Wix SEO | Content Strategy for SEO

Hello and welcome to WIX SEO Webinar Content Strategy for SEO. I'm Matthew. I'm a Product Marketing Manager for SEO Education here at wix, and I'm here joined by Mark Traphagen, who's the VP of Product Marketing at SEO Clarity. All right, so let's go ahead and get started. Mark, welcome. Thank you for joining us.

Thank you for having me. Very excited to be with you and with your audience today, all the people in WIX world, Greetings. It's good to be with you.

We're really excited to have you and everybody. We have a treat in store for you. This is going to be a great presentation. Mark is a master at content strategy, specifically around SEO. So I'm going to turn the reins over to you, Mark. Let's get started. And throughout the presentation, if you have any questions, feel free to ask. And I will do our best to answer any common questions as well throughout the presentation. So take it away.

Terrific. Thank you, Matthew. First of all, I am Mark Traphagen. I'm Vice President of Product Marketing and Training. My title is Way Too Long at SEO Clarity. So basically, I'm helping our clients on one of the world's leading SEO platforms to get to know us better, to get to use us better, and let the world know about what Clarity does. So we're very excited to be here today, excited to have this opportunity to share a little we've learned working with thousands upon thousands of sites all over the world over the last 12 years. It's helped them to grow their content, grow their traffic, get the audience that they want and need to grow your business or whatever it is that you're trying to do with your wix site. So what we're going to be focusing on today is something that SEO clarity, we call the content life cycle. We tend, as we all, as website owners, we all know we have to build content. It's one of the most essential things that we are going to do, not only for our users and our audience, which should be our first concern, but particularly here, we're talking about SEO. So for search engines, search engines feed off of the content on your site. But often we tend to get very isolated in that we tend to think of content as what's the next blog post I have to write? What's the next page that I should fill out? I want to take a broader view today and lead you through and thinking of your content in terms of a lifecycle. Let's dig in and describe what we mean by that. So we've Seen on typical sites, analyzing a lot of sites over time, a pattern that tends to repeat itself over and over again. Where initially the site, you know, plants some content, you're getting started. You think about the initial things you want to rank for. And so you build some pages around that, you build some content. That's the planting stage. You get it out there. And if you've done your job well and your site's set up well, it's optimized for SEO as a good WIX site is, then it begins to attract some traffic over time, some attention, and it starts to grow. And you get excited because you're finally starting to get some traffic and it's coming up there. And maybe you get so excited you think, like, we've done it, we did SEO, we did content, we're done. And then what happens is it inevitably starts to decay. The search world is, what have you done for me today? What have you done for me lately? There's always something new, there's always something more relevant, there's always new content out there being produced. And the search engines never tire. They're constantly looking what's the best, what's the latest, what's the most relevant. So you can't get let this cycle happen to you. Instead. This is what we're going to. This is the overview of where we're going today. I'm going to give you a series of steps for each of those parts that you showed you before. Planting, growing, and even the decay cycle that inevitably happens so that over time, this is your goal, you're still going to have these waves of planting and then growing and then seeing some decay. But out of this webinar, you'll know what to do to build this. So over time, even though it might come in waves, a little bit of up and down, seasonality, other things, this is going to be an upward climb over time. That's what we're looking to build today out of this content lifecycle. Let's dig into each of the stages of that and let me show you what we're doing. Advise our clients to do what we've seen over the years builds this kind of content success that builds traffic, audience conversions, the things that you're seeking for. So the planting stage we said is getting content on your site. It's where you start and it really comes up again and again because there's always new areas of content. Maybe you've branched out into a new service, a new product, a new area of knowledge that you want to cover. So you begin to build content out around that. And that's the seeding part of it. And we call that seeding because you never get any plants in your garden if you don't plant the seeds. And your content pages are those seeds. So the more seeds you plant in your garden, the more plants you're going to have at harvest time. It's a simple formula. So you could say very simply, more content equals more opportunities. Now, I want to be very careful here and jump right in and say that does not mean building content for content sake. You know, you may have seen some outdated SEO advice like that, like just build as much content as you can. You need more pages and you constantly need new pages. That's not the thing you should be concentrating on. Very much more important always to be building quality content that's relevant for your audience, that's well constructed, that's. That shows authority, shows expertise, shows trustworthiness. Things that Google is getting better and better at sussing out and looking for. You want to make that your concentration. But it's still undeniable over time. The more content you have and the more focused content segments and pieces that you have, the more opportunities you're creating for people to find you and the right people to find you. So that all starts with keyword research. Now, that's beyond the scope of this webinar. We're not going to go into detail on that. And has tremendous resources that Matthew and others can share with you about how to do keyword research properly. But it all starts there. It still starts there. I know some SEOs will say keywords are dead or keyword research is dead. And that's because Google's getting more sophisticated about thinking about things topically. But it still starts. The root keywords are the basic words that people use to search for, and they are the best clues that you have initially to what content you should be creating. So look up those resources. Educate yourself on keyword research. That's your starting point. That's all we'll say for now. Another important part of that, I think, is to think, always think like