SEO in 2025: Adapting to Google’s New Reality

In the latter half of 2023 and throughout 2024, the SEO landscape has been thrown into upheaval. Monumental updates and changes have left many small- and mid-size websites reeling, especially in niches where they once outperformed larger competitors.

The reality is, SEO results almost never happen in a vacuum. Every action you take on your site is influenced by a web of concurrent developments — algorithm updates, SERP feature shifts, and more. This makes it difficult to isolate variables and pinpoint what’s really driving disruptions in your performance.

Understanding what’s currently happening in the world of SEO is more vital than ever for informing your strategy as you plan for what’s ahead in 2025.

A timeline of SEO turbulence: Late 2023 into 2024

The last six months of 2023 saw relentless volatility in the SERPs, with one major algorithm update after another.

• August 2023 Core Update: This marked the beginning of a turbulent period, shaking up rankings across the board.
• September Helpful Content Update (HCU): Previously separate from core updates, this iteration has left many sites struggling to recover.
• October and November Core Updates: These continued the trend of volatility, with significant impacts on rankings and traffic.
• Google’s Deal with Reddit: In February of 2024, Google licensed Reddit’s content to train its AI models. At the same time, Reddit’s presence in the SERPs exploded, sparking debate about its usefulness and safety for users. While Reddit’s AI overview appearances are dwindling, its influence on search visibility remains significant.
• March 2024 Core Update: This 45-day-long update aimed to reduce unhelpful content by 40%, with harsh penalties for offenders. Sites were deindexed within days, making this one of the most impactful updates in recent memory.
• August 2024 Core Update: With this update, Google acknowledged that many smaller sites saw major losses during the HCU, aiming to connect people with “a range of high quality sites, including small or independent sites that are creating useful, original content, when relevant to users’ searches.” Early results show some signs of recovery for those sites.

Adding to the complexity, Google replaced the First Input Delay (FID) with Interaction to Next Paint (INP) as a Core Web Vitals (CWV) metric. While not a primary ranking factor, INP and CWV could act as tie-breakers among top-ranking pages — a crucial detail given the fierce competition on the SERP today.

The rise of AI Overviews and the impact on organic search

In May of 2024, during Google I/O, Google launched its AI Overviews (AIO), formerly known as the Search Generative Experience (SGE) following a period of beta testing. Despite the initial excitement, AIO quickly came under fire for generating hallucinated answers. 

Although its visibility has decreased, AIO still significantly impacts the SERP, pushing organic results down by an average of 900 pixels. This shift affects the click-through rates of even top-ranking pages.

It’s possible to have your content cited in AIO, which is theoretically prime placement. However, trying to tell where your site is appearing in these overviews is extremely hard (a “maddening adventure,” as Search Engine Roundtable puts it). Google Search Console currently lumps those clicks and impressions into overall data.

Learn more on our blog: Age of SGE: How Will AI Affect Search Traffic in the Next Decade?

The resulting outcome: More zero-click searches

As these changes unfold, we’re seeing a rise in zero-click searches — instances where users either get the information they need directly from the SERP without clicking through to any site, or create a new search because the initial results didn’t satisfy them. For the former case, this trend ties closely to Google’s apparent goal of keeping users within its ecosystem for longer, thereby increasing ad revenue. Features like AIO contribute to this, as they deliver information-rich content that satisfies user queries without the need for external clicks.

This change has profound implications for organic search. The traditional click-through rate curve may start to change shape, with even top-ranking positions losing their prime status as SERP features push them further down the page. Higher competition and the evolution of search behavior mean that being number one might not be as valuable as it once was.

Sounds scary, I know. But rest assured, there are steps you can take to confidently navigate these challenging times in SEO.

How to respond: Re-establishing your SEO strategy in 2025

Given the current landscape, it’s important to re-establish your baselines and goals. Don’t hyperfocus on year-over-year losses, especially if your site has been hit by updates like the September Helpful Content Update. In some cases, recovery might not be the right goal — stability could be the new success.

