SEO in Times of Crises

Growing an online business during an economic downturn can be challenging, in such times, the key to success is to keep going and take action. This is why SEO activities can be absolute lifesavers for your website, as they tend to have a longer-term impact on your website and provide a positive effect on your website’s technical performance and content.

In this webinar with MarketMuse Co-founder Jeff Coyle and Beatrice Gamba, Head of SEO Agency @ WordLift, we see how SEO can power up your online business through challenging times, as we approach and adapt to the “new normal”.

• Discover ways to ensure your content is up to date with the latest trends for your niche.
• Get hands-on advice and guidance on how to use E-E-A-T to stay relevant.
• Gain insight into how automation can help you scale your digital marketing strategy.

Content marketers should focus on understanding their audience’s changing needs by conducting long-tail keyword analysis and analyzing user intent.

Jeff Coyle suggested that content marketers should focus on “maintaining a cluster of content” by “ensuring that your middle of funnel is appropriate for today’s intent.” He also suggested that marketers could focus on “some impact kind of piece instead of some grand marketing campaign” if they had a limited budget.

Beatrice Gamba further explained that “it’s essential to analyze what your niche is searching for and intercept and answer to the user intent.” She also noted that “it’s at the intermediate stage where consumers move between exploring and evaluating the options that are available and this is where they will evaluate your content.”

She went on to explain the importance of “embeddings” and how they can be used to “cluster queries” and “tailor” content to the needs of the audience.

Jeff also shared a link to “decoding with the messy middle” which “looked like a big traffic map or a subway map.” He noted that “a lot of people believe that that middle funnel or that those decision making dynamics are very linear.”

Automation and AI can help content marketers create more effective content.

Jeff and Beatrice discussed how automation and AI can help content marketers create more effective content. Jeff noted that “we’re thinking about what it means to be an expert on a topic, and then we’re using that data to apply it to strategy. We’re taking a very, very mathematical approach to an understanding of what it means, what this word really, really means, even being able to show us.”

Beatrice discussed how they built an in-house tool to help with product description automation, saying “you have to have a good editorial team that is collaborating with you in order to help you build a prompt that can scale. So you have to build a prompt that is scalable and in order to do that you of course need actual product description for the model to learn from. You need to feed the model with a ton of examples of the brand you are working with.”

Jeff added that “you should always want the tone, the voice to be reflected. There’s a lot of ways that you can make the thing that gets generated more refined. There’s a lot of techniques that were like mad libs in the past they were templates and now you can do them more effectively.”

Leveraging AI technologies can help content marketers create more effective content.

Beatrice and Jeff discussed how AI technologies could be used to create more effective content. Beatrice highlighted the importance of adding FAQs to landing pages, and integrating structured data into the page’s backend. She also mentioned the use of semantic briefs to help with content optimization. “Making all the pieces in order, one of the most important things that we are doing is adding like FAQs,” said Gamba.

Jeff discussed the importance of having a content brief that both the writer and the editorial leader could use as a single source of truth. He also asked Beatrice about how NLP and other techniques could be used to get featured snippets more effectively. “But I think that the more you work with teams, having maybe a creative brief is important, but also having a content brief that gets the writer on the same page as the editorial leader, that single source of truth builds trust,” said Jeff.

Beatrice discussed how AI-generated text could be used to cover more topics, and how AI-based tools could be used to analyze competitor content and identify missing entities. “So what we also do is build strategies on the agency front,” she said. “So if you don’t want to dive in with the plugin, what we have on is the offering of an add on that does the entity analysis for you.”

Featured Guest

Born and raised in Rome, Beatrice joined WordLift’s team in 2016, after a 3-year experience in Berlin, where she worked for a big e-commerce company.

Beatrice has over 7 years of experience in digital marketing and SEO. As Head of Agency, Beatrice manages the success of many SEO campaigns daily, for both Fortune 500 companies and mid-sized businesses. She is focused on strategy, operations, and growth.

She’s passionate about semantic SEO and AI-driven digital marketing strategies. In her spare time she collects old 70s records, DJs and rides her bike.

Resources

• Decoding Decisions: Making sense of the messy middle
• Gartner’s B2B Buying Journey Illustrative
• SEO Add-On for Google Sheets by WordLift
• WordLift Academy