Enterprise content marketing involves creating and sharing relevant content to attract, engage, and retain an organization’s target audience.
When enterprise content marketing is done well, it can drive tons of leads, conversions, and, ultimately, revenue. In addition, it can help with things like brand perception and awareness.
There’s a misconception that big enterprise websites rank for everything. They definitely have an advantage, but they still have to figure out what content to create and put in the work to rank.
Even with all the advantages that enterprise companies have related to the strength of their domain, as well as personnel and resources, they struggle to use SEO effectively to get more traffic.
Scale, complexity, politics, lack of strategy, lack of processes, and red tape make content marketing for enterprise companies more difficult than it is for smaller companies.
Here’s how to approach enterprise content marketing.
Getting buy-in and scaling
In enterprise organizations, it can be hard to find your way around, navigate the political landscape, and compete for resources. Don’t expect miracles right away. It can take a while to get traction. Here’s how to make progress.
Show off your successes
After you have some initial success, show that off repeatedly. Do the whole dog and pony show. Eventually, you’ll find advocates for your work and teams who want to work with you to repeat that success. Replicate your success with other teams or business units and show them off, too. Build momentum one win at a time, and eventually most of the organization will be bought in.
Also, try to get involved with any training initiatives the company may have. This way, you can showcase the success you’ve had and educate others on what to do at the same time.
When doing reporting and showcasing wins, try to show revenue generated or as close as you can get to revenue. Revenue, SQLs, MQLS, etc. It’s what executives care about, and you’re more likely to get attention.
Get promoted
As you move up higher in the org chart, it gets easier to make progress. There will be more money available, and it’ll be easier to get buy-in from executives. At a point, things typically start to get centralized, and you may see things like Centers of Excellence (CoE). As standards and processes are written, it’s easier to have everyone follow best practices. This should lead to more success and an easier time getting more buy-in. Every company seems to go through similar transitions in their SEO maturity.
Create enterprise SEO scorecards
Another tactic you can use to get things moving is to create scorecards for different product teams or different business units to showcase how each is improving across different metrics. This can help you identify areas that need additional help or may need some persuasion to get things moving. I describe how to do this in more detail in the Enterprise SEO metrics & reporting article.
Integrate with other teams
One way to get more buy-in is to show people the bigger picture. Communicate with other teams to integrate with them and then show everyone how that leads to more business success.
For instance, the paid team would love to re-market to the people who landed on your organic pages. The social team can help promote your content. If you can show execs the whole picture of how teams can help each other to grow the business, then you’ll get buy-in and resources easier. You can also ask them to help promote your content on their channels.
Align with business goals
It can also help if you can align with business goals. Pushing content around products or services the business wants to grow is a great way to get attention. Many companies have some kind of top 20 / top 50 project where they have specific things they want to push and grow. Start there, get the attention of the folks at the top, and you’ll have an easier time growing your enterprise content marketing program.
Final thoughts
There’s so much at stake in enterprise SEO and so many opportunities. Just keep pushing and building momentum one win at a time. When a company and its people finally get behind SEO, they can dominate an industry.
If you have any tips, enterprise SEO experiences you’d like to share, or questions, let me know on X or LinkedIn.
Most content today is arbitrage, simply moving information from one place to another.
Very few blog posts create new information. Most serve to remix, curate, and copycat existing content, transferring the same core information from one website to another.
If all your content does is shuffle common knowledge around, then I have bad news: the robots will eat your lunch. Generative AI is the ultimate arbitrage machine, able to churn out thousands of copycat articles faster than you ever could.
To stand out in a sea of commodity content, you have to go beyond the rote copy/pasting of information and find other ways to add value.
Thankfully, there are three ways you and your squishy human brain are uniquely qualified to add value beyond AI: experimentation, experience, and effort.
1. Experimentation: create proprietary data
The best way to add value beyond AI content is to experiment: to go into the world, test ideas, and collect new information that has never existed before.
LLMs are trained on a staggeringly vast dataset and continue to consume new information on a daily basis. But they are not omniscient. They have gaps in their knowledge: information that they haven’t been trained on, or more importantly, information that doesn’t exist yet.
When you experiment, you create something new and proprietary, unique to you and never seen before. If someone wants the information you have on offer, there’s only one place they can get it. It doesn’t exist in the data available to LLMs (at least, not yet). This is something that you, and only you, can do.
How to do it
This might sound intimidating, but experiments can be big or small, substantial projects in their own right or quick value-adds for otherwise mundane topics.
This has always been a great marketing strategy (and a great link-building tactic—everyone wants to link to original data, as the backlink data for Aira’s report shows).
But it becomes more effective in an era of near-perfect information, when the marginal cost of content creation is virtually zero and the answer to any common problem can be summoned in an instant.
There is no longer lasting value in sharing basic information: the days of getting outsized results from being the first brand to share a basic “how to” or tutorial are numbered. Today, you have to create information as well as share it.
2. Experience: dirty your hands
Anything created solely by generative AI is trapped in the realm of theory. It will always be less valuable than the same advice from an authoritative source, someone with obvious and relevant experience.
In a world where it’s easy to get answers to questions, readers will care more about the source of the answer. You can stand out from faceless AI content by proving to the reader that you have dirtied your hands, and actually experienced the thing you are writing about.
If there are fifty websites—or five hundred—offering an answer to their question, readers can afford to be discerning about the source they choose. If they want to learn about budgeting, they’ll probably pick the experienced financial advisor over the faceless CRM solution and a blog post authored by “Content Team”.
If they want to buy a new camera, they’ll prefer the reviewer that bought, used and compared actual cameras:
Creating credibility through first-person anecdotes, original product photos, and a documented testing methodology.
Over any brand that scraped product descriptions from popular ecommerce stores or wrote in theoretical statements:
No credibility in sight—just regurgitated product features without any firsthand experience.
The more crowded a topic becomes, the more important first-hand experience becomes as a method of differentiation. Your job is to prove the provenance of your advice.
How to do it
This is something we try to do regularly on the Ahrefs blog.
You can write about topics you have first-hand experience with, like Chris, an experienced agency SEO, writing our beginner’s guide to SEO reporting:
Interview people on topics that you don’t, like Mateusz surveying real-life marketers about their favorite metrics:
Provide concrete evidence of your experience, whether that’s screenshotting the tool, filming the interview, or sharing a photo of the book you referenced:
Share anecdotes and stories that provide context to the information, like SQ reflecting on his experience writing over 100 articles:
The inverse is also true: you should avoid writing about topics where you lack any experience, and can’t justify acquiring it.
3. Effort: go further than others
Most companies I see scaling AI content are cost-motivated. They are not using generative AI to create new, innovative experiences: they are trying to save money, and willing to sacrifice quality for speed of publication and reduction in headcount.
This provides a clear route of differentiation: make better things, expend more energy, and create content that is more than just words on a page.
How to do it
Many of the brands I follow (and products I pay for) earned my attention through big, effortful content campaigns.
This kind of content is rare. It is costly and difficult to create, requiring specialized skills and collaboration between different departments. But difficulty is a moat: if it’s hard to create, it can’t be instantly pumped out by any old company with any old AI tool.
Whilst it’s often hard to justify the effort and expense of these projects, it is becoming easier with every passing day. Thanks to generative AI, publishing functional, “vanilla” content—words on a page with a stock image or two—is just not a differentiator.
The more effort you expend building tools, publishing books, or creating unique experiences, the greater the likelihood that real people will remember your brand, care about your company, and eventually buy something from you.
Final thoughts
Generative AI makes it very easy to share fairly well-written, fairly accurate information, on a staggering array of topics. Humans will never beat AI at this game, and frankly, we shouldn’t try.
We need to accept the growing bifurcation of content. Let AI handle the low-end of content—basic informational content, definitions, summaries and synopses, listicles—and focus skilled human energy on the high-end.
In the era of generative AI, there is no edge to be found by simply shuffling common knowledge from place to place. We need to find new dimensions of differentiation and lean into our unique strengths: creating new information through experimentation, getting our hands dirty and sharing first-person experience, and exerting ourselves to create what others won’t.
Not sure how to prepare your content report? I get it — too many metrics to report, and what should a report look look in the first place? I promise this will change by the end of this guide.
In this guide, you’ll learn the three best practices of reporting and eight types of information that make a solid content report, including the actual KPIs used by content marketers.
What to include in a content marketing report
In this part of the guide, we’re discussing content marketing KPIs and qualitative feedback that will allow you to build a solid report. These are based on our poll on metrics actually used by marketers and a few tried and tested suggestions from us.
Keep in mind that your final metrics may differ depending on your strategy. We encourage you to customize your reports.