Here’s what you can do to adapt:

• Prioritize Quality Traffic: Not all traffic is created equal. Focus on creating content designed to convert, following Google’s guidelines for helpful content as well as the Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines. Write for humans, not search engines!
• Solidify Your Technical Foundation: Crawlability is key — Google needs to access your content easily. Core Web Vitals may not be everything, but as mentioned, they can break a tie when all else is equal. Audit your site’s technical state and incorporate elements like schema markup to help search engines quickly understand your content.
• Emphasize Content Freshness: Google now considers multiple dates when crawling your content — byline date, syntactic date, and semantic date. Consistency across these signals is key. Avoid URL dates if possible, as they’re harder to update.
• Bolster E-E-A-T: Expertise, Experience, Authority, and Trustworthiness should be the pillars of your content strategy. Author bylines, bios and expert quotes will help build credibility, while structured data helps communicate your industry niche and relationships to other organizations.
• Optimize for Conversion: With organic traffic potentially dropping, optimizing for conversion becomes critical. Understand your user funnel and tailor CTAs to guide users further down the path. This way, any losses in traffic will have less impact on your bottom line.
• Prioritize Your Efforts: When planning your action items, use a chart to outline resource intensity and estimated impact. This will help you prioritize tasks wisely.

Staying agile in an ever-changing world of SEO

SEO is inherently dynamic, but the strategies outlined here are evergreen. As the landscape continues to evolve, staying informed and adaptable is key. Focus on creating high-quality content, maintaining a strong technical foundation, and optimizing for user experience.

Working with an expert partner in all things SEO will help you stay in front of the curve, and your competitors. 

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Try These 7 B2C Influencer Marketing Tactics for B2B Success

Despite their differences, business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) influencer marketing share several key similarities. 

Both audiences seek value, with a strong emphasis on trust, credibility, and social proof. They are actively engaged online and respond well to relevant, high-quality content. Effective influencer marketing strategies for both segments leverage this content to address specific needs and interests, driving engagement and fostering meaningful connections.

This is all to say that the many successful tactics that work for B2C influencer marketers can work for those on the B2B side of things, too. Yes, the goals and audiences may differ but the fundamental principles behind these tactics — building trust, leveraging content, and engaging authentically — are always relevant. By digging into these B2C tactics and adapting them for B2B, we can uncover strategies that get results. Let’s take a look at seven popular B2C methods that can be optimized for B2B influencer marketing.

1. Content co-creation

• B2C: Influencers create content that authentically showcases the brand, often integrating the product into their daily life.
• B2B Adaptation: Co-create content that aligns with both the brand’s marketing goals and the influencer’s expertise and audience.
• The Stat: 40% of brands say creator and/or user-generated content was the most important part of their 2023 social media strategy. (Source: Wall Street Journal) 

“What’s a faster way to connect with a target audience than building thought leadership from scratch? Working with influencers that already have authority and credibility with the target audience you want to reach.” – Lee Odden, Board Advisor, TopRank Marketing

2. Authentic storytelling

• B2C: Influencers share personal stories and experiences with a product to connect emotionally with their audience.
• B2B Adaptation: Humanize your brand by encouraging B2B thought leaders to share their professional journeys, challenges, and how your solution helped solve their specific problems. For best results, ensure the influencers in your selection pool have vast experience with your brand.
• The Stat: Conversions improve by 30% when brand-influencer posts focus on storytelling. (Source: Sprinklr)

3. Product demonstrations and reviews

• B2C: Influencers create captivating short-form videos to show products in action.
• B2B Adaptation: Because of their sometimes intangible traits (think software), showcasing a B2B product, service or solution takes special care. Rely on the influencer to share their POV on the offering, being sure to back it up with their industry expertise, the value proposition, their personal experience, and use cases. 
• The Stat: 96% of B2B companies plan to use video product demos in their content marketing over the next year (Source: RIVIA.AI)

“Influencers showcasing the practical applications of B2B products or providing authentic reviews can significantly influence potential buyers. This type of content aids in decision-making and boosts product credibility.” – Neil Patel, Co-Founder, Neil Patel Digital

4. Event partnerships and live streaming

• B2C: Influencers often attend brand events and live-stream their experience to their followers.
• B2B Adaptation: Partner with influencers to live-stream industry events, conferences, or product launches. These types of activations not only increase your reach but also adds a layer of credibility when an industry expert endorses your brand.
• The Stat: 68% of B2B marketers found that having influencers attend and cover industry events significantly enhances brand visibility and generates quality leads. (Source: Influencer Marketing Hub)

5. Long-term partnerships

• B2C: Consumer-facing influencers form long-term relationships with brands, promoting products over a series of months or even years.
• B2B Adaptation: Turn your B2B influencers into brand ambassadors. Recurring content creation, thought leadership, and event appearances can build sustained credibility and trust over time.
• The Stat: 56% of CMOs interviewed believe that the best way to optimize the use of B2B influencer marketing campaigns is to “build long-term relationships that show true brand advocacy.” (Source: Warmly,)

