updated: September 9 2024

Even though the Internet is full of articles that praise content marketing, recent research has shown that less than 6% of those who invest in this type of promotion feel they’re doing it right.

With more resources than ever being poured into content marketing, it has become crystal clear to everyone that most people are struggling to get their content to work for them. It’s getting harder and harder for all sorts of companies, entrepreneurs, freelancers and marketers to justify their efforts in this department.

Why is this happening? Why are people failing to get their targeted audiences to interact with their content?

Content marketing is still a tough cookie to crack. Regardless of all the hype that constantly surrounds this practice online, things just aren’t falling into place for most people who invest in it.

Even though most people feel that their success via content marketing is limited by their fierce direct and indirect competition, studies have shown that the cause of this problem can usually be traced back to the publisher.

The Challenges of Running an Effective Content Marketing Campaign

As HubSpot reports, a miserable 32% of all surveyed B2B marketers say they have a documented content marketing strategy, while 55% of them have publicly declared they aren’t really sure what content marketing success looks like.

This is a huge problem. The above mentioned statistics clearly state that a lot of people who invest in content marketing don’t really have a genuine strategy for their efforts. They just produce random articles that they think their targeted audiences will love, and hope for the best. None of their efforts are data-driven, which, of course, is the main reason why they continue to fail with their content marketing.

If you want to achieve success in this department, you need to plan your moves carefully, learn how to analyze your performance, what you need to do in order to improve the overall quality of your content and feed your audiences with what they actually need from you.

Here is a definitive list of KPIs you should be measuring for your content marketing initiatives:

1. Unique Visits + Site Retention + Geography

It’s all about traffic. But not just any type of traffic. If you want to make your content marketing really work for your brand and business, you need to know what kind of audience you really want on your website, where does your current traffic come from, and what type of content generates the most views on your site. Once you figure all that out, you can easily come up with a bulletproof pattern to replicate (and even exceed) those numbers with your future content marketing efforts.

Google Analytics can help you acquire that information. If you’re interested in finding out which page brings the most traffic, head over to Google Analytics > Behaviour > Overview. From there, you can start analyzing your unique visits, site retention, and geography.

These 3 KPIs provide the necessary insight that could help you understand how a specific piece of content is performing. Measuring how many people have viewed a single piece of content in a given time-frame and from what location will help you get a clear view of the actual size of your audience.

Combine that with the average time your users spend on your site per session, and you’ll understand if your visitors are actually reading your content, or are they just scrolling through it in order to find the information they’re looking for.

If you’re a brand, it’s in your best interest to get as many intelligent visitors to your site as possible. If you see that the majority of your visitors comes from a specific location, you should probably think about personalizing your future content marketing efforts for that area.

If you’re a brand, you also don’t want to chase page views or people who don’t have a real potential to become your actual paying customers. Your goal is to stimulate a specific group of people to hop on your pages and follow your chosen path through the site, not stuff your funnel with garbage.

On the other hand, if you are a niche publisher, you may not have a huge audience, but it may show loyalty and engagement by clicking deep into the site and generating page views.

Both examples have one thing in common – having a real, data-driven understanding of just how satisfied your visitors are with your content could help you significantly improve your efforts in this department.

If, for example, as I have already mentioned, you see you have a lot of unique visits to a particular page, but your visitors are just scrolling through your content, because the average time spent on your page per session is low – this probably means something is standing between them and their desired information. Maybe you have a big opening that bores them to death, maybe you have written your content in a tone or voice that doesn’t really suit your targeted crowd – the possibilities are endless.

The important thing to have in mind is that you have something truly good on your hands. All you have to do is figure out a way to make your information attractive to your viewers.

2. Exit Rates

Exit rates are often confused with bounce rates. Unlike bounce rates, which give us an overview of the people who have landed on one of our pages and immediately left, exit rates provide us with the percentage of visitors who have actually clicked away to a different site from one of our pages.

While bounce rates are only based on sessions that begin with the page you’re currently analyzing, exits go beyond that. Exits may have viewed more than one page in a particular session, meaning they have not really landed on that page, but simply found their way to it while browsing through your website.

This KPI is extremely important for content marketers because it helps improve user experience. It helps us locate the problem areas of our site and content. Exit rates are there to help us tweak the pages that should naturally lead to further interactions with our site, but simply don’t. They need to be revised and optimized, yet again.

Even though exit rates could provide great insight about your user experience, pages and content, you need to be cautious with them. If, for example, you write a 10,000-word article about backlinks, but you decide to cut it into 4 different pages, and you see the exit rate on the last page is high, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Your visitors have reached the end of the article, so it’s quite natural for them to exit your site.

3. Heat Maps

Every successful content marketing professional is basically an obsessive person who constantly reviews and fine-tunes his work. Myself included. In order to win big with my efforts in this particular department, it’s imperative for me to constantly analyze and revise my work. I need to take a deep dive into my content and start messing around with the details. This is a delicate business. Even the smallest of errors can really hurt you.