1. Summary
Summaries are designed for stakeholders who just want to know the most important points. They may not have the time or the interest to dive into data and put together an overall picture of your performance. These people will be expecting something like this:
Content output: increased by 20%, with 20 new pieces published.
Traffic: rose by 35%, reaching 135,000 monthly visitors.
Keyword rankings: 50% of targeted keywords now in top 3 SERP positions.
Audience growth: expanded by 25%, now totaling 75,000.
Engagement: improved by 15% across all platforms.
Conversions: grew to 5%, resulting in an additional 50 sales.
Recommendations: we’re on the right track, and we’re ready to invest more in content scaling.
It’s a good practice to add summaries at all times, but you’ll find them especially useful in large teams and when working with clients.
Summaries are put in the front of the report but written last. Don’t write them before collecting and analyzing the data.
2. Content output
This section details the quantity and type of content published within a specific timeframe. This will tell your boss or client how efficient you/your team is.
It can include blog posts, videos, podcasts, infographics, and social media posts.
You can simply measure the volume of content produced and categorize it by type to assess productivity and diversity in your content strategy.
3. Traffic
Traffic shows how good the content is at attracting clicks to the website.
Typically, stakeholders want to know the growth of traffic rather than just the number of clicks in a given period. A thousand more clicks in a month may be exceptional for one website but a poor result for another.
It’s also a good idea to break down traffic growth by:
Source: in the case of content, that will mostly be organic, email, referral (but only from the sources you influenced), and social media. Include direct traffic only if it actually correlates with content. Paid traffic is typically the domain of performance marketing, but if you’re running any ads for content, add that, too.
Target: this depends on whether your goal is to drive traffic to the entire site or its parts, such as product landing pages, pricing, contact, etc.
Traffic is easy to measure. Free tools such as Google Analytics or Matomo should be enough. For organic traffic from Google, make sure you use Google Search Console, though.
Tip
Google Search Console will give you the most accurate organic click data, but SEO tools like Ahrefs will give you the means to improve it. For example, you can see how a site stacks up against competitors (and break down their strategy) or see which pages gained and lost the most traffic in a given period.
Organic competitors report in Ahrefs showing a month-to-month performance change.
For traffic reporting, you will also find Ahrefs’ Portofilos feature helpful. You can track organic traffic and other SEO metrics for any collection of pages. For instance, a set of your client’s websites, competitors, or all content directories.
There is a variety of metrics you could report here, but according to our insights, marketers usually report these:
Impressions: how often a site appears in search results.
Rankings: what pages rank for a given keyword. The higher the rankings, the more organic traffic you can get.
Share of voice: percentage of all possible organic clicks (from SERPs) for the tracked keywords landing on your website.
Backlink growth: refers to the increase in the number of inbound links pointing to a website over a specific period. Worth tracking if you’re creating link bait content or doing link building.
Organic traffic: already covered in the previous paragraph. It overlaps with the SEO metrics category because, generally speaking, organic traffic growth is the outcome of effective SEO.
You’ll need two types of tools to report these metrics: Google Search Console for organic traffic (i.e., clicks) and impressions and an SEO tool like Ahrefs for everything else.
If you feel that the recipient of the report will be interested in top-level metrics only, consider reporting just the share of voice and organic traffic.
You can find the share of voice metric in Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker.
The benefits of being visible in Google are obvious even for non-marketers, so you’ll send a clear and strong message if you prove with these metrics that your content makes the brand stand out in Google, and because of that, you’re able to attract more visitors.
On the other hand, if your audience is SEO-savvy and that channel is a big part of your strategy, you can make your report shine with additional metrics explained in this guide to SEO reporting.
Further reading
5. Audience growth
This measures the increase in your content’s audience over time, including new subscribers to newsletters, video/podcast channels, and social media followers.
Tracking these metrics helps assess the effectiveness of your content in attracting and retaining a growing audience. In other words, audience growth shows the demand for more content like the one you’re already making.
For example, at Ahrefs, we track the subscriber growth on AhrefsTV YouTube channel, and we simply use YouTube’s native metrics for that.
An actual screenshot of our YouTube channel audience growth.
6. Engagement
Engagement metrics gauge how actively your audience interacts with your content.
Here are some common engagement metrics tracked by marketers:
Likes and comments on socialmedia: you can track them easily with native social media platform analytics or by using a tool like Buffer to collect all data in one place.
Email list engagement: these typically include how many people open your emails (open rate), how many click on the links inside them (click rate), and spikes in unsubscribe rate. All email marketing tools are equipped with these metrics.
Time on page: how long people spend reading or interacting with a specific page on your website. Tracked by default in GA4, needs setting up in Matomo.
Scroll depth: how far down a page a visitor scrolls. In many cases, deeper scrolling should indicate the content is engaging enough to keep readers interested. GA4 and Matomo can be set up to display an event when a pre-defined scroll threshold has been reached (e.g., 10, 25, 50%). But if you want a bit more data without the need to dabble with technicals, use Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity.
Scroll depth report in Microsoft Clarity.
It’s almost never bad if you get high numbers on those metrics. In an ideal world, they indicate that people really enjoy your content, but in reality, these metrics are quite nuanced. For example, some types of content are less likely to get likes on social media, and a short time on page may mean that people found what they wanted and left immediately.
Therefore, it may be best to use engagement metrics in the right context.
Use likes and comments to compare content. You can also use it to gauge interest in new types of content or topics.
Use engagement rate on Twitter instead of total engagement: (Likes + retweets + replies) / (total number of followers)
Use scroll rate and time on page only for long-form content, i.e., pages meant to keep the user a bit longer.
7. Conversions
Conversion metrics measure how effectively your content prompts users to take a desired action, such as signing up for a free trial.
Examples:
Revenue/signups correlation with traffic: the more people visit your site, the more opportunities to convert visitors into subscribers or paying customers.
Conversion growth from the bottom of the funnel content: conversion tracked only for visitors that may be considering buying (comparisons, white papers, customer success stories, etc.).
First page seen to paying customer: if your content is the first page a visitor has seen and then converted into a customer, that means the content works.
Content downloads: high download rates can signal that your audience finds your content valuable.
Leads: people who leave contact information in exchange for access to content. Marketers typically track MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) and SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads): people who have shown interest and may be ready to buy in the future and contacts who are likely ready to be contacted by the sales team.
Leads, downloads, and even revenue vs. traffic correlations are quite easy to track (and prove). Most tools that allow you to create a lead capture form will have built-in analytics, while esoteric data analysis stuff like correlation can be handled by ChatGPT in a breeze these days.
Correlation analysis done entirely by ChatGPT.
But if you want to prove that a specific piece of content generated X number of sales or Y amount of monthly recurring revenue, that’s going to be tricky. Essentially, you’ll be trying to prove the ROI of content marketing — something everybody wants to know, but nobody can really prove without using the word “probably”.
It’s very likely that the people who will read your report, or even yourself, might like to know the “return on investment”, so let’s stop here for a brief moment.
The problem with ROI in content marketing lies within imperfect attribution models and non-linear customer journeys. Ryan Law explains it in his guide to calculating content ROI:
Did someone convert because of an article or in spite of it? When they read multiple articles, which had the biggest impact? If someone buys because of an advert, should we still credit the blog post they read beforehand?
Customer journeys are also rarely as straightforward as we’d hope. One person might read 50 articles and never buy anything; another might read a single article, disappear for a year, and immediately buy. What role did content play in those journeys?
That said, the ROI of content is not a topic you should avoid. You basically have two choices here:
Try to calculate ROI by using imperfect but reasonable methods. Ryan explains three of them in his guide.
Assume positive content ROI based on its strategic role. Essentially, ROI is an excellent argument for pursuing content marketing, but it’s not the only one. Content marketing plays a strategic role because it has multiple benefits that are really hard to say “no” to. Think about it. If all competitors do content, can you afford to be the exception? In what other way will you demonstrate to the audience how the product/service solves their problems? If your boss or client doubts in the very idea of content, it’s a good idea to discuss it and manage expectations before you go all in.
Further reading
8. Qualitative feedback
Finally, finish your report with anything worth mentioning that goes beyond raw data or beyond the ordinary.
These could be:
Mentions in newsletters and other content roundups.
Social media praise.
Feedback on content quality from the audience.
Content mentioned by prospects in conversations.
For example, I use Ahrefs every month to find sites featuring my articles. This example shows two industry influencers linking to my recent SEO study.
This is also a good opportunity to mention operational feedback:
Roadblocks, like low availability of the design team.
Projections, for example, aiming to recover lost organic traffic by focusing on updating old content.
Opportunities for improvement, such as aligning content more closely with sales goals.
Final thoughts
No report can be effective without support from stakeholders. Rather than insisting on a specific report format, show a sample of the report, explain the value of it, and ask for feedback. You’re the expert, but they’re the client, so be open to finding a middle ground.