a marketer. Even if you're a content marketer or you're an SEO, you can't stop thinking like a marketer in general, which means you have to know your audience. And again, we're not going to go in depth on this. This is a whole other topic that we can provide resources for you on. But this is just good old marketing 101. You know, who are my potential, who are my customers, first of all, or the people who already are interested in whatever my site is about. You can find out through surveys, you can find out through analysis of traffic on your site, search queries on your site, all kinds of ways to find that out. And then you know, what are my potential audience? Who do I want to reach? What are they like? What are their hopes, fears, dreams, needs? Those are all the things that are going to inform you, along with your keywords on the kind of content and the tone it should have and the level of expertise and all of those things that's going to make that content highly relevant to your audience. But another place you can go to discover things is the SERPs themselves, the search engine results pages. You go into Google and just type in the main keywords that you want to rank for and see what Google is ranking. It's one of your best clues to the type of content. That doesn't mean copy exactly what the highest ranking pages are doing, but they will give you an idea of the kind of quality, the kind of coverage, comprehensiveness, all of these things. And then Google provides some wonderful clues themselves sometimes in the search features. One of the best ones that they've given us in many years is people also ask. They're actually showing us actual questions that people have put into Google that Google sees as relevant to the topic. So here what is insurance fraud? Is the query that we typed in can you go to jail for insurance fraud? Somebody's a little worried there. All these are little of fraught with, fraught with angst here, but it's the kind of thing we're talking topic like insurance fraud. It's going to be in that direction that gives you a clue even to the tone and type of content that you want to be producing. So you know, do some actual on the SERP research there to find out what kind of content you should be producing. And then topical coverage. Think in terms of topics moving from the keyword level to the topical level, the higher level of what are the main topics that we want to rank for, not just keywords and how can we cover those controversial or well, maybe controversial, that might work for you, but comprehensively is the word that I meant to say. So here's an example. This is our blog, but we've structured it at SEO Clarity now as a resource center, as a learning center. And you can see on the left there we have all kinds of types of content level that you can even select by your SEO level that you feel that you're at or you want to work for or the type of content. So I show you this to show that we've worked hard over the years not just to produce, you know, all the different kinds of SEO related content that we think we should be producing, but also to group it into topics and to think about it. Okay, you know, we've covered this topic of content marketing life cycle. What else is related to that? What else is somebody who's interested in that also going to want to learn about or see? So you start to think topically, then you move, you're ready to move into the planting stage. And our strategy there is to feed the content that we've been producing. There's some things, you've probably heard this advice before, but it bears saying, you know, it's not content, is not build it. And they will come. You've got to prompt it, you've got to feed by promoting. So social media newsletters, partnering. I mean what I'm doing today, very bold faced, like, you know, me partnering with wix here to do this webinar is promotion. It's getting you to know that SEO Clarity is out there. Maybe you're going to go after this and check out our blog and our resource center and learn more about SEO. That's all part of content promotion. It's not direct SEO, but it gets you noticed. It maybe starts to get your content noticed where people will start to link to it and that makes Google pay attention to you. But another more directly content SEO related tactic that we promote very heavily at SEO Clarity is this idea of topic clusters. Once you begin to get a certain amount of content on your site and you see what people are interested in, what they respond to and what performs for you, you'll start to get a better idea of the main topics of your site as we've been talking about and those you want to think of as your pillars. So we talked about pillar topic. Here is something that's a high level topic for you. You want to have at least one really good page that's maybe a little bit longer content, maybe a little bit more media rich, whatever that just covers that topic at a high level but very comprehensively. And then you start to think in terms of, you do some research to see like remember those people also ask questions kind of things like what are specific things within that top that people want to know? And instead of just keep adding those all onto that super megalong article, build those out as their own satellite pieces of content. None of those by themselves are going to get as much traffic, but together they are targeting an individual segment of your audience. And getting highly relevant to that. Let's look at an actual example of how that would work. Let's say you're a travel site in the travel field. Like our big topic is vacation home. So we're going to want to have a pillar page, a main content page that covers the topic of vacation homes. Just general information about it, the main things people would want to know. But then you start to think about what are other things that people want to know about that and asking about. So it might be things like how to buy a vacation home or how to rent vacation homes, how to find vacation rentals, how to rent a beach house for weekend. As we're getting a little more specific there, can you rent a house for a single night? Very specific. But you start to see that people want those types of things and Google is more likely if that's what they're looking for. Like can I rent a vacation house for a single night? Google's more likely to send people to a page that you have specifically about that than to your general vacation homes page. And then you want to interlink all of these back to that main page. So Google begins to over time search engines begin to see, oh, this is a comprehensive site. Like this is a site where anything you want to learn about vacation homes and vacation home rentals or buying vacation homes, like this site's got it covered. So that's the idea of a topic cluster. Again, that's one of the best strategies we've ever seen for growing, growing traffic with your content over time.