“Influencer marketing in the B2B space cannot be focused on short-term tactics; it’s about building long-term relationships with key opinion leaders. These relationships can lead to ongoing collaborations, where influencers become advocates for your company.” – Rafael Schwarz, CRO, TERRITORY Influence

6. Leveraging niche platforms

• B2C: Influencers often engage with audiences on niche platforms like TikTok or Instagram, depending on where their audience is most active.
• B2B Adaptation: Identify and engage with influencers on niche platforms relevant to your industry, like TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, newsletters, and even Threads. These platforms might have smaller but more engaged and relevant audiences for B2B brands, allowing for more targeted influencer campaigns.
• The Stat: Instagram is the top platform for influencer marketing, with 80.8% of marketers planning to use it in 2024. (Source: Sprout)

7. Influencer-driven content series

• B2C: Creators develop multi-part series to keep their audience engaged and the brand on their radar. 
• B2B Adaptation: Partner with influencers to develop a content series that explores different aspects of a relevant industry topic. Examples include blog posts, videos, or webinars that allow the influencer to provide insights on complex subjects over an extended period of time.
• The Stat: B2B buyers engage with 3-7 pieces of content before talking to a sales rep. (Source: Kurve)

“As brands, we need to stop building pay-per-post influencer campaigns.” – Justin Levy, Head of Social Media, Influencer Marketing and Community, ZoomInfo

Are you ready to unlock the potential of B2C strategies for your B2B organization? Our team of award-winning influencer marketing experts is here to help you every step of the way, from strategy development to execution. Contact us today.

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Content Localization Tips From the Experts

Content localization can be a time-consuming, research-intensive process, which is probably why it’s often overlooked — even by big brands that otherwise have highly robust and effective SEO strategies in place. But that’s also what could make it such a key differentiator for you.

When you take the time to accurately localize your content, your brand won’t just feel like another option for your audiences. Instead, you’ll feel like a brand that actually understands them and takes the time to speak to them on their own terms (literally). You’ll stand out from your competition, form more authentic relationships with your audience, and drive more qualified traffic to your web pages. All it takes is a little extra work on the front end.

If you’re wondering whether it’s worth localizing your content for different regions, that’s already a pretty good sign the answer is yes. 

What is content localization?

Content localization is the process of creating or editing content for a specific region. Though localization is related to — and frequently conflated with — content translation, the two are separate undertakings that require separate expertise.

Where translation is about converting the text of one piece of content from one language to another, localization can be thought of as converting the meaning of a text. Localizers are in charge of rewriting text to ensure its message makes sense to and resonates with the localized audience they are attempting to communicate with.

Compared to translation, content localization is much broader in focus. It could involve any number of alterations to content, including changes to:

• Spelling, such as changing American English to British English (for example, changing the spelling of “color” to “colour”).
• Measurements, such as switching from the imperial measurement system to the metric system (for example, changing feet to meters).
• Time and date formatting, such as changing the MM/DD/YYYY format used in the US to the DD/MM/YYYY format used in most of Europe.
• Idioms and phrases, which may rely on cultural knowledge that makes them difficult to translate to other cultures, requiring a replacement or analog instead.
• Hyperlinks, including any links to other webpages or websites you include in the content. You don’t want to localize one page only to send your visitors to an un-localized, irrelevant webpage when they want to learn more.
• Images and other media are often overlooked by localizers, but swapping out images and videos with media that’s more relevant to a local audience is a great way to make a page feel more targeted.
• Emojis, which can have different connotations in different cultures and regions. For example, the smiley face emoji actually symbolizes contempt or distrust in China.
• Keywords are also highly affected by localization. Using localized keywords is an opportunity to rank highly in the locales you’re targeting, significantly boosting your visibility to the right audience. Keyword localization is an important part of international SEO.

Depending on the nature of the content itself, even more substantial changes may be necessary. For instance, if you’re writing about celebrations or cultural events that aren’t observed in every region you’re targeting, then it won’t make much sense to publish that content in those regions. Instead, your content team should consider creating an alternate piece of content for those regions — or scrapping the idea entirely in favor of something with broader appeal.

Content localization best practices

No matter your audience, your content, or the region you’re localizing to target, you should always take the time to follow each of these best practices.