As for reporting frequency, the norm is monthly, quarterly, and annually. Additionally, reports may be prepared for specific campaigns, which can vary in duration. Again, this is something worth discussing with the recipient of the report.
Got questions or comments? Let me know on X or LinkedIn.
SEOs have a lot to offer companies during the merger and acquisition (M&A) process. They can help identify acquisition targets, do due diligence and help with valuation and risk identification, identify future opportunities, work with teams on website migrations, monitor migration progress, and train new teams in best practices.
Acquisitions can have a dramatic impact on your search visibility. Long ago, one of the main competitors of an engineering company I was working with shut down. I asked about acquiring their website and managed to get it for a few hundred dollars. Needless to say, this led to a significant amount of new leads and business growth as we merged the two websites.
Another time, I managed to snag the expired domain of what was the number one HVAC company in my local market. They were consolidating several service companies into one new brand and they let the domain expire. I redirected this to the website of a client who was fairly new in the market, and they saw top rankings for many of their main terms practically overnight.
While this type of acquisition isn’t common for small companies, it is business as usual for larger companies. If you’ve done
To merge or not to merge
Whether you choose to merge domains usually comes down to whether you want more listings or one listing that potentially ranks higher. This can depend a lot on your current rankings and the resources you have available to maintain your web presence. Or you may have a company policy that says it needs to merge.
Many news sites choose to run the websites on separate domains. Both sites can show in Google News and in organic search results multiple times for the same stories or affiliate content targeting the same terms.
Businesses will often run the websites separately for a while but tend to merge the websites eventually. You may see this happen in several stages:
The acquired company adds a tag of “a xxx company” on the current domain.
The acquired domain is migrated to the main company’s domain with the same branding.
The acquired company is rebranded and more integrated with the product or offering of the main company.
Some of the main things that can cause traffic loss during migrations are failing to do redirects and killing off content. I’ll show you how to check these in the next section.
You also need to make sure that you support older branded names in some way. Sometimes these terms are still used by people in the market for many years, and you don’t want to lose this valuable search traffic to another website that may rank instead of your own!
You’ll also want to make sure your TLS certificate (what allows HTTPs to work) will work across domains. If not, users may get an error and not be forwarded to the new site, even if you have a redirect in place.
Post-acquisition monitoring and training
The easiest way to check for any major drops is to create a Portfolio with the old domain and the new path or pages on the site. Then you can use the Site Explorer Overview report to look for any major traffic drops and use the compare mode in any of the other reports, like Organic Keywords, to zero in on where traffic may have been lost.
Depending on the setup, you may be able to just add the old domain as a competitor in the overview report to see how the migration went.
You’ll want to check the old URLs to make sure redirects were done, and all the content was migrated successfully.
To get a list of your most linked URLs, you can use the Best by links report in Site Explorer.
You can upload that list as a custom list in Site Audit in the URL sources tab. Alternatively, you could just select Backlinks as the source in this tab. I would remove any other crawl sources for this use case.
We’ll then crawl all the URLs with links. In Page Explorer, you can customize the table to include things like Redirect URL, Redirect status code, Final redirect URL, and Final redirect status code to get an easy view of all the redirects that are happening.
Make sure your redirects are 301 or 308 rather than 302 or 307 status codes if you are doing a permanent move and want URLs indexed on the new website instead of the old one.
You should monitor the renewal of the old domains as well. You wouldn’t want a competitor registering them or for the site to be repurposed into something more nefarious.
SEOs can also help with the transfer of knowledge and best practices between companies. There are lots of different ways they can facilitate this. See this section for some ideas.
Final thoughts
Even if you weren’t involved in the original migration process, you probably should check behind some of the main company acquisitions to see if any value was left on the table. Look for redirects not done, content not migrated, etc. In my experience, there’s a lot of value to be had cleaning up after these old acquisitions.
If you have questions, message me on X or LinkedIn.
Keyword clustering tools group keywords with the same or similar intent. This makes it easier to take action on your keyword research because it tells you which keywords to target on the same page.
Unfortunately, most keyword clustering tools aren’t exactly quick…
For example, I asked a popular keyword clustering tool to group 4,703 keywords. It took 51 minutes! That’s a long time to wait!
Luckily, you can cluster keywords much quicker in Keywords Explorer.
How to cluster keywords in Keywords Explorer
Just enter your broad search or list of keywords and click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab in the Overview or a keyword ideas report:
You’ll see your keywords grouped into clusters by Parent Topic and sorted by Cluster volume.
To see the keywords in a cluster and their metrics, hit the caret in the Keywords column:
Let’s go into more detail for a few different scenarios.
To cluster an existing list of keywords…
Paste in your list of up to 10,000 keywords, hit search, and click the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab on the Overview report. That’s it!
To cluster a new keyword list…
Enter a few seed keywords, go to one of the keyword ideas reports (e.g., Matching terms), then hit the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab to cluster all keyword ideas.
If you want to be more selective, use the filters to refine your search and add keyword ideas you like to a keyword list.
If you then select this your list of keyword lists on the left and hit the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab, it’ll cluster your list:
To cluster your competitor’s keywords…
Enter a competitor’s domain into Site Explorer, go to the Organic Keywords report, and export the data.
Sidenote.
If your competitor ranks for over 10,000 keywords, you’ll have to use the filters to refine the report before exporting. This is because 10,000 is the maximum number of keywords you can paste into Keywords Explorer, which is the next step.
Next, paste the exported keywords into Keywords Explorer, then hit the “Clusters by Parent Topic” tab on the Overview report.
Looking to cluster more than 10,000 competitor keywords?
It’s not yet possible to do this by Parent Topic in Ahrefs, but the Top Pages report in Site Explorer does something very similar. It shows you the top pages by estimated traffic and the keyword sending the most traffic to the page (which is often a good indicator of the overall topic).
You can also see all the keywords the page ranks for by hitting the caret:
If your goal is to find topic ideas from your competitors, this report is a goldmine.
Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer tool also has instant term clustering!
Term clustering is where you group keywords by the words or phrases they contain rather than intent. It’s useful for understanding trends, finding niches, and clustering keywords into topical buckets so you can create related content in batches.
To do it in Ahrefs, just hit the “Clusters by terms” tab in the Overview or a keyword ideas report.
For example, if you enter “notion” as your seed keyword and cluster by terms, you’ll see that one of the term clusters is “template”:
This cluster contains 5,098 keywords with a global combined search volume of 257K.
If you hit the caret to reveal the keywords, you’ll see all kinds of Notion templates people are searching for, like:
notion budget template
notion calendar template
notion project management template
notion school template
notion journal template
notion workout template
notion travel template
Given how much search traffic potential there is here, this could be a great niche for a new website.
Why should you cluster keywords?
Keyword clustering speeds up content production by turning keywords into topics that writers can immediately start working on. It also helps you produce more comprehensive content, as keywords in clusters often represent important subtopics.
What is the best keyword clustering tool?
Ahrefs is the best keyword clustering tool if you’re looking to cluster keywords fast. It takes just seconds, while other tools can often take more than an hour just to cluster a few thousand keywords.
What is the downside of using Keywords Explorer as a keyword clustering tool?
Keywords Explorer is arguably less accurate than some keyword clustering tools because it clusters by Parent Topic. This means we’re judging the similarity of keywords based on the top-ranking result, not the entire SERP (as some other tools do). But that’s also why it’s so fast!
The vibe: 5-star hotel but with a laid-back atmosphere
Both times I’ve attended this conference, the Prosperity team has gone all out on hiring top-notch, five-star venues.
Located in the heart of Sydney, both venues have been easy to get to and are near many attractions for interstate or international travelers to enjoy.
You can also expect five-star service from the venue staff, and the food and drinks provided throughout the day exceeded my expectations. None of that undrinkable conference coffee over here.
The food was also great. Apparently, the lunchtime lamb was “to die for” and I witnessed many people going back for seconds (and thirds!) Yeah, you know who you are 😉
Not to mention the after-party overlooking the harbor. It was a great place for people to let their hair down, enjoy some drinks on Prosperity Media’s tab, and get into deep and interesting conversations. Just what a girl needs to nerd out over knowledge graphs with Nik Ranger or Google’s helpful content updates with affiliate folks.
It was a fun day all around!
The crowd: You’ll meet a diverse range of super-smart people
Some conferences have a feel about them where you know you’ll mainly be around affiliate folks, or enterprise folks, or generalist marketers. Sydney SEO Conference wasn’t like this.
There were around 300 people at the event, and I was pleasantly surprised by the diverse range of skills and interests of the attendees. I met affiliate marketers, agency owners, in-house teams, and division heads from enterprise companies. There were also some non-SEO developers and WordPress specialists.