Okay, so question the. In this case, if it's a travel company or travel agency, maybe the, the pillar page would be about vacation homes. That would be like the topic. And then you have all the different types of. Can you just do one topic as like your main blog? Like Michelle's asking, would a pillar page work as a whole blog or is it better to have multiple topics on your blog or throughout your site?

Yeah, I mean blog versus site pages, you know your topic page. That's a great question. You know our advice on that from, from a structural standpoint is your main topic pages, your pillar topic pages should be high level in your site navigation. So you know, try to create them as actual pages and link them if you can from your, from your main navigation. So as few clicks away because you know with a blog, how a blog works is a blog is structured to be the latest, the top and as something your older content gets pushed further and further and further down. So one way to indicate to the search engines that this is a main topic is to take these pillar topic pages and make them main resource pages as again as high in your navigation as you can. Now the other pages, the satellite pages, they can be blog posts, they can be individual pages, whatever you want them to be, as long as you interlink them. So each of them. So each of these pages you see here, how to buy a vacation home, how to find vacation Rentals would be linked to my main topical vacation home page. And then as much as possible, you don't want to over clutter, overburden your main page. But for the, maybe the most popular ones, the most relevant ones, link back to them. So maybe you know, at the bottom, like other things, you've seen these on webpages where you know other topics you might be interested in. How to buy a vacation home, how to rent vacation home. Link back to those that in WIX

blogs we have a great feature that's other related posts where when you take up one blog post, you can add at the bottom, you can link to other posts that are on your blog. That's a great way to do this sort of interlinking and it's built right into the product. That's perfect.

