they enjoy because of working with you. The more specific the statement, the more information potential customers will have about your business and what they can expect.

FAQs

How should I get customer testimonials?

PPC Bidding Strategies: Find Out Which One is Best for You

Henry Right — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 21:25:30 +0000

As you are building out your digital marketing strategy, you are probably looking to add a PPC (pay-per-click) strategy. It makes a great deal of sense to start advertising on Google Ads, as Google has come out and said that advertisers make an average of $2 in revenue for every $1 spent on Google Ads.

While I’m sure any business owner would look at that as a good investment, it is important to make sure you are getting the most out of your ad dollars by selecting the bidding strategy that makes the most sense for you and your business. To make the most informed decisions about what bidding strategy to go with, you are going to need to know the following things: the difference between manual and automated bidding, the role of keywords in bidding, the different types of bidding strategies, and the pros and cons of each strategy.

PPC Bidding Basics

What is PPC Bidding?

Before building your Google ad strategy, it is helpful to understand what is PPC bidding. PPC bidding is a digital marketing strategy where businesses and advertisers compete to have their ads appear in prominent positions in SERPs (search engine results pages).

Advertisers place bids on the specific keywords or phrases that they want to advertise on. These bids are essentially how much the advertiser is willing to pay each time a user clicks their ad, hence the term pay-per-click. Platforms like Google look at these bids along with ad quality and relevance to determine which ads get served and where.

The Auction Process

Here’s how PPC bidding looks:

Advertisers set a maximum bid on the highest prices they’re willing to pay for a click on their ad.
Advertisers select the specific keywords for which they want their ad to appear.
The instant auction takes place whenever a user searches for the keyword.
Google ranks the ads based on the bid amount, the ad quality, the ad relevance, and the data they have on the user being served the ad.
The ads with the best combination of the attributes above are served in a prominent position on the SERP or website.

Keywords’ Role in PPC Bidding

You’ve already heard a bit about keywords’ role in this process, since they are the key to a successful PPC campaign. Let’s dive into them a little bit more. Keywords are at the center of your PPC campaign because they are what you are bidding on and dictate when and where your ads will appear. When setting up your campaign, you are going to have to make sure you are choosing the right keywords for your business and campaign goals. There are three groups of keywords to look at when crafting your bidding strategy: long-tail, short-tail, and negative keywords.

Long-tail keywords are longer, more specific keywords. These are those more complex keywords like “best gluten-free pizza near me” or “best white casual sneakers for walking”. These types of keywords are usually cheaper and less competitive because they have less search volume than short-tail keywords, but they usually drive more conversions since they are so specific. All of these variables make long-tail keywords a cost-effective way to get conversions.

Short-tail keywords are shorter, more general search terms. Searches like “pizza” or “men’s shoes” are short-tail keywords. These keywords usually have higher search volume than long-term keywords, making them more competitive and expensive to bid on. These keywords are great for increasing brand awareness with the higher search volume.

When crafting your PPC strategy, it is best to include a combination of both long-tail and short-tail keywords. Having a good mix of these keywords will give you a good balance of increasing brand awareness with the short-tail keywords and increasing conversions with the long-tail keywords.

Negative keywords are keywords that you select to NOT run ads on. Negative keywords go onto a list that you create to make sure that none of your budget goes towards keywords and SERPs that won’t apply to your target customer. For example, if you sold premium menswear, you would want to add any keywords containing “cheap”, “discount”, or “budget” to your negative keyword list to not waste ad spend on these search queries.

Manual vs Automated PPC Bidding

Now that you understand how the bidding process works, let’s dive deeper into the different ways you could place bids. There are two different ways to place bids: manual or automated.

Manual bidding is a hands-on approach where you, the advertiser, are in complete control of your bids. You are in control of every aspect of bidding, from setting the maximum bids to adjusting the bids as data comes in.

Advantages of manual bidding: you are in full control, it’s good for learning how bids affect the performance of ads, and you can react quickly to changes to prioritize specific keywords.
Disadvantages of manual bidding: incredibly time-consuming, it is difficult to scale if you are running a lot of campaigns, and it’s prone to human error, meaning you could miss key opportunities that an automated system could take advantage of.

Automated bidding is a bidding strategy that uses machine learning to set the bids in real time for you. Google calls automated bidding “Smart Bidding,” and it is just automated bidding that uses machine learning to optimize ads using real-time data signals (like device, time of day, and location) to predict the likelihood of conversion. All you have to do is tell Google what goals you are looking to achieve, and then the algorithm adjusts the bids automatically to achieve the goal.