If you’re anything like me then chatting to other attendees in the breaks or social events after the conference is where you learn some super interesting things! It’s honestly my favorite part of going to conferences.
My best SEO-related takeaway came from Georgia Tan who shared some awesome things she’s working on with her team around “digital shelf optimization” for clients like Pepsico. It’s about going beyond Google or other search engines to optimize products for specific ecommerce, marketplace, or app platforms where people shop.
I also learned some great non-SEO tips about living in Andorra and the digital-nomad residency options available. Worth checking out if you’re looking for a nomad-friendly place in Europe as your next base!
The speakers: You’ll learn from big names and local experts alike
Tim Soulo on-stage presenting about using Ahrefs for competitive intelligence.
The speaker lineup delivered knowledge bombs for each and every attendee, no matter their role or SEO experience. It wasn’t the case that only one or two speakers were the standout favorites here.
The diversity in presentation topics hit the nail on the head, and every attendee I spoke to walked away with new insights and actionable tips relevant to their role. That’s how you know a conference has nailed it with its speaker lineup.
If you’re feeling a little FOMO, not to worry; here are my favorite takeaways from each speaker that you can also walk away with.
From search to surfaces: Your guide to Google’s metamorphosis
Jes made a powerful case for the seismic shift that search is on the verge of in the Gemini era. Google is moving away from using schema.org and its ~1,400 defined entities for understanding content towards Gemini’s ~175 billion parameters. As a result, Google is re-training people to stop searching with only 2-5 words and rather embrace longer, conversational, context-rich searches instead.
Unlocking the hidden power of internal links with machine learning
Nik’s talk was nerdy in the best way! She covered exactly how she uses machine learning to programmatically improve internal linking on websites. You can test out the model using the LinkBERT demo.
Sally shared next-level tips on how she uses AI to automate tasks like web scraping, redirect mapping, and turning keywords and intents into topical maps en masse. So many golden nuggets for making boring (yet essential) processes more efficient. Check out her free automation scripts.
Moving the Needle: Search campaigns at enterprise scale
Georgia, Ana, and Ben answered questions relating to doing SEO at a mid-market or enterprise level. There were some great takeaways for in-house and enterprise folks seeking ideas on how to implement their strategies or to get buy-in from non-SEO executives.
Keep your enemies close: How to do competitive intelligence with Ahrefs
Tim shared practical use cases for using Ahrefs as a competitive intelligence tool, including 3 metrics, 3 actionable tips, and 3 tools including my favorite, the portfolio feature. You can use this to compare a segment of a competitor’s site to yours or track all your competitors as a batch so you get updated competitors’ stats anytime you need them.
Greg’s presentation was dynamic and full of local SEO hot tips. I especially loved Greg’s tip about getting links from churches, charities, and other hyper-local, trusted organizations in your area. Local links like this tie in with his advice to turn your blog into a local destination and a place that local folks turn to for content about the area, not just about your services.
Regan took a deep dive into all things E-E-A-T with some great examples of how to run a detailed E-E-A-T-based brand audit. My favorite tip was using Google search operators like [example.com -site:example.com] to find indexed brand mentions on sites other than your own.
I’m biased towards paying extra attention to all things combining SEO and UX. So Aaron’s talk on the impact of user interactions in SEO has a soft spot in my heart of SEO hearts. My top takeaways:
For low-competition SERPs, focus on query relevance.
For more difficult SERPs, prioritize content quality and consider user interactions.
For difficult SERPs, it’s all of the above plus your site’s authority.
Programmatic SEO: A winning formula for scaling growth
What an energetic speaker to close off the day! I loved Dejan’s tips on making the most out of programmatic SEO. And it wasn’t about creating quasi-spam, mass-AI pages at scale. I loved his takeaways on using APIs, next-level programmatic internal links, and programmatically inserting hreflang. My #1 tip was to only consider a programmatic SEO campaign for keywords and topics with over 20,000 searches a month if you want to get a return on investment.
Final thoughts
Good vibes, fun folks, and expert speakers. What more do you need?
With some top-level speakers already secured for next year’s lineup, including Aleyda Solis, Kyle Roof, and Cyrus Shephard, I encourage you and your team to join me at Sydney SEO Conference in 2025.
See how much fun these folks are having? This could be you next year.
It was great to host over 300 SEOs and Digital Marketers at the 2024 Sydney SEO Conference.
With 98% of attendees saying they want to attend again in 2025, tickets are available and now selling out quickly already.
If your site has lost traffic, it’s natural to wonder what you’re doing wrong. But what if it’s not your fault?
Let’s be real. Most of the time, it’s likely that it is your fault in some way. You may have site or content quality issues you were unaware of or low-quality links dragging down performance.
However, assuming it’s always your fault can be harmful. If you try to “fix” issues that aren’t really there, it can backfire and do more harm than good. Sometimes, losing traffic is truly not your fault and is genuinely out of your control.
Here are the top three reasons for traffic losses that aren’t your fault and how you can respond to them.
2. People’s wants and needs change
Many people use the same phrases but are looking for different things. When this happens en masse, it could trigger an intent switch where Google changes the layout and types of results returned.
For example, let’s look at the topic of “conservatorship.” Before Britney Spears’ legal drama became a popular topic for gossip magazines, people mainly searched for this term looking for legal definitions and advice.
The top of the SERPs looked like this:
But when Britney was going through her legal drama in 2021, the top of the SERPs looked like this with the Top Stories feature taking priority:
The Query Deserves Freshness (QDF) model is responsible for this. It’s a re-ranking model that changes SERPs at the last minute to deliver the most current information.
In situations like this, if your site remains on the SERPs and the content is relevant to the new intent, you may see a temporary traffic spike. However, if your content is not relevant to the new intent or it’s dropped from results altogether, that’s where you may experience traffic losses.
So, how do you respond if there’s an intent switch on your keywords?
If you think it’s a QDF event that will pass: You could just wait it out until the rankings re-stabilize.
If it’s a minor intent change or something that still aligns with your brand: You could update your content to reflect the shift.
If the new intent does not align with your brand: There isn’t much action you can take. It’s best to be transparent with stakeholders about why traffic was lost and how reclaiming it is beyond your control. Instead, show where the new strategic benefits lie and how you’ll be pivoting the strategy.
Here’s another reason intent switches can happen: Google’s understanding of what users want improves
This is actually what happened in the gardening example I used above. Between both dates I checked, there’s been a predominant informational intent in the organic listings. However, Google shifted the features above the fold from prioritizing local services and gardening news to showcasing ecommerce products instead.
As Google gets better at understanding what people want, it will continue to make changes like this.
In this scenario, as it isn’t a QDF event that will pass, you either need to update your content to reflect the shift or admit defeat and communicate reasons for your traffic loss to stakeholders.
3. People’s browsing habits are changing
As users become more tech-literate and adept at using other platforms, their search behaviors and expectations change.
More people these days are bypassing Google and turning directly to other platforms like:
ChatGPT for conversational searches
YouTube for video content
Reddit for user-generated responses
TikTok for snackable, entertaining content
Amazon for product searches
If Google wants to stay relevant, it needs to make changes that keep younger audiences engaged. As such, these changes can also lead to traffic declines that are beyond your control.
A prevalent example of this, taking place in SERPs right now, is how Google includes user-generated content and forum sites in prime organic positions. There was an announcement in 2022 launching the “Forums and Discussions” feature, but many changes have since been made to include more UGC content in SERPs.
Sites like Reddit and Quora are now pinching traffic from digital publishers and niche site owners in millions of SERPs where they were not featured before.
Let’s look at Reddit’s traffic trend for the last two years in Ahrefs:
Overall, Reddit has seen a:
24.5% lift in organic keywords
81.5% lift in organic traffic
47% lift in its Top 3 keywords
87.2% lift in Traffic Value (this one blew my mind)
And Quora’s performance follows a similar pattern:
Quora has seen a:
16.7% lift in organic keywords
72.3% lift in organic traffic
26.7% lift in its Top 3 keywords
85.5% lift in Traffic Value
Unless Google makes a change, there’s no chance that publishers and brands that lost traffic will be able to reclaim it easily.
Now, it’s not always going to be the case that absolutely nothing can be done. I encourage you to think outside the box here and find creative ways to make winning content in the face of such changes.
For example, many SEOs are now posting on Reddit and leveraging Reddit’s existing rankings to get more eyeballs on their content.
Changes in user behavior can also often bring about opportunities for new content formats that are untapped and have very little competition. The aim of the game here is to adapt and show up where your audience is searching, even if that’s beyond Google.
SEO in its purest form is platform agnostic; it’s not just about Google, and I think many SEOs have forgotten this.
Final thoughts
In general, it’s best to hold off taking action until you’re certain of the root cause of your website’s traffic loss.