Please take advantage. You will be amazed over time if you do that, the effect that that will have in your traffic. Because Google wants to send people to sites that are comprehensively about a topic, not just the individual query that they had. But if Google says like, you've got this covered, well, we're more confident because people that you know are just searching for recreation homes, they have these other questions too. And if they can find that information on your site, that's even more useful. Okay. And how to find homes rent by owner, don't leave them out too. All right, the next stage is the grow stage. This is exciting. Like now we want to grow our content, which means we want to use the content that we already have. And we want to say how can we expand the traffic for that and the audience for that? How can we get more bang for our buck out of that content? Two strategies here. The first one, the one's negative one's positive and the negative one you got to do. And we call that pruning. So pruning is something obviously this metaphor comes out of horticulture, planting, growing, decay as we're talking about here. So over time, if you've ever, you know, grown trees, had trees, you know, trees will, as they age, will begin to have branches or even some types of plants that, that are not productive, they're dying out and they're actually sapping energy from the tree. So a good tree manager will come in and will be willing to cut off those dead branches so that the tree will be healthier and it can produce new branches and new traffic. That's what you want to do. So let's talk about a basic strategy for that. Gonna go through this a little bit quickly, but remember, this will be recorded. You can get this later. You can come back and find all these. We, we use the acronym ROT here for this pruning stage. So what is rot? Well, first up, the R in ROT is redundant content. Looking for redundant content. What is that? That can be duplicate content. As you start to build a lot of content on your site, it's going to happen. You're going to discover over time that you have pages that are virtually the same. They're about the same thing for the most part. Maybe even they have a lot of the same phraseology, a lot of the same content on them. Sometimes even turns out they actually are identical, but you just maybe have two different titles on them. You're trying to rank for different keyword. This is confusing to search engines. There's no penalty for it except for the fact that you're probably not going to get as much traffic because the search engine feels a little uncertain about which page really is the page for that kind of related is cannibalization. People doing different things by cannibalization. At SEO Clarity we talk about in terms of cannibalization is where you have a page and you literally see if you're tracking your rankings over time and you have a tool that shows you you know which URL on your site is ranking for a keyword. You can see that the Google like flip flops back and forth like Google seems to be uncertain. Sometimes it ranks this page, sometimes it ranks that page. You don't want to cause that kind of confusion to search engines. So the fix here you can read. You can go and do some research and learn about these techniques if you don't know them first. Two are a little technical, but there's ways to redirect the one page to the other so that if somebody goes to the page, they actually get end up on the page that you prefer for them to end up on. You can use canonicalization to tell the search engine which page is the important page for that keyword or that topic. You can merge the content, just bring it together. If there's good elements from both, make one page that merges the best of each or redo the lesser page, you know, change it, make it significantly different so that it will rank for a different keyword. The second is outdated content. Second of the rot or the O thing. Outdated is just what it sounds like. It's old content. A lot of your old content over time will just be outdated beyond repair. By beyond repair, I mean where you look at and you realize like, there's nothing we can do to update this. If you can update the page, fantastic. Do that. And by the way, update does not mean just changing the date on the page. Google's wise to that. That doesn't fool anybody or it doesn't fool the search engine. Update means literally updating the content to bring it up to date and make it relevant. That can be a good strategy. We say, like, this is something, you know, we're an iPhone website. You know, Nobody cares about iPhone4 anymore. That doesn't get much traffic. The fix is, if it can't be updated, kill it. This is a hard thing if you invested so much work and time into your content. Everybody hates sticking with content, but you're really, it's think of that tree again, cutting off those dead branches. It really is going to make your site healthier for SEO in the long run. And then finally, trivial content. By trivial here we mean it's not working for you. It's not, for whatever reason, it's just you look at your analytics and you say, this just never drove any traffic, it never got attention, it's not earning any links. And maybe you've tried a few things, you've tried to improve it, grow it, whatever, for whatever reason, it's just not performing again. You know, if you give it every chance, kill it. You got to be willing to prune your non performing content if you can't improve it. However, there is way, there are ways. It's more positive now in the growth stage to take advantage of performing content, high performing content, and get even more out of it. And we call that splicing. You may know again, in the world of horticulture, the world of plants, spicing is a technique, especially with trees, fruit trees, where you graft a branch from one kind of variety of a fruit onto another and you produce a whole new variety. You get, you get something new out of it. And that's what we're looking to do in the splicing stage. So splicing simply means figuring out where on a really high performing piece of content there may be opportunities to split off parts of that content into its own pages, its own blog post, whatever that will perform better overall than what the page is doing now. And we recommend that you just as a rule of thumb, you don't have to follow this religiously, but we tell our clients we recommend that anything where a page is ranking for three times the average keywords ranking per page for your site is a candidate for splicing. Let me go quickly through a formula, then I'll show you how you can work that out to determine that. But just what you're going to do here is you want you need to get the count of your ranking keywords from Google Search Console. Hopefully you're in our Is Google Search Console integrated into wix? Matthew?

It is. So if you use our Our Get Found on Google tool or the Setup, it's also known as the SEO Wiz. If you complete the first step and you use the Connect to Google button, it'll create an account in Search Console automatically for you and automatically index your homepage. So you may already have this data there and you didn't even realize it. So all you have to do is go into Search Console using your account that you connected to and you'll have all this information in there waiting for you to play around with and check out.

