Your website’s content ultimately determines your success with SEO and organic lead generation.
Don’t get us wrong—big-picture strategy, reporting, and your site’s technical health are all critically important, too. But they’re not so useful for an empty website!
Many brands struggle to create high-quality, SEO-optimized content (rooted in current SEO best practices) that attracts the right audiences. That’s understandable.
After all, consistently creating effective content is tricky, requiring sizable time commitments and a nuanced understanding of what web users want.
We get a ton of questions from clients and partners about our content creation process. So let’s pull back the curtain.
In this guide, we’ll walk through our process for creating lead-generating onsite content that grabs more attention for our clients’ brands.
Content Creation: Quick Context
Why is content so critical? What defines “quality” content these days?
Let’s quickly review this essential context before diving into the content creation process:
Why is content creation so important?
An old SEO truism, “Content is king,” still holds true even as the industry has undergone massive changes over the years.
The optimized content on your website, including your homepage, blog posts, and key product/service pages, act as the focal points of your SEO strategy.
Think of it this way—the intended outcomes of an SEO strategy are to:
- Help your website rise in rankings on search engines so that you can…
- Attract more traffic to your website in order to…
- Convert visitors into marketing- and sales-qualified leads for your business
Your content is what ranks. The quality of that content ensures visitors who click through will choose to stay on your website. The strategies employed within the content (its subject matter, structure, graphics, and calls-to-action) convert those qualified visitors into secured leads.
It all comes back to the content.
Once you create high-quality, optimized content that can outperform other pages, you can then bolster its visibility and prove its helpfulness to search engines through various offsite activities and regular improvement.
What is “high-quality” content today?
It’s not enough to simply draft and publish content with relevant keywords. The quality and embedded strategies of your pages and blog posts play critical roles in how well they perform.
For context, SEO today is a lot more holistic and complex than it used to be. You may remember the old frontier days of SEO, when a basic page stuffed with dozens of mentions of unnatural keywords could easily appear as the first result for your search.
Now, Google and other search engines use an extremely wide range of direct and indirect signals to gauge the quality, reputability, and helpfulness of content. These systems have become sophisticated at ‘understanding’ the content, too, powering the rapid rise of generative AI in search engines.
See our writeup on Google’s AI Overviews and our take on what SEO means in an AI environment to learn more.
So what do these advancements mean? To succeed and secure visibility, content has to do much heavier lifting than it did just a few years ago.
In the playbook below, we’ll outline all the embedded strategies and elements that drive SEO success.
Heads up that there are quite a lot—follow along and don’t hesitate to reach out to our team if you have any questions.
SEO Content Creation for Mission-Driven Brands: The Playbook
At a glance, here’s the complete process for creating high-quality, optimized SEO content:
This process consists of seven key steps:
- Keyword research
- Content planning
- Drafting the content
- Images and multimedia
- Publishing and promoting
- Tracking performance
- Long-term improvements
Note that the last three stages are not directly part of the onsite content creation process.
We’ll briefly review them here, but please refer to our other blog posts about the importance of promoting, tracking, and improving your content over time.
1. Keyword Cluster Research
The content creation process starts with a core topic or target keyword. The content’s structure and strategy will revolve around it and related keywords, together called a keyword cluster, resulting in a page that will be positioned to rank for all of them.
Choosing keywords can be tricky business since there are several potential factors that can come into play. These are among the most prominent factors that you may consider when choosing keywords for content:
Business Priority
- Relevance to your brand’s current or upcoming priorities, for instance, if you’ll be launching a product or service line soon and want to establish early visibility
Strategic Gaps
- Gaps in your current SEO strategy, like keywords that your competitors currently dominate or topical gaps in your content library that will give you a fuller online presence if pursued
Past Performance
- Keywords based on trends you’ve seen in your SEO performance, like if you’ve slipped in rankings for a certain keyword and want to reclaim visibility
For SEO newcomers, you likely already have a primary target keyword in mind based on your brand’s priorities.
However, you want to maximize the visibility of your content by ranking for multiple variant keywords. Plus, SEO pros increasingly talk about the importance of targeting topics through a cluster approach in order to stand out to today’s advanced algorithms. This contrasts with the old-school approach of choosing one very specific keyword, a couple of secondary keywords, and then filling the content with them.
Today, we recommend being more organic or holistic in how you think about keywords.
Consider the full range of questions and subtopics that someone may have about your core topic. Think through the related concepts that someone at that stage in the buying journey may be interested in. Below we explain how to refine your cluster of keywords and how the buying journey stage or user intent should inform your strategy.
Refining Your Keyword Strategy
Using specialized keyword research tools, client input, and we weigh a few different factors when fleshing out a complete keyword strategy. These include:
- Search volume: The estimated number of monthly searches a query receives
- Competitiveness: Roughly gauged using search volume and the strength of the websites currently ranking well for a query
- Related keywords and topics: Supplementary and secondary keywords that will expand your visibility and relevance, gathered from the search engine and keyword research tools
- Any existing rankings: Checking for any related keywords the website already ranks for to avoid strategic overlap that will reduce overall performance
- Client preferences: Any specific terminology or strategic preferences that should be taken into account
After considering these elements, you may adjust your primary keyword slightly and add a handful of related secondary keywords to your strategy. These extra keywords are quite helpful; they expand your content’s reach and demonstrate topical relevance to search engines. The goal is to strike the right balance of business relevance/priority, volume, and achievability.
Consider Funnel Position and User Intent
Now, think about the funnel position and user intent of your primary target keyword.
Is it broadly educational, near the top of the sales funnel? Is it specifically about a product or service, near the bottom of the funnel? Somewhere in between?
Don’t overthink this step. Simply ask, “What does someone want to accomplish when they search this keyword?”
Check out the content that search engines already rank highly for the keyword. Are these pages short, long, education-focused, conversion-focused? How comprehensive or how concise are they?
The funnel position of a keyword and the user intent behind it shape the ultimate form of the content. Your content needs to match the user intent in order to succeed.
Here are a few examples:
| Keyword | Funnel Position | User Intent | Content Should Be: |
|---|
| School fundraising | Top | Informational | Comprehensive, full of related tips and resources |
| How to plan a school fundraising campaign | Middle | Informational (with more specific intent) | Helpful, direct, and as long as necessary to satisfy user intent |
| School fundraising consulting | Bottom | Commercial | Concise, structured to quickly address user pain points and needs |
Thinking about funnel position and user intent now will pay dividends in the next steps. By ensuring that your content outline and draft align with what users and search engines expect of it, you’ll be better positioned to rank.
Pro tip for your keyword cluster strategy: Have a well-rounded strategy.
Many brands new to SEO want to focus solely on top-funnel keywords (with higher search volumes) or bottom-funnel keywords (that are more likely to generate leads). Don’t discount the middle-funnel stage!
Bottom-funnel keywords can be extremely competitive, and the search results for top-funnel keywords are easily eaten up by AI-generated answers these days. Middle-funnel keywords help you build greater topical authority and more smoothly funnel visitors towards eventually converting.
2. Content Planning
Once you’ve determined your keywords, it’s time to plan your content around them.
You’ll need to gather information from a variety of sources and synthesize them into a comprehensive content plan and outline. When you’re done, you’ll have a complete roadmap for your content—making the drafting process much easier.
So what should you gather? This information will cover your bases:
- The keyword strategy, including related/secondary keywords
- The funnel position, user intent, and audience for the keywords
- The top pages that Google already serves for these keywords
- Any specific client preferences or input already received
- Existing content on the website that ranks for any of the keywords
- In-depth subject matter details
Researching the subject matter is particularly important. Of course, you want (and need) your content to be accurate and helpful. But it also has to stand out.
Use Google, your brand’s own internal resources, authoritative industry new sources, and more to gather:
- Relevant talking points, best practices, and examples
- Recent relevant trends that will resonate with the audience
- Authoritative statistics to support your claims and convey trustworthiness
Outlining Your Content
With all this information, you should then have what you need to create a complete content outline. What should it include, and how detailed should it be?
First, high-quality SEO content uses clear heading structures. A logical order of H2 headings for main sections and H3 headings for subtopics not only provides users with a better experience but also allows search engines to more easily understand what your content is about (essential for ranking).
Structure your outline using a topic-subtopic structure, noting the specific headings you’ll use to create logical flow. Fill as much detail as you want (the more the better!) to streamline the drafting process later.
Here’s a rough example:
Title/H1:
- Introduction
- H2: First Main Section
- Talking points, details, statistics to include, etc.
- H3: Distinct Subtopic
- H2: Second Main Section
- Talking points
- H3: Distinct Subtopic
- H3: Distinct Subtopic
- H2: Conclusion Section
Remember, the length and structure of your outline should align with the keyword’s user intent. There’s a basic rule of thumb you can follow:
If you’re targeting a top-funnel, educational keyword, go long. Think through the key information that users want to learn, relevant subtopics and contextual information, and a logical flow that will keep readers engaged.
For lower-funnel content with more commercial or transactional intent, go short. Determine what someone wants to accomplish by searching this keyword and give it to them directly, without extra fluff or unnecessary sections.
Creating Your Conversion Strategy
During this stage, you should also think through how you’ll encourage readers to convert, i.e. take a specific next action that brings them closer to making a purchase.
For a deep dive into conversion optimization and strategy, how to write your calls-to-action, and more, check out our complete guide.
For the purposes of fleshing out your content plan, here’s a quick template our content developed to define a conversion strategy:
- Target conversion action:
- Target landing page:
- Target audience:
- Who is searching this keyword?
- Why are they searching this keyword?
- Key message/value proposition:
- What is the reader looking to accomplish and why?
- Why is the client/the client’s expertise the best choice?
Explore the Full Template
We’ve only scratched the surface and could keep going on listing all the elements that a truly comprehensive content plan should include.
If you want to see everything our team considers when planning content, feel free to explore (or steal) our content plan template:
Our top tip: Take your time with the content planning process.
A thorough plan that combines user intent insights, subject matter research, conversion strategy, and more will be immensely helpful when you sit down to write. It also ensures that you’ll produce the best possible content to compete for your target keywords.
3: Drafting Your Content
Now comes the fun part—or at least our copywriters think so! It’s time to bring your content plan to life by drafting your content as a blog post or page on your website.
There are a few essentials to keep in mind as you write:
- Keep the user intent in mind. Actively think about what users expect and need from your content after finding it by searching a specific keyword. Avoid over- or under-explaining key points in your content depending on the user’s assumed level of familiarity. If the keyword cluster calls for a concise, bottom-funnel approach, you’ll likely need to create a well-designed product or service page with tight, keyword-rich copy.
- Be original. What unique expertise or perspective can your brand bring to the content? Originality is increasingly important for SEO success, and it’s something our team has been focusing heavily on over the past year. You can incorporate originality in all kinds of ways:
- Taking a specific stance or position on an open question or controversy related to the topic
- Including plenty of statistics, expert quotes, and your own analysis of them
- Adding real-life examples from your work and case studies
- Don’t forget the links. Including links in your content, both internal links to other pages on your site and external links to third-party sources, brings important benefits. Internal linking is hugely beneficial for both SEO and conversions, as it not only shows Google how your content is all related but also encourages more users to stick around and move down your sales funnel. External links to reputable sources convey trustworthiness to users and Google alike.
- Use a clear heading structure. As mentioned above, structuring your content with a logical H1-H2-H3 structure makes it easier for Google to understand what it’s about. Clearly labeled sections in an easy-to-follow order also provide a vastly better user experience than large chunks of text.
Short on time? Not a fan of writing for hours?
Drafting your content is where the rubber really hits the road. A marketing team might have a firm grasp on SEO best practices but lack the time to actually implement them in new content.
Creating high-quality content takes time, and while AI can help, you won’t see great results with a website full of AI copy. Nexus Marketing specializes in content creation for the mission-driven sector, and our content team has years of experience writing great content (and quickly) for brands like yours.
4. Images and Multimedia
With a complete draft of your new content, you can now turn to the finishing touches—adding engaging images and multimedia.
Images, videos, tables, embedded elements, and more can significantly benefit your content.
Not only are they more engaging for users, keeping them on your page for longer (and making them more likely to click around your website), but they also show search engines that you’ve put effort into creating helpful, high-quality content. A recent study of Google ranking factors by Semrush found a surprisingly strong correlation between top rankings and the number of images from across the whole domain that appear in image results.
Images and multimedia also give you one more place to demonstrate topical relevance, as search engines can read the alt text added to elements and (for some image formats, like .svg, and .webp) even the text in the images themselves.
For this step, our copywriters conceptualize images for the content and collaborate with our graphic design team to create them. A few key points to keep in mind for your own process:
- Don’t be afraid to occasionally reuse relevant evergreen images you’ve already created.
- Give your images alt text (a short written explanation of what the image conveys) to boost accessibility and signal increased relevance to Google.
- Compress your images files to reduce their total size and help prevent your site’s load time from lagging.
- Include your logo on high-value images that illustrate processes or key talking points.
- Stumped on what kind of images to create? Check out what the competition is doing, or try a quick Google images search to get the creative juices flowing.
- If your content includes statistics, you might easily create tables, charts, and graphs to illustrate them and create a more engaging experience.
Marketing professionals increasingly turn to video as an ideal medium for conveying ideas, engaging users, and expanding reach.
You can embed relevant videos from YouTube or Vimeo directly in your content, but for the greatest long-term value, you should ideally create custom branded videos. Check out this overview of the benefits of video and our production services:
Short video explanations of key concepts or processes, engaging walkthroughs of your services, video case studies, and more will engage audiences and offer continued value as you reuse them across multiple pages and channels. Learn more about common types of B2B videos here.
Want custom videos but don’t know where to start? Need support with your graphic design process?
The Nexus Marketing team can help! Get in touch and tell us a bit about your needs.
5. Publishing and Promoting
In the last stages of the content creation process, we check a few more tasks off our list:
- Proofreading the completed content
- Peer edits of the content, including images and multimedia, to check for mistakes, technical issues, and improvements
- Client edits on the full draft
- Preparing to publish
The content publishing process can be a little more complex than you might assume. This is when we consider who will be attributed as the author of the content, the content’s publish date, and any logistical considerations involving URL redirects.
Each of these elements can play important roles in the future performance of the content. Google increasingly seeks to connect quality content and reputation to real names in the industry or subject matter area.