Get to know your regions first

The earlier you start your localization process, the more effective it will be. If possible, make thoughtful localization a part of your content and SEO market entry strategizing. As you develop audience personas, take note of where these audiences are located, and gather insights such as the following:

• Languages spoken in the regions
• Formatting styles used in the region (for date, time, measurements, spelling, etc.)
• Average demographics in the region (including age, education, income level, etc.)
• How people within this region typically find and interact with content online
• Major competitors in the region and how they approach content creation
• Audiences most likely to be interested in your product 
• Major holidays celebrated in the region
• Unique cultural factors to be aware of within the region
• Specific words, phrases, and subject matter to avoid 
• Anything else your content creators should know about the region

The later you implement your localization strategy, the more content you’ll have to retroactively localize, which can be a time-consuming and resource-intensive process. If you already have a great deal of existing content you’d like localized, it’s worth taking the time to conduct an SEO content audit with your new regions in mind.

Create (and maintain) regional style guides

Once you’ve researched the regions you’re targeting, build out separate style guides for each. These style guides should contain all of the information you found during your research and will serve as a source of truth for your content and SEO specialists.

Consult these style guides frequently and continuously update them as you learn more information about the region in question. If and when you conduct additional customer research, cross-check your learnings with your regional style guides and update them accordingly. If you maintain them properly, your style guides should continue to become more accurate and useful the longer you have them — just like your personas.

Don’t think of your regions as “primary” and “secondary”

Chances are, you probably do most of your business in one or two major regions. It’s tempting to think of these regions as your “primary” regions and narrowly focus on them. But by deprioritizing “secondary” regions, you risk stifling their potential for growth.

Take the time to consider all of these regions a primary source of traffic and potential revenue, and create content for them accordingly. Doing any less will only serve to alienate your “secondary” regions — which is exactly what localization aims to avoid.

Measure success for continuous optimization

Track all the localization changes you make to content closely so you can measure their success. Detailed, regionally segmented reporting will help you understand the specifics of progress and opportunities. 

Keeping a close eye on how your localization efforts affect your success within target regions can inform your ongoing content approach. Include learnings in your regional style guides to build out more informed and impactful localization strategies for each of your regions over time.

Ask for local guidance

There’s nothing more valuable than local insight for any stage of your content localization. If you’re just starting out, ask locals to review your research and style guide and add anything they can come up with. Have these locals review any localization edits you make to your content on an ongoing basis to ensure a higher level of authenticity and effectiveness.

You’ll find that your brand gets out of content localization what you put into it. If you take the time and invest the resources to accurately and thoughtfully localize your web content per target region, you’ll see just how valuable localization can be.

Want to learn more about advanced content strategies that can help your brand get ahead? Check out our full content marketing hub.

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How Strong SEO Strategies Will Boost Your Lead conversion

Whether you work at an agency or you’re managing a marketing budget in-house, you’ve probably had the classic debate before: do you focus on organic lead cultivation through SEO or try to generate as many leads as possible with aggressive tactics right now? 

I won’t pretend to be impartial: When you have the choice, favoring SEO is almost always the better investment. This isn’t an unfounded hunch, either: in our client programs here at TopRank Marketing, organic traffic consistently converts at a higher rate than overall traffic across a range of conversion types. 

Marketers tend to argue that SEO is important because it’s essential for “long term” growth. The time’s come to reframe that argument: SEO is essential because it unlocks the true potential of a brand’s lead conversion. 

Here are the big ways SEO unlocks that potential, with real-world examples from TopRank’s case studies.

Brand awareness generates more leads than demand generation over time

When the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising (IPA) noticed that brand marketing was “losing the budget war” to lead generation a number of years ago, they conducted a large scale study to find out why. 

At first, this study confirmed the conventional wisdom that led to marketers emphasizing lead gen over brand marketing in their budgets. Direct response efforts yield much faster results that translate to a quick spike in leads. Marketers can point to these short-term results as a measurable win. 

As they looked at the results, however, the IPA noticed something else: brand marketing driven by SEO took longer to ramp up than lead gen, but while these lead gen tactics fizzled out quickly, the brand marketing’s effectiveness kept rising.

Ultimately, the IPA study showed that SEO-based brand marketing initiatives reliably generated more leads for the same share of budget than their direct response counterparts. On average, your money goes further when you use it on brand marketing than when you spend on lead gen.