Terrific. Another advantage of being a WIX user, it's just so many things set up automatically for you. It's just there and you can do it. That's awesome. So you're going to get your count of ranking keywords. I'll show you how to do that in a moment. You're going to get your count of ranking URLs. That means the keywords URLs. That means the URLs and keywords that Google is actually using to send traffic to your site or at least showing in search may not be sending traffic. Better to say like these are at least showing on search result pages and you're gonna divide one by the other and that will give you your average number of keywords ranking per page. Now let's show you how you do that in Google Search Console. So in Google Search Console, you're gonna want to go to the Performance tab and first go to queries. Queries are your keywords. Queries are the things that Google sees your page relevant for and it's putting them in to search. And so then you scroll to the bottom of that page and you'll see a number down here. It says rows per page and it shows you how many rows you've got. So this is a personal website of mine, and I've got a thousand that Means and numbers in Google search console are always kind of rounded. And that's okay for this purpose. Perfectly okay. So I have about a thousand keywords that my little site that Google says I rank for, that I show up in search for. So you put that, you write that number down. Thousand keywords. Next, for the URLs, we're going to go to the pages tab under performance. Same thing, go to the bottom, get that last number, 62. So I have 62 pages that Google is showing in search results for me now. I take those Numbers and saying 1000 keywords that I'm ranking for divided by 62 URLs that Google has indexed and is showing insight. And that comes out to 16 keywords per page average. And so using our rule of thumb about three times, I want to again go back and look for any pages that have about 50 or more ranking keywords about three times that average. And those are good candidates for splicing. The main takeaway here is just simply any pages on your site that you start seeing from your SEO information rank for a lot of keywords. Splicing is going to be your strategy. One, do. So how do we do that? How do we splice? Well, first of all, you identify the keywords first place candidate. You can do that from Google Search Candidate or Google Search Console. So you go, you focus in specifically on the URL of the candidate page and you find the keywords that aren't ranking well but are still relevant for you. So you're gonna have some keywords that are ranking on page one. Those are terrific. Dig down a little deeper. You find all this keywords like, you know, ranking position 27, something like that. But boy, it's still a good keyword for us. It's still, it's still relevant. So what do I do here? Create a new piece of content centered around that keyword. Focus on it. Google's seeing your present page relevant for that keyword, but it's not ranking it for it. It's not really ranking it high enough for it to get traffic. So that means you already have the relevancy. Google wants to rank you for that. Give them a page specifically, build out a great page around that keyword and then interlink it as we said before, that topical, excuse me, topic clustering strategy with the, you know, with the existing piece and sit back and wait a little bit and I bet you'll begin to see you moving up on that keyword ranking. Splicing is such a great, great strategy. We use it all the Time. All right, let's finally move on to the last stage, the sad one. But sav inevitable in any life cycle is decay. No matter how good a piece is, you know, almost inevitably over time it's going to start to fall off in traffic and intention and you know, what do you do with that when something starts to starts to decay. So there's only one tactic here and that is refresh where you can. So let's talk about refreshing. We just as far as like finding what to refresh. Good place to start again. This is back in Google Search Console again we're looking at our pages that we're ranking for and I've dug down here. Now if you look on the right hand side where it says position, you see these are all now 12, 13, 14. Generally that means we're on the second page. Generally, you know, there's a lot of variances these days, but generally we think of the first page of Google having 10 links on it, 10 sites that rank. So these are, these are doable. Like these are almost there, you know, they're almost to the first page. Which means maybe a little bit of work of improving some of the things that we talked about already in this webinar. Applying that going in and just spicing up the content a little bit, adding more more to it, making it better, more comprehensive, finding opportunities to interlink with other relevant content on your site. All those techniques, these are good candidates that you could drive these up to page one and start getting some traffic from them. So that's refreshing. Also look for and you can find this in Google Search Console again keywords that you have that have or pages that have high impressions but low click through rate. So something that you know, a lot of people are looking for that thing but they're not clicking on yours. So one of the things that you want to you can do with that is try to improve your meta description. The little description that Google includes the first two or three lines after a search result is you may know from experience they don't always show the one that you put in and you code into your site, but they often do. If it's well written, it's very well descriptive of the page. Maybe you can't get too salesy in it. You can't say things like click here please, but give a little bit of enticement that people are interested because there's some people, not everybody clicks on that first result. People do scan through the page and they look at those little descriptions to get an idea of like which of These should I click on first? So little things you can do to improve that click through rate.

So we have a few people who went into their search console and they said they're not able to see. They can see the pages but they can't see the position column. How do you add it at the top of the page right when you're looking for. When you're looking at that report.

Exactly. Yeah. There's options that you can have to show which columns to show. So at the top, look at the top of that page and you'll see different things you can click on to show and then false. You want to just include position on that report. Good question.

Great.