As we have already mentioned in one of our previous blog posts, the average attention span of internet users is constantly decreasing. In 2017, the average attention span of people who frequently surf the Web is down to a miserable 8 seconds. The age of smartphones and instant information has left us with the attention span of a goldfish.

Having all this in mind, one could interpret content marketing as nothing more than the practice of tailoring custom information for impatient audiences. If we want to achieve success in this field in 2017, we constantly need to have a close eye on how our desired audience is engaging with a particular page on our site and its content.

Luckily for those who make their bread and butter by writing and publishing content on multiple domains, there are great tools for that. In addition to Google Analytics that can provide you with great on-page insights and help you track click patterns, there are tools like CrazyEgg, that make it possible for all of us to create heat maps and easily understand what section of a given page is getting the most views, and which are just being skipped.

This information is critical for everyone who wants to maximize their blogging ROI. Once you figure out which sections of your post have a negative effect on your overall page views, you can easily optimize them and improve your overall user satisfaction.

4. CTR (Click-Through-Rate)

We have already discussed the importance of tracking CTR scores on our blog.

You can read more about this metric in the post linked above.

As we have already mentioned, CTR is an important metric for everyone who engages in any type of marketing online, not only those who spend their days clicking and optimizing everything in Google AdWords.

Every successful content marketer tracks his CTR.

If you figure out how to maintain a good CTR score, you’ll improve your impression numbers, which will automatically help you position your creatives at the very top of your targeted search results. Once you do that, you will significantly increase your chances of being discovered by your desired audience, which will certainly have a positive effect on your overall conversion numbers.

5. Backlinks

Backlinks matter. They influence the popularity, relevance, and overall authority of a certain website. The more high-quality backlinks you have pointing back to your domain, the better. Backlinks help improve organic rankings in search and attract great referral traffic. In addition to that, backlinks also help Google index pages a lot faster, which naturally has an insanely positive effect on SEO. Even though they are extremely important for overall success online and everyone wants to get as many quality links as possible to point back their site – in 2017, in the post-Penguin era, backlinks cannot be built – they have to be earned.

This is where content comes to shine. Even though it’s now quite difficult to find a relevant subject that hasn’t already been covered thousands of times on various different websites across the Web, you can still come up with amazing material that has the potential of generating tons of shares and links for your website. All you really need to do is analyze what’s currently trending in your niche or industry, and build your story on that. If you want to earn a lot of links with your content marketing efforts, you’d better do your best to come up with authoritative content that answers popular questions, original research results, content that discusses trending topics with amazing insights, etc.

Summary

I hope this article has helped you understand how to elevate your content marketing efforts to the next level. As you can see from everything written above, there’s more than a few metrics to consider when designing a proper content strategy for your brand and business. Some of them may be more challenging than others, but it’s important to have in mind that every single one of these KPIs is there for a reason. Be sure to monitor them to ensure you’re building your content strategy on the right foundations.

1. Understand Your Audience

Before you start creating video content, it’s essential to understand who your audience is and what they are looking for. Conduct thorough research to identify their preferences, pain points, and interests.

How to Implement: Use tools like Google Analytics, social media insights, and customer surveys to gather data on your audience. Identify the types of content they engage with the most and tailor your videos accordingly. Create videos that align with your audience’s preferences and interests to maximise engagement and retention.

Benefits: Creating content that resonates with your audience increases engagement and the likelihood of your videos being shared, which can improve your SEO.

Delving Deeper

Understanding your audience involves more than just basic demographic data. You need to delve into psychographics to comprehend their motivations, values, and interests. Psychographics give insights into why your audience behaves the way they do, which can help you craft content that not only meets their needs but also resonates on a deeper level.

Tools and Techniques

Utilise advanced tools such as Google Analytics to track user behaviour on your website and social media platforms. Social media insights from platforms like Facebook and Instagram can provide valuable data on user engagement and preferences. Additionally, conduct surveys or focus groups to gather qualitative data directly from your audience. This will help you understand their pain points and preferences more accurately.

2. Focus on High-Quality Content

High-quality video content is more likely to engage viewers and keep them watching longer. This, in turn, signals to search engines that your content is valuable and relevant.

How to Implement: Invest in good video production equipment or hire a professional videographer. Ensure your videos are clear, well-lit, and have good sound quality. Plan your content thoroughly to make it informative and engaging. Additionally, take steps to optimise your video for better search visibility by focusing on aspects such as video metadata, keyword research, video titles, descriptions, tags, and utilising hashtags.

Benefits: High-quality videos can increase watch time, reduce bounce rates, and enhance user experience, all of which are positive signals for SEO.