This conclusion led the IPA to formulate the famous “60-40” rule, which states that the optimal balance of brand and demand is 60% branding and 40% direct response. Your lead gen efforts guide your customers through your sales funnel to conversion, but your SEO brand marketing is what brings them into that funnel in the first place. 

As this study proves, when you emphasize brand marketing, you simply put your brand in front of more leads overall than you would with lead gen alone. And if you want to maximize your lead gen potential, SEO is a clear necessity. 

Intent-driven SEO provides the right kind of visibility for lead gen

Impressive as these numbers may be, the best argument for the importance of SEO has more to do with quality than quantity. In today’s SEO, search volume isn’t the end-all, be-all it once was. When determining which keywords to pursue now, SEO experts carefully consider a combination of search volume, keyword difficulty, and — most importantly — search intent. 

Search intent attempts to understand why a search engine user types in the keyword they’re looking for. Understanding this intent is the best way to provide best answer content to these users. As search engines become more intelligent, intent is increasingly the best way to rank highly in Search Engine Result Pages. But understanding and capturing search intent is also one of the most important things you can do to generate leads. 

Your ideal leads have specific intent whenever they use a search engine. If you can understand this intent and provide users with the information they’re looking for, the quality of traffic to your site will rise. The people who find you via organic search will be looking for what you have to offer. Through your best-answer content, get to know your brand, start to associate you with your area of expertise, and then look to you for help if and when they become leads. 

The right intent-focused SEO doesn’t just raise your brand visibility; it brings you the right visibility to generate leads. And, as the IPA proved, it continues to do so effectively over time.

An example of how this works: one of TopRank’s clients, a public accounting firm, came to us for help raising their brand visibility. Instead of focusing on general visibility, we developed a highly-focused SEO strategy to zero in on the relatively low-volume but high intent keywords the firm’s highly-educated, relatively technical audience would be looking for. 

This strategy helped the client rank for over 55 new keywords in SERP positions 1-3 and earn a 96% year-over-year gain in new keywords in top search positions. Even more crucially, however, the keywords we were able to rank for drive the right kind of audience to the firm’s site permanently. The client has become visible to the right people for the right reasons, and the leads follow.

Strong SEO can multiply the effect of all other lead gen initiatives

As the examples above show, SEO strategies aren’t just for raising brand awareness. Instead, it’s more accurate to think of them as the central hub of any digital marketing strategy. 

After all, everything you do — from your long-term brand raising efforts and content marketing to your SEM lead generation — feeds back to your site. The more effective you can make this hub, the more all your other efforts will benefit as a result.

When a luxury home décor retailer approached TopRank Marketing, they were looking for a way to stand out against much larger national brands and e-commerce juggernauts in their competitive category. To do that, they would need to carefully manage a long, multi-touchpoint customer journey.

To help them achieve their goal, TopRank incorporated every tool in our tactical mix into an integrated, multifaceted strategy with SEO at the heart. 

Through competitive auditing and analysis, our SEO experts identified high-intent keywords our client’s audience was searching but their competitors weren’t winning. We pivoted the client’s SEO and content strategies to focus on these opportunities, then used a combination of lead-generating influencer marketing, social media marketing, and video and content affiliate marketing to drive leads back to the newly SEO-optimized pages.

The result of this strategy was a 11.2% month-over-month increase in revenue, driven by +28.6% MoM gains in organic traffic, +30.9% gains in total website sessions, and a +55% return on ad spend. 

By starting with SEO strategy, TopRank was able to provide the backbone that the rest of the initiatives needed. First, organic SEO, focused on intent, captured the attention of the right audience. Then, we retargeted this audience with social media and influencer lead generation advertising. Finally, these ads led the audience back to search engines – and back to the high-intent pages we optimized to give them what they wanted. 

It’s time to stop thinking of SEO and lead conversion as two separate objectives to be pursued in isolation: they are both a part of the same buyer’s journey. If you want your marketing to convert leads as effectively as possible, building a strong SEO strategy should be one of your top priorities.

For more help using SEO to drive the measurable results you need, check out our Top SEO Strategies for Lead Generation.

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Should You Develop a Microsite for SEO? Learn Why and How

If you’re searching for Nike shoes, you might go to Nike.com and browse. But what if you want to know more about Nike as a company? Say you wanted to research their sustainability commitments and practices before you buy your new kicks. In that case, you can visit nike.com/sustainability and find a whole mini-website dedicated to everything Nike and eco-friendly.