So just finally some ways to refresh. So okay, I know what pages I want to refresh. How do I do that? Simplest and most direct way. Expand the text, do some keyword research and maybe include some more relevant keywords on the page and talk about those. Don't just throw keywords on the page, but those keywords are just clues to like oh we should, you know, we should expand a little bit here and talk a little bit more about these related areas. Look at the SERP again as we said before, the search result page and see if something's changed. Maybe you got behind, maybe you didn't realize like the whole topic had shifted in some way and other pages have moved on, but you didn't like you didn't get a clue. Find that out and then of course you know, build it into one of your topic clusters. If it's low performing page, don't. If that page is on page two but in Google but it's kind of orphaned. Is there a topic cluster that you can include it in to make it more relevant, more visible. So just you know, all things that you can do in that. So over time I call it the Lifecycle lifecycle because we talked about the content like or the life cycle of a particular piece of content. But it's a way of life, it's maybe a lifecycle lifestyle. You want to develop this regular thing of seeding new content, feeding it to make it begin to get some traffic and to grow the audience that it has. Being willing to prune from time to time, go back and cut out the dead non performing or conflicting content where you can splicing and taking off high performing content. That's ranking for a lot of keywords and splitting off to more targeted long tail keywords in their own pages on your site. Rinse and repeat, rinse and repeat. And we see time and again our Clients who do this have this upward cycle over time where they're growing their traffic and their relevance. And that's your. That's your goal. So thank you so much for being a part of this. And here's the places where you can learn more and follow us.

All right, awesome. That was a fantastic presentation. Thank you so much. So we tried to answer as many questions as we could throughout the chat, but I do have a couple that I think I'd like to add to this. So somebody has asked early on that they provide a service. They have a few clients that provide the same service in the same geographical area. How can they differentiate their content in order to rank if they're targeting, like dentists in Boise, Idaho or something, that's a very small niche topic, and it's a very small, you know, targeted area. What can they do to kind of differentiate themselves in order to. In terms of content?

Yeah, that's a great question. Part of that is a local SEO question, which is, you know, not. Not our special. We actually have a division called Local. Yeah, Local. Local. Clarity. Thank you. Can remember our own brand name that. That deals with that. So local SEO is not my specialization. And you can. There's places where you can learn more about that. But from a content standpoint, this can actually be easier than you think, simply because, like, it's a great, like, I love that you use dentist because the niche. Because I happen to have a friend who's a dentist in Charlotte who's built a tremendous SEO presence in the Charlotte, North Carolina regional area with his content optimization. Because you notice like most of if you go to most dental sites, there's either very little real content, like real useful educational content, or if it's there, you can tell instantly like they bought this content somewhere, it's a paragraph or two, or, you know, they had some paid writer who doesn't really know anything about dentistry. Just, you know, slap up a few words on a page when you see that kind of thing in your niche, just by creating better content. Like, you know, spending some time and thinking about what are the most important educational things that my dental clients might want to know about and being the best. And it's actually easier to do content optimized ranking on that, like a localized niche like that, because you're not competing against, you know, huge medical sites or something that are global or nationwide. You know, Google knows if you've done your local SEO work right? Google knows you're in. You're focused on that particular area. So you're only competing against the other dentists in Charlotte, in this case, my friend. And you know, as he just, he just looked at their sites and said I can do better than that and just took it one by one and caught that project. So I think from the standpoint of what we're talking about today, look at that. Number one advice I would have is actually go look at the other sites in your niche in that local area and do better than them. You can do better.

That's always to take a look at what your competitors are doing. We actually did a great webinar together with Semrush on competitor analysis. So I highly recommend you take a look at that webinar that we did. It's on the Wix.com YouTube channel. So we got another question. Throughout the presentation, a lot of people have been asking about different keyword tools or different free tools. Are there any tools that you recommend or even want to demo? Wink, wink, Mark.

Funny you should ask. Yeah, we have. So this is our free Spark content optimizer tool. You're seeing it on the left there. This is actually a page on our own website and it's a Chrome plugin. You can install it for free, use it for free for life. All the information there is yours. But this is also really great for competitive research. Not just learning about your own site, but going out and looking. You know, when you start to see like what are the sites that are ranking for keyword I am and what are they doing differently for than I am that I should maybe be thinking about doing. It's a great tool for doing that kind of research. So it's not a keyword research tool per se, that's a component of it, but more of a great tool for both analyzing how are my own pages doing for on a very simple level and how are my competitors pages doing? So I'll just walk quickly here through some of the things you can see this way. Right at the top you see for the page that I'm on right now, it tells me how many keywords am I ranking for? And the top keywords. This isn't a very aged page, hasn't been around very long. So right now it's ranking for just one keyword. SEO for travel industry. That's a really great keyword for us. So that's good to see a quick on page summary, like real basic information about the HTML structure of your page or a competitor's page that you're looking at. So you can see right off the bat like what's the title that Google sees. What's the meta description that Google sees all this kind of information? A quick usability audit which is looking at possible technical problems that might be on that page that you might want to think about getting fixed that might be preventing it from getting indexed or having Google to have a hard time understanding that page. A little bit of the backlink information on the page, we draw that from Majestic SEO. We get a firehose feed from them, all of their information. Great, great information on that. You can even do a relevance analysis using this is this gets you inside some of our tools that enterprise level businesses pay thousands of dollars for. So you can put in a keyword here that gosh, we wanted this page to rank for this keyword, put that in there, hit analyze and we'll tell you what you should be adding to this page to if you want to rank for that particular keyword or topic and some basic information.