If you’re updating or completely overhauling older content, you should pay extra attention to the publish date, which signals freshness and relevance, and the URL. A page’s URL very directly shows search engines what the page is about, so you should optimize it for your target keyword and ensure that there’s not already content on the domain with that URL. If needed, implement (and double-check!) a redirect from an older URL to the newly-optimized one.
From here, you should be ready to hit Publish!
Bask in the glow of your shiny new content live on your site, and give it all a last review to check for any technical or formatting issues.
Pro Tip: After publishing new content, the Nexus team always takes one last manual step of requesting that it be indexed by Google.
Content is indexed when it’s crawled by Google for the first time, and it’s not an automatic process. Indexing usually doesn’t take long for healthy website (a few days at most), but by manually requesting indexing, you speed up the ranking process to start seeing results even sooner. Do this in the URL Inspection Tool in Google Search Console.
Promoting Your Content
Once new content is live, many brands then actively promote it.
Why? Promotion helps in both the long- and short-terms to maximize the value of your new content. By sharing your content and building links to it across various channels, you can 1) increase the traffic it receives and 2) begin to demonstrate its trustworthiness to Google. When the right signals come together—high-quality content that receives interest and demonstrates trustworthiness via links from other domains—search engines take note.
The process of promoting your B2B content can take a few forms:
- Offsite content creation, what we used to call “guest posting” to build links to the content on reputable sites in your industry
- Sending emails to your contact lists to promote and tease the content, encouraging clickthroughs
- Posting about the content on LinkedIn or in a LinkedIn newsletter to further boost its visibility
It’s easy to overlook this stage of the content’s lifecycle, but you won’t want to miss out on the kickstarted traffic and brand value that it generates!
Explore our blog to learn more about the offsite content promotion process, or sign up for our newsletter to receive new insights straight in your inbox.
6. Tracking Performance
Approaching SEO strategically as a sustained lead generation channel means you’ll have to actively track performance over time.
Google Analytics will be your foundational tracking tool, combined with Google Search Console, any rank tracking platform you use (like Semrush or Moz), and reports from your website regarding form completions or contact requests. At Nexus Marketing, we round up all the relevant data into easy-to-use custom SEO dashboards—much easier than navigating between multiple data sources to find insights.
The most important SEO metrics to pay attention to on your new content include:
- Conversions
- Rank positions and trends
- Impressions and clickthroughs
- Traffic, filtered down by source
We won’t go into the nitty-gritty, but once you begin collecting data, you can use it to pinpoint specific improvements and course corrections to take. For example, if rankings slip, you’ll know to analyze the page, compare it to the current top-ranking pages for its keywords, and make improvements. If clickthroughs are low but rankings are holding steady, take a look at how your content appears in search engine results pages—the title and/or meta description could likely be made more enticing.
If you’re a Nexus client, we handle this entire process for you and recommend future activities to combat (or capitalize on) trends in your SEO performance data.
Pro Tip: Don’t over-fixate on surface-level metrics like traffic, impressions, and clickthroughs.
Remember, your ultimate goal is to generate value through conversions. Top-level metrics often correlate with overall performance, but they don’t give you the whole picture. For niche industries, for example, traffic will always be relatively low. But if you’re successfully getting the attention of the right users, even if there are just a few of them, low traffic metrics don’t matter.
Learn more about our SEO reporting philosophy, and ensure all the SEO stakeholders in your organization understand which metrics are truly the most important for your investment.
7. Long-Term Improvements
Your brand’s content library is a living thing. Actively maintain it, improve it, and expand it over time.
Long-term content improvements bring huge value for your SEO strategy for two key reasons:
- It establishes your domain as a reputable and active source of information.
- It keeps your content up-to-date and as rankable as possible.
These are serious benefits for your brand and SEO performance.
So how do you do it? As mentioned above, tracking your content’s performance over time is a fundamental first step. Proactive SEO agencies (like us!) will also proactively recommend improvement activities over time based on your performance and your brand’s upcoming marketing priorities.
Once you identify improvement opportunities for your content, the actual process can take many forms—we’ll cover all the options and our go-to strategies in an upcoming article in this series. Stay tuned!
Wrapping Up
Clearly, effective content creation is a lot of work.
Emphasis on the effective.
While it’s easier than ever to churn out passable content to populate your website (looking at you, ChatGPT), this approach doesn’t cut it and isn’t likely to generate the value you need, particularly in B2B sectors.
We’ve seen time and time again, and Google has told us as such, that the bar for content quality has been upped. Search engines today look for an incredibly diverse array of quality signals that gauge your brand’s and content’s originality, helpfulness, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness, and more.
Don’t let your content be just another carbon copy of the same bland talking points on every other page that covers that topic.
Take the time to understand your keywords, target audience, conversion goals, and subject matter. Infuse your content with helpful details and original tidbits. Use images and multimedia to engage your readers and make a professional impression.
If you’re already worried about how much time and brainpower all these steps will take, you’re definitely not alone.
Let our team handle it for you.
We’ve been the SEO experts in the mission-driven space for over a decade now—check out our case studies to see our approach (and their results) in action.
In addition to content creation, the Nexus team can help with digital PR and brand-building in your niche, video production, and graphic design support. We can help you build and grow a complete framework for organic lead generation.
Have questions about anything we’ve discussed in this guide?
Please contact us to learn more.
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Sign up for our newsletter or follow us on LinkedIn!
Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) Scorecards Explained
/in Client & Industry Resources/by David MyersAI-powered tools like ChatGPT and Google AI Overviews are transforming how users access information—and much faster than anyone expected just a year ago.
For marketers, this presents a new challenge.
How can your brand and its thought leaders stand out in AI-generated answers? How do you ensure that your company’s expertise, identity, and messaging are not only recognized but trusted by LLMs?
It’s time to prepare your brand for the future of search. We’ve developed a solution to help you lay out a roadmap for success in AI search results: GEO (generative engine optimization) Scorecards.
What is GEO?
Generative engine optimization (GEO) is the process of optimizing a brand’s or thought leader’s digital presence to ensure it is accurately recognized, represented, and prioritized by large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and others.
While both GEO and traditional search engine optimization (SEO) work to improve a website’s visibility GEO takes a broader—and in some aspects, more technical—approach. Here’s how they differ:
GEO gives brands a framework for ensuring their digital presences mesh with how LLMs “think” and process information.
Remember, these systems don’t just list websites; they create summaries, comparisons, and narratives based on the data they encounter. Your data—your brand’s story, expertise, value proposition, and more—all need to be highly legible. For marketers, this means focusing on the bigger picture of how the brand itself is understood in a generative-first world.
Why is GEO Important?
A successful SEO approach (like the holistic, targeted, and quality-backed strategies we recommend) can give you a solid footing for GEO success. But it’s not enough.
AI search tools don’t operate like traditional search engines because they don’t rely solely on indexing and ranking web pages.
Instead, they synthesize information from diverse sources, including structured datasets, knowledge graphs, and even user-generated content. They operate heavily on the concept of entities—distinct identifiers like people, organizations, and products—and use these to construct the web of knowledge that powers their outputs.
While advanced search engines like Google have incorporated more sophisticated systems like entity mapping in recent years, LLMs go a step further. They generate more context-rich narratives and insights based on how entities are related, rather than just delivering a ranked list of links. The integration of this technology into search engines (like Google’s AI Overviews) will blur the lines between the two types of search going forward.
GEO practices help ensure your brand and its thought leaders are properly recognized, understood, and prioritized in a more dynamic and interconnected information environment.
After all, Google AI Overviews are extremely visible, front and center in search results for millions of users. ChatGPT has experienced unprecedented traffic growth, already ranking in at the 8th most visited site on the internet:
Generative AI tools are quickly becoming integral to how people learn about and engage with brands. It’s estimated that over one-third of organic traffic to B2B sites could come from chatbot-style generative AI search engines over the next three years.
Optimizing your brand for these platforms will be an investment in staying competitive online.
Why We Developed GEO Scorecards
We saw the need for a structured way to help our clients navigate the changes brought by LLM-driven search platforms.
Our GEO scorecards allow businesses evaluate their readiness for the generative AI era and identify actionable steps to improve.
On a more technical level, they help you audit your brand’s legibility as an entity (how easily LLMs can identify you) and its salience as an entity (how likely LLMs are to prioritize your brand and thought leadership).
We’ve developed two distinct scorecards:
These tools don’t just identify gaps—they guide you toward better visibility, stronger authority, and long-term relevance in the AI-powered search landscape. Plus, they make the whole process easy. We recently completed a GEO audit and round of improvements to help a client increase their AI visibility by 300%. Check out the case study to learn more.
Using the GEO Scorecards
Next, let’s walk through the technical, content, and offsite elements that the scorecards evaluate, starting with the Brand GEO Scorecard.
Brand GEO Scorecard Criteria
The Brand GEO Scorecard’s criteria are broken down into three core categories and several subcategories, starting with technical, in-site elements:
In-Site GEO Criteria
In-Site Elements cover the technical elements and tags in your website that support its legibility to LLMs. This group includes:
On-Site GEO Criteria
On-Site Content includes the quality, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness of the material published on your website. This group includes:
Off-Site Visibility
Off-Site Visibility refers to all the ways that your brand is referenced on other websites and platforms, particularly those that LLMs are known to frequently reference when generating responses. This group includes:
Author GEO Scorecard Criteria
The criteria in Author GEO Scorecards are broken down into two key categories and several subcategories.
On-Site Presence
On-Site Presence refers to how well-represented the author is on the brand’s website. This is where LLMs will first learn about the author as an entity and relate them to the brand.
Off-Site Presence
An author’s Off-Site Presence demonstrates their position as a reputable (and cite-able) thought leader to LLMs and search engines.
Generative AI and LLMs are reshaping the future of search. GEO scorecards provide a clear roadmap to ensure your brand—and its key voices—are prepared for this shift.
By improving both the legibility and salience of your organization or thought leaders as distinct entities, the scorecards will help you build lasting relevance in the AI-driven digital landscape. They should give you a clear structure for identifying improvements and laying out solutions.
Are you ready to optimize your digital presence for the generative era? Please contact your Nexus account manager to ask about assessing your AI readiness with our new tools.
Not yet a client? We’d love to hear from you! Check out this GEO case study and drop us a line to tell us a bit about your digital marketing needs.
SEO Content Creation Playbook for Mission-Driven Sectors: Onsite, Lead-Generating Content
/in Common Questions/by David MyersYour website’s content ultimately determines your success with SEO and organic lead generation.
Don’t get us wrong—big-picture strategy, reporting, and your site’s technical health are all critically important, too. But they’re not so useful for an empty website!
Many brands struggle to create high-quality, SEO-optimized content (rooted in current SEO best practices) that attracts the right audiences. That’s understandable.
After all, consistently creating effective content is tricky, requiring sizable time commitments and a nuanced understanding of what web users want.
We get a ton of questions from clients and partners about our content creation process. So let’s pull back the curtain.
Content Creation: Quick Context
Why is content so critical? What defines “quality” content these days?
Let’s quickly review this essential context before diving into the content creation process:
Why is content creation so important?
An old SEO truism, “Content is king,” still holds true even as the industry has undergone massive changes over the years.
The optimized content on your website, including your homepage, blog posts, and key product/service pages, act as the focal points of your SEO strategy.
Think of it this way—the intended outcomes of an SEO strategy are to:
Your content is what ranks. The quality of that content ensures visitors who click through will choose to stay on your website. The strategies employed within the content (its subject matter, structure, graphics, and calls-to-action) convert those qualified visitors into secured leads.
It all comes back to the content.
Once you create high-quality, optimized content that can outperform other pages, you can then bolster its visibility and prove its helpfulness to search engines through various offsite activities and regular improvement.
What is “high-quality” content today?
It’s not enough to simply draft and publish content with relevant keywords. The quality and embedded strategies of your pages and blog posts play critical roles in how well they perform.
For context, SEO today is a lot more holistic and complex than it used to be. You may remember the old frontier days of SEO, when a basic page stuffed with dozens of mentions of unnatural keywords could easily appear as the first result for your search.
Now, Google and other search engines use an extremely wide range of direct and indirect signals to gauge the quality, reputability, and helpfulness of content. These systems have become sophisticated at ‘understanding’ the content, too, powering the rapid rise of generative AI in search engines.
See our writeup on Google’s AI Overviews and our take on what SEO means in an AI environment to learn more.
So what do these advancements mean? To succeed and secure visibility, content has to do much heavier lifting than it did just a few years ago.
In the playbook below, we’ll outline all the embedded strategies and elements that drive SEO success.
Heads up that there are quite a lot—follow along and don’t hesitate to reach out to our team if you have any questions.
SEO Content Creation for Mission-Driven Brands: The Playbook
At a glance, here’s the complete process for creating high-quality, optimized SEO content:
This process consists of seven key steps:
Note that the last three stages are not directly part of the onsite content creation process.
We’ll briefly review them here, but please refer to our other blog posts about the importance of promoting, tracking, and improving your content over time.
1. Keyword Cluster Research
The content creation process starts with a core topic or target keyword. The content’s structure and strategy will revolve around it and related keywords, together called a keyword cluster, resulting in a page that will be positioned to rank for all of them.
Choosing keywords can be tricky business since there are several potential factors that can come into play. These are among the most prominent factors that you may consider when choosing keywords for content:
For SEO newcomers, you likely already have a primary target keyword in mind based on your brand’s priorities.
However, you want to maximize the visibility of your content by ranking for multiple variant keywords. Plus, SEO pros increasingly talk about the importance of targeting topics through a cluster approach in order to stand out to today’s advanced algorithms. This contrasts with the old-school approach of choosing one very specific keyword, a couple of secondary keywords, and then filling the content with them.
Today, we recommend being more organic or holistic in how you think about keywords.
Consider the full range of questions and subtopics that someone may have about your core topic. Think through the related concepts that someone at that stage in the buying journey may be interested in. Below we explain how to refine your cluster of keywords and how the buying journey stage or user intent should inform your strategy.
Refining Your Keyword Strategy
Using specialized keyword research tools, client input, and we weigh a few different factors when fleshing out a complete keyword strategy. These include:
After considering these elements, you may adjust your primary keyword slightly and add a handful of related secondary keywords to your strategy. These extra keywords are quite helpful; they expand your content’s reach and demonstrate topical relevance to search engines. The goal is to strike the right balance of business relevance/priority, volume, and achievability.
Consider Funnel Position and User Intent
Now, think about the funnel position and user intent of your primary target keyword.