Tweaking your content or throwing links at a site rarely helps recover traffic you lost for any of the above reasons.
If you’ve got any questions or have examples of other reasons why sites have lost organic traffic when it’s not their fault, feel free to share them with me on X or LinkedIn.
If you’re looking to automate boring SEO tasks or create custom SEO reporting dashboards, APIs can be a major time-saver.
So, I asked our team for recommendations for a well-balanced SEO API stack that covers everything you’ll likely ever need.
I’m excited to share this list with you, so let’s get straight to it.
2. IndexNow: For pinging search engines about your content
IndexNow tells search engines when a change has been made on a website. If you add, update, remove, or redirect pages, participating search engines can pick up on the changes faster.
The good news is that many CMSs, CDNs, and web hosts already use IndexNow and automatically ping participating search engines anytime changes are made.
However, you can also use the free IndexNow API if you have some technical chops. Try these steps as shared by Bing if your website doesn’t already use IndexNow:
Generate your free IndexNow API key
Host the API key on your site’s root directory in txt format
Submit your key location as a URL parameter
Receive details on how many URLs have been discovered by participating search engines
If you haven’t already heard, we’ve also just dropped some seriously epic features by supporting IndexNow within Ahrefs. Check out Patrick’s update about it.
Here’s a quick snapshot of how IndexNow will work with Ahrefs:
By supporting IndexNow, we’ve created a win-win situation for both search engines and webmasters.
Webmasters can fix errors ASAP and ensure content is indexed by search engines faster and more reliably.
Search engines can reduce costs and environmental impact by strategically crawling pages only after changes are made.
Whether you use it through your CMS, CDN, or Ahrefs, IndexNow is the shortcut you’ve been looking for that gets your content indexed faster and more reliably.
3. Wayback Machine APIs: For pulling historical snapshots of a webpage
Wayback Machine records visual snapshots of webpages over time and is very useful when evaluating the history of a website.
With its free Save Page Now 2 API, you can keep your own record of visual snapshots. These help to benchmark projects before you start work on them or automate snapshots being taken in order to maintain a visual history of key pages on your website.
Wayback Machine is your best option for automatically completing things like:
Analyzing the history of a list of expired domains
Automatically restoring the historical content on a website
Confirming past visual redesigns and reskins of a client’s or prospect’s website
Linking design changes to SEO performance changes
Documenting or benchmarking a webpage
There are also more nuanced and specific use cases to which you can apply the API, like automating some elements of competitive intelligence. For instance, you can see how competitors’ social profiles have grown, assess their websites’ historical visual or messaging changes, or check out A/B tests they’ve run.
Or you can use the Wayback CDX Server API and pull archived snapshots and body text to programmatically handle tasks like redirect mapping on large websites. Check out exactly how Patrick does this with his free redirect matching script.
Either way, there are some super cool Wayback Machine applications in your SEO API stack!
4. Search Console API: For tracking performance in Google Search results
The Seach Console API allows you to pull data directly from Google Search Console (GSC) into any interface or dashboard you like. Its biggest advantage is overcoming the 16-month data storage limit within the GSC dashboard.
I recommend integrating the GSC API with your Ahrefs account. We’ll automatically store all your GSC data in Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker. From the moment you connect your account, you’ll have the last 16 months automatically imported, and then we’ll continue to add all future data so you can access it without limitations.
You can also access custom visualizations of your performance by device or click-through distributions…
… along with a quick-and-easy cannibalization report exclusively using your GSC data. In the Keywords report in Rank Tracker, check out all the URLs that rank for a specific keyword to identify any instances of cannibalization that might be hindering your site’s performance.
Check out the documentation on getting started with the Search Console API. It’s free but subject to usage limits explained in the documentation. Otherwise, you can keep things easy by following the prompts within Ahrefs’ Rank Tracker to connect any project to your Google account:
5. Analytics Data API: For acquisition, behavior, and conversion data
Similar to the Search Console API, the Analytics Data API is from Google and gives you direct access to your website’s GA4 performance data.
With this data, you can better understand how people discover and use your website.
You can also use the Measurement Protocol for server-side tracking (instead of client-side) or to write data to your analytics from internet-connected devices, like a point-of-sale system. It’s also helpful in connecting online and offline events, measuring offline conversions, or capturing events on apps or devices where automatic collection isn’t available, like kiosks and watches.
The most common ways I’ve seen this API used is to:
Automate complex reporting for agency clients or internal stakeholders
Connect website usage data to metrics and KPIs reported in other business applications
Run batch reports with a single API call
Analyze and export audience metrics
I find that due to GA4’s flexibility, fewer people need to use the API to customize reports when they only want to look at different views of their GA4 data. However, if you want to connect this data with anything that’s not native to GA4, that’s where the API will most likely come in handy.
For example, you can use the API to pull GA4 organic conversion data that you can then use to build predictive lead-scoring models for your sales team to know which SEO leads are worth following up with and which are likely to be tire kickers.
No matter your use case, you can get started with this API for free, though it is also subject to some usage limits.
6. Natural Language API: For machine learning + semantic SEO
Google’s Natural Language API allows developers to gain insights from unstructured text using machine learning.
This API can do many different things. Unlike the other APIs listed so far, which you’d mainly use to pull specific types of data, this API can help you do more interesting things, like:
Analyzing the sentiment and predominant emotional opinion from text
Entity extraction and analysis from unstructured text
Analyzing syntax to quickly figure out what a piece of text is about
Tagging parts of speech in a body of text or list of keywords
These applications are very useful for reputation management, semantic SEO, competitive analysis, and also for automated content auditing processes.
You can also use the API to programmatically create website taxonomies based on known entities. For instance, say you have thousands of products for your ecommerce store and need to create tags and categories to organize these products. You can get a decent part of the job done with the help of the Natural Language API.
Check out the documentation for a more in-depth look at all its capabilities. It’s available on a freemium pricing model where you can get up to 5,000 credits for free each month.
7. OpenAI API: For chain prompting generative AI
OpenAI has a number of APIs with very versatile uses. The main benefit of adding OpenAI to your SEO API stack is that you can programmatically leverage generative AI technologies and prompt large language models in bulk.
These are incredibly useful for many SEO tasks, from obvious uses like creating content programmatically to analyzing, sorting, and categorizing bulk text or image-based data. Of course, with Google’s latest algorithm updates, you have to be careful not to go overboard with programmatic content that contributes to the internet’s existing spam problem.
Having said that, the sky is the limit with such a versatile set of APIs, but here are some interesting examples of how they can be handy for SEO projects.
You can use chain prompting to automate various SEO tasks, from digital PR to article outline generation. Check out Kristin Tynski’s scripts for ideas on how to get started.
Or, you can build a custom ChatBot for your blog content using the embedding model. Flow SEO did this on their blog.
Another of my favorite examples is sorting, tagging, and classifying images in bulk for large ecommerce stores or marketplaces using GPT-4.
All of OpenAI’s models are paid and based on usage. Despite this, it’s still worth considering OpenAI for your SEO API tech stack, as you can help automate a great variety of SEO tasks.
8. PageSpeed Insights API: For pulling performance metrics
PageSpeed Insights API helps monitor desktop and mobile performance metrics like Core Web Vitals, lighthouse metrics, and mobile issues.
You can pull these metrics to assess issues or potential website improvements:
Field data from CrUX
Lab data from the Lighthouse test
Bulk page-level core web vitals data
However, instead of querying the data yourself, you can connect PageSpeed insights to Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool to do the heavy lifting for you. We have multiple graphs in the Performance reports that can help you drill deeper into your pages.
Another advantage to connecting the PSI API to your Ahrefs account is that you can automatically receive alerts if recent website changes affect performance.
For example, with the combination of IndexNow + PageSpeed Insights + Ahrefs Alerts, you can set up a workflow that looks a bit like this:
This is a very powerful workflow that only Ahrefs can help you automate compared to other SEO tools, and it is largely thanks to our integration of IndexNow.
Final thoughts
With the right SEO API stack, the possibilities for how you can automate SEO strategy, auditing, and reporting are endless.
With Ahrefs in your corner, you can unlock some seriously cool functionalities that no other tool offers, especially now that we use IndexNow’s capabilities to offer constant crawling and automated performance updates following any website change.
Chat with our enterprise team if you’d like more info on how Ahrefs can be your competitive edge when it comes to SEO data or automating your SEO strategy.
Let’s do a thought experiment and imagine that there was an SEO tool which would give you a highly precise search volume for any keyword. What would you use it for? Would you be able to accurately predict your search traffic from that keyword?
No!
You can’t know for sure at which position your page will end up ranking. Today it’s #3, tomorrow it’s #5, the day after is #1. Rankings are volatile and you rarely retain a given position for a long enough period of time.