Nike’s sustainability hub is a great example of a microsite. It helps a particular audience explore a single topic, with depth and breadth of coverage. It’s easier for people to find the information they’re looking for and explore related topics, too.

Microsites can be a powerful way for B2B brands to reach specific audiences with specific messages. Here’s what you need to know about microsites for SEO.

Developing a microsite SEO strategy

Microsites have a bad reputation in some SEO circles, and it’s true the technique can come off as spammy or convoluted if it’s not done properly. But the right microsite strategy helps everyone:

• Improves the user experience
• Helps people find information easily
• Highlights topics important to your brand
• Helps your audience self-select
• Builds your domain’s authority around a specific area

But let’s start with the basics:

What is a microsite?

A microsite is a small standalone website with a specific focus on a topic, product, campaign, sub-brand or event. They usually have their own subdomain or even a unique url, such as business.att.com or HubSpot’s Website Grader at website.grader.com.

Advantages of microsites for B2B

There are a few key ways that a microsite can improve your site SEO and your customers’ experience:

1. Targeted content. Microsites are highly focused, which helps attract niche audiences and can boost rankings for long-tail keywords.
2. Link building. When microsites are crosslinked with the main website, it helps the SEO of both sites.
3. Enhanced user experience. Microsites encourage users to explore the entire collection of pages, which helps boost time on page, lower bounce rates, and signal to search engines that the content is valuable.
4. Brand authority. Specialized microsites can establish a brand’s authority on a particular topic, with in-depth content that boosts credibility.

Microsites in action: A case study

A TopRank Marketing client has a solution with two distinct audiences: 

1. Individual end users, who might purchase a monthly subscription (B2C)
2. HR leaders, who would purchase a business licenses for their teams (B2B)

It’s easy to see how these two audiences need dramatically different messaging. Trying to reach both with one site was underserving the B2B audience and failing to generate traction.

To better reach the B2B audience, we helped this client develop a microsite focused on the benefits of the solution for teams. We created content aimed at helping this audience, and at  demonstrating the solution’s value.

Ultimately, the microsite helped target the B2B audience more effectively. The site is now ranking in the top 10 for dozens of keywords with B2B-specific intent — a feat that would have been almost impossible without the microsite.

When to create a microsite

Here are a few simple guidelines to help determine whether your audience/message would be best served with a microsite or simply a page on your main site.

1. You’re launching a new product or campaign. If your latest launch has its own messaging, branding, goals or unique audience, it could benefit from a microsite.
2. You’re targeting a new audience. As with the B2C/B2B example, a new audience for your brand could use a clean-slate introduction.
3. You’re testing a new idea or product. Microsites are a good way to soft launch a new service without cluttering the main site.
4. You’re telling a new brand story. As with Nike’s sustainability site, microsites help tell brand stories beyond the products and services you offer.
5. You want to optimize for a subset of keywords. If you have your eye on a juicy collection of long-tail keywords, a microsite can help you rank for them.
6. You have a complex navigation structure on your main site. Convoluted navigation is a bad user experience that can hurt your ranking potential. Microsites are an effective way to get organized.

Developing a microsite SEO strategy

The process for developing a microsite is similar to strategically creating content for your main site, with a few key differences. Follow these steps:

1. Determine your objectives. Set specific goals for the microsite to accomplish.
2. Analyze your audience. Make sure it’s unique enough to warrant a microsite, and explore content and keywords related to this particular audience.
3. Develop your content strategy. Research your keywords as they relate to your audience and refine your topics and subtopics.
4. Create content. Develop your content with an eye toward specificity, depth of coverage and value for the intended audience.
5. Optimize for SEO. Meta descriptions, tags, headers and SCHEMA can all help your content get seen.
6. Publish and promote. Use paid and organic social, influencer activation, and paid search to help launch the site.
7. Measure and optimize. Keep tabs on your site’s performance and adjust as needed.

Microsite challenges to watch out for

As useful as microsites can be, there are a few challenges you’ll need to meet:

1. Keeping the site up to date. It can be challenging to manage multiple microsites. Make sure you have the resources to support what you’re creating.
2. Brand consistency. A microsite should have its own look and feel, but still be recognizable as part of your brand.
3. Duplicate content. It’s important to not cannibalize your main site for microsite traffic. Make sure all microsite content is original and unique.

A microsite with macro impact

When they’re strategically created, deployed and supported, microsites can be a great way to reach a specific audience or promote a new product, service or campaign. 