Is it broadly educational, near the top of the sales funnel? Is it specifically about a product or service, near the bottom of the funnel? Somewhere in between?
Don’t overthink this step. Simply ask, “What does someone want to accomplish when they search this keyword?”
Check out the content that search engines already rank highly for the keyword. Are these pages short, long, education-focused, conversion-focused? How comprehensive or how concise are they?
The funnel position of a keyword and the user intent behind it shape the ultimate form of the content. Your content needs to match the user intent in order to succeed.
Here are a few examples:
Thinking about funnel position and user intent now will pay dividends in the next steps. By ensuring that your content outline and draft align with what users and search engines expect of it, you’ll be better positioned to rank.
2. Content Planning
Once you’ve determined your keywords, it’s time to plan your content around them.
You’ll need to gather information from a variety of sources and synthesize them into a comprehensive content plan and outline. When you’re done, you’ll have a complete roadmap for your content—making the drafting process much easier.
So what should you gather? This information will cover your bases:
Researching the subject matter is particularly important. Of course, you want (and need) your content to be accurate and helpful. But it also has to stand out.
Use Google, your brand’s own internal resources, authoritative industry new sources, and more to gather:
Outlining Your Content
With all this information, you should then have what you need to create a complete content outline. What should it include, and how detailed should it be?
First, high-quality SEO content uses clear heading structures. A logical order of H2 headings for main sections and H3 headings for subtopics not only provides users with a better experience but also allows search engines to more easily understand what your content is about (essential for ranking).
Structure your outline using a topic-subtopic structure, noting the specific headings you’ll use to create logical flow. Fill as much detail as you want (the more the better!) to streamline the drafting process later.
Here’s a rough example:
Remember, the length and structure of your outline should align with the keyword’s user intent. There’s a basic rule of thumb you can follow:
If you’re targeting a top-funnel, educational keyword, go long. Think through the key information that users want to learn, relevant subtopics and contextual information, and a logical flow that will keep readers engaged.
For lower-funnel content with more commercial or transactional intent, go short. Determine what someone wants to accomplish by searching this keyword and give it to them directly, without extra fluff or unnecessary sections.
Creating Your Conversion Strategy
During this stage, you should also think through how you’ll encourage readers to convert, i.e. take a specific next action that brings them closer to making a purchase.
For the purposes of fleshing out your content plan, here’s a quick template our content developed to define a conversion strategy:
Explore the Full Template
We’ve only scratched the surface and could keep going on listing all the elements that a truly comprehensive content plan should include.
If you want to see everything our team considers when planning content, feel free to explore (or steal) our content plan template:
3: Drafting Your Content
Now comes the fun part—or at least our copywriters think so! It’s time to bring your content plan to life by drafting your content as a blog post or page on your website.
There are a few essentials to keep in mind as you write:
4. Images and Multimedia
With a complete draft of your new content, you can now turn to the finishing touches—adding engaging images and multimedia.
Images, videos, tables, embedded elements, and more can significantly benefit your content.
Not only are they more engaging for users, keeping them on your page for longer (and making them more likely to click around your website), but they also show search engines that you’ve put effort into creating helpful, high-quality content. A recent study of Google ranking factors by Semrush found a surprisingly strong correlation between top rankings and the number of images from across the whole domain that appear in image results.
Images and multimedia also give you one more place to demonstrate topical relevance, as search engines can read the alt text added to elements and (for some image formats, like .svg, and .webp) even the text in the images themselves.
For this step, our copywriters conceptualize images for the content and collaborate with our graphic design team to create them. A few key points to keep in mind for your own process:
Marketing professionals increasingly turn to video as an ideal medium for conveying ideas, engaging users, and expanding reach.
You can embed relevant videos from YouTube or Vimeo directly in your content, but for the greatest long-term value, you should ideally create custom branded videos. Check out this overview of the benefits of video and our production services:
Short video explanations of key concepts or processes, engaging walkthroughs of your services, video case studies, and more will engage audiences and offer continued value as you reuse them across multiple pages and channels. Learn more about common types of B2B videos here.
5. Publishing and Promoting
In the last stages of the content creation process, we check a few more tasks off our list:
The content publishing process can be a little more complex than you might assume. This is when we consider who will be attributed as the author of the content, the content’s publish date, and any logistical considerations involving URL redirects.
Each of these elements can play important roles in the future performance of the content. Google increasingly seeks to connect quality content and reputation to real names in the industry or subject matter area.
If you’re updating or completely overhauling older content, you should pay extra attention to the publish date, which signals freshness and relevance, and the URL. A page’s URL very directly shows search engines what the page is about, so you should optimize it for your target keyword and ensure that there’s not already content on the domain with that URL. If needed, implement (and double-check!) a redirect from an older URL to the newly-optimized one.
From here, you should be ready to hit Publish!
Bask in the glow of your shiny new content live on your site, and give it all a last review to check for any technical or formatting issues.
Promoting Your Content
Once new content is live, many brands then actively promote it.
Why? Promotion helps in both the long- and short-terms to maximize the value of your new content. By sharing your content and building links to it across various channels, you can 1) increase the traffic it receives and 2) begin to demonstrate its trustworthiness to Google. When the right signals come together—high-quality content that receives interest and demonstrates trustworthiness via links from other domains—search engines take note.
The process of promoting your B2B content can take a few forms:
It’s easy to overlook this stage of the content’s lifecycle, but you won’t want to miss out on the kickstarted traffic and brand value that it generates!
6. Tracking Performance
Approaching SEO strategically as a sustained lead generation channel means you’ll have to actively track performance over time.
Google Analytics will be your foundational tracking tool, combined with Google Search Console, any rank tracking platform you use (like Semrush or Moz), and reports from your website regarding form completions or contact requests. At Nexus Marketing, we round up all the relevant data into easy-to-use custom SEO dashboards—much easier than navigating between multiple data sources to find insights.
The most important SEO metrics to pay attention to on your new content include:
We won’t go into the nitty-gritty, but once you begin collecting data, you can use it to pinpoint specific improvements and course corrections to take. For example, if rankings slip, you’ll know to analyze the page, compare it to the current top-ranking pages for its keywords, and make improvements. If clickthroughs are low but rankings are holding steady, take a look at how your content appears in search engine results pages—the title and/or meta description could likely be made more enticing.
If you’re a Nexus client, we handle this entire process for you and recommend future activities to combat (or capitalize on) trends in your SEO performance data.
7. Long-Term Improvements
Your brand’s content library is a living thing. Actively maintain it, improve it, and expand it over time.
Long-term content improvements bring huge value for your SEO strategy for two key reasons:
These are serious benefits for your brand and SEO performance.
So how do you do it? As mentioned above, tracking your content’s performance over time is a fundamental first step. Proactive SEO agencies (like us!) will also proactively recommend improvement activities over time based on your performance and your brand’s upcoming marketing priorities.
Once you identify improvement opportunities for your content, the actual process can take many forms—we’ll cover all the options and our go-to strategies in an upcoming article in this series. Stay tuned!
Wrapping Up
Clearly, effective content creation is a lot of work.
Emphasis on the effective.
While it’s easier than ever to churn out passable content to populate your website (looking at you, ChatGPT), this approach doesn’t cut it and isn’t likely to generate the value you need, particularly in B2B sectors.
We’ve seen time and time again, and Google has told us as such, that the bar for content quality has been upped. Search engines today look for an incredibly diverse array of quality signals that gauge your brand’s and content’s originality, helpfulness, expertise, authoritativeness, trustworthiness, and more.
Take the time to understand your keywords, target audience, conversion goals, and subject matter. Infuse your content with helpful details and original tidbits. Use images and multimedia to engage your readers and make a professional impression.
If you’re already worried about how much time and brainpower all these steps will take, you’re definitely not alone.
Let our team handle it for you.
We’ve been the SEO experts in the mission-driven space for over a decade now—check out our case studies to see our approach (and their results) in action.
In addition to content creation, the Nexus team can help with digital PR and brand-building in your niche, video production, and graphic design support. We can help you build and grow a complete framework for organic lead generation.
Have questions about anything we’ve discussed in this guide?
Please contact us to learn more.
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Keyword ROI Exercise Explained
/in How We Work/by Rafi NorbergAt Nexus Marketing, we pride ourselves on using data-driven strategies to inform our work with partners and clients.
One of our tools is the Keyword ROI Estimating Exercise. This tool enables us to evaluate the potential ROI of an investment in SEO through two lenses:
In this blog post, we’ll explain the methodology behind the document.
1. Organic CTR by SERP Position: Why Ranking Matters
When assessing the value of organic traffic, the position of a keyword on the search engine results page (SERP) plays a crucial role. Our analysis leverages industry-standard click-through rates (CTR) by position to determine how much traffic a given ranking will generate.
Here’s a breakdown of the average CTR by SERP position:
This data shows that the first position captures a significant portion of search traffic—28.5% of all clicks.
However, as rankings drop, the CTR declines sharply, with the 10th position receiving only 2.5% of clicks.
This steep drop-off emphasizes the importance of securing top rankings for your keywords. By understanding and applying these CTR metrics, we can estimate the potential traffic volume from organic search based on a keyword’s position, allowing us to calculate the expected value of that traffic for our clients.
2. Understanding Current Rankings
We analyze current keyword rankings, a critical step in the Keyword ROI Estimation Exercise. SEMRush provides real-time data on where a client’s website ranks for specific keywords, including metrics like search volume, keyword difficulty, and competitive insights.
Why Are Current Rankings Important?
Current rankings are a key performance indicator for any SEO strategy. They give us a clear picture of a website’s visibility in search engines and help us identify which keywords drive traffic and which need further optimization.
By consistently monitoring rankings, we can measure the effectiveness of our SEO efforts and make data-driven decisions to improve keyword positioning.
Ranking data also helps us prioritize our SEO initiatives.
For example, a keyword ranked in the top 3 positions is likely generating significant traffic already, but even minor improvements in those rankings can lead to substantial traffic gains. Conversely, keywords ranked on the second or third page have room for significant growth, and targeting these can unlock new traffic streams.
Having a business’ current rankings is the foundation of our ROI estimate.
Step 3: Initial Keyword Research and Preliminary Content Strategy
The third step in our process involves conducting initial keyword research to identify potential topics tailored to your business.
Using tools like SEMRush and insights from our initial discussions, we analyze keywords and group them into relevant keyword clusters.
These clusters represent groups of related terms with common themes or search intent.
Once we have these keyword clusters, we map them to potential content opportunities.
By organizing the clusters into strategic cornerstone content ideas, we can create or optimize pages that have the potential to rank for multiple keywords at once.
Step 4: Tiering Content Based on Engagement Levels and Traffic Value
In Step 4, we prioritize and tier the potential cornerstone content ideas by evaluating two key factors: traffic value and the speed of execution. We determine the traffic value by analyzing the estimated CPC (cost-per-click) for the keywords associated with each content idea. This helps us understand the monetary value of ranking organically for these keywords compared to the cost of driving the same traffic through paid advertising.
Next, we assess how quickly we can take advantage of the opportunity based on the current state of your website and existing content. With this information, we assign each cornerstone content idea to one of three tiers:
By assigning these tiers, we ensure that our efforts are focused on maximizing ROI in a structured, strategic way. It also clarifies which keyword clusters will be tackled first, second, and third, allowing for a phased approach that delivers results at each engagement stage.
Step 5: Calculating Current and Future Traffic Value by Strategy Tier
In Step 5, we quantify your website traffic’s current and potential future value by evaluating current state traffic and future traffic estimates for each strategy tier.
We begin by calculating the current traffic value based on existing organic traffic and its estimated CPC value.
This allows us to understand how much it would cost to acquire this traffic via paid search, giving us a baseline to measure the effectiveness of your current SEO efforts.
Next, we project future traffic estimates by strategy tier.
Using data from keyword rankings, CTR benchmarks, and search volume, we forecast the increase in traffic that can be expected after implementing content optimizations at each tier.
For each tier, we calculate the potential CPC savings by estimating the traffic’s worth if acquired through paid advertising instead of organic search.
This step helps quantify the ROI potential of your SEO strategy by clearly showing the value of improved rankings across different content tiers.
By comparing the current state traffic to the estimated future traffic, we can demonstrate the financial impact of moving forward with a well-defined content strategy, helping you prioritize investment based on expected returns.
Step 5: Estimating Revenue Based on Conversion Rates and Deal Value
In Step 5, we move beyond traffic estimates and calculate the estimated revenue that your SEO strategy can generate.
This is done by factoring in your business’s average deal value, visitor-to-lead conversion rate, and lead-to-close rate.
If you have this data available, we use your actual numbers to provide a precise estimate. However, if this information isn’t available, we rely on industry benchmarks to guide our estimates.
For instance, according to HubSpot’s sales statistics, the average sales close rate was 29% in 2023.
When working with our clients, we see 10 – 50% sales conversion rates based on the solution and industry. Based on three years of data across 50 clients, the average among clients serving a mission-driven sector is 20%, so we’ll use that baseline without the prospect having their own data.
Additionally, data from Geckoboard suggests that the visitor-to-lead conversion rate for B2B websites typically falls between 2.23% and 4.31%.
When working with our clients, we see 1 – 5% visitor-to-lead conversion rates based on the solution, industry, and what a lead is.
Based on three years of data across 50 clients, the average among clients serving a mission-driven sector is clients is 3%, so we’ll use that baseline without the prospect having their own data.
We can calculate potential revenue outcomes for your business by applying these benchmarks.
Here’s how it works:
This approach allows us to create a clear picture of the financial impact of your SEO strategy.
Whether using your data or industry benchmarks, we can project the revenue potential for each tier of your content strategy, demonstrating the direct business value of optimizing your site for organic search.
Step 6: Finalize and Summarize Results
In the final step, we present the data and insights gathered throughout the keyword ROI estimation process in a clear, visual format, typically in a slide deck.
The slides summarize the key findings, including traffic value estimates, tiered content strategies, projected ROI, and the financial impact of your SEO efforts.
Our goal is to offer a comprehensive strategy overview focusing on measurable outcomes. Each slide highlights critical data points like:
The slide deck serves as the final product of our analysis, ensuring that you have a clear and actionable plan for leveraging SEO to boost your traffic, generate leads, and increase revenue.
It also allows you to make informed decisions about future investments in your SEO strategy by showcasing the value and expected returns over the next 12 to 24 months.