And even if you did: you can’t get precise data on the click-through rate (CTR) of each position in Google. Each SERP is unique, and Google keeps rolling out more and more SERP features that steal clicks away. So even if you knew precisely the search volume of a keyword and the exact position where your page would sit… you still would not be able to calculate the accurate amount of search traffic that you’ll get.
And finally…
Pages don’t rank for a single keyword!Seven years ago we published a study showing that a typical page that ranks at the top of Google for some keyword would actually rank for about a thousand more related keywords.
So what’s the point of trying to gauge your clicks from a single keyword, when you’ll end up ranking for a thousand of them all at the same time?
And the takeaway from all this is…
“Directionally accurate” is accurate enough
Here at Ahrefs we spend a tremendous amount of time, effort and resources to make sure our keyword database is in good shape, both in terms of its coverage of existing search queries, and the SEO metrics we give you for each of these keywords.
They’re designed to be “directionally accurate.” They give you an overall idea of the search demand of a given keyword and if it’s a lot higher (or lower) compared to some other keywords which you are considering.
You can’t use those metrics for doing any precise calculations.
But hundreds of thousands of SEO professionals around the world are using these exact metrics to guide their SEO strategies and they get precisely the results that they expect to get.
It’s too easy to break your SEO during a website redesign. Here’s a foretaste of what can go wrong:
Loss of rankings and traffic.
Loses of link equity.
Broken pages.
Sluggish page loading.
Bad mobile experience.
Broken internal links.
Duplicate content.
For example, this site deleted about 15% of organic pages (yellow line) during the redesign, which resulted in an almost 50% organic traffic loss (orange line). Interestingly, even the growth of referring domains (blue line) afterward didn’t help it recover the traffic.
Fortunately, it’s not that hard to avoid these and other common issues – just six simple rules to follow.
1. Keep a backup of the old site
Easily overlooked but could save the day. A backup ensures you can restore the original site if anything goes wrong.
Ask the site’s developer to be prepared for this fallback strategy. All they will need to do then is redirect the domain to the folder with the old site, and the changes will take effect almost instantly. Make sure they don’t overwrite any current databases, too.
It won’t hurt to make a backup yourself, too. See if your hosting provider has a backup tool or use a plugin like Updraft if you’re using WordPress or a similar CMS.
2. Test staging site for mobile friendliness and Core Web Vitals
The thing is, a website redesign can seriously affect site speed, stability, responsiveness, and mobile experience. Some design flaws will be quite easy to spot, such as excessive use of animations or layout not scaling properly on mobile devices, but not others, like unoptimized code.
Ask your site developer to run mobile friendliness and CWV tests on template pages as soon as they are ready (no need to test every single page) and ask for the report. For example, they should be able to run Google Lighthouse on a password-protected website.
3. Run a site audit pre and post-launch
An SEO audit uncovers SEO issues on your site. And if you do it pre-and post-launch, you will easily spot any potential new problems caused by the redesign, especially those that really matter, such as:
So before the new site goes, click on New crawl in Site Audit and then again right after it goes live.
Then after the crawl, go to the All issues report and look at the Change column – new errors found between crawls will be colored red (fixed errors will be green) .
You can access the history of site audits by clicking on the project’s name in Site Audit.
4. Keep the old URL structure
By URL structure, I mean the way web addresses are organized and formatted. For example, these would be considered URL structure changes:
ahrefs.com/blog to ahrefs.com/blog/
ahrefs.com/blog to ahrefs.com/resources/blog
ahrefs.com/blog to blog.ahrefs.com
ahrefs.com/site-audit to ahrefs.com/site-audit-tool
Altering that structure in an uncontrolled process can lead to:
Broken redirects: redirects leading to non-existing or inaccessible pages.
Broken backlinks: external links pointing to deleted or moved pages on your site.
Broken internal links: internal site links that don’t work, hindering site navigation and content discoverability.
Orphan pages: pages not linked from your site, making them hard for users and search engines to find.
Naturally, you should keep the old URL structure unless you’re absolutely sure you know what you’re doing. In this case, you will need to put some redirects in place. On top of that, make sure to submit a sitemap via Google Search Console to help Google reflect changes on your site faster.
Tip
Google also advises submitting a new sitemap if you’re adding many pages in one go. You may want to do that if that’s the case in your redesign project.
5. Keep important organic pages
Redesigns often include some kind of content pruning or simply arbitrary deleting of older content. But whatever you do, it’s crucial that you keep the pages that are already ranking high.
Traffic is one reason, but since these pages are already ranking, chances are they’ve got some backlinks you risk losing.
To make sure you’re not cutting out the good stuff, use two reports in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer: Top pages and Best by links.
Top pages report is a list of all the pages on your site ranking in the top 100, appended with SEO data and sorted by traffic by default. So, just one click on your left-hand side, and you’ll see a list of your best “traffic generators”.
The Best by links report follows the same logic, but the focus is on links (both external and internal) and it shows all crawled pages on your site (not only the ones ranking in top 100).
You can also plug in any page in Ahrefs’ Site Explorer and see whether it can be cut without any damage to the site’s organic performance.
Recommendation
If part of the redesign is an inventory cleanup, you can still get traffic to products you don’t offer anymore if you create an “archive” page and link to a place where visitors can find more similar products. E-commerce sites and hardware brands do that regularly.
This way, you can still rank for related terms, and the user experience is better than simply redirecting old products to new products.
Further reading
6. Minimize modifications to pages with high rankings
Lastly, if you find yourself in a situation where the new design imposes significant changes to your top-ranking pages, take extra caution when altering these elements:
Keywords in text, title and H1s: changing keywords can alter the page’s relevance for corresponding queries. For instance, if a product page ranks for “kick scooter for kids”, you might lose that if you start scratching the phrase out from the crucial parts of the content.
Depth of content: expanding or reducing content should be done with the intent to serve user needs better, provide more value, or clarify existing information (i.e., search intent). Keep in mind that Google rewards helpful, people-first content, and not necessarily creative, persuasive copywriting.
Internal links: changing/cutting a few internal links shouldn’t do any harm, but you need to be tactical about it – ask yourself if any particular change could hurt the ranking. Keep in mind that internal links aid the flow of link equity and help Google understand the context of pages.
Distance of that page from the homepage: keep high-value pages close to the homepage to signal their importance to search engines.
Schema markup: any changes should aim to accurately describe the content and take advantage of eligible schema properties.
Page speed: don’t overuse heavy graphics, animations, and video. Again, make sure to pre-test the staging site for CWV and run a site audit right after the launch.
Final thoughts
While an overall site redesign might sound like a good moment to introduce some SEO, you need to think about the traffic and backlink equity the site has already earned. If you change too much in one go, you won’t know what worked and why, and maybe more importantly, what didn’t work and how to fix it.
Truth is, SEO is always about experimentation. You can have a well-educated guess, but you can never really know what will happen.
Want to share your SEO story here? Let me know on X or LinkedIn.
You won’t read anything good about the content marketing funnel in this article. Only bad things. Like, it’s too linear and simplistic to address the complexities of customer journeys.
If you need a framework to build your content strategy on, it should probably be a no-funnel framework instead. And there are very good reasons for it.
What’s wrong with the funnel model?
It oversimplifies literally everything important for a content marketer. And because of that, the model gets some things completely wrong and ignores others.
This isn’t just theoretical. I’ve applied the funnel approach at various companies. Initially, it was reassuring, providing a sense of structure and control. However, the deeper I got, the more confusing it became. It started to seem like the sense of order was purely imaginary, as there was no reliable method to verify if people were truly following the funnel.
1. Misunderstands consumer behavior
The funnel model assumes a perfectly linear path from awareness to purchase and tries to rush people through it. Or, actually, it makes you think you should rush people through it with your content.
However, consumer behavior is more complex and non-linear. People often jump between stages, revisit them, or take unique paths to purchase.
So, the journey is not a funnel; it’s more like a maze.
B2C customer journeys are even more peculiar. Remember that time when you saw an ad and bought that product immediately? Or conversely, how the journey from see to buy lasted for years. I know I can:
But content marketers shouldn’t try to solve that maze, or cut a straight line through it just for their convenience. They should rather adapt to it.
2. Tries to fit round pegs in square holes
Not all content types can be, nor should be, fit into rigid stages of the funnel, as the model wants it.
Here’s an example based on one of our articles. Which stage(s) of the marketing funnel does our blog post about “How to find low competition keywords” serve?
As you can see, the model can’t handle one of the basic forms of content marketing – a blog post. But take any type of educational content, and you’ll find the same problem. Many content types can serve multiple stages of the funnel or work across them. They can both attract and reengage a visitor or even bring them all the way from discovery to purchase.
Because of that, the content marketing funnel simply isn’t helpful for creating content that’s enjoyable for the user and effective for the business.