Elements of High-Quality Video

High-quality video content is characterised by several key elements:

1. 1. Visual Quality: Ensure your videos are shot in high resolution. Poor visual quality can deter viewers and negatively impact your SEO.
   2. Sound Quality: Invest in a good microphone. Clear and crisp audio is crucial as poor sound quality can lead to viewers dropping off early.
   3. Content Planning: A well-structured script and storyboard can help in delivering a coherent and engaging message.
   4. Editing: Use professional editing software to refine your videos. This includes cutting out unnecessary parts, adding transitions, and including graphics and captions.

Investment in Equipment

While smartphones today have excellent cameras, investing in professional equipment can make a significant difference. High-quality cameras, lighting setups, and microphones can elevate your videos, making them more appealing and professional. If the budget allows, consider hiring a professional videographer to ensure top-notch production quality.

Optimise Video Titles and Descriptions for Video SEO

Just like with written content, optimising your video titles and descriptions is crucial for SEO. These elements help search engines understand what your video is about and index it correctly.

How to Implement: Include relevant keywords in your video titles and descriptions. Make sure the title is catchy and accurately reflects the content of the video. Write detailed descriptions that provide context and include important keywords naturally. Utilising YouTube SEO techniques, such as optimising video titles and descriptions, can significantly improve your rankings on YouTube. Additionally, inserting video transcripts can provide extra text for search engines to index, enhancing accessibility and visibility.

Benefits: Optimised titles and descriptions can improve your video’s visibility in search results and attract more clicks.

Keyword Research

Conduct thorough keyword research to identify the terms your audience is searching for. Tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and SEMrush can help you find relevant keywords with good search volume and low competition. Incorporate these keywords naturally into your video titles and descriptions.

Crafting Engaging Titles

Your video title should be concise, descriptive, and engaging. It should include your primary keyword and give viewers a clear idea of what the video is about. For example, instead of a vague title like “Tips for Cooking,” a more specific and engaging title would be “10 Easy Tips for Cooking Perfect Pasta Every Time.”

Detailed Descriptions

The video description provides an opportunity to give more context and detail about your video. Include a summary of the content, links to related resources, and a call-to-action. Make sure to incorporate secondary keywords naturally and avoid keyword stuffing.

4. Use Tags and Categories Wisely

Tags and categories help search engines categorise your videos and suggest them to the right audience. Use them strategically to enhance your video’s SEO.

How to Implement: Choose tags that are relevant to your video content and include primary keywords. Use categories that accurately reflect the topic of your video. Using tags and categories wisely can help rank videos higher in search results.

Benefits: Proper use of tags and categories can improve the discoverability of your videos and attract more targeted traffic.

Tagging Strategy

Tags should include your primary keyword, related keywords, and variations. For example, if your video is about “Baking a Chocolate Cake,” your tags could include “baking,” “chocolate cake,” “cake recipes,” and “baking tips.”

Choosing the Right Categories

Selecting the right category is crucial for SEO. Ensure that the category you choose accurately reflects the content of your video. This helps search engines and viewers understand the context of your video, improving its chances of being recommended to the right audience.

5. Create Engaging Thumbnails

Thumbnails are the first thing viewers see when they come across your video. An engaging thumbnail can entice users to click on your video, increasing your views and watch time.

How to Implement: Design custom thumbnails that are visually appealing and relevant to your video content. Use clear images, bold text, and contrasting colours to make your thumbnails stand out. Creating a compelling video thumbnail is crucial to improve click-through rates and attract more potential viewers.

Benefits: Eye-catching thumbnails can boost click-through rates and improve user engagement, positively impacting your SEO.

Designing Thumbnails

A great thumbnail should be high-resolution and visually appealing. It should include a clear image that represents the content of your video and bold text that stands out. Use contrasting colours to make the text and image pop. Tools like Canva can help you design professional-looking thumbnails even if you’re not a graphic designer.

Consistency in Thumbnails

Maintaining a consistent style in your thumbnails can help in building a recognisable brand. Use similar fonts, colours, and layouts across all your video thumbnails. This not only makes your content easily identifiable but also gives your channel a professional look.

6. Include Transcripts and Closed Captions

Transcripts and closed captions make your videos more accessible to a broader audience, including those who are hearing impaired. They also provide additional text that search engines can index.

How to Implement: Create accurate transcripts and closed captions for your videos. You can use tools like Rev or 3Play Media to generate them automatically. It’s also important to compare the performance of the same video across different channels to understand how authority and community impact visibility.

Benefits: Transcripts and captions can improve your video’s accessibility, increase watch time, and enhance SEO by providing more keyword-rich content for search engines to crawl. Additionally, they can boost your visibility on search engine results pages by making your content more discoverable on both Google and YouTube.

Benefits of Transcripts

Transcripts make your video content accessible to people who prefer reading over watching videos. They also help viewers who are in environments where they cannot play audio. Moreover, transcripts can be repurposed as blog posts or articles, further extending the reach of your content.