Deciphering SEO News: Antitrust, AI, & What They Mean for You
/in Deciphering SEO News/by David MyersSummer 2024 has been one for the books in the SEO world. We’ve seen some wild industry developments that promise to bring more change to the SEO status quo than we’ve seen in a very long time.
If you keep track of SEO, tech, or digital marketing news, you’ve probably picked up on the buzz.
And you probably have a few questions, namely, “What does all this change mean for my brand and SEO strategy?”
In this SEO news update, we wanted to provide an overview of the biggest news stories of the past couple of months. We’ll cover the key developments, what they mean for you, and our overall take on the story that’s unfolding and the future of SEO strategies in the AI age.
Any questions as you read the guide? Reach out anytime—the Nexus team will be happy to help.
The Google Antitrust Case
We recently posted an explainer on our LinkedIn page (give us a follow!), but here’s a quick summary of what you need to know about this landmark legal case:
This article from Search Engine Journal provides a helpful explanation of the ruling from an SEO perspective.
So what will happen as a result of this ruling? It’s unclear, and we won’t know for a while. Many options are within the realm of possibility, and there are already some reports that the court might move to take any of these actions:
What It (Probably) Means for You
What are the potential SEO implications of this case?
Regardless of the specific legal outcomes, we’re likely to see increased diversity in traffic sources. You may not think often about Bing or DuckDuckGo today, but there’s a good chance you will in the future. Other search engines use ranking systems very similar to Google’s, so the SEO best practices will remain steady.
OpenAI’s newly announced search engine, SearchGPT, will also likely shake up the landscape in the coming years—more on this below.
Key takeaways:
AI Overviews & Algorithm Updates
In more Google news, we’ve seen many improvements and tweaks roll out in recent months.
Google’s AI Overviews have received some beneficial changes after a rocky rollout earlier in 2024. In terms of design and interface, here are the key updates:
AI Overviews now more prominently highlight their linked sources—this is huge news since the primary concern in the SEO world has been that the Overviews would obscure their sources and seriously dampen clickthrough rates.
Specifically, the updated AI Overviews include these features:
AI Overviews are also now being deployed outside of the US for the first time, and they will also display for users using incognito mode or who are not logged into Chrome.
What do these developments tell us?
Something to be aware of: We’ve seen that for content linked in AI Overviews, some SEO rank-tracking tools report those pages as ranking in the first organic position. However, the link might be one of many within the Overview. In other SEO tools, rankings within AI Overviews are sometimes tracked inconsistently or incorrectly. We’ll see continued changes in the reporting and logistical impacts of AI Overviews, so keep an eye out.
Beyond the AI Overviews, we’ve seen a handful of other big developments from Google recently:
What It Means for You
We have a few conclusions we can draw from these recent Google updates:
SearchGPT
Finally, the big news out of OpenAI earlier this summer: Its very own AI-infused search engine, SearchGPT.
We don’t know yet when it will be widely available, although the prototype is currently available to a small group of test users.
If you’ve seen headlines about SearchGPT and wondered how it will affect the SEO landscape, let’s first clear the air.
There are still many uncertainties in the AI world. Economists have pointed to an “AI bubble” of investment funding that’s likely to burst (or at least shrink). New AI-based projects and developments will keep coming and going, and rapidly.
It’s just way too early to make any concrete predictions about what’s to come at the intersection of AI and SEO.
Here’s what we know about SearchGPT so far:
SearchGPT will work similarly to Google’s AI Overviews. Content identified as the highest quality and most relevant to a query will be used to generate an answer. You’ll be able to refine your search with suggested follow-up questions, although it is not a chat-style LLM like ChatGPT.
The SearchGPT interface very prominently displays links to the source content, seen in this example:
This example screenshot shows the generated answer for the query “What is AI.” On the right side is the AI-generated answer, including linked citations. On the left is a list of the source content, including domains, titles, publish dates, and meta descriptions.
SearchGPT will also proactively suggest follow-up questions and query refinements:
This response for the query “best email marketing software” includes a prompted follow-up question, “which ones are the cheapest?” The results show specific products with prices and citations.
(We pulled these examples from Go Fish Digital’s recent walkthrough of the platform—highly recommended if you want to learn more!)
One important note: You’ll notice that the source domains for these examples are all big-name players like BBC, Wikipedia, IBM, Forbes, and PCMag. Results are currently limited to a small set of domains that have opted into the prototype. It’s unclear when and how OpenAI plans to expand the pool of content it uses to generate results.
Key takeaways:
What It Means for You
Nothing, at least right now.
The one immediate conclusion we can draw is that competition is ramping up for Google if this product truly takes off.
In terms of your SEO strategy, SearchGPT is likely to work on a very similar system for analyzing and ranking content.
If you already perform well, we think you’ll likely do well on this more AI-forward search engine. If you make fundamental SEO improvements to your website and content, they should theoretically help you on any search engine.
Just keep in mind that we still don’t know exactly how SearchGPT will rank content and whether it will crawl the whole web or stay limited to smaller sets of domains. The answers to these questions will impact the specific technical best practices and steps you should follow to maximize visibility in its results. We’ll keep an eye on it and update you as we learn more.
SEO in an AI Environment: Our Take
First, what’s the throughline in all of these news items?
But if you’re worried that the dramatic infusion of AI into search engines will catastrophically disrupt SEO as we know it, think again.
We’ll walk through our thought process:
1. AI & search are old pals.
Did you know that Google Search has long included AI-powered systems that work to understand language by making connections between concepts?
The introduction of AI into SEO has been a long, slow process—not an overnight change, even though all the headlines have made it feel that way.
Google’s ability to parse language has become incredibly sophisticated over the years. Much of the “leaked” Google documents this year didn’t actually include any surprises on that front.
This means that SEO professionals already know how to adapt and drive results in an AI-infused environment. We just haven’t been explicitly talking about the evolution of search in terms of AI for very long.
Remember the study mentioned above? 99.5% of AI Overviews cite content that already appears within the top 10 organic results for their queries.
Users will always prefer human-centric content from trusted, high-quality websites. These will be the pages, sites, and brands that AI systems prefer to pay attention to.
So even though it’s unclear exactly what technical processes will power SearchGPT, we think they won’t be radically different than those that power Google today. You’ll just need to stick to the fundamentals, learn, adapt, and grow like normal.
2. Technical practices change, fundamentals don’t.
Technical best practices have to evolve to keep up with changing technology. Surface-level content trends come and go, too.
However, the fundamental guiding principles of effective SEO do not change. What are they?
As the space evolves, we’ll undoubtedly see new best practices and technical requirements for achieving these fundamentals (but this would happen even if AI were taken out of the equation).
Our recommendation? Work toward achieving the fundamentals and stay on top of developments in the industry without making drastic overnight strategy shifts.
3. But we can count on a few new priorities.
All that said, there are a couple of new strategic priorities that you should keep in mind as the SEO world changes.
These are the same big-picture takeaways we first identified back when AI Overviews were launched:
If you’re already achieving the fundamentals of SEO listed above, you have what you need to succeed with these strategic priorities.
We can help with everything, too, including executing full-funnel content strategies, implementing CRO improvements, partner posting, and other brand-building activities.
Have questions about anything we’ve discussed in this guide? Curious to learn more? Let us know!
Please contact us to learn more about our full range of digital marketing, SEO, and lead generation services.
And if you’re a Nexus client or partner, please contact your Nexus points of contact—we’d love to chat.
Maximize the Value of SEO: Our Easiest Conversion Optimization Tips
/in Common Questions/by David MyersThe ROI of SEO activities is ultimately generated by conversions. When users discover your website through organic search, engage with your content, and convert, your efforts have directly generated value for your brand.
But what if your top-ranking content doesn’t seem to get much attention? What can you do to bolster the value of content that attracts traffic but fails to generate any actual conversions?
The Nexus team thinks about CRO constantly—after all, it’s how we ensure our clients see concrete value from their SEO engagements with us. We’ve got a few tried-and-true CRO best practices that we incorporate into our content creation process, and we’ve rounded them up in this crash course:
A conversion occurs when a web user takes the specific target action on your website that you’ve asked them to.
These target actions can take many forms depending on the circumstances and your marketing goals. For B2B marketers, conversions often occur when users:
Each page on your website should serve a conversion purpose. CRO is the process of determining this purpose and then making tactical improvements to your web pages so they can better support their conversion purposes.
The only rule of thumb to keep in mind is that marketing conversions should represent a meaningful step forward in the sales journey. Requesting a demo is a late step in that journey, while clicking through to a strategically important bottom-funnel page could count as an earlier step. Signing up for emails would be an even earlier step towards an eventual sale by allowing you to stay in touch with casual visitors.
This concept relies heavily on the sales or marketing funnel framework that you, as a savvy marketer yourself, likely already think about every day. Brush up on the basics if you feel a bit rusty!
Understanding user intent
In SEO and CRO alike, user intent is a critical concept. It can be thought of simply as what a user wants to accomplish when they search a particular keyword.
To rank well and create a positive user experience, your content and its conversion elements must align with the user intent.
User intent is generally broken down into three categories:
Educational
The user wants to learn more about a topic. They have a problem to solve or gap to fill but are just starting to address it, so they’re at the top-funnel stage of their buying journey.
Commercial
The user has an idea of what products and services could solve their problem, so they want to learn more about their options and compare providers. Keywords with a commercial intent typically fall into the mid-funnel range of the buying journey.
Transactional
The user knows exactly what they want and explicitly look for a product/service or more information about it with the intention of making a purchase.
The user intent of a keyword should shape the content in several ways: its format, length, level of detail, tone, and the conversion tactics that it employs.
By understanding user intent and funnel position, you can more thoughtfully align conversion asks and how to frame them for a page’s particular audience. Try answering these key questions:
This exercise will help you pinpoint a page’s unique intersection of user intent and funnel position, which will then allow you to more strategically build a conversion strategy.
Quick steps for developing a B2B conversion strategy
How do we determine ideal conversion recommendations for our clients’ content? Here’s an abridged version of our process:
Of course, this is not a one-size-fits-all approach. The ideal process will vary from business from business depending your niche, audience, sales/web collateral, and goals.
Effective calls-to-action
So you’ve determined what you’ll ask your page visitors to do. Now how will make that ask?
Calls-to-action (CTAs) are the explicit asks that you include in your content and that trigger conversions by leading users directly to the relevant form, page, or resource.
CTAs can be linked graphics, buttons, or plain linked text. They occur throughout the content, most notably near the top of the page and at the bottom, although they should also be sprinkled throughout the middle of the content in strategic spots.
CTA strategies must be focused. Never distract the reader with multiple big asks. This means emphasizing your content’s primary conversion ask. Any secondary ask should occur more naturally throughout the content.
How to develop an effective CTA
Once you’ve determined the key conversion goals of your content, you’ll need to craft the actual asks of the CTAs themselves. To phrase them effectively, we recommend taking a moment to answer these questions:
Working through these questions will help clarify the general angle of your ask. CTAs should resonate with readers as relevant to their goals while emphasizing you as the helpful next step they need.
Best practices for crafting CTAs
What are the logistical and copywriting best practices to keep in mind for CTAs? Here are some rules of thumb that have served us well over the years:
Placement
The ideal number and placement of CTAs will vary based on the content’s length and funnel position. The shorter and more bottom-funnel the content, the more direct and concise the CTA strategy. For longer, higher-funnel content, your approach can be more expansive and incorporate secondary engagement-boosting asks.
Note: Contextual relevance is key. CTAs should not be haphazardly placed.
Primary CTAs should fit cleanly between section breaks in the content. Secondary CTAs should clearly offer more value to readers based on the surrounding content. For example, link to case studies when discussing metrics or results, or link to a deeper-funnel article that’s about a specific concept that was mentioned.
Language
The language that you include on a CTA graphic or button does the heavy lifting. Follow these best practices:
That last point is especially helpful. Understanding features vs. benefits can transform your appeals and CTAs into conversion powerhouses.
Simply put, features are the describable, distinguishing characteristics of your product/service. Benefits are the positive impacts that those features have on your customers or clients. There’s a time and place for using both types of appeals, but benefits will usually be most effective since they more clearly tap into why a user is looking at your website in the first place.
Length
Aside from keeping the language on your CTAs short and to-the-point, there aren’t any concrete rules to follow. That said, we’ve found these rough guidelines helpful:
Design
Visual design plays the crucial role of catching the eye of the user. Remember, we all skim and have learned over the years to visually gloss over what we perceive as ads or irrelevant page elements. For your CTAs, be intentional about how they look and present themselves to users.
Here are a few best practices we rely on:
Key takeaways
Oh, look—here’s a CTA now:
Eye-catching titles
The titles of your SEO-optimized pages play essential roles in converting users for a simple reason—they attract users to visit your site in the first place.
When you search for something on Google, you likely don’t immediately click on the very first result. Instead you might skim the titles and descriptions of the first three or so results to quickly see which one most aligns with what you’re looking for.
Effective titles improve your clickthrough rates on results pages, helping you secure a bigger chunk of the traffic searching those keywords.
But a title can also prime the user to be more engaged once they arrive.
Try the “So what?” test
Titles should give readers an instant window into the purpose of the page and what benefit they can expect from visiting it.
When you draft a title, put yourself in a user’s shoes and ask, “So what?” Why is a reader searching that keyword? What can they expect after reading your title? What will they get out of it?
By aligning your title with the user intent, really anticipating the user’s needs, challenges, and reasons for searching, you can better encourage users to engage with the whole page and click through your CTAs to convert.
Reliable title formats
We rely on a handful of tried-and-true title formats to help us craft effective titles for content:
Title best practices
Keep your titles concise.
Conciseness is key. Titles of roughly 8 words or fewer and between 50-60 characters will both quickly show users what you have to offer and ensure the content shows up as intended in search results.
Use snappy language that taps into emotional motivation.
“Power words” are immensely helpful for grabbing attention with titles.
But don’t forget that you can go a step further to align your title with user needs and pain points by reflecting their emotions or motivations. In B2B contexts, this might feel a little silly, but remember that every search is driven by some kind of motivation. Here are some examples:
Consider the full context of your keyword and why users are searching it. What are they looking for? Why do they need answers?
Of course, you don’t need to go all-out on strange clickbait titles, but you can pepper in a few strategic words that strike right at the heart of user motivations.
Differentiate your top-funnel titles.
Very broad, educational keywords often yield results with very similar titles – “The complete guide to X, “Everything you need to know about X,” “Learning about X.”