Advantages of automated bidding: it saves time, it is easy to scale when managing a lot of different campaigns, and it is fully data-driven, meaning that it uses signals like user location, device, and time of day to optimize the ads for performance.
Disadvantages of automated bidding: it requires historical data to be effective, it can be less transparent about how bids are being set, and you have less control.

Things to Consider Before Selecting a PPC Bidding Strategy

Now that you know the basics, it’s almost time to choose your PPC bidding strategy, but there are a few things you should consider before selecting a bidding strategy. The first thing you should consider before jumping into a PPC campaign is your goals. Your goal will completely dictate which bidding strategy is best for you. It is important to ask yourself, “What am I looking to get out of this campaign?”. Some common goals could be to increase brand awareness through impressions, to increase website traffic through clicks, to generate leads through form fills and calls, to increase sales revenue through conversions, or your goal could be a mix of these.

Regardless of what your goal is, it is important to establish what you want from the campaign and to establish KPIs before starting the campaign. Once you have a clear goal and KPIs to measure success, it’s finally time to select which PPC bidding strategy is best for you.

7 Different Types of PPC Bidding Strategies on Google

Here are the 8 different PPC strategies and the pros and cons of each of them:

1. Manual CPC (Cost-Per-Click): In this strategy, you manually set the maximum bid you are willing to pay for each click on your ads. The system defaults to setting a maximum bid for the entire ad group, but you are also able to go in and set a maximum bid for each target keyword in the ad group. In this strategy, you are responsible for monitoring the performance of your ads and adjusting bids accordingly.

Pros:

- You have complete control over bids.
- Complete transparency: you know exactly where every dime of your budget is going
- Great for newer campaigns that lack data. Most automated strategies rely heavily on historical data to work effectively

Cons:

- Extremely time-consuming. This strategy requires constant monitoring coupled with manual adjustments.
- Presents the opportunity for human error. Manual control comes with the risk of making mistakes, which could lead to insufficient spending.
- Incredibly hard to scale. When running multiple campaigns, it is very difficult to manually run all of them effectively.
- Lack of data-backed decision-making. When manually running a campaign, you are unable to account for the real-time signals (like device, location, or time of day) that automated bidding strategies use to optimize bids.

2. Maximize Clicks: This strategy is an automated bidding strategy in Google Ads designed to get you the most clicks possible given your daily budget. Instead of setting bids manually, you set a daily budget, and Google’s algorithm adjusts your bids to find the cheapest clicks. You are able to set a maximum bid to make sure that Google doesn’t spend too much of your daily budget on one click. This strategy is great if your goal is to generate the most amount of website traffic possible.

Pros:

- Drives traffic quickly. This strategy will get you a lot of visitors to your site quickly, so if that’s your goal, this strategy is for you.
- Great for data collection. This strategy is good for newer campaigns because it generates a lot of data on which keywords and ads are working and which ones are not.

Cons:

- Generates low-quality traffic. Since the algorithm is only focused on generating clicks, it might bid on cheaper keywords that won’t lead to conversions.
- Opportunity for inefficient spending. The algorithm focuses more on clicks and throws conversions out the window. This opens you up to the risk of a poor return on your budget.

3. Maximize Conversions: This strategy is a smart bidding strategy from Google Ads that is focused on getting you as many conversions as possible within your daily budget. In this strategy, Google’s algorithm looks at real-time signals, like device, location, time of day, and audience, from each user and then bids on the users with the highest chance of converting.

Pros:

- Highly effective at driving conversions. If your goal is to hit a specific conversion goal, this strategy is for you.
- Completely data-driven. This algorithm analyzes all of the real-time signals to make bidding decisions.
- Tied directly to ROI. This strategy is focused solely on driving conversions, which directly impacts revenue and your bottom line.

Cons:

- Requires historical data to work effectively. Since this strategy is so data-driven, it needs a lot of data from previous conversions to make efficient decisions.
- Risk of low-value conversions. This strategy is only focused on the number of conversions, not the value of the conversions. If you run a business where conversions are not of equal value, the algorithm might optimize the campaign for the lower value conversions.

4. Maximize Conversion Value: This is a smart bidding strategy that is similar to maximize conversions, but goes one step further and looks at the likely value of each conversion. For this strategy to work effectively, you must assign a value to your conversions. For an e-commerce business, this would look like giving Google Ads the exact purchase value of each conversion. Businesses that are looking at conversions as leads would give Google the different values associated with the different conversions, for example, a form fill is worth $xx whereas a newsletter signup is worth $xx. Google’s algorithm then uses this information, paired with the real-time signals, to bid on the auctions that are more likely to give you the higher-value conversions.