Generating Closed Captions

Closed captions are beneficial for SEO as they provide more text for search engines to crawl. They also enhance user experience by allowing viewers to follow along with the audio. Use automatic captioning tools like YouTube’s built-in feature, but always review and edit them for accuracy.

Promote Your YouTube Videos

Promotion is key to getting your videos in front of a larger audience. The more people who watch, share, and engage with your videos, the better they will perform in search rankings.

How to Implement: Share your videos on social media platforms, embed them in blog posts, and include them in email newsletters. Embedding videos in a blog post can increase engagement and improve SEO. Encourage viewers to like, comment, and share your videos.

Benefits: Increased views, shares, and engagement can improve your video’s visibility and SEO.

Social Media Promotion

Share your videos on all your social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Tailor your promotion strategy to each platform’s unique audience and features. For example, use Instagram Stories and Reels for short previews and Twitter for direct engagement with followers.

Embedding Videos

Embed your videos in relevant blog posts and web pages. This not only enhances the content of your website but also increases the chances of your video being watched. Embedding videos can also improve the dwell time on your website, a positive signal for SEO.

Email Marketing

Include your videos in email newsletters to your subscribers. Emails with video content have higher open and click-through rates. Use engaging subject lines and brief descriptions to entice subscribers to watch the video.

8. Monitor and Analyse Performance

Regularly monitoring and analysing your video’s performance can provide valuable insights into what’s working and what needs improvement. Use this data to refine your video SEO strategy.

How to Implement: Use tools like YouTube Analytics, Google Analytics, and third-party platforms like TubeBuddy to track key metrics such as views, watch time, engagement, and traffic sources. It’s crucial to track video performance on Google search and Google search results to understand how your videos are ranking and performing on these platforms.

Benefits: Understanding your video’s performance can help you make data-driven decisions to optimise future content and improve SEO.

Key Metrics to Track

1. Views: The number of times your video has been watched. This indicates the reach of your video.
2. Watch Time: The total amount of time viewers have spent watching your video. Higher watch time signals to search engines that your content is engaging.
3. Engagement: Includes likes, comments, shares, and subscriptions. High engagement indicates that viewers are finding your content valuable.
4. Traffic Sources: Identifies where your viewers are coming from, such as search, suggested videos, or external websites. This helps you understand how your promotion strategies are working.

Using Data to Improve

Analyse the data to identify patterns and trends. If certain types of videos perform better, consider creating more content in that vein. If viewers drop off at a certain point, investigate why and adjust your content accordingly. Regularly updating and refining your strategy based on performance data can significantly enhance your video SEO efforts.

Summing Up

Creating engaging video content is a powerful way to boost your search engine optimisation (SEO) and drive more traffic to your website. By understanding your audience, focusing on high-quality content, optimising titles and descriptions, using tags and categories wisely, creating engaging thumbnails, including transcripts and closed captions, promoting your videos, and monitoring performance, you can significantly enhance your video SEO efforts. Video transcripts are essential for improving search engine visibility, making your videos more accessible to search engines for indexing, and appealing to a global audience. Optimising YouTube videos and each YouTube video is crucial as part of a comprehensive video SEO strategy. Stay proactive and continuously refine your strategy to ensure your videos reach and resonate with your target audience, ultimately improving your search engine rankings and online visibility.

• Basic Keyword Research guide
• URL Structure
• Page Titles
• Meta Descriptions
• Social Metadata
• Schema
• Headings (h1-h6)
• Textual Content
• Internal Links
• Images
• Videos
• Ideal End Result

Basic Keyword Research (KWR) guide for content optimization

First – we need to decide what the article/page is about and start by typing that phrase in Google and hit “Enter”. This will allow us to take a look at the search results page and realize what kind of content is ranking for a given term.

For example – we need to write an article about an agency providing online marketing solutions. Let’s try typing “online marketing solutions” in the Google search bar (we shall use the Incognito mode while searching on Google – we need to hit Ctrl+Shift+N on the keyboard, while in Google Chrome, to access Incognito mode).

Next – let us take a look at the amount of the results ranking for that given phrase:

More results can mean that it will be harder to rank for that phrase. Now, we will try typing the phrase without hitting “Enter”. We shall get something like this:

This is called Google Autocomplete. It includes terms people usually search for, and is based on our given phrase.

Next – we need to focus on the user search intent – understand what a user searching for this phrase wants to achieve, and try to adjust the initial search phrase. For example – we’d want to avoid “online marketing solutions scams”, as this is not the initial goal. Let us also take a look at the bottom of the search results page:

These are the searches related to our search phrase.

Next – we will combine the results gathered from the Google Autocomplete list and the above-related search phrase list. We need to aim for the phrases that have the lowest amount of the results shown on the search results page.

Bingo! We got this:

As you may see – there are 47,200,000 results, and we’ve started by having 591,000,000 results.

Now – let’s try searching like a real person (remember that we need to focus on user intent).