When you craft a new title, take a moment to scope out the competition on Google. What are their titles? What motivations and user intents are they tapping into?
The top-ranking titles for a keyword are certainly doing something right in the eyes of Google, but that doesn’t mean yours should be a carbon copy.
Learn from the other titles but then take a stab at differentiating yours. Look at the list of title formats above and try out a few variations.
Lead with a benefit for bottom-funnel titles.
For your bottom-funnel content like product/service pages, product comparisons, technical how-to’s that create natural pitches for your services, your title should lead with a benefit.
What’s in it for the user? What is the unique benefit they’ll get from your expertise and offerings?
For example, if you’re a capital campaign consultant for nonprofits, you’ll likely want a strong page on your website that targets the keyword “capital campaign consultant.” You could approach the title a few ways:
The simple twists of “thrive,” “lasting impact,” and “take the guesswork out” in these examples tap into the deeper goals that nonprofits have when they search for campaign support. These titles would likely be much more effective at grabbing attention and clicks (and ultimately more conversions).
Conversion copywriting basics
“Conversion copywriting” involves using a range of strategies in the structure, style, and small language choices in your content to support conversion goals.
This goes beyond just using “salesy” language (that often turns off readers anyway). Effective conversion copywriting creates a smoother, more user-focused experience. It infuses the content’s copy, titles, meta descriptions, text on CTAs, and more to naturally encourage engagement and immediately convey relevance to readers.
Here we’ll review a few of the core concepts our copywriting team uses to enrich content and boost the conversion power of our articles.
Social proof
Infusing your content with social proof can be extremely helpful for driving conversions, especially on lower-funnel pages with commercial and transactional intent. These readers will be looking for reasons to trust what you have to say.
Social proof can take these forms:
Even using more subtle language to imply social proof can be helpful – “join hundreds of other nonprofits..” “we’ve helped fundraisers like you..” etc.
Creating social proof resources like case studies and a testimonial page on your website is a very worthwhile investment of your time. We often recommend these activities to our clients and help create them, too. Once you have these resources in place, you can reference them and direct readers there to learn more, enriching the user journey and ultimately making more compelling asks.
Messaging hierarchies
Let’s say you’re creating a bottom-funnel page (like a core service or product page). How should you structure your page’s content and the case it makes for your offerings?
A clear messaging hierarchy structures the copy to proactively answer the questions or respond to the thoughts that readers will have.
Anticipating user questions/desires/expectations reduces the friction they experience and increases overall engagement, making them more likely to convert.
Here’s a messaging hierarchy that will put you in your customers’ shoes and help you generate more conversions:
Here’s an example of how you might hone your messaging using this messaging hierarchy:
From here, you can adapt your approach based on the context of the content (length, first vs. third person framing, the particular social proof you can offer, etc.). Combine and adjust the steps as needed to polish your message.
Just be sure you understand the reader’s pain point, the key message relevant to them, the features and benefits that support that intent, and how you can offer credibility.
This is a handy trick to have anytime you’re explicitly writing about your offerings. Try it out for your own business and see what you come up with!
Other writing formulas
Like a messaging hierarchy, a writing formula gives you an easy roadmap for writing smoother, more compelling copy.
AIDA
This classic writing formula remains one of the most effective ways to craft more engaging content that can encourage conversions.
Use this formula in all kinds of contexts to create a more engaging flow in your copy and build up to your conversion asks more naturally. For example, here’s how you might use this formula to outline the beginning of an article about planning a capital campaign:
This set-up acknowledges reader desires and concerns. It encourages engagement by framing the content as accessible and foundational. These talking points all pave the way to not just providing a positive user experience but also naturally framing conversion asks (like reading about consulting services or taking a readiness assessment).
For bottom-funnel pages or spots where you’re writing about your offerings very explicitly, you can expand the AIDA model to include “conviction” — social proof or statistics/results.
The 4 P’s
This model is helpful for writing much more concise conversion copy, like sections of your product/services page or the text of CTA graphics.
Understand your reader’s intent and pain point, then use the model to hit the essentials:
Of course, these formulas aren’t hard and fast rules. Rather, they’re helpful additions to your toolkit. Understand how they work and why, and you’ll have powerful options to explore the next time you sit down to create new web content, draft a sales email, or engage with your customers in any other way.
Success stories
Combining consistent SEO work, high-quality web content, and CRO know-how can generate some amazing results.
Please explore our case studies to learn how our clients and partners have increased their leads from organic search:
A few of our favorite success stories about lead generation include:
What you’ll need to convert more visitors
So to sum it all up, what do you need to develop a winning organic online lead generation strategy?
Brands of all sizes can effectively hit all these marks with the right approach and enough time and bandwidth.
For sustained results, partnering with an agency (like us) that provides technical SEO, content creation, and CRO expertise might be your best bet.
If you’re already a Nexus client or partner and want to improve conversions on any of your most important web pages, please get in touch! We can easily review your analytics and provide quick recommendations at both the site-wide and page-specific levels.
Have any questions or want to learn more about how we approach CRO?
Contact us or reach out directly to your Nexus points of contact at any time.
Website Relaunch Guide for Nexus Clients
/in Client & Industry Resources/by Rafi NorbergYou’ve decided to do a site-wide overhaul, but aren’t sure how it will impact SEO. Never fear! We’ve put together a guide to walk you through the critical steps of relaunching your website. If you have specific questions about any of the steps in this list, your Account Manager will be happy to help.
What types of changes have an SEO impact?
Any change to the website has the potential to impact SEO — however, the biggest changes that can impact SEO performance are changes to the parts of the site Google can “read.” We’ll explain a few of the key ones here and how they impact SEO:
URL changes
This is the single biggest thing that can impact your SEO. Your page’s URL is like the page’s name or identity in Google’s mind. If you change the URL without properly redirecting, it would be like handing someone a copy of The Great Gatsby that you had retitled The Roaring 20s Were Wild without letting them know. When their other friends recommend The Great Gatsby (or, in SEO terms, when other sites link to the old URL without a redirect in place), your book recipient wouldn’t know it was the same book you gave them. We want to avoid that!
Changes to H2s,H3s, or image alt text
This can have a negative impact on your best-performing pages, as these are what Google “reads” to understand what the page is about. To continue the book analogy, this would be like trying to understand a textbook without chapters, section headers, or captions. We want to preserve these page elements on the new site so that Google can continue to smoothly understand the site’s content.
Site speed and mobile-friendliness
Google increasingly prioritizes sites that load quickly and are usable for searchers on mobile. Any site relaunch should take the technical performance of the site into account.
Changes that are less important for SEO
Some website elements can provide a better or worse customer experience but have very little impact on SEO. These types of changes include:
What needs to be done before the new website goes live?
Set up your robots.txt correctly
After arriving at a website but before spidering it, the search crawler will look for a robots.txt file. If it finds one, the crawler will read that file first before continuing through the page. Because the robots.txt file contains information about how the search engine should crawl, the information found there will instruct further crawler action on this particular site. If the robots.txt file does not contain any directives that disallow a search crawler’s activity (or if the site doesn’t have a robots.txt file), it will proceed to crawl other information on the site.
Read more
Ensure you have a sitemap
You can use an XML sitemap to make sure Google can find and crawl all pages you deem essential on your website. An XML sitemap contains all the important pages of a site to help Google determine its structure.
Read more
Create a redirect plan
Determine the new location for all existing pages on the website, so you can put redirects into place after pushing the new website live. Redirects will prevent any loss of existing online authority during the relaunch process.
Read more
Transition tracking and plugins
Bring over any tracking codes or plugins to the new website such as:
What needs to be done immediately following the website relaunch?
Check all 301 redirects
Double-check that all 301 redirects are functioning correctly to prevent any loss of online authority or 404 errors. This is the most important step to preserving SEO performance, so don’t skip it!
Ensure noindex and nofollow tags are removed
View your website’s source code to ensure noindex or nofollow meta tags are removed to prevent indexing or crawling issues. This ensures pages can seamlessly show up in search results pages, and that SEO “link juice” is passed correctly through links around the site.
Reindex pages via Search Console
Submit core product and content pages for indexing via Google Search Console to speed up the re-indexing process.
Double-check how Google views your pages
Google provides free tools which measure the speed of a webpage and how it will be rendered by Google’s search crawler. Run your website pages through these tools to identify any page speed issues after your website goes live.
Read more
Monitor for issues
Check the website regularly for the first 2 weeks after it goes live to identify any issues that arise during the relaunch process such as:
Cookieless Tracking, Google Analytics 4, and What It All Means for You
/in Deciphering SEO News/by David MyersThe ways that websites collect visitor data is changing fast. The biggest player in the space, Google, has been slowly implementing changes to catch up.
To stay compliant with evolving privacy regulations and to keep drawing reliable insights from your website’s performance (like the ROI of your SEO investments), you need to understand these changes. Specifically, you need to understand Consent Mode and its predictive modeling features in Google Analytics 4.
Here’s a quick guide to third-party cookie deprecation, “cookieless tracking,” and what they mean for your marketing analytics:
Quick disclaimer: We’re not tech or legal experts, we’re digital marketers.
This is our quick summary of changes in the digital privacy landscape and their implications on digital marketing. Please consult with a specialized professional if you have questions about your site’s compliance or backend consent management practices.
(But for questions about digital marketing, SEO, and tracking your lead generation results, we can definitely help.)
Update: July 2024
Since we originally published this guide, Google came out with a pretty huge announcement. The company has reversed course and will not phase out third-party cookies for users on its Chrome web browser.
Instead, Chrome will eventually ask users to choose privacy and cookie preferences that will apply across their entire browsing experiences. Search Engine Journal’s writeup provides a helpful summary.
What does this mean?
Google always keeps us on our toes!
For the full story, including context about privacy regulations, Consent Mode, and how to turn it on, please keep reading, and let us know if you have any questions!
Quick Context
Here’s the background:
Let’s say you understand the laws and your website actively asks for consent to use cookies. Everything seems to be running fine.
So what’s the issue?
There are two key areas where your brand could take a hit as a result of changing cookie practices: first-party data collection and advertising.
Impacts on First-Party Data Collection
Google Analytics uses first-party cookies to track engagement data of visitors on your website. These cookies are not considered “necessary” and thus require consent.
When users decline or ignore consent requests, this results in gaps in your data—potentially huge blank spaces in your digital marketing analytics.
You’ve likely already seen some of these effects as consent collection becomes the norm and as Google Analytics 4 has rolled out new compliance features and tools.
Without reliable data about how users are finding, engaging with, and leaving your website, your marketing strategy will suffer. Understanding user journeys and conversions is critical for improving over time, and this data is essential for measuring the ROI of your marketing strategies like SEO campaigns.
This is why this issue is top of mind for us here at Nexus Marketing. As the web evolves, we want our clients and partners to help lead the charge.
Impacts on Online Advertising
For brands that rely heavily on online advertising, particularly retargeting campaigns, the deprecation of third-party cookies on Google’s Chrome will be a major change.
As they currently work, these campaigns will be practically impossible without third-party cookies.
Many brands are still running late. An Adform survey found that:
Why It Matters
Cookie deprecation is already underway, and it’ll continue to be a major discussion in the coming months as Google moves ahead with its planned changes. You need a strategy for shifting your advertising and first-party data collection methods now.
Thankfully, Google appears to be on top of it. For advertising, Google has been developing new alternatives to third-party cookies. For data collection, GA4 has introduced new features that help fill data gaps.
We’ll take a closer look at GA4’s solution, behavioral modeling in Consent Mode, below—jump ahead to check it out.
And if you’ve already implemented Consent Mode, we’ll also discuss warning signs to look for that may indicate data isn’t flowing correctly.
Digital Privacy Regulations & Cookies
Here’s extra context that you may find helpful:
Why do cookies require consent?
Since the adoption of the GDPR and ePrivacy Directive in the EU, third-party cookies have been effectively banned for use on site visits from European visitors. Similar laws from the U.S. and around the world have since been enacted, too.
Even though not all of a site’s users will come from these jurisdictions, the laws are widespread enough today that it’s essentially easier to treat them as universal than it is to spend time and resources completely fine-tuning the site’s backend for different visitors.
This is why sites today expressly ask for user consent to use cookies. (Learn more about cookies here.)
Many of the big web players adapted fairly quickly. Web browsers like Safari and Firefox made fast changes to comply with the new norm. Apple has made frequent updates to the privacy features of iOS to stay in compliance, as well.
The effect has been that it’s now difficult for websites to track user behaviors on these browsers and systems for the purpose of retargeting them with ads.
Why has Google been slow to adapt?
Google implemented a solution in GA4 for mitigating the impacts of cookie consent, Consent Mode, back in 2020.
Since 2020, Google has also announced and postponed third-party cookie deprecation several times. The delays now appear to be coming to an end, with the current deadline sometime in 2025.
Why the delays? Google generates a lot of its revenue from advertising tools and services.
Third-party cookie deprecation directly limits their ability to operate, so Google has been working to develop alternative systems that will protect these revenue streams through its ambitious Privacy Sandbox initiative. With the 2025 phaseout period fast approaching, it seems like Google might finally be ready.
What’s the difference between first-party and third-party cookies?
Both types of cookies can serve a variety of purposes. For example, cookies are useful for remembering a user’s preferences. A first-party cookie will log this preference data in discrete events rather than as a longer flow of behaviors across multiple sites, as would a third-party cookie.
The biggest use case of third-party cookies by far is to glean insights from a user’s behavior across the web in order to target them with advertising and tailored content later.
Websites use Consent Management Platforms to ask for user consent, track consent collection, and implement the appropriate (or no) cookies as needed. This tool is essential for relaying users’ consent to Google Analytics.
Are third-party cookies illegal?
No, they’re not. But collecting user data without consent is illegal under the regulations discussed above.
In effect, then, most third-party cookies have been made useless (at least for websites that care about compliance).
Remember, too, that the regulatory landscape is constantly changing.
New, complex legislation spurs changes to the web browsers and systems that the whole world uses every day. These big changes filter down into the smaller tools that websites use to measure their traffic and engagement. As the landscape evolves, we can always expect to encounter broken code, malfunctioning website plugins, and more.
This is one of our key takeaways:
Stay aware and be intentional about what you install on your website and whether it’s working properly.
Here we should note that the term “cookieless tracking” is a bit of a misnomer.
Third-party cookies are being phased out on Google Chrome in 2025. Older methods of tracking web analytics relied on them heavily, so the scope of this change in recent years has been quite significant.