Pros:

- Maximizes ROI and revenue. If your goal is to increase revenue, this is the strategy for you because it makes sure that your ad spend is going directly toward the conversions that will bring you the most money.

Cons:

- Requires historical and sufficient conversion data. Since this data relies heavily on data, it requires accurate conversion values to work effectively. This strategy also requires that you have enough conversions (about 15-30 in the past 30 days) to be successful.
- During the early stages, the algorithm can go through a “learning phase” trying to figure out what keywords bring the best conversions. During this time, you might have low performance due to the algorithm spending on keywords that aren’t bringing in conversions.

5. Target CPA (Cost-Per-Acquisition): This is a smart bidding strategy focused on getting as many conversions as possible at a specific average cost. You tell the algorithm the average cost you are willing to pay for a conversion, and it adjusts the bids in real time to meet that average cost. Obviously, the individual CPA will vary, but the goal is to get the average cost right around the price that you set.

Pros:

- Predictable CPA. This strategy creates a generally predictable CPA, which can be good for businesses that need to manage costs closely.

Cons:

- Requires historical data to work efficiently. Just like the other automated strategies, this one needs a decent volume of conversion data to work effectively.
- It can be unstable and less flexible than other strategies. This strategy is prone to performance issues during a “learning phase” in the beginning. Another issue that might arise if you set your CPA too low is that the algorithm might not be able to compete in higher-priced auctions, leading to fewer conversions.

6. Target ROAS (Return On Ad Spend): This is a smart bidding strategy focused on getting the highest possible conversion value for a specific return on ad spend. ROAS is a marketing metric that is very similar to ROI. ROAS is the revenue that comes from ad spend divided by the ad spend, multiplied by 100. In this strategy, you set a target ROAS percentage. This percentage could be 300%, meaning that you want to make $3 in revenue for every $1 of ad spend. Google’s algorithm takes this percentage and bids more aggressively on the auctions that it thinks will result in high-value conversions to meet or exceed the target ROAS.

Pros:

- This strategy maximizes profitability. This strategy focuses on the higher-value conversions and tries to get the most profit from your budget.
- This strategy is highly automated. All you have to do is set your ROAS percentage, and the algorithm handles all the bid adjustments in real time.

Cons:

- Needs historical conversion data. Just like the other automated strategies, this one needs a decent volume of conversions to work correctly.
- Limits your ad’s reach. Since the algorithm is only going after the high-value conversions, your ad might result in lower traffic and fewer conversions overall; however, your ROAS goal still might be met.

7. Target Impressions Share: This is an automated strategy that is focused on achieving a specific percentage of impressions on the SERP. This strategy is great if your goal is to grow your brand visibility or awareness. In this strategy, you choose from three different placement options for your ad: absolute top of page (first ad position), top of page (any ad spot before the organic results), or anywhere on the page. You then set a target impression share percentage and a maximum bid. This strategy is most commonly used when wanting to dominate the SERP for your brand name, if you want to appear first for your competitor’s name.

Pros:

- You are able to control where on the SERP your ad appears.
- Allows you to completely dominate keywords, ensuring that your ad is the first result when a user searches that keyword.

Cons:

- Risk of overspending. There can potentially be a high cost associated with achieving a high impression share, especially on competitive keywords. This could lead to a high CPC and overspending.
- Risk of low ROAS. Since you are only targeting impressions, your ads could have a low CTR, leading to impressions that don’t result in clicks and wasted ad spend.

Best Practices to Get the Most Out of Your PPC Budget

Hopefully, now you have a grasp on what PPC bidding strategy you are going to use. Here are some general best practices to help you succeed in your PPC campaigns.

Set clear goals and KPIs for your campaigns. Before starting any campaign, make sure that you clearly define what result you are looking to gain from the campaign. Set clear KPIs so you are able to recognize what a successful campaign is and what it would look like. By doing this, you will set yourself up to definitively know what is working and what is not working in a campaign.

Use A/B testing to compare strategies. A/B tests are extremely helpful when trying to diagnose what doesn’t work in a campaign. Using A/B tests to test the different elements of your ad copy will give you valuable insight into the aspects of your ads that users like and dislike. A/B tests take the guesswork out of your campaign by helping to identify what elements are working and which ones are not working, allowing you to optimize your ads.

Continuously monitor campaigns and adjust accordingly. It is important to monitor your campaigns for any fluctuations in performance. Even if you choose an automated strategy, it is still imperative that you check in on it every so often to see if there are any errors, because algorithms make mistakes just like us humans!