“Digital marketing solutions meaning” sounds too formal. We will try “What is a digital marketing solution?”.

We can also add the following words as a prefix or a suffix:

How (to), What (question form), Step-by-step (tutorials, courses), Best (comparison, reviews), Proven (based on data), Top (similar to Best) – let’s take a look at the “People also ask” section illustrated above, to get some ideas on user intent.

E.g. – “Top Digital Marketing Agencies” – and add the location (e.g. the USA) – So: it would be “Top digital marketing agencies in the USA”

Here is the search result page:

We are now down to the 29,000,000 results. Did you notice how our original phrase “online marketing solutions” switched to “digital marketing agencies” – because this is what users search for, according to Google. It also aligns with our goal, because we want to write an article for an agency offering online marketing solutions (let’s make sure to always keep an eye on an initial goal).

Next – we may want to add some more delimiters to differentiate from the rest of the pages ranking for this phrase. This will further narrow the number of results. Our phrase will be focused based on what the company has to offer.

For example – “Top SEO and PPC service providing agencies in the USA” – brings us down to 19,300,000 pages ranking for a given phrase.

Tip – We can use all or some of other terms (mentioned above) as subtitles in the article/page. For example, our title can be What are Top SEO and PPC service providing agencies in the USA

Then, the first subtitle, can be “What is SEO and PPC? “ followed by the “List of top 10 SEO & PPC agencies in the USA”, and so on.

To make sure we are on the right track, let’s use the Ahrefs tool to compare the search terms (keywords) we’ve discovered by following the above strategy.

Let us log into Ahrefs and open the Keyword Explorer https://ahrefs.com/keywords-explorer

Let’s insert all the search terms, separated by a comma, and click on the search button:

On the left side of the search button is a drop-down menu where we will need to choose the country where we want to rank for given keywords. Please make sure to use this correctly going forward.

Then – let’s click on the Metrics tab:

We will see the comparison table with all these keywords included:

Tip – Pay attention to the KD (keyword difficulty) and the Volume columns. Aim for the keywords with the lowest difficulty that have a high Volume.

In this particular case, we’d want to avoid SEO agency, but take PPC agency and digital marketing agency into consideration. If we search Google for Best PPC agencies in the USA we will see that it has only 4,350,000 pages ranking for that phrase

Pro tip – While in Ahrefs, do click on the Content explorer option https://ahrefs.com/content-explorer. Once there, you can type in the keyword of your preference and it will provide the list of the most popular content out there, that matches your keyword. The most popular content score is calculated based on the total amount of shares across social networks tracked by Ahrefs (e.g. it includes Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest,…)

We suggest using this option to help you craft the title of your designated article/page. By doing this, you will increase the possibility of your content getting viral and shared on popular social media networks – this specifically goes for blog article titles.

Note – for the purpose of this KWR guide, we have chosen very competitive keywords and topics that have millions of search results, thus making our task very difficult.

Another note – don’t worry if you repeat all the above steps, and get different numbers of the results shown on the Google search result page. This is because Google serves different search result pages based on the location, IP address, etc.

URL Structure

• Decide on and keep URL structure consistent. URLs should be as concise as possible while containing all the right words so that the page’s content can be guessed by just looking at it. This also makes URLs more memorable and easier to search for in search engines. 
• Avoid using underscores, spaces or any other character in URLs and when necessary, separate words using hyphens. Also, note that overuse of hyphens in URLs can be seen as spammy, so it’s best to use caution and limit hyphen use in URLs when possible.  
• Try putting important keywords in URLs as well so if there’s a service like “Netflix” do not make URL like https://www.mybusiness.com/netflix, rather https://www.mybusiness.com/netflix-video-on-demand 

• Avoid the use of parameters, if possible. If parameters need to be used, they should be limited to two or less. 
• Avoid using file extensions like .html or .aspx, these are unnecessary and can be safely omitted is possible.

Page Titles

• The page title helps search engines and users identify the content of a page before looking at it. It should include the primary keyword for the page to improve ranking while considering usefulness and readability for the user to improve click-through rates from search results.  
• Titles should be no longer than ~60 characters or 600 pixels in width in Google results. Since there’s no precise character number (pixel length is counted) preview desired page title here or always keep it below 600px to be on a safe side. 
• To make page titles look attractive, use CamelCase as in example image above (each first word has uppercase except for conjunctions such as ‘and, for, to, in, etc`) 
• Titles should include important keywords at the beginning of a snippet followed with branding segment separated with the | (pipe) character. For example, Blue Widgets for Sale | Widgets Factory
  Construct page title snippet wording as the one you would personally click in search results.

Example: https://www.orange.jo/en

Mobile Phones & Wireless Internet Services | Orange Jordan

Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions help search engine users to decide whether the page suits their needs and match their intent. This is why it’s important to have precisely described page that relates to search engine users’ search query, they’ll click the result more often. It doesn’t affect SEO directly, rather click-through-rate (CTR), or clickability which are indirect ranking factors.