First-party cookies aren’t going anywhere. They’ll still be essential for understanding how users engage with your website, but the constantly changing privacy landscape and platform updates mean that they’ll be used in new and increasingly constrained ways.
In fact, these regulatory changes and the third-party cookie phase-out are what spurred the creation of the newest version of Google’s web analytics platform.
Privacy and Google Analytics 4
The shift from Universal Analytics (UA, the legacy version of the platform) to Google Analytics 4 (the newest version) is now complete. As of July 2024, all historical data stored in Universal Analytics properties is now unavailable.
GA4 is a robust platform. This upgrade from UA to GA4 introduced many up-to-date consent compliance features.
What’s the key difference between UA and GA4?
The core difference between these platforms is how their data models group incoming engagement data.
We won’t get too in the weeds, but the key takeaway is that GA4 allows for a much more granular and customizable understanding of how visitors are engaging with your website.
(If you’re curious, this article details the technical differences between the platforms in greater detail.)
Privacy features are integral to GA4.
The event-based structure of GA4 allows it to collect first-party data more seamlessly and in new ways that reduce privacy concerns.
It’s possible to collect user engagement data on GA4 without using third-party cookies or collecting IP addresses. This is done through first-party cookies. When users decline consent requests, these data gaps are filled using GA4’s Consent Mode.
What is Consent Mode?
Consent Mode is a feature that you can enable in your GA4 properties that ensures your tracking mechanisms properly adapt to user preferences. Google describes it as a tool that allows websites to collect data on website conversions while fully respecting users’ consent settings.
When Consent Mode is enabled, you’re then able to turn on a “behavioral modeling” feature that works to fill in the blanks in your analytics data through machine learning.
In a nutshell, here’s how it works:
This process is driven by machine learning. Although it’s still a relatively new technology and will keep evolving, it’s extremely helpful and gives us something much closer to the full data picture.
Learn more about Consent Mode with this list of FAQs.
Is Consent Mode mandatory?
Yes. As of March 2024, Consent Mode is now mandatory for all websites that use Google Analytics and/or Google Ads.
Without Consent Mode, you risk noncompliance with key European and other regulations. Not enabling Consent Mode will also make collecting data for users in many jurisdictions around the world and/or who reject cookie consent essentially impossible. The data that you would collect would be incomplete and give you a warped view of events, engagement, and conversions on your website.
But by enabling Consent Mode, you’ll stay compliant and be able to use helpful GA4 features that fill in gaps in your analytics.
How to Implement Consent Mode and Behavioral Modeling
Let’s dive into the details about exactly how to ensure these features are enabled in your GA4 properties. First, some important clarification:
We’ll take a look at each of these elements below.
Enabling Consent Mode
There are two ways Consent Mode can be enabled on your website depending on how you currently manage user consent preferences.
If you take the manual route, here’s what you’ll need to know:
First, you need to establish a default consent state for when users first arrive on your website. The default should be consent denial. Within your site’s code, add a script that establishes these defaults before the main Google Tag Manager script begins.
Next, update your hard-coded cookie consent banner to communicate user choices (and effectively override the default settings) by adding a new script:
From here, navigate to your Google Tag Manager. You’ll need to enable “Consent Overview” to ensure that GA4 picks up on the changes you’ve made manually and so that you can further customize the consent settings for tags if needed.
Here’s Google’s technical guide to implementing these coded changes. This video overview also explains the steps in greater detail if you’re curious:
Remember: In most cases, websites already use Google-certified Consent Management Platforms and will not need to handle these steps manually. Double-check what tool your website uses if you’re unsure.
If you do already use a CMP, explore its settings or reach out to its support team to confirm that Consent Mode has been activated for your properties.
Understanding Conversion Modeling
When Consent Mode is activated and running smoothly, your GA4 instance should be able to automatically model conversion data to help fill in data gaps.
Why is this necessary?
If a user declines consent but ultimately converts on your website (defined in GA4 as triggering a “Key Event”), their initial source will be reported only as “Direct.” They’ll be added to a bucket of unattributed conversions. This isn’t terribly helpful for understanding your website’s marketing performance.
Conversion modeling brings back attribution by mixing machine learning and observable data (either consented or highly limited, anonymized session start data). This diagram explains the value of Conversion Modeling:
In this example, 20 users out of 100 converted. Without conversion modeling, the 10 of those users who declined consent are reported in GA4 as coming from a Direct source. Conversion modeling uses a mix of data to resort those users’ sources more accurately.
For marketers, conversion modeling is arguably the most important of GA4’s new AI- and privacy-related features to understand.
Conversion modeling should also occur in your GA4 properties automatically once Consent Mode is enabled. You don’t need to manually enable it.
However, know that you’ll gain the most useful insights from this feature if your website if your website generates enough conversions to provide Google with enough data to make predictions:
Here’s a helpful guide to conversion modeling if you want to learn more.
Behavioral Modeling in Consent Mode
For many websites, GA4 offers an additional feature that fills in gaps in your analytics: behavioral modeling.
This feature pulls from observable data and predictive, AI-driven insights to help you estimate the exact events and interactions that occur across your website.
It’s important to note first that not all websites can use behavioral modeling through Consent Mode. Google lays out these eligibility requirements:
Why does Google set these requirements? For the behavioral modeling system to work correctly, it needs enough data to learn from. Without enough input data from both consented and unconsented users, the system is unable to make meaningful predictions.
If your website meets these requirements, great! We’ll explain below how to ensure behavioral modeling is enabled in your GA4 properties.
If your website does not meet these requirements, don’t worry. Of everything discussed in this guide, Consent Mode and conversion modeling are the most important for 1) ensuring compliance and 2) learning about your big-picture marketing performance. Behavioral modeling provides a more granular look at specific interactions on your website, but unless you have highly robust digital marketing practices, you likely won’t be missing much or any data that you would have previously used.
Remember that conversions are what create ROI for your marketing efforts, not smaller events.
Enabling Behavioral Modeling
Here’s a quick explanation of the implementation process for behavioral modeling:
Items to note in this explainer:
That’s it—turning on behavioral modeling is a simple process with only one manual step for most websites. Here’s where to turn on the correct reporting option for that last step:
Setting your property’s reporting identity to “blended” tells Google to activate the behavioral modeling system and begin incorporated predicted data into your analytics reports.
Want a closer look at how GA4’s modeling systems work and how to enable behavioral modeling? Here’s an overview from Google:
Next Steps
For Nexus Marketing clients, contact your Account Manager if you have any questions about this guide, your GA4 properties, and whether Consent Mode is activated for them. We can help you check and determine the appropriate next steps.
If You’ve Already Implemented Consent Mode
We mentioned above that broken functionalities are to be expected in the coming months and years. Some websites are already seeing issues with traffic attribution as Google fine-tunes its approach to privacy regulation adherence.
Depending on the mix of tools installed on your site and your GA4 settings, your data reporting not be working properly.
How can you tell? Here are a few signs that something isn’t working:
Now may be the right time to quickly double-check your GA4 properties to look for any strange patterns or traffic drops.
Once they’re identified, the process of troubleshooting and correcting them shouldn’t be too difficult.
This is a rich (and complicated) topic that won’t be going away anytime soon, so we encourage you to keep learning about third-party cookie deprecation, cookieless tracking, and GA4. Here are a few resources that we’ve found helpful:
AI’s Impact on the SEO Content Creation Process
/in Common Questions/by Rafi NorbergWith the platform achieving over 100 million active users in just under two months since its release, it’s become clear to all digital marketers that ChatGPT, an AI-powered tool, isn’t going anywhere.
While AI-generated content can seem daunting for many digital marketers, the team at Nexus Marketing views it as an opportunity. As part of our commitment to providing high-quality content, we leverage ChatGPT to streamline parts of the content creation process and add educational value to our articles.
This guide will walk you through how we use ChatGPT to improve our results for our clients while maintaining a “by humans, for humans” approach.
Our position on fully AI-generated content
While ChatGPT is a powerful tool for streamlining content creation workflows, we never use it to fully generate SEO content. This is due to a few reasons:
To ensure ideal SEO performance, it’s important to uphold the “by humans, for humans” approach. That means using ChatGPT to help with the tasks outlined below without publishing its words verbatim.
Nexus Marketing’s ChatGPT use cases
1. Generating content outlines
One of the first steps of our content creation is outlining, and ChatGPT plays an important role in starting the process on the right foot. We use ChatGPT to generate wireframe outlines of general ideas for the content. Then, the writers combine the wireframe with our in-depth subject matter, UX, and SEO knowledge to make it into something new.
The prompt: Generate an outline for an FAQ guide educational blog post about Google Ad Grants best practices for nonprofit professionals who have never heard of the program before.
The response:
I. Introduction
II. What is Google Ad Grants?
III. How can my nonprofit organization qualify for Google Ad Grants?
IV. What are the key features and limitations of Google Ad Grants?
V. How can I create effective Google Ad Grants campaigns?
VI. How can I measure the success of my Google Ad Grants campaigns?
VII. Are there any additional resources or support available?
VIII. Conclusion
2. Writing meta descriptions
ChatGPT plays a valuable role in generating potential meta descriptions for content. We use the tool to quickly create meta descriptions that we adjust afterward. Instead of asking for meta descriptions based on generic, one-word topics, we take the client’s intended audience and offerings into account. Then, we modify the meta description to ensure relevance and precision.
The prompt: Generate a meta description for an ultimate-guide style blog post about Google Ad Grants for nonprofit professionals who are new to the program.
ChatGPT’s response: Unlock the power of Google Ad Grants for nonprofits. Maximize your online impact and raise awareness with this comprehensive guide for new program participants.
3. Proofreading copy
Our team harnesses the power of ChatGPT to proofread and refine written content. By providing already written passages, we request ChatGPT to proofread, correct grammatical mistakes, tighten the language and improve clarity. The objective is to optimize the content for readability, logical flow, and coherence.
It’s important to note that we never directly copy the rewritten content from ChatGPT. Instead, our team takes inspiration from the suggested changes and incorporates them into their own writing. This ensures that our content maintains a human quality that attracts readers.
The prompt: Proofread the following paragraph for clarity, logical flow, and grammatical mistakes:
In today’s digital age, nonprofit organizations strive to create a meaningful impact and extend their reach to make a difference in the world. However, limited marketing budgets often pose significant challenges. That’s where Google Ad Grants comes in as a game-changing opportunity. In this educational article, we will delve into the world of Google Ad Grants and explore how nonprofit organizations can harness its power to maximize their online presence, raise awareness, and drive meaningful engagement. Whether you’re new to the concept or seeking to optimize your existing strategy, this comprehensive guide will equip you with the knowledge and insights needed to leverage Google Ad Grants successfully. Get ready to unlock new possibilities and propel your organization’s mission to greater heights in the digital realm.
ChatGPT’s response:
In today’s digital landscape, nonprofit organizations strive to make a meaningful impact and extend their reach to create positive change in the world. However, limited marketing budgets often present significant challenges. Enter Google Ad Grants, a game-changing opportunity that empowers nonprofits. This comprehensive educational article delves into the world of Google Ad Grants, guiding nonprofit professionals on how to maximize their online presence, raise awareness, and foster meaningful engagement. Whether you’re new to the concept or seeking to optimize your existing strategy, this guide equips you with the knowledge and insights needed to leverage Google Ad Grants successfully. Unlock new possibilities and propel your organization’s mission to greater heights in the digital realm.
4. Generating stories/examples
The content team uses ChatGPT to generate stories or example scenarios to enrich the content. These stories are helpful for illustrating key concepts that are discussed in the content and the problems that the content’s tips will help the audience solve. The goal of including example stories is to frame the information in a compelling and realistic way instead of relying on abstract concepts.
By reading this example passage, the reader can better understand how Google Ad Grants can maximize traffic to their nonprofit’s website and convert casual visitors into active supporters:
The prompt: Write an example story for an article educating nonprofit professionals about why they should pursue Google Ad Grants. The story’s takeaway should be that pursuing Google Ad Grants is an easy and cost-effective way to spread awareness of your cause.
ChatGPT’s response:
Imagine a nonprofit organization called “Global Health Alliance” dedicated to providing medical assistance in underserved communities. The organization struggled to reach a wider audience and raise funds to support its critical initiatives. However, after learning about Google Ad Grants, they decided to give it a try. With the help of expert guidance, Global Health Alliance created compelling ad campaigns that specifically targeted keywords related to their cause. Within weeks, their online visibility skyrocketed, attracting a surge of website traffic and generating significant interest in their mission. Thanks to Google Ad Grants, Global Health Alliance quickly realized that pursuing this program was not only easy but also an incredibly cost-effective way to spread awareness of their cause, reach a broader audience, and make a greater impact in the world.
5. Brainstorming call-to-action language
Crafting effective call-to-action (CTA) language is essential for driving conversions for clients. Our team leverages ChatGPT by asking it specific questions to align the CTA with the client’s target audience and desired tone. Also, with ChatGPT’s browsing mode, we can quickly collect data from across the Internet to support our claims.
The results from ChatGPT serve as inspiration, which our copywriters adapt and customize to fit the client’s context, ensuring the CTAs are engaging and relevant.
The prompt: Write an engaging, click-worthy CTA for a business that promotes Google Ad Grants management to nonprofit professionals. The tone should be professional, yet eager and optimistic. The CTA should be around 3 sentences in total.
ChatGPT’s response: Ignite your nonprofit’s growth with our expert Google Ad Grants management. Maximize your online reach, raise funds, and make a lasting impact. Unlock the power of Google Ad Grants and propel your cause to new heights.
6. Optimizing for snippets
Snippets are concise sections of content that appear on Google’s search results pages, providing quick answers to user queries. ChatGPT helps us optimize snippet-bait sections by making them concise, direct, and highly relevant. Our team prompts ChatGPT to answer specific questions or refine existing snippet baits or FAQs, allowing us to enhance their performance and visibility in search results.
The prompt: Concisely answer the question “What are Google Ad Grants” for an audience of nonprofit marketing professionals. This answer will be targeted to secure a featured snippet on a Google results page.
ChatGPT’s response: Google Ad Grants is a unique program offering eligible nonprofit organizations up to $10,000 per month in free advertising budget on Google Ads. Designed to empower nonprofits, these grants provide the opportunity to raise awareness, drive website traffic, and promote their causes to a wider audience. By leveraging Google Ad Grants, nonprofit marketing professionals can maximize their online presence and make a greater impact in the digital landscape.