Pardon Teresa actually asked, don't we have this info that this extension is providing on wix? Yes, you do have some of this information for your site, but this is a great way to see what other sites are up to. If you see another page that's ranking ahead of you for a keyword that you want to rank for, you can easily open this extension and see, okay, what's their meta description? What are the top words in their page? Who's backlinking to them? So you can kind of see what's going on on other pages. A lot of this stuff of course you can see your H1s and you can see your meta description in the editor, but this is a great way to kind of spy on the competition and understand kind of what's going on

outside of your site and our user base. The people that use the Spark tool and love it consistently tell us like that's their number one usage is spying on, on the competitors. They, they typically have some, you know, some of this information already on their own pages. So it's a great way to do a quick comparison and see what they're doing. And we even this is, this is really cool going into again, this is giving you a top level analysis from something that enterprise clients pay thousands of dollars to get in much more detail. But we, we can do high level topical analysis and looking at the page that you're looking at right now in your browser, we can tell you that here are the keywords that search engines most likely see as relevant for this page and that might give you some ideas where you want to maybe include more of that or talk more about that on the page, beef that up. All these are ways that you're going to want to use in that refresh strategy or that growth strategy that we talked about where you're trying to expand the relevancy of your pages, get them to rank better, get more traffic. So that's the spark. If you look up spark SEO clarity on Google, you'll find it. It's also linked from the webinar, so absolutely free. Try it out and have fun with it.

Yep. And afterwards when we send out the an email to all of our to everybody with the link. We'll also send a link to the extension as well. So also let's ask a few more questions someone asked about the end. You showed the life cycle, life cycle how you want to keep going. How long does that take for a life cycle like that to go? What's the time frame?

The great. I can give the most familiar SEO answer to that. Matthew, what is

depends.

It depends exactly which is the horrible cop out answer. But in so much of SEO, it really is true. So what that's going to depend on is your marketplace that you're in and, well, a number of factors it's also going to depend on like your own resources. How quickly can you build content? How quickly can you pivot, you know, how quickly can you apply the steps? In general, the more time that you can give to spending on those steps that I showed you going through plant grow, decay, you know, seeding, feeding, refreshing, all those, all those things, the more times you can go through that over the course of a year, generally, I think the quicker that cycle is going to go because Google moves slowly. SEO is a process where you're seeding. That's why I think the horticulture metaphor is so good, because you got a seed in the spring to get a harvest in the fall and you got to think of Google in that way. But the nice thing is scalability. So in the beginning it's going to be slow and the cycle is going to be long and the benefits are going to be long coming. But keep doing it. Don't give up. And over time, especially as you have more and more to work with, because you've been applying these steps, you're going to see that you're going to begin to scale and it will become quicker. Google gets more confident about your site, gets more confident that it knows what it's about, that it's good, that it's relevant, that it's useful to the Google audience, et cetera, et cetera. You're going to find that cycle cutting down over time. So I can't give you any one size fits all answer. In most cases though, you're looking at over a period of months at least. So every, you know, I would say every few months, try to come back at least and revisit and do the pruning and the splicing and those kind of steps. That will. And refreshing.

Yeah, that's a great point. SEO is a marathon, it's not a sprint. Every change you won't, you might not see the effects of that change for a while. So it does take time, have patience and that actually is a great thing. You just mentioned about Google and helping Google understand your site better. Someone asked, does buying Google Ads help Google understand and help your site rank better at all? It's not really related to content, but still, it might be a good way to answer.