Maintain an optimized keyword list. Continuously update your keywords to make sure you are getting the most out of your keyword list. You should be deleting poor-performing keywords from your target list so you are not wasting ad spend on them. Review your negative keyword list regularly and make sure that you are updating it as new competitors come in or as you find the system bidding on keywords that you don’t want your ad shown on.

Optimize your landing pages. Make sure that your landing pages are relevant to the ad connected to them. Your landing page should directly match the offer that you made in your ad so that customers are getting what they expected. It is also important to make sure that your landing pages load quickly and are free of any errors. If you fail to do these, your ads will have a high bounce rate because users will leave your pages if they find them irrelevant or take too long to load.

Final Thoughts: Time to Start Running Campaigns!

A successful PPC campaign can do anything from raise brand awareness to increase website traffic to increase profitability. For any of these great things to happen, a campaign must have a great foundation. To lay a great foundation, you must research both long and short-tailed keywords to target with your campaign. You must then research and compile a list of negative keywords, or the searches that you don’t want your ads appearing in. The last step of laying that foundation is the most important: setting a goal for the campaign. This step is pivotal and defines success in your campaign.

Once you’ve laid a solid foundation, it’s time to pick the PPC bidding strategy. You have a few laid out in front of you, and it is important to pick the strategy that most aligns with your goals. If you choose to manually run the bidding on your campaign, make sure you are consistently checking in and adjusting bids as needed. If you go with an automated or smart bidding strategy, make sure you are choosing a strategy that aligns with your KPIs. No matter what strategy you pick, remember to regularly check the campaign to make any adjustments that are needed.

If you’ve gotten to the end of this blog and realized that running your own PPC campaign might just be too much for you, don’t worry, Digital Strike – Targeted Marketing is here to save the day! Digital Strike – Targeted Marketing is the award-winning digital marketing agency that can help take your Google Ads campaign to the next level. We’ve run countless paid campaigns on all major digital advertising platforms, and we’re ready to put that expertise to work on your campaign.

The Top 5 Benefits of Blogging for SEO and Brand Growth

Kristen Greif — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 17:00:52 +0000

A blog is the best way to attract potential customers to your site. On average, websites with a blog have 55% more traffic than websites without a blog. In the modern world of search, it’s imperative to run a helpful and informative blog that potential customers can use as a resource. Large and small businesses alike can boost their online presence, encourage inbound links, find new customers, and more with a successful blog. If that’s not enough to convince you to start a blog for your business, here are 5 more benefits of blogging.

Why You Should Have a Blog: 5 Benefits of Blogging

1. Blog Content Fuels Your Site’s SEO

A blog is an easy and affordable way to drive traffic to the rest of your website. You’ve probably heard your SEO specialist say the old adage, “content is king”. This is true now more than ever. Google is looking at the content on your website to decide your site’s search ranking. Content determines where you will rank on Google, but it will also determine if you will be cited in AI. The AI models like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Gemini are looking towards written content, like blogs, to answer user queries. If you want to be cited in this new age of search, you are going to need a blog to build up authority with these models.

Creating helpful and informative content on the topics surrounding your industry will help you attract customers. This is because Google and other search engines’ main goal is to provide users with the best possible user experience. This means serving users the best possible results to their queries, and search engines will reward the sites that help them achieve this goal. If you are able to help Google with answering questions like “how do I fix my leaky sink?” Google will, in turn, rank you well when people search “plumbers near me”. By answering the first question, Google views you as an authoritative and trustworthy source in your industry, so when people are looking for a plumber, you will be at the top of the rankings due to your authority.

It’s crucial that you are adding new content to your site and updating old content on a regular basis. SEO is a long-term investment that will probably never end, but the ROI is so much better than almost any other marketing strategy if it’s done right.

Write content that’s worth reading.

Create posts that prove you are an industry leader. Show off your expertise. Doing so will give your brand credibility and build trust among not just human readers, but also search engines like Google and the AI models.

Content that’s worth reading can include:

Reactions to industry-relevant changes, especially if they impact your clients. This is a great way to show how your company will adjust to these changes to help the client.
Case studies, especially if they’re populated with lots of easy-to-digest graphics and statistics that showcase how you help your clients.
Thought leadership pieces to situate yourself as a leader in your industry. These are the topics that will serve as trust signals for the search engines and position you as an authority figure.
Evergreen blog articles, or articles about content that is always going to be relevant to your industry, like a blog about how to fix a leaky pipe for a plumber. These blogs will be available for rankings and searches forever because they will always be relevant.
FAQ blogs are blogs that relate to common concerns and questions that your potential customers might have about issues in your industry. These blogs are great ways to showcase expertise and build trust with potential clients. These blogs also improve SEO ranking by allowing you to rank in “People Also Ask” SERPS and AI overviews.