To maximize click-through rates on search engine result pages, it’s important to note that Google and other search engines bold keywords in the description when they match search queries. This bold text can draw the eyes of searchers, so you should match your descriptions to search terms as closely as possible.

• Meta description should not be longer than 160 characters.
• It has to include a call-to-action element (eg. “Learn more/Try/Buy now!” or similar)
• It should match the search engine user’s intent closely and contain important keyword mentioned in the page title.
• It should “sell” the service/product to the user by describing product/service good enough so that they get interested to click and visit.

Example: https://www.orange.jo/en

“We provide modern prepaid/postpaid mobile network, wireless internet, broadband, fixed-line telephony, and digital TV services. Check our offers now!”

Simply consider the following template while writing meta description snippets: QUESTION + USP + CTA

Social Metadata

Social metadata is a set of HTML tags placed in page <head> section and are responsible for the rich representation of web page link when shared on social networks like Facebook or Twitter.

There are two sets of social media metadata for a regular page (which doesn’t cover any specific product or service, like the homepage), and for pages which cover specific product or service.

The difference is that social metadata for product/service can contain additional attributes to describe what’s being sold better, like providing the price of the service or color of the product. Check last two lines in product metadata snippet to get an idea on this difference. Adjust fields containing variables (eg. $PAGE-TITLE) to contain values already present on the page (URL, page title, meta description).

Regular page (article) social metadata template:

<!– TwitterCards –>
<meta name=”twitter:card” content=”summary_large_image” />
<meta name=”twitter:site” content=”@something” />
<meta name=”twitter:title” content=”$PAGE-TITLE” />
<meta name=”twitter:description” content=”$META-DESCRIPTION” />
<meta name=”twitter:creator” content=”@something” />
<meta name=”twitter:image” content=”$URL-TO-PRODUCT-OR-SERVICE-SHARING-IMAGE” />

<!– OpenGraph –>
<meta property=”og:title” content=”$PAGE-TITLE” />
<meta property=”og:type” content=”article” />
<meta property=”og:url” content=”$PAGE-URL” />
<meta property=”og:image” content=”$URL-TO-PRODUCT-OR-SERVICE-SHARING-IMAGE” />
<meta property=”og:description” content=”$META-DESCRIPTION” />
<meta property=”og:site_name” content=”AwesomeCompany” />

Product/service page social metadata template:

<!– Twitter Card –>

<meta name=”twitter:card” content=”product” />

<meta name=”twitter:site” content=”@something” />

<meta name=”twitter:title” content=”$PRODUCT-OR-SERVICE-PAGE-TITLE” />

<meta name=”twitter:description” content=”$META-DESCRIPTION” />

<meta name=”twitter:creator” content=”@something” />

<meta name=”twitter:image” content=”$URL-TO-PRODUCT-OR-SERVICE-IMAGE” />

<meta name=”twitter:data1″ content=”$150″>

<meta name=”twitter:label1″ content=”Price” />

<!– Open Graph –>

<meta property=”og:title” content=”$PRODUCT-OR-SERVICE-PAGE-TITLE” />

<meta property=”og:type” content=”article” />

<meta property=”og:url” content=”$PAGE-URL” />

<meta property=”og:image” content=”$URL-TO-PRODUCT-OR-SERVICE-IMAGE” />

<meta property=”og:description” content=”$META-DESCRIPTION” />

<meta property=”og:site_name” content=”AwesomeCompany” />

<meta property=”og:price:amount” content=”150.00″ />

<meta property=”og:price:currency” content=”USD” />

Upon publishing, test metadata on social network’s official debugging tool (please note that you have to be logged in, before testing metadata):

• https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator
• https://developers.facebook.com/tools/debug

Schema

Schema is standard honored by major search engines which when implemented properly should lead to richer search results and increased CTR, it doesn’t affect SEO directly and is not a ranking factor currently. Schema can be used to enrich product/service pages and display additional information such as star ratings, pricing, stock status and product attributes such as color variations and more.

Example search result of page enriched with Schema:

Ideally, every website should contain Organization (if they’re global business) or LocalBusiness (if they are local business) Schema vocabularies along with Product and/or Service vocabularies if applicable. During our work, we compiled several templates for each of these so use them accordingly and adjust necessary data/fields.

• Organization: https://pastebin.com/raw/6HuSsrqz
• LocalBusiness: https://pastebin.com/raw/DjrEmNXe
• Product: https://pastebin.com/raw/b1cSWW1g
• Service: https://pastebin.com/raw/uZp4GNUr
• WebApplication (applicable to SaaS’ for example): https://pastebin.com/raw/JrwU1b6Z

More Schema vocabularies are available on http://schema.org/docs/schemas.html.
After implementation, a must is to check for code validity on https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/.