Okay, I can answer this one. It does not depend. The answer is emphatically no. And I truly believe this. And not just because Google's actually Google. Google takes every opportunity they can when this question comes up to say no, no, it's like absolute separation between ads and things. Now I know like a lot of us probably don't trust Google or say like, you know, it's a huge mega corporation. Like why would we trust what they say? You don't need to just go on what they say. To me it makes absolute sense that they, that they keep that separate. And here's why. Google's search, organic search industry, it's website search, it's organic search is one of the most valuable things on the face of the earth. It's driven one of the largest businesses ever known. It's created just untold billions for Google. That's the goose that lays the golden egg along with the ads. So it's the thing that drives the ads. But if Google search was ever to be. And all of that runs on trust. We use Google because we trust it. We trust that we're getting truly organic search results. You know, that the algorithm has our best interest at heart. I guess I link this to my feeling about conspiracy theories in general. The bigger the organization and the bigger the conspiracy theory, which I think you know, that buying ads helps your organic ranking. I think it's a conspiracy theory because there's no proof of it. The bigger the conspiracy, the more certain it is that it's going to be leaked. It's going to get out eventually. And that's the reason why I don't think it happens. Because it would just take once if somebody could, you know, if somebody leaked out and absolutely, you know, somebody escaped from Google headquarters with the evidence and said like, yep, you know, you buy enough ads and like we send a message over to organic, link these people higher, that would be the end of Google. It would be the end of them. So that's why I think, that's why I believe them when they say that.

And also, I mean there is a place for Google Ads in your marketing strategy. It is a great way to generate traffic fast. But ultimately Google Ads are like a water faucet. You know, when you, when you have it on and you turn it on and you're, you're paying Google, the, the traffic flows but the minute you turn off the campaign, the traffic stops. But that doesn't happen with SEO organic. It does take longer time to build up but it is higher quality and it's more sustainable. You're not going to, you know, even though this process does take time and the life, the lifecycle does take time and energy and effort, you'll see you'll reap the benefits by getting really quality traffic.

And another thing if I may quickly that you know, the ads are useful for from an SEO standpoint is paid ads are a great way to test out keywords, you know and see like before you, before you invest in building a piece of content with all the expense and time that takes like you know, test out the paid ad landing page. If it's working in paid, then it's probably worth investing in for organic and you know, building, optimizing for organic on that. So it's a good way to do quick because you get, because with ads you get very fast feedback, not the kind of feedback you get from organic. So it's a great testing guide. It's worth spending the money, especially on a news site to begin to test the waters and see what it might be worth trying to build out organic strategy around.

Fantastic. And going on that especially if you're a new site. A few people have mentioned that they're just getting started. They're not sure how to do this for a brand new site or they're a one man band, a small team, they don't have a lot of resources. How can they go about creating this content? How can they go about creating a content strategy if they don't have the time to write or don't have the time to do all this stuff that we talked about.

Yeah, it's a boy. I feel for you. I know it's a tremendous dilemma. I wish I could give you an Easy answer for that. Because you've got to find, if you want to drive organic traffic, it's going to be a great source of traffic over time. You've got to make. It's like anything else in your business. You know, if you're running a business, you don't have time for anything. Like everything is urgent, everything's like, you know, so you got to stock, you know, if you had a store, you say, like, stocking the shelves takes so much time. I don't have time for that. And I've got to do accounting, I've got to do, you know, this and that, and I got to do advertising. But you don't put any product on the shelves, you know, you're going to go out of business. So at some point you've got to build some time and priority in this. It's okay to start slow. Like I said in the beginning, like even just my dentist friend, he's in the same boat that you are. So go out and get your. Build a few good pieces of content around your most relevant topics and do it better than your competitors are doing it. And that's a place to start. And then the lifecycle that I showed you, I'm giving you a vision for the future. Because if you plant the seeds, even if you plant a few seeds and start to slowly and start to grow them, you're going to get, over time the content library that you can begin to apply those things to and make those more efficient, make them do more for you over time. So I wish I could tell you how to find the more time. That's another miracle for another miracle worker.

Yeah, I mean, also getting started, you can just do an hour a week or, you know, you can set aside time to write. To write the. Write a few things here and there. And then when you ever, you know, over time it will build up, it'll become a snowball. And once you see it work and you see the results, you'll. You'll find the time you'll want to do it. Once again, thank you. Thank you, Mark, and thank you to all of our Wix users for coming out today and have a great day.

Thank you, Matthew, and thank you, Wicks and everybody who came.