A microsite makes it easier to target a specific subset of keywords. This helps the site reach a more relevant audience, which helps search engine algorithms see the value of your content. 

Need help building your own microsite SEO strategy? Our SEO team is on the case.

 

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TopRank Marketing and Sprinklr Win a Prestigious 2024 Content Marketing Award

New York, NY USA — The Content Marketing Institute (CMI) just announced TopRank Marketing and Sprinklr won a 2024 Content Marketing Award for “Across the Socialverse 2023: B2B Social Influence.” The Content Marketing Awards, presented each year by CMI, is the largest and longest-running international content marketing awards program in the world for content creation, distribution, and innovation.

The Content Marketing Awards recognize the best content marketing projects, agencies, and marketers in the industry each year. This year’s panel of all-star judges reviewed nearly 1,000 entries to determine the best of the best in content marketing excellence.

The 60 categories recognize all aspects of content marketing, including the best in strategy, automation, research, social media, video, editorial, illustration, design and much more, across many different industries from healthcare to manufacturing, from B2B to B2C. 

“It’s been another great year of content marketing excellence,” shares Stephanie Stahl, managing director, Content Marketing Institute. “The winning marketers and brands prove that content — strategic, compelling, informational, and inspiring content — is at the heart of any great marketing program. These winners showcase some of the most innovative and successful content and experiences in the marketing industry. We are honored to award their hard work and share their amazing projects with our content marketing community.”

The Socialverse campaign, developed by TopRankMarketing and Sprinklr, took shape as a documentary-style masterclass hosted by social media thought leaders, helping Sprinklr expand to new audiences and build resonant awareness around their powerful new AI-integrated Self Serve Plan offering. 

“It’s an especially big honor to be recognized among a field of finalists in this category that featured several very impressive and high-scale B2C influencer campaigns,” says TopRank Marketing CEO Donna Robinson. “This really is a sign of how far B2B influencer marketing has come, and where it’s going.”

As winners of Best Use of Influencer Marketing, TopRank Marketing – Sprinklr are now in consideration for Project of the Year. Finalists and winners for that category — along with Branded Campaigns of the Year, Agencies of the Year, and Content Marketers of the Year — will be announced in September and winners will be celebrated at Content Marketing World, October 21-23 in San Diego, California. 

About TopRank Marketing

Founded more than 20 years ago, Minnesota-based agency TopRank Marketing has long been a leading force in the B2B influencer marketing practice, producing the annual B2B Influencer Marketing Report and partnering with big brands around the globe to plan and execute winning strategies.

About Content Marketing Institute

Content Marketing Institute (CMI) exists to do one thing: advance the practice of content marketing through online education and in-person and digital events. We create and curate content experiences that teach marketers and creators from enterprise brands, small businesses, and agencies how to attract and retain customers through compelling, multichannel storytelling. Global brands turn to CMI for strategic consultation, training, and research. Organizations from around the world send teams to Content Marketing World, the largest content marketing-focused event, the Marketing Analytics & Data Science (MADS) conference and CMI virtual events, including ContentTECH Summit. Our community of 215,000+ content marketers shares camaraderie and conversation. CMI is organized by Informa Connect. To learn more, visit https://ift.tt/PgXBaK1.

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Researching Keywords for Your SEO Strategy, Step by Step

Successfully ranking for the keywords you’re targeting won’t make much of an impact on your business if those keywords are not relevant to your audience and their buying journey. In fact, many companies end up wasting a lot of time and resources in this pursuit. That’s why a smart, thoughtful and data-driven keyword strategy is paramount to an effective SEO strategy.

Fortunately, you have everything you need to start conducting keyword research and setting your strategic direction now.

How to research keywords for your B2B SEO strategy

By following this step-by-step process, you can start figuring out what your audience wants to find, how they’re looking for it, and how you show up for them in the search results.

Check your current rankings

Before you start researching keywords, it’s always wise to run an SEO audit of your current rankings as step one. This can provide a baseline of what your website is showing up, which can help you understand where search engines view your domain as authoritative. 

Checking your website’s SEO rankings is fairly straightforward, and there is a wide variety of both free and paid online tools you can use to do it. 

Conduct a competitive analysis

An SEO competitor analysis is a review of how your competitors are showing up in search. This concerns not only business competitors (i.e. companies competing for your customers) but also SERP competitors (i.e. companies competing for your target keywords), which are not always the same. 

This process can tell you a lot about how competitors are approaching their keyword strategies – and how you can differentiate yours or overtake key rankings.