2. A Blog Gives Your Company a Voice

Having a clear voice as a company is an integral part of your brand. Customers connect with and are loyal to brands that have a company voice that resonates with them. A blog on your website is the perfect way to show your customers who you are and what your business values. Having a blog that provides helpful information about your industry in a way that resonates with your target market is a great way to build your brand.

A blog also allows you a space to interact directly with your customers. A comment section below each blog will allow you to answer any questions a client might have, and give you a clear space to showcase your company’s voice in a real client scenario. This is a great way to show potential customers the tone and way you interact with customers. Replying to comments is also a great way to build up trust with your audience AND with search engines. When search engines see comments on a blog post, it signals to them that the post is engaging, boosting your rankings by showing the search engine that your content is engaging and that you are trustworthy.

Use your brand voice and messaging in a helpful and informative blog as a way to build credibility and authority among your target market. This is going to help you generate brand awareness, build authority, and cultivate trust with website visitors.

3. Blogging is a Great Way to Communicate with Potential Customers

If your blog is a helpful source of information regarding the issues in your industry, it will be a great and cost-effective way to reach potential customers. If you want to reach potential customers with your blog, you should focus on writing about your customers’ pain points and concerns. Address these issues in a helpful and authoritative way.

Helping potential customers will allow you to showcase your expertise and build up goodwill with them by meeting them where they are and helping them before they ever spend a dollar with you.

Blogging is a cost-effective way to promote your business to potential customers. Your blogs will attract new visitors to your site, and hopefully, after reading your blog, they will stay on the site and explore your different services or product pages. Running a helpful and informative blog is relatively cheap compared to other advertising tactics, and it is much more effective because potential customers are seeking your advice and expertise rather than you going to them randomly like a billboard or TV ad.

4. Blog Content can be Repurposed

Your blog content can be repurposed and converted to fit different channels and audiences. There are so many different types of content you can convert a single blog post into. You can take a blog and convert it into an infographic for your social media channels to meet customers there. You could convert a blog post into a script for an audio post, podcast, or video to reach customers through those channels.

Converting blog content into these different types of media that you can post on your social media channels will help grow your brand awareness. Users are much more likely to share these types of helpful resources connected to your brand than they are to share your product pages. By investing in a blog, you are investing in a resource for your customer base to access through all different types of channels.

5. Blogs are a Great Way to Build up Your Network

Blogging can grow your network in three ways: showcase your thought leadership, open you up to collaboration opportunities, and build brand awareness from shares. Blog posts are a great way to build up the resumes and portfolios of the individuals writing the blogs. It’s a great idea to have your employees, and even your CEO, write blogs about their views and opinions on the new and relevant topics in your industry. By writing and sharing these posts to their individual networks, your company will be viewed as a thought leader in your industry.

When your blog and company are seen as a thought leader, people will start coming out of the woodwork to collaborate with you. These collaboration opportunities could look like influencers or media outlets reaching out to you for quotes on issues in your industry, or industry blogs offering you the opportunity to guest blog for them. Both of these are great opportunities to grow your brand awareness across new audiences.

A great blog post is likely to generate buzz and a decent amount of shares. People sharing your content with other people is obviously a great way to generate brand awareness, but other websites sharing your content helps your site more than just generating brand awareness. Other websites talking about and linking to your blog provide your site with valuable backlinks, which are extremely helpful to your site’s SEO success. These backlinks will help boost your domain authority and improve your overall search rankings. Click here to learn more about the importance of backlinks.

The Benefits Far Outweigh the Cons

As you’ve just learned, there are so many benefits that your site and brand could be enjoying if you started a blog. Your blog material will become the backbone of your SEO, improving your rankings across the board. You will be able to showcase your company voice to potential and existing customers, showing them who you are, what you believe in, and how you treat customers. You will be able to reach potential customers, offering them a resource before they ever spend a dollar with you. Your blog will provide you with content that you can repurpose to reach different audiences across different channels. Your blog will allow you to grow your personal and your company’s network through shares and collaboration opportunities.

As you can see, the benefits of a blog greatly outweigh the time and effort it takes to strategize and create the content. So, whether you’re looking to start a new blog or revamp your old one, don’t neglect blogging platforms as valuable digital marketing channels; they just might be the backbone behind your digital marketing strategy.

Looking to improve your content strategy? Let Digital Strike work with you to develop a content strategy that will fuel your marketing efforts. Contact us today for a free consultation.