3. Neglects customer retention
Customer retention is how good you are at keeping your customers. It’s important because you don’t want customers to buy just once from you; you want to keep coming back so that you don’t need to attract a total stranger each time to make a sale — that’s both hard and expensive.
Here’s another way to look at it. According to the study by Bain and Company, increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%. And it makes total sense if you think about it — if someone asked you to generate an extra $1000 in sales in 24 hours, would you go to existing customers or try to find new ones?
But if you’re practicing the old ways of the funnel, catering to your existing customers is very limited because the funnel ends at the purchase stage. There’s nothing a content marketer can do nor should do after a prospect becomes a customer.
It’s having a party where you’re so focused on inviting new guests that you forget to entertain the ones already inside.
4. Ignores customer expansion
If you only chase new customers and forget about the ones you already have, you miss the chance to make more sales to them or get them to recommend your business to others. Happy customers can really boost your business by buying more and telling their friends about you.
How can content help with that? One good way is to create product-led content. This type of content is designed to show how your product can solve the customer’s problem.
The mechanism is simple: showing product features in action turns a regular user into a power user. They start to use more features and get better value from them, which builds loyalty and gives you a good ground for upselling.
And if that content is really good, people will share it with others, amplifying your brand’s reach.
Making a habit of regularly visiting the @ahrefs blog again. Learned the basics from them back in 2015 and still consider them a go-to primer when approaching a new problem (e.g. manual content audit – which I haven’t done in years).
The best thing: good content will be recommended not only by your customers. People don’t really need to be your customers or know a lot about your brand to give your content a shout-out on social media.
3 no-funnel alternatives you should consider
The best solution to the shortcomings of the funnel is to have no funnel at all. Here’s why:
Adapting to consumer behavior, not forcing it. Focus on how consumers naturally interact with content rather than trying to dictate their journey. Make your content easily accessible without imposing how it should be consumed.
A more efficient use of content marketing. Content can work both pre-sales and post-sales. It doesn’t have to be useful in one moment in time. It can be designed to stay useful and relevant over time.
A more helpful way to create content. No time wasted on deciding whether that guide you’re about to write belongs to the top or middle of the funnel. You can simply focus on delivering value and delighting your audience.
Here are three different no-funnel models that share those advantages.
1. The business potential framework
This approach is about using your content to directly boost demand for your product, whether before or after a sale.
Instead of sorting content by stages of a sales funnel, you rate it based on how closely it relates to your product.
So for example, for a content marketing tool, topics with high business potential would include content marketing metrics, “B2B content marketing”, “content ideation”, “content optimization”, and “content distribution” (and not an interview with content marketers or “history of content marketing”, etc.).
This scoring system makes planning your content strategy really easy. You can quickly decide how much of each type of content to make. Also, you can use it with other important metrics (we use it with organic traffic potential) to further prioritize content.
Ahrefs has been using this model for years, especially for SEO content, which is most of what we publish. It’s great for understanding which search terms are most valuable.
Take these two keywords below as an example. The first one has a lot more traffic potential but is too broad to easily include our product — it would get a “1.” Conversely, the keyword with less traffic but more focused on SEO would get a “3” because it’s more relevant to our customers and our product.
The Business Potential Framework might be a good fit for you if you’re working in an established industry, where there’s already considerable demand for content directly linked to products like yours. This will make it easier to find topics with a score of 2 and 3. You can gauge that demand by looking at search volume in our free keywords generator.
2. The content playground
The Content Playground, devised by Ashley Faus, reimagines the buyer’s journey as an open, interactive space, akin to a playground, moving away from the traditional funnel’s linear path.
It aims to cater to varied audience interests and learning styles by offering a mix of deep dives, strategic frameworks, and practical tips. To achieve this, it covers topics in three levels:
Conceptual: covering big ideas and their significance.
Strategic: outlining frameworks and processes.
Tactical: providing specific, actionable steps.
Staying with the content marketing tool example, topics you would create content about could look like this: “what is content marketing” (conceptual), “developing a content marketing strategy” (strategic), “how to promote content” (tactical).
To illustrate, this content hub on Agile from Atlassian is designed to be a content playground. There is a mix of all three types of content, and the user can start at any point, go as deep as they like, and jump to another topic at any time.
Naturally, the content needs to be interlinked and ungated so consumers may access it however they want and navigate through it freely. The bonus of that is getting organic traffic from related keywords. According to Ahrefs, this one hub attracts over 591k organic visits every month, and it looks like it’s about to get more.
But a playground doesn’t need to be confined to one site. As long as you tackle a topic with these three types and allow people to access them freely, you can have it scattered across a limitless number of sites and platforms: microsites, blog posts, social media, email, ebooks, etc.
I had a brief chat with Ashley, the mind behind this framework, to understand where this framework fits best. I learned that the framework was developed and tested with B2B marketers in mind, and that’s where it’s most relevant. B2C marketers simply don’t have as big of a problem with customers “coming and going” and re-engaging them on different channels.
Further reading
3. The cluster-channel network
There is a way to cover all customer intents, topics, journey stages, and key marketing channels naturally by simply focusing on what matters to your audience and where they are willing to consume content. I call it the Cluster-Channel Network (CCN).
Two core elements of the framework are:
Clusters: thematic groupings of content around a central topic, supported by a network of related subtopics. They represent things people care about.
Channels: platforms and mediums through which your message reaches your audience. They represent meeting places that bring you and your audience together to talk about things they care about. Think advertising, email, social media, Google, etc.
CCN ensures a multi-channel presence with content that both attracts your audience and makes your brand an authority in a carefully picked selection of topics.
What’s more, this is an efficient framework because it allows you to “squeeze out” the most of any topic. That’s an important benefit because there are only so many topics a brand can comfortably cover, without creating turning into a content farm spinning irrelevant content just for the sake of traffic.
The framework consists of five steps.
Identify relevant clusters: choose clusters aligned with your brand’s expertise and audience interests.
Define subtopics: within each cluster, pinpoint subtopics for comprehensive coverage.
Produce core content: select a primary channel and format for in-depth content, making this your centerpiece to attract traffic from other platforms.
Distribute across channels: repurpose the core content into smaller, channel-specific formats.
Interlink clusters and subtopics: connect related clusters and subtopics. Chances are, people interested in more than one cluster (e.g. SEO and content marketing).
If we were to visualize this framework consisting of four clusters, it would look something like this:
Content playground could be visualized as a fully connected network with 3 node sizes.
So if we used content marketing as a cluster, one of the subtopics could be AI content. For that subtopic, you could create a blog post about ethics in content marketing in the AI era and distribute it as a thread on X, offer that topic to podcast hosts, etc.
This framework will work best if you have the resources to be present on multiple channels and you’re committed to long-term goals (building trust and authority takes time).
Tip
You can find clusters and subtopics very fast using Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer. Just plug a broad term related to your product (your cluster), and let AI do the brainstorming.
From a bit over 10 keywords the AI found for me for the word “SEO”, Keywords Explorer found over 32k keywords which then organized into 3466 ready-to-target topics in a matter of seconds. All with traffic potential and keyword difficulty metrics to help with prioritization.
Final thoughts
On a final note, the topics you choose to cover are as important as these frameworks. Check out our guide to content ideation to never run out of ideas.
Got questions or comments? Find me on X or LinkedIn.
Google knows about 300T pages on the web. It’s doubtful they crawl all of those, and at least according to some documents from their antitrust trial we learned they only indexed 400B. That’s around .133% of the pages they know about, roughly 1 out of every 752 pages.
For Ahrefs, we choose to store about 340B pages in our index as of December 2023.
At a certain point, the quality of the web becomes bad. There are lots of spam and junk pages that just add noise to the data without adding any value to the index.
Large parts of the web are also duplicate content,
Can you compare RDs?
You would think this is straightforward, but it’s not.
Solving for all the issues is a lot of work
There are a lot of different things you’d have to solve for here:
The extra days in Semrush’s data that you’ll have to remove or add to the Ahrefs number.
Remember that Semrush also includes dead RDs in their dashboard numbers. So you need to filter their RD report to just “Active” to get the live ones.
Remember that half the links in the test of Semrush live data were actually dead, so I would suspect that a number of the RDs are actually lost as well. You could possibly look for domains with low link counts and just crawl the listed links from those to remove most of the dead ones.
After all that, you’re still going to need to strip the domains down to the root domain only to account for the differences in what each tool may be counting as a domain.
What is a domain?
Ahrefs currently shows 206.3M RDs in our database and Semrush shows 1.6B. Domains are being counted in extremely different ways between the tools.
According to the major sources who look at these kinds of things, the number of domains on the internet seems to be between 269M–359M and the number of websites between 1.1B–1.5B, with 191M–200M of them being active.