Look for opportunities using a gap analysis

As you’re analyzing competitors, keep an eye out for any opportunities they’ve missed – or “gaps” in their SEO footprint. These include topics that they aren’t showing up for, but that customers in your solution category are searching for.

An SEO gap analysis can be a great place to start your search, surfacing keywords your competition may have overlooked entirely. Many online SEO tools and expert partners can help you quickly surface gaps in your competition’s keyword strategy. At TopRank, we develop keyword glossaries that list competitor rankings for each keyword alongside your own rankings to easily see where you can fill in the blanks for your audience and build share of search.

Bonus: Create a topical map 

In modern SEO, it’s very important to demonstrate topical authority by covering priority subjects in depth and at length. You want search engines like Google to recognize your domain’s expertise and focus on a topical area by covering as many facets of it as possible, creating and cross-linking content for the core keyword as well as relevant longtail offshoots and variations. (This is often referred to as a hub-and-spoke model.)

A topical map can be a fantastic tool for this purpose, helping you clearly map out different keywords that are tied together by user intent. Our agency builds topical maps for clients as part of our SEO service offerings and they are amazingly useful for content planning.

Prioritize relevance and intent over volume

When it comes to finding keywords worth pursuing, you should always consider relevance and intent more important than volume — especially in B2B marketing. As any savvy practitioner knows, bringing a dozen of the right people to your site is much more valuable than 100 of the wrong people.

Keywords with relatively low monthly search volume can be valuable if the people looking for them have the right relevance and intent. As you search for SEO keywords, try to determine how the most educated, high-intent users are searching for products and services like yours. Chances are, you’ll determine that they’re using lower volume search terms to try to hone in on what they’re looking for more specifically. 

The most effective SEO strategies focus on a combination of high, medium, and low volume keywords of high relevance and match their content to intent accordingly, filtering users from higher-volume keywords to more specific product-related pages.

Balance volume and achievability 

Along with the average search volume that a keyword drives, SEO tools will also highlight the keyword difficulty. This is often expressed as a percentage, with 0% being the easiest and 100% being the hardest. Keyword difficulty is essentially a measure of how firmly entrenched the current top results are in the SERP for a given keyword. As keyword difficulty increases, you’ll need better content and more referring domains to compete with other results.

Keywords with high volume and low difficulty are often the “low-hanging fruit” worth prioritizing, but chances are you won’t find enough of those keywords to build out your full strategy. 

After that, you’ll have to pick and choose your battles by evaluating what’s valuable vs. what’s achievable. Striking the right balance will mean targeting a healthy combination of high-intent, low volume keywords with low or reasonable difficulty and higher volume keywords with achievable difficulty. 

Report, rinse, repeat

Effective SEO strategy is never “finished.” As you pursue the keywords you’ve surfaced, report on your ranking progress on a regular basis. Evaluate how effective your approach is to optimize your strategy over time, and continuously look for new keywords you can start targeting to round out your strategy and build your domain authority. 

SEO keyword strategy template

Consult the following checklist for each keyword you’re considering adding to your strategy. The more boxes you can check off for the keyword in question, the better an opportunity it represents. 

• Ranking for this keyword would improve your brand’s visibility and/or drive the right audience traffic to your site
• This keyword is directly relevant to your brand’s topical pillars
• When people search for this keyword, they are looking for information you have the expertise and authority to provide
• Users who search for this keyword are at some stage of your marketing funnel
• Your direct competitors are not ranking in the top 10 positions for this keyword OR you feel confident that your content could outrank theirs
• This keyword has enough monthly search volume OR the right search intent to drive quality traffic to your site
• This keyword has low enough keyword difficulty that a site with your level of authority could rank for it 
• You already have or could create compelling content that provides what users are looking for when they search this keyword

In all likelihood, most of the keywords you find will not check each of these boxes. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re not worth pursuing. Use this SEO keyword strategy template to inform your larger SEO strategy and help you determine which keywords to prioritize first, not as the sole arbiter of whether pursuing a keyword could be useful.

Despite all the advanced tools and resources you have to help you, researching keywords for an SEO strategy remains as much art as science. Finding the right keywords to pursue is as much about understanding your audience and your industry as it is practicing good SEO — which is exactly why modern SEO advice like this is all about helping you do both.

For more help finding and pursuing the right keywords, check out our full guide on Why You Need a Keyword Strategy and How to Create One. 

 

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