Headings (h1-h6)

Headings are big headlines in page content which serve to breakdown logical sections of the page/article and make it more readable and understandable to readers. Google might use an H1 heading as page relevance indicator so make this heading the relevant to article as possible. Ideally, this should contain the same text as page title but without branding segment and there should be only one instance of tag present on the page.

Use other, lower-in-hierarchy headings such as h2-h6 to structure the rest of the content with headings of article subsections. It’s best if H1 heading is placed above all content on the page, as the first and most important heading of the page.

Example

Ideally, a page should start with the H1 heading, followed by an H2 heading, which can be followed by an H3 heading should you need a sub-section. For the start of a new section, you should use another H2 heading. Don’t skip a level in the hierarchy; for example, don’t go from an H1 heading to an H3 heading. There should be an H2 heading in between them.

Here’s a good example of correct heading usage:

<h1>This is the title of the page</h1>
<h2>This is the first section</h2>
<h3>This is a sub-section</h3>
<h2>This is the second section</h2>
<h3>This is another sub-section</h3>

How all headings (H1-H6) look like

The following code shows all the heading levels, in use.

<h1>Heading level 1</h1>
<h2>Heading level 2</h2>
<h3>Heading level 3</h3>
<h4>Heading level 4</h4>
<h5>Heading level 5</h5>
<h6>Heading level 6</h6>

Here is the result of this code:

Heading level 1

Heading level 2

Heading level 3

Heading level 4

Heading level 5

Heading level 6

Textual Content

Textual content is an integral part of a web page. Search engines are using it to get the idea on what the page is about. Google officials are saying that the richer and longer the text on the page is, the more valuable they will consider it for their users and offer page as a search result for a broader spectrum of keywords people are using to discover similar service/product.

There is a rule of thumb that pages with 350+ words (for product/service pages) are considered rich in text and should offer the best experience to both visitors and search engine crawlers. For articles like informative blog posts, 1000-2000 words length should be a sweet spot.

• Describe products and services in depth and use technical terms if applicable
• Use only unique content (do not copy from external sites, mark quotes/citations in blockquote tag)
• Use relevant keywords (or ones provided in KWR/KWM document) and their variations scattered through the content naturally
• Use links to other internal pages where necessary

I strongly suggest not using word processors such as Word and similar due to their special character conversion where double quotes, dashes, ampersands, and similar characters might look weird in web browsers. I also strongly suggest using code editor such as SublimeText or Notepad2 to write plain text which can be easily converted to clean HTML while DOC/DOCX/ODT can’t and may not display properly in browsers.

Additionally, for content that is going to be sent out to 3rd parties, I recommend writing articles in Markdown editors which allow for exporting of clean HTML and can be easily edited by everybody, not just those having MS Office or LibreOffice installed. Some good ones are StackEdit and Dilinger. Google Docs also has Export as Markdown add-on which allows you to export entire article written and formatted in Docs as Markdown file which can be shared.

As for readability, Google has readability analysis algorithm built-in which can understand UX of the copy so avoid using large (tall) paragraphs and break text on each 3-5 sentences (use common sense and write the text the way you like to read it).

Internal Links

Internal links are great for multiple reasons: they boost contextual page relevance in Google’s eyes if linked via keyword-rich anchor text and help to Google crawlers to move through the website easily. If keywords are provided in KWR/KWM document, use them and their variations (if viable keywords are not provided, improvise) as anchor text to link to relevant internal pages. Use internal links from relevant product/service pages as well as in blog posts where appropriate.

For instance, use:

“…if you find this product interesting you might be also interested in our blue widgets which are on sale right now…”

The ideal structure

Imagine a website to be a pyramid with the most important content on top. There should be lots of links to that highly relevant, most essential content from topically-related pages in the pyramid, which passes most link value on to those pages. However, you should also link from those top pages to subpages about related topics. Linking internally to related content shows Google what pages hold information about similar topics.

Don’t forget to link from the top too

Besides linking from topically-related posts and pages, it’s possible to make your highly relevant content more authoritative by adding links to it from the homepage or the top navigation. This will give the most important posts or pages a lot of link value and makes them stronger in Google’s eyes.

Linking to taxonomies

If you run a blog it could be beneficial to add internal links to the taxonomies the post belongs to. Adding links to the category and tags helps Google to understand the structure of your blog and helps visitors to more easily navigate to related posts.

More on internal links

No-follow links

There is a probability that you have links that aren’t important for SEO on your website. E.g. If you have a login/sign in link for your clients, you don’t want to pass link value to your log-in page – that page doesn’t need to rank high in the search results. You can do that by adding a no-follow tag to this page.

The link value for the whole page completely disappears when you add a ‘no-follow’ tag to a link on it.