Semrush’s number of RDs is higher than the number of domains that exist.
I believe Semrush may be confusing different terms. Their numbers match fairly closely with the number of websites on the internet, but that’s not the same as the number of domains. Plus, many of those websites aren’t even live.
It’s going to get more complicated to compare these numbers
Part of our process is dropping spam domains, and we also treat some subdomains as different domains. We come up close to the numbers from other 3rd party studies for the number of active websites and domains, whereas Semrush seems to come in closer to the total number of websites (including inactive ones).
We’re going to simplify our methodology soon so that one domain is actually just one domain. This is going to make our RD numbers go down, but be more accurate to what people actually consider a domain. It’s also going to make for an even bigger disparity in the numbers between the tools.
Data freshness / Update speed
I ran some quality checks for both the first-seen and last-seen link data. On every site I checked, Ahrefs picked up more links first and on most Ahrefs updated the links more recently than Semrush. Don’t just believe me, though; check for yourself.
Comparing this is biased no matter how you look at it because our data is more granular and includes the hours and minutes instead of just the day. Leaving the hours and minutes creates a biased comparison, and so does removing it. You’ll have to match the URLs and check which date is first or if there is a tie and then count the totals. There will be some different links in each dataset, so you’ll need to do the lookups on each set of data for comparison.
Semrush claims, “We update the backlinks data in the interface every 15 minutes.”
Ahrefs claims, “The world’s largest index of live backlinks, updated with fresh data every 15–30 minutes.”
I pulled data at the same time from both tools to see when the latest links for some popular websites were found. Here’s a summary table:
Domain
Ahrefs Latest
Semrush latest
semrush.com
3 minutes ago
7 days ago
ahrefs.com
2 minutes ago
5 days ago
hubspot.com
0 minutes ago
9 days ago
foxnews.com
1 minute ago
12 days ago
cnn.com
0 minutes ago
13 days ago
amazon.com
0 minutes ago
6 days ago
That doesn’t seem fresh at all. Their 15-minute update claim seems pretty dubious to me with so many websites not having updates for many days.
In fairness, for some smaller sites it was more mixed on who showed fresher data. I think they may have some issues with the processing of larger sites.
Don’t just trust me, though; I encourage you to check some websites yourself. Go into the backlinks reports in both tools and sort by last seen. Be sure to share your results on social media.
Ahrefs now receives data from IndexNow
This will make our data even fresher. That’s ~2.5B URLs / day in March 2024. The websites tell us about new pages, deleted pages, or any changes they make so that we can go crawl them and update the data. Read more here.
Crawl speed
Ahrefs crawls 7B+ pages every day. Semrush claims they crawl 25B pages per day. This would be ~3.5x what Ahrefs crawls per day. The problem is that I can’t find any evidence that they crawl that fast.
We saw that around half the links that Semrush had marked as active were actually dead compared to about 17% in Ahrefs, which indicated to me that they may not re-crawl links as often. That and the freshness test both pointed to them crawling slower. I decided to look into it.
Logs of my sites
I checked the logs of some of my sites and sites I have access to, and I didn’t see anything to support the claim that Semrush crawls faster. If you have access to logs of your own site, you should be able to check which bots are crawling the fastest.
80,000 months of log data
I was curious and wanted to look at bigger samples. I used Web Explorer and a few different footprints (patterns) to find log file summaries produced by AWStats and Webalizer. These are often published on the web.
I scraped and parsed ~80,000 log file summaries that contained 1 month of data each and were generated in the last couple of years. This sample contained over 9k websites in total.
I did not see evidence of Semrush crawling many times faster than Ahrefs for these sites, as they claim they do. The only bot that was crawling much faster than Ahrefsbot in this dataset was Googlebot. Even other search engines were behind our crawl rate.
That’s just data from a small-ish number of sites compared to the scale of the web. What about for a larger chunk of the web?
Data from 20%+ of web traffic
At the time of writing, Cloudflare Radar has Ahrefsbot as the #7 most active bot on the web and Semrushbot at #40.
While this isn’t a complete picture of the web, it’s a fairly large chunk. In 2021, Cloudflare was said to manage ~20% of the web’s traffic, up from ~10% in 2018. It’s likely much higher now with that kind of growth. I couldn’t find the numbers from 2021, but in early 2022 they were handling 32 million HTTP requests / second on average and in early 2023 they had already grown to handling 45 million HTTP requests / second on average, over 40% more in one year!
Some of the SEO tools share the number of pages they crawl on their websites. The only one in the chart below that doesn’t have a publicly published crawl rate is AhrefsSiteAudit bot, but I asked our team to pull the info for this. Let me put the rankings in perspective with actual and claimed crawl rates.
Ranking
Bot
Crawl Rate
7
Ahrefsbot
7B+ / day
27
DataForSEO Bot
2B / day
29
AhrefsSiteAudit
600M – 700M / day
35
Botify
143.3M / day
40
Semrushbot
25B / day* claimed
The math isn’t mathing. How can Semrush claim they’re crawling multiple times as fast as these others, but their ranking is lower? Cloudflare doesn’t cover the entire web, but it’s a large chunk of the web and a more than representative sample size.
When they originally made this 25B claim, I believe they were closer to 90th on Cloudflare Radar, near the bottom of the list at the time. Semrush hasn’t updated this number since then, and I recall a period of time where they were in the 60s-70s on Cloudflare Radar as well. They do seem to be getting faster, but their claimed numbers still don’t add up.
I don’t hear SEOs raving about Moz or Sistrix having the best link data, but they are 21st and 36th on the list respectively. Both are higher than Semrush.
Possible explanations of differences
Semrush may be conflating the term pages with links, which is actually mentioned in some of their documentation. I don’t want to link to it, but you can find it with this quote: “Daily, our bot crawls over 25 billion links”. But links are not the same thing as pages and there can be hundreds of links on a single page.
It’s also possible they’re crawling a portion of the web that’s just more spammy and isn’t reflected in the data from either of the sources I looked at. Some of the numbers indicate this may be the case.
3rd party validation
Y’all shouldn’t trust studies done by a specific vendor when it compares them to others, even this one. I try to be as fair as I can be and follow the data, but since I work at Ahrefs you can hardly consider me unbiased. Go look at the data yourselves and run your own tests.
There are some folks in the SEO community who try to do these tests every once in a while. The last major 3rd party study was run by Matthew Woodward, who initially declared Semrush the winner, but the conclusion was changed and Ahrefs was ultimately declared to be the rightful winner. What happened?
The methodology chosen for the study heavily favored Semrush and was investigated by a friend of mine, Russ Jones, may he rest in peace. Here’s what Russ had to say about it:
While services like Majestic and Ahrefs likely store a single canonical IP address per domain, SEMRush seems to store per link, which accounts for why there would be more IPs that referring domains in some cases. I do not think SEMRush is intentionally inflating their numbers, I think they are storing the data in a different way than competitors which results in a number that is higher and potentially misleading, but not due to ill intent.
The response from Matthew indicated that Semrush might have misled him in their favor. Here’s that comment:
While Semrush doesn’t provide current hardware stats, they did provide some in the past when they made changes to their link index.
In June 2019, they made an announcement that claimed they had the biggest index. The test from Matthew Woodward that I talked about happened after this test, and as you saw, Ahrefs won that.
In June 2021, they made another announcement about their link index that claimed they were the biggest, fastest, and best.
These are some stats they released at the time:
500 servers
16,128 cpu cores
245 TB of memory
13.9 PB of storage
25B+ pages / day
43.8T links
The release said they increased storage, but their previous release said they had 4000 PBs of storage. They said the storage was 4x, so I guess the previous number was supposed to be 4000 TBs and not 4000 PBs, and they just got mixed up on the terminology.
I checked our numbers at the time, and this is how we matched up:
2400 servers (~5x greater)
200,000 cpu cores (~12.5x greater)
900 TB of memory (~4x greater)
120 PB of storage (~9x greater)
7B pages / day (~3.5x less???)
2.8T live links (I’m not sure the total size, but to this day it’s not as big as the number they claimed)
They were claiming more links and faster crawling with much less storage and hardware. Granted, we don’t know the details of the hardware, but we don’t run on dated tech.
They claimed to store more links than we have even now and in less space than we add to our system each month. It really doesn’t make sense.
Final thoughts
Don’t blindly trust the numbers on the dashboards or the general numbers because they may represent completely different things. While there’s no perfect way to compare the data between different tools, you can run many of the checks I showed to try to compare similar things and clean up the data. If something looks off, ask the tool vendors for an explanation.
If there ever comes a time when we stop winning on things like tech and crawl speed, go ahead and switch to another tool and stop paying us. But until that time, I’d be highly skeptical of any claims by other tools.