7. Generating FAQs
FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) provide valuable information to users and enhance the user experience. ChatGPT assists us in generating relevant questions related to specific topics. These questions help enrich your content and address user intent. Our team evaluates and refines the generated questions to ensure they are valuable additions to the FAQ section.
The prompt: List 10 frequently asked questions about Google Ad Grants that nonprofit professionals might have when trying to determine if they should pursue the program as part of their marketing strategy.
ChatGPT’s response:
ChatGPT can also quickly create FAQ schema code for your content, which is beneficial for SEO.
8. Sourcing statistics
Statistics add credibility and educational value to your content. ChatGPT’s Web Browsing mode assists us in sourcing interesting statistics and credible resources related to specific topics. Our team ensures that ChatGPT provides sources to verify the relevance and freshness of the statistics. For up-to-date information, we double-check ChatGPT’s suggestions with manual research.
The prompt: List interesting statistics about Google Ad Grants that I can use in an ultimate guide-style article for an audience of nonprofit professionals and provide your sources.
ChatGPT’s response: Here are some interesting statistics about Google Ad Grants that you can use in your ultimate guide-style article:
9. Generating ideas for original images
Providing custom-branded images helps signal an article’s educational value, which can boost its SEO ranking. The content team leverages ChatGPT to make engaging and informative images that complement written content.
The prompt: Give me 3 unique image ideas for an ultimate guide-style article about Google Ad Grants. Think along the lines of Venn diagrams, flow charts, and themed images that visually represent the information in an engaging and educational way.
ChatGPT’s response:
We hope this guide provides you with insights into how we use ChatGPT to enhance our content creation process. By leveraging this AI-powered tool in a strategic and thoughtful manner, we strive to deliver exceptional results while maintaining the human touch and expertise that define our approach.
If you have questions or want to learn more about how we’re using AI to continually improve our content for clients, please don’t hesitate to contact your Nexus Account Manager or Copywriter.
Deciphering SEO News: The Infamous 2024 Google Leak
/in Deciphering SEO News/by David MyersThe dust has settled after another big news story in the SEO world: a purported leak of internal Google data about how its ranking algorithm works.
If you’re plugged into the SEO sphere, you likely caught wind of the drama. But if it’s news to you, you’re not alone. Either way, you likely have some questions.
Now that we have more context about the leak, the Nexus Marketing team wanted to offer a quick overview and our take on its implications for your organization’s SEO.
What happened?
On May 5th, 2024, SEO thought leader Rand Fishkin received news of leaked Google API documentation from a source claiming that it came from Google’s secretive Search Division. On May 27th, Fishkin published a full write-up:
It immediately became the biggest topic in the SEO world in years—the buzz eclipsed even the very recent rollout of AI Overviews.
Since then, the leaked information has been a major point of controversy. We’ll dig into why it’s controversial among SEO professionals, but first, let’s clarify:
Was this a leak of the actual Google ranking algorithm?
No. At this point, it’s been pretty much disproven.
Here’s how SEO expert, Eli Schwartz, put it in a recent newsletter:
What information did the Google leak include?
So, what exactly did the leaked Google API documentation include?
It includes detailed lists of over 14,000 named protocols that Google’s Document AI Warehouse potentially uses to understand and sort information.
Some of the specific protocols that caught people’s attention include:
siteFocusScore
A potential representation of a site’s topical authority, or how closely it sticks to its relevant subject matter
siteRadius
A potential measure of how closely a given page aligns with the site’s core topics
EffortScore
A potential estimate of the relative effort that went into content creation on a page, related to Google’s PageQuality measures
freshdocs
A “link value multiplier” that appears to weigh the value of links from newer pages over links built on older pages
fullLeftContext and fullRightContext
Protocols that appear to tell Google to interpret the surrounding context of a link’s anchor text, meaning anchor text like “click here” can still be understood
Mentions of the NavBoost system
A system of protocols that likely reranks results based on their click metrics (as an approximation of content quality, user satisfaction, etc.)
Based on this information, many SEO professionals quickly assumed that these or similar factors are used in the Google Search algorithms to understand and rank content out in the wild. The thinking is that if Google has supposedly built these systems and features, they’re likely deployed elsewhere.
Note how often we use “potential” in these descriptions—remember that we don’t know for sure whether these factors are actually included in Google Search algorithms.
Want to go deeper? This SearchEngineLand article explains more of the specific protocols included in the leak. However, keep in mind that this article was published before we learned more about the actual provenance of the data—take its analyses of the leak’s SEO implications with a grain of salt.
Want an even deeper dive? (Not highly recommended, but it’s definitely interesting!) Here’s a comprehensive table of all the protocols found in the leaked documentation:
How did the SEO world react and why?
The news of the Google leak created waves immediately. First reactions ran the gamut from measured skepticism to frenzied anger to jaded dismissal.
Now that a few weeks have passed and we’ve learned more about the leaks, the buzz has calmed significantly.
First, some context. Whenever we get news of big Google shake-ups, algorithm changes, and hints about how the ranking algorithm works, a similar swarm of reactions occurs.
The SEO space is as diverse as the internet itself. When websites use released information to make assumptions about updated SEO best practices, not all of them will reap benefits. Some may actually see decreased SEO performance. No two sites will experience an algorithm update the same way or see the same impacts from making similar changes to their content.
This, understandably, can create frustration and blame-casting.
Some SEO professionals then assume that Google intentionally misleads them. Seemingly contradictory statements or mixed results from implementing assumption-based changes fuel the fire.
Many immediately thought the leaked information came directly from the core Search ranking algorithms. Many of the signals and features included in the leak do seem to contradict past statements from Google about how Search works. Confirmation bias set in, and we saw some angry and jaded reactions.
But fast forward just a few days.
A clearer picture of the leak emerged. Here’s how Search Engine Journal article put it in late May, 2024:
“Many SEOs [have come] to the conclusion that the alleged Google data leak was not a leak, did not contain ranking algorithm secrets, was five years out of date, and did not show anything new. While that’s not how everyone feels about it, SEOs in general don’t tend to agree about anything.”
The leak is complicated. And while some in the space distrust Google’s statements, jumping to black-and-white conclusions one way or the other is never the best move.
Why Does it Matter?
All this context might be confusing. We get it, so why are we sharing it?
We want to arm our clients and partners (and everyone else) with knowledge and a healthy dose of skepticism.
If you work in marketing and encounter SEO news and trends, you need to understand why we see a range of dramatic reactions to industry developments as they break. These reactions tend to die down after a few days, and then the real takeaways emerge after that (and we’ll tell you about them).
Extra Context: Why is the algorithm a secret, anyway?
To be fair, Google does very carefully word its releases and public discussions of algorithm details. Why?
If Google were to fully publicize its algorithmic ranking factors or even discuss a single new one in great depth, it could wreak havoc on the search results. Here’s a hypothetical:
A little dramatic, maybe, but that’s the general idea why Google is so secretive about the exact makeup of its ranking algorithms.
What does it mean for your website?
Honestly, not much.
If you follow tried-and-true best practices, create quality content for your users, build links to it, and maintain your website’s health, you’re already ahead!
But even if the leaked information did come directly from the Search algorithm, it wouldn’t have taught us much that we didn’t already know or couldn’t piece together.
If you pay attention to Google’s big-picture changes (like their Helpful Content Update, spam crackdown, and the rollout of AI Overviews), you can already infer that more deeply understanding the context and quality of content has been a big priority. It makes sense that Google would want to be capable of piecing together the full context of the language surrounding a link, for instance.
But if you’re already creating excellent, user-centric, well-organized content, this shouldn’t even be a concern.
Here’s our take:
When SEO professionals take leaks, rumors, clickbait strategies, and Google’s hints too literally, it’s no surprise when they see mixed results.
Google’s ranking system is extremely complex, with thousands and thousands of ranking factors constantly in flux.
It’s not a checklist or recipe of exact measurements to get just right. And you definitely don’t succeed at SEO by taking dramatic swings at big strategy changes based on assumptions and expecting all-or-nothing results.
SEO success comes from building up your website’s quality, helping your users, and creating a respected brand. You’ll satisfy algorithm signals along the way, and Google will learn to recognize you for your hard work.
To sum it all up, we love this quote from SEO thought leader, Eli Schwartz:
“The user pays your bills, not the search engines.”
Learn from a balanced mix of sources—Google’s statements, firsthand trial and error, experts in the field, and your audiences’ needs.
This is exactly how we approach SEO at Nexus Marketing, and it’s served our clients well for a decade now. Want to learn more? We’d love to hear from you.
Have any questions or want to learn more about our approach to SEO?
Contact us or reach out directly to your Nexus points of contact at any time!
SEO for Nonprofits: Quick Start Guide
/in Client & Industry Resources/by David MyersA user does a quick Google search for a program or service that your nonprofit provides.
What if your nonprofit was the very first thing they see?
Search engine optimization (SEO) isn’t just for big for-profit brands—any organization that depends on reaching online audiences to promote its programs, services, and products can benefit from an SEO strategy.
Yes, that includes nonprofit organizations! In 2023, NP Tech for Good found that just 37% of nonprofits have dedicated SEO strategies. Considering the long-term value that effective SEO generates, this is a huge missed opportunity for the sector and communities around the world.
SEO is completely learnable and built on straightforward technical and marketing concepts. We’ll cover them all here:
Ready to grow your nonprofit’s services and product revenue?
What is SEO?
Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of technically maintaining your website and publishing high-quality, keyword-optimized content to help a website appear higher in organic search engine results.
Within the broader field of SEO, you’ll encounter some more specific practices:
Quick context: Organic search results are any that are not paid ads (like the Google Ads you’re likely used to seeing). Search engine results pages are often called SERPs, which we’ll use in the rest of this guide.
What are the Goals of SEO?
Organizations of all types and sizes use SEO strategies to rank higher for their target keywords. By ranking higher, they can:
Spoiler Alert: Effective, ongoing SEO has a powerful flywheel effect.
In other words, when your website is a trusted source of high-quality content, it’s more likely to rank higher for a wider range of keywords, further growing your visibility (and incoming customers).
Why SEO Matters for Nonprofits
SEO is a smart investment for many nonprofit organizations for several reasons. These include:
Digital Advertising vs. SEO for Nonprofits?
Organic search SEO is often weighed against paid search ads, with many nonprofits opting to increase their ad spend rather than launch an SEO strategy.
Is there one right option? No, the nonprofit sector and organizations’ revenue streams are too diverse to generalize about optimal strategies.
However, for some types of nonprofits, SEO is a major missed opportunity. It’s an ideal way to build awareness and demand for programs, services, and products that generate revenue. It’s not a great long-term choice for generating fundraising dollars.
We’ve gathered a few salient points from the most recent M+R Benchmarks Report (our favorite source for up-to-date insights on the state of nonprofit digital marketing):
The story is different for every nonprofit and mix of revenue streams. But looking at those last numbers, it’s clear that for many organizations there are much more cost-effective channels (like SEO) for generating leads. Looking at you, social media ads.
Here’s how the report summed it up:
Essential Points to Remember
There are a few big-picture points to keep in mind to succeed with SEO for your nonprofit. Here are the essential reminders that we often discuss with our SEO clients:
Simply put, demand generation should be the overarching goal of SEO, not leading metrics like web traffic.
A Closer Look at SEO Goals for Nonprofits
For nonprofit organizations specifically, SEO is better for marketing some types of your offerings than others:
When you focus your SEO strategy on scalable, sales-based revenue sources, you create a much clearer path to success. Think of it like this:
While SEO can help build awareness of your mission and brand, perhaps eventually leading to donations if you capture users’ attention and contact information, the timeline of this ROI is extremely long. You’re much more likely to receive a donation from someone with a pre-existing relationship with your nonprofit.
But if you offer specific programs, services, and products that generate revenue for your mission, SEO is the key to reaching your target audiences efficiently.
We advise our clients that short-term or fundraising-based goals are better supported with other marketing channels like direct email outreach, paid ads, social media, or specialized local SEO services. In other words, SEO should be an ongoing, foundational marketing activity on which you layer additional channels and campaigns to support specific objectives.
How SEO Works
With the context squared away, let’s get into the nitty-gritty—how does SEO work? How does a page go from unranked to dominating the SERP?
Here’s a condensed rundown of the basics of SEO:
1. Search engines like Google use crawler bots to explore the internet. They screen content, pick up on keywords and concepts, check out the links it includes, and log all of its contextual information as part of its algorithmic ranking system.
This process is called indexing. If a page cannot be indexed, it won’t appear in Google results and is likely the result of a technical issue with your website.
2. Google pays extra attention to links. When one website links to another, Google considers this a kind of vote of confidence, a little stamp of approval that says, “I trust this source enough to show it to my audience.” Over time, pages accrue backlink profiles of all the other pages on the internet that link to them.
3. Pages are analyzed and ranked for EEAT. EEAT stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It’s a helpful shorthand for understanding how Google defines truly “helpful,” rankable content:
There’s some overlap between these concepts, but taken as a whole, they give us a reliable picture of the content Google wants to serve its users.
Extra Context: The Google Algorithm
A combination of algorithmic and human scoring—from real content reviewers—is used to gauge how highly a web page should rank and for which keywords.
Google also uses AI-based natural language processing systems to interpret content and map interrelated concepts, which has allowed it to better understand content quality over time.
Google’s ranking algorithm is notoriously complex and constantly changing, with hundreds of different ranking factors being tweaked, prioritized, and deprioritized over time. Historically, Google has been secretive about the exact makeup of the algorithm, but a recent leak (huge news in the SEO world!) gave us more direct insight into its current ranking factors than ever before.
4. When users search keywords or longer phrases, Google delivers a mix of content. Google makes assumptions about the user’s intent from the keyword—what they’re trying to accomplish with their search—which informs the mix of SERP features that it delivers.
These always include organic results, pages that have organically demonstrated their EEAT to Google. Most SERPs also include pay-per-click (PPC) ads, which are indicated with “Sponsored” taglines.
SERPs usually also include features designed to quickly provide answers and satisfy that particular user intent.
Extra Context: Types of SERP Features
The biggest new SERP features to be aware of are AI Overviews (more on these below), but other common features include:
Google scrapes relevant content to populate these SERP features. This is usually an indication of high quality. If your page gets highlighted in a Featured Snippet, you’ll secure even more valuable SERP real estate!
5. User engagement signals impact the ranks over time. Based on how users engage with the results on SERPs, Google’s ranking algorithm refines its inferences and makes adjustments over time.
Extra Context: User Engagement Signals
When Google users interact (or don’t interact) with results on SERPs, it generates a measurable user engagement signal. The most important examples include:
These metrics indirectly measure how well your content satisfies users’ queries and the search intent for that particular keyword.
Although Google has long denied that engagement metrics play central roles in the SEO ranking process, that story is changing. Many SEO experts predict that Google’s increased ability to understand content, engagement metrics, and their correlations will make engagement metrics more prominent parts of the ranking algorithm over time. The takeaway? User experience and content quality are prerequisites for success!
SERPs never stand still for long. In addition to user engagement signals, rankings can change for all kinds of reasons:
It’s important to keep track of your SEO performance and identify slippages so that you can make targeted content improvements—we’ll explain this process in the playbook below.
6. Google comes to recognize some domains as more authoritative than others. As a website publishes more high-quality SEO-optimized content and accrues backlinks, Google will recognize that domain as a reliable source of helpful content about its core topics. It then gets prioritized in more SERPs—a powerful flywheel effect that amplifies your SEO success.
To measure a domain’s authoritativeness, SEO professionals use a variety of proprietary metrics. At Nexus Marketing, we’ve long relied on Moz’s Domain Authority score as a rough gauge for how well-established a website is in the eyes of Google.
Key Elements of SEO-Optimized Content
Ok, so you understand how Google ranks content. In tactical terms, what are the specific elements that your organization’s content needs to catch Google’s attention? Good question.
The Nexus team spends all day thinking about, researching, and writing SEO-optimized content for our clients and partners. Here are our top recommendations and the specific elements we always include in SEO articles.
Our Top Advice for Creating SEO Content
Our three most important rules of thumb for creating effective SEO content:
From these tips, you can probably tell that there is no one-size-fits-all SEO content template you can follow for SEO success. Stuffing keywords into a generic article and hitting publish may have worked once upon a time, but those days are long gone.
Users and Google alike want quality content from trustworthy sources. The length, structure, and complexity of your content should be tailored to the audience’s needs. If the keyword calls for a long, educational guide, that’s what you should create. If the keyword calls for very short definitions and quick bits of information about a product or service, create that content.
Elements to Optimize in SEO-Optimized Content
Even though there’s no single template for SEO content, there are specific technical elements that any web content intended to rank should include. The most important of these are:
SEO for Nonprofits in the AI Age
The rise of generative AI has been a seismic shift for the marketing world, and especially for SEO. The introduction of AI Overviews directly in SERPs has probably shaken up the industry more than any other update in decades.
However, anytime you search “AI in [insert industry here]” to learn more, you’re likely to see a slew of dramatic editorials and conflicting claims. It’s the same in the SEO space, and it’s more confusing than helpful for newcomers.
We’ve already written a few guides that spell out our positions on the implications of AI on SEO:
Misusing or misunderstanding AI can create all kinds of risks for your nonprofit’s website. If you don’t have time to read these articles, we hope you take away these key points:
Your Nonprofit’s First SEO Playbook
Ready to get started? Here are the core steps for launching an SEO strategy for your nonprofit for the first time.
1. Check your site’s technical health.
Start with a quick website check-up:
For complete coverage and diagnostics, we recommend conducting a full technical SEO audit. Please contact us to learn more about this process and what it entails.
2. Define your objectives.
What are the core organizational objectives that you want to accomplish with SEO?
Remember, these should revolve around demand generation. Is there a particular offering or aspect of your nonprofit’s operations that you want to focus on first? These might include:
Under these objectives, you’ll set more tactical goals, like reaching Page 1 ranks for a certain number of your target keywords or increasing conversions on a specific landing page by X%.
3. Determine your nonprofit’s first target keyword.
Based on your most important objective, choose your first target keyword to pursue.
Ideal keywords for quick wins live in the “Goldilocks Zone” of high demand and low competition. This means it’s a topic searched by qualified leads without a ton of other high-authority websites crowding the SERPs with standout content. Writing a stellar article that educates this audience and introduces your offering can drive value relatively quickly.
SEO tools often have their own proprietary methods of gauging a keyword’s competitiveness. Moz’s Keyword Explorer is one of the easiest to use.
But you know your space (and your competitors and peer organizations), too—reviewing the existing SERPs of potential keywords can also give you a quick idea of who’s pursuing them and the caliber of content you’ll be up against.
SEO agencies can help you lay out a more comprehensive keyword strategy and roadmap based on your objectives and the competitiveness of your space. This is one of the first steps that we take with new clients here at Nexus. Thorough upfront keyword research pays off!
4. Develop a user-centric content strategy.
Outline an article that will help you rank for your target keyword. You may already have an article that could rank if you update and improve it!
We recommend following these steps to sketch out a winning content strategy:
1. Check the competition.
Review the SERP for the target keyword and read the content that’s already ranking. What does it include? What does it do well? How could your content go further?
2. Consider your audience’s intent.
Consider what the audience really wants when they search this keyword—quick answers, a thorough guide, or a product or service page?
3. Analyze the SERP.
Take a look at the additional topics and snippets that the SERP includes, and consider how you can include these topics to catch Google’s attention.
4. Draft a title.
Write an enticing title that includes the target keyword and is between 50 and 60 characters long.
5. Outline your headings.
Outline the core topics and subtopics that the article will cover using a logical order of H2 and H3 headings. Make sure to include the keyword and natural variants throughout the headings.
6. Flesh out the outline.
Expand your outline with the same level of (or ideally, more) detail and background that other ranking content includes.
7. Go a step further.
Identify spots to inject your nonprofit’s unique take using relevant data and donor and constituent stories.
5. Consider your conversion strategy.
Before finishing your outline, take a moment to carefully think through how you’ll ask readers to convert—take a specific action that supports your organizational objective.
Depending on the context, this target conversion action might be:
Think about your audience, their goals for searching the target keyword, and how your offerings align with that user intent. Pinpoint sections in your outline where you can promote your offering and ask users to take action.
These calls-to-action (CTAs) are often formatted as buttons, banners, and branded graphics that catch the eye. However you handle your CTAs, make sure they link straight to a landing page where users can take the target action. Common landing pages include contact or signup forms, lead capture pages to collect email addresses, and specific product/service pages.
6. Write, publish, and index your content.
Now comes the fun part!
Draft your article, give it a short and intuitive URL that includes the target keyword, review your draft, and make revisions. Bonus points for engaging visuals and videos—users and Google appreciate them! Make sure that your article is also attributed to an author, ideally a real person at your nonprofit. A more generic byline simply listing your organization can also suffice.
Hit publish, and then head over to Google Search Console. Search your new article’s URL and “request indexing.” This will fast-track the indexing and ranking process for your content
7. Start accruing backlinks to your nonprofit’s SEO content.
Once your content is live, you can begin the process of building backlinks to it.
Start with internal links. Identify several other pages on your nonprofit’s website where a link to your new content would make sense and enhance the user experience.
Next come external links to your content from other websites. This is a diverse practice all on its own. Authority-building by securing backlink placements with external partners is a core part of our process here at Nexus. The most common ways to secure backlinks include:
Extra Context: Ethical Link-Building
Over the years, building backlinks has seen a lot of practices and trends come and go.
There is such a thing as unethical and improper link-building.
Spammy websites may use shady practices to build tons of links to their content in comments, forums, and garbled AI-generated content. Do not use these practices, and don’t hire any SEO vendors that use them.
If it detects that a site is violating its spam policies, Google can issue manual actions. These will directly penalize a website and prevent it from ranking well in the future. Not to mention, Google algorithm updates increasingly combat these practices and the rise of spammy AI content head-on. Trying to take a shortcut will result in headaches, not success.
Instead, accrue backlinks organically. Good content naturally secures links as it travels the internet. Reach out to your actual partners and peers to ask for links and blogging opportunities. These natural-looking links are much more valuable and worth your time.
Extra Context: The Importance of Brand-Building
Building brand recognition is increasingly important for SEO, although often in an indirect way.
In the age of AI, Google pays extra attention to names and brands that it understands to be recognized, connected, and respected in their topic areas. Cross-blogging with other websites is one way to build your nonprofit’s brand, but any positive publicity online can help.
At Nexus Marketing, our extensive partnership network has been a core part of our clients’ successes.
By building relationships with hundreds of high-quality, recognized brands in the mission-driven space, we can plug our clients right into the action.
Other activities like industry speaking engagements, influencer partnerships, and various digital PR opportunities all build your brand’s profile, as well. We’ve even built out an entire community, NXUnite, dedicated to fostering these connections between nonprofits, associations, businesses, and their audiences!
8. Track and analyze your page’s performance.
As you continue building links and your brand’s visibility, keep track of how your content is performing.
If you’ve invested in a dedicated SEO tool or professional SEO services, this is easy. You can access performance reports or receive them straight from your SEO agency—check out how we handle reporting with easy-to-use dashboards.
On your own, you can also use Google Search Console and Google Analytics to track your content’s visibility, traffic, and more. Just remember to dig deeper than topline numbers. Actual conversions—the number of users who take your target conversion action—are ultimately the most important metric for success.
This is why it’s essential to have a clear conversion strategy on your SEO pages. When you understand exactly what you’re asking readers to do and link your CTAs straight to the place to take action, you can easily measure clickthroughs to that landing page and the number of form completions.
9. Make improvements over time.
Finally, take the insights you’ve learned from keyword research, the content creation process, and your page’s performance metrics to make improvements over time.
It’s a good idea to regularly revisit your SEO content to audit its performance and compare it to fresher content on the SERP. We typically schedule these kinds of “refresh” activities for our clients because Google highly values fresh, actively maintained content. This is also when you can make improvements to your conversion strategy if needed.
Hiring an SEO Agency for Your Nonprofit
Organizations of all shapes and sizes hire SEO agencies to handle the ongoing and day-to-day work of running an SEO strategy.
Successful strategies take dedicated time and effort, which is why they’re often postponed by busy organizations. Plus, SEO is a long-term strategy—it takes time to reap the full benefits—so faster marketing channels may receive attention first.
SEO agencies bring specialized experience and technical know-how that most nonprofits don’t have in-house.
Working with experts is the most effective way to get an SEO strategy off the ground, especially when they offer:
These comprehensive services can support the whole lifecycle of your nonprofit’s SEO strategy, turning it from a time-consuming activity for your team to a revenue-generating channel that runs in the background. The right vendor will work with you to develop a custom strategy, maintain the health of your website, and let you be as hands-off (or hands-on) as you want.
So how do you hire one? We recommend these general steps:
1. Learn more about SEO services.
As you can tell from this guide, the world of SEO services and practices is diverse.
Different agencies offer a wide variety of services, ranging from full custom SEO engagements and content creation to periodic technical check-ins. Consider the scale of support you want.
Also, consider your timeframe—ongoing strategy execution (recommended for long-term SEO success) or one-time projects (which can work if you have very specific needs). Keep in mind that SEO takes time to bear fruit. Overnight results are not likely.
Learn more about our SEO client engagements to get a sense of the range of services and options available.
2. Define your needs and objectives.
Do you have specific organizational objectives that you want to accomplish with SEO?
Or do you simply know that it’s a neglected channel in your nonprofit’s marketing strategy?
Either answer is fine! It’s useful to understand your reasons for investing in SEO before getting in touch with vendors. This will ensure you both come to the table with clear expectations about your needs and the best potential solutions.
3. Set a monthly budget.
Most SEO agency services are paid monthly, similar to other marketing and advertising services.
Although you may ultimately budget a total annual or quarterly spend depending on the terms of your contract with an agency, they typically charge an hourly rate for their services. You’ll purchase a set number of hours for your engagement to be delivered each month, with your total cost based on the hourly rate and projected over the course of the engagement.
This means your monthly budget for SEO will be the most helpful financial number to bring into the research and vetting process.
4. Research specialized vendors.
Now it’s time to start researching potential SEO vendors.
Google searches, chats with peers in other organizations, and calls for recommendations on LinkedIn are all reliable starting points.
The nonprofit space is distinct from the for-profit B2C and B2B worlds. Your audience has different needs and interests than generalist services will likely be able to satisfy. Link- and brand-building, essential for sustained SEO success, will also be challenging for generalist agencies.
Look for agencies that have:
(Quick note: We check all these boxes, and we’d love to chat!)
5. Dig deeper into your candidates.
When you have a shortlist of candidates, look at their track records. Check out things like:
6. Chat with your top vendors.
Now, reach out to your top options by requesting information about their services or how they’d support your organization.
At this point, agencies will likely walk you through their approach to SEO and case studies of their past successes with clients. This is also the time to ask questions.
Note that the full process of learning more, looping in the relevant stakeholders, and securing buy-in may take a while and require multiple meetings. The right agency will be happy to adapt and make sure you’re getting all the information you need!
7. Discuss terms.
Once you’ve chosen an SEO agency, ask for a more formal outline of the proposed engagement, its terms, and the cost.
The process of discussing the contract’s terms and making adjustments may take some time, but keep in mind that SEO is a long-term marketing investment—it’s always worth ensuring you’re happy with your new partnership!
8. Prepare for onboarding!
Congrats! Your SEO strategy is about to take flight. But first, your SEO agency will likely have some onboarding steps and requests for you to take care of.
These typically include providing marketing and branding assets, answering more in-depth questionnaires about your lead generation activities and goals, and granting backend access to your website.
Why Nexus Marketing Stands Out
Nexus Marketing is the leading SEO agency in the mission-driven space.
We’ve helped diverse organizations and businesses thrive online, reach the right audiences, and build powerful brands for a decade now. Check out our case studies!
What sets us apart? Deep expertise in mission-driven subject matter and extensive, organic connections in the space.
Plus, we offer a full range of additional content creation and PR opportunities to take your brand’s online visibility to the next level. Between custom email and video production, our influencer marketing program, and constant industry speaking opportunities, we’ve got you covered. These options allow you to drive both short- and long-term ROI, unique among SEO agencies.
Please contact us or learn more about our approach. Tell us about your nonprofit’s demand generation goals, and we’ll lay out a plan to reach them.
Learn More about SEO: Recommended Resources
Want to learn more about SEO for nonprofits? Check out our recommended resources:
Finally, don’t hesitate to reach out to us with any questions. Curious about anything covered in this guide? Have a unique SEO challenge in mind? We’re always happy to chat about SEO and the latest trends!