Note that adding a ‘no-follow’ tag doesn’t mean that those target pages can’t be found in Google’s search results. If you don’t want pages or posts to show up in the search results you should give them a ‘no-index’ tag as well. The ‘no-index’ tag means that Google shouldn’t render the page and shouldn’t give the content a place in the Google index to show up in the search results.

Anchor texts

Once you have decided which links should be on a page and which pages should get link value, it’s important to use the right anchor text. The anchor text is the clickable text that visitors see. For example, the anchor text of the internal link in the example below is ‘our blue widgets’:

“…if you find this product interesting you might be also interested in our blue widgets which are on sale right now…”

Be careful and remember that, Google is smart enough to understand that the content around the anchor text says more about the relevancy of a keyword than the anchor text itself. So, make sure the anchor text looks natural in your copy: it’s fine to use keywords but don’t add the exact same keywords to every link’s anchor text.

Images

Google advocates rich pages as this offer most value to its users. By “rich” they do not only consider rich in the text but in multimedia as well. Images and videos are all welcome additions to every page which should make page experience better for users thus Google as well. When possible, provide images on new product/service page in order to make it more interesting and appealing to visitors.

These images do not only serve as something to look at, but they also add up to page optimization as Google use these to rank images when someone search for “mobile phone” photo in Google Images so it can drive traffic to the website in a similar way as regular web search does. This will be applicable to some niches but not all.

To be on the safe side, use keyword-rich both ALT and TITLE image attributes to give images a chance to get ranked and to improve optimal page relevance. Keywords provided in KWR/KWM document might not be completely applicable or natural to use so improvise to achieve a good balance between SEO and appropriate content for these attribute.

For instance, using “blue widgets 1”, “blue widgets 2”, etc, consider following approach “blue widgets on sale”, “$BRAND most sold blue widgets”, “blue widget front/side/back”, etc.

Additionally, the image file name is also a good place to put targeted keywords in. For instance, instead of “some_unrelevantstuff_hires.png” use “blue-widgets.png” and similar.

Avoid using GIFs as they’re not quite web-friendly. Yes, they’re interesting but can often be large in size due to plenty of frames and they do not perform well on lower-end underpowered phones and tablets as some waiting time will be needed until all frames are rendered (too much hassle for low benefit). Static, decent resolution images should work the best.

As for image resolution for sharing on social media, there are exact sizes and aspect ratios that should be used. Since it’s unrealistic to create multiple different images to fit each social media network, there are some universal sizes which should fit nicely to all.

• Horizontal image (landscape): 1024 x 512px
• Vertical image (portrait): 800 x 1200 px

Additionally, properly included images (contain the keyword in the filename, contains the keyword in ALT attribute) add to page relevance and make it more valuable to both search engine users and search engines themselves.

Videos

Similar to images, videos are a good addition to a page because they make the user experience better than just plain text (plenty of people are visual learners). It enriches the page content and offers valuable insight into service or product which plain text alone can’t do. Google recognizes this and might offer the page as a search result if it finds it to be more informative in nature than the competition.

When and where possible, record (or take one from Youtube) and include a brief video of a product/service within the page. Humans are visual beings and will most likely watch it which gives you more time to persuade them in trying/purchasing something if it’s presented well. Consider it as just another marketing mean which should compliment page already optimized by all advice in this document. This might not apply to regular blog post-style articles but sometimes it will. Use common sense to decide if it’s appropriate/needed or not.

It is a recommended practice to host your videos on YouTube thus avoiding a bigger impact on your page load speed. Another thing to use (when it comes to video material) is the above-mentioned schema markup – this time uses the video schema markup. Here you may find the example of a correct video schema snippet to use on a page that shows a video content.

Another thing that you may also benefit from, is creating a video sitemap. Here is the example of such a sitemap https://www.xml-sitemaps.com/sitemap_video.xml (please note that you don’t need a separate sitemap file for videos –  you can embed your videos into an existing sitemap).
For best results, host a video sitemap on your own servers and link to it from your robots.txt.

Every entry in a video XML sitemap requires the following:

• Title
• Description
• Primary Video URL
• Thumbnail URL
• URL of either the hosted video file or the source URL of the embedded video
  

Tip: Remember that there should be a difference when creating a dedicated video page. These kinds of videos should be able to stand alone and deliver information or an experience that covers a given topic without the need for further context.
A great example of this kind of content from the SEO world is Moz Whiteboard Friday.

Optimizing a Dedicated Video Page

As the page itself is dedicated to the video, the following elements should be in place and optimized:

• Page Title: Should be the same, or close to, the name of the video.
• Page Description: Should about the topic and approach of the video.
• H1: Should be the same as the name of the video.
• Transcript: Should be included under the video as the text copy of the page. Don’t just include an ugly block of text though. Apply proper formatting to make it easy to digest and skim. Include stills from the video as images for those who prefer to read or are unable to watch.

Ideal End Result

In the end, after a page is modeled around suggestions from this document, the page should look something like this: