SEO Tactics That I see Driving Growth & Results
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Welcome to the Voices of Search podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything podcast network. Ready to expedite your company's organic growth efforts? Sit back, relax, and get ready for your daily dose of search engine optimization wisdom. Here's today's host of the Voices of Search podcast, Tyson Stockton.

Hey, what's going on? My name is Tyson from Previsible.io and joining me today is Kristen Bauer, who is an independent SEO consultant at Bauer Growth Consulting. Bauer Growth Consulting provides tailored services to help companies reach their full potential with a focus on innovative strategies and personalized approaches. The company assists clients in achieving sustainable growth and success.

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So check out Ahrefs' webmaster tools at ahrefs.com slash AWT. That's A-H-R-E-F-S dot com slash A-W-T. Yesterday, Chris and I talked about how to win at Marketplace SEO with advanced tactics. And today we're continuing that conversation. But we're going to be talking about SEO tactics that drive growth results.

So a little broader sense of the conversation. And with that, here's my conversation with Kristen Bauer, independent SEO consultant at Bauer Growth Consulting. Kristen, welcome back.

Thanks, Tyson. It's great to reconnect and dig into a new topic today. Yeah. And yesterday we were kind of in the marketplace world, I think, from the conversation. Obviously, you've spent some time in that area. It's a fun little facet, you know, oftentimes in an e-commerce sense, not always, but I feel like it's a fun kind of like subset of enterprise website that has its own unique challenges. Yeah.

And today we're not defining just within kind of like that marketplace setting, but we're talking a little broader sense, but we're still talking tactics. What's some of the tactics that you see that can be impactful and also maybe has that like future proof potential with obviously we never know for 100% certainty, right?

But from your perspective, ones that you think are kind of safe, safe investments that are going to kind of continue to produce results. Yeah, I love that concept of future proof because that really leans into the concept of SEO, just future.

being more than just keywords and links. It's all about providing that great product and user experience to safeguard and future-proof your brand. So in terms of tactics that I'm seeing working really well right now, the first thing that comes to mind is UX improvements. I've been working with a lot of brands on this lately, and I know we all know that Google has confirmed this in the DOJ hearings.

I was a skeptic before that and just kind of assumed that this was part of Google's algorithm. It's definitely something that I've been seeing really successful right now for brands. I do think AI, obviously using AI in a smart way that helps with SEO efficiency as well as how fast

SEO and content are displayed on the site has been really successful with brands that I've worked with as well. I'm a big fan of testing, SEO testing. That's something where I've also been working with brands on pretty heavily lately in terms of validating what's working and what's not as successful.

And I do think technical cleanup is always something that should be focused on for brands, whether you have a small site or a large site, even more important for large sites. But technical cleanup is still something that is really, really important for SEO, especially for those enterprise brands and something that I don't see going away as an SEO trend or impactful trend.

And then lastly, content refinement, continually refining your content, aligning it with searcher intent and optimizing existing content. I've seen paid dividends in terms of that investment versus producing new content as well.

That's a solid list you have there. Which I mean, yeah, like I agree with a lot of those. For me, it's kind of like picking and choosing like, okay, which one do we want to dive into first? Testing kind of really jumped out at me. Like this is like, it's such a, in my mind, like a fundamental of like the SEO mindset or the SEO approach. What tips can you share with the audience on how to

how you should be thinking about running tests for like as an organization, how should you be embracing like the testing mindset? Like what can you kind of advocate for within this kind of vein? So SEO testing is something that can really help refine what you push out live and

from the site without any kind of large scale negative impacts. And so you can really quantify that on a smaller scale before it gets rolled out across the site. You can also test on individual pages as well or page groups. And so if you have an initiative, for example, that might be very resource heavy or cost intensive, test

Testing it out on a subset of pages can be really helpful and help validate the investment. You can also test across just basic SEO items like title tags, meta descriptions, H1s, content changes, layout changes. Those are all really easy things that are great candidates for testing and not something to get organizational buy-in. I think just try...

trying to reiterate the small scale refinement and validation before any kind of large scale investment or changes, you can really safeguard traffic by testing. You can also safeguard investments by testing. And

SEO is a practice. Not every brand will actually react the same way to a change that gets rolled out live. And this is something that I've worked on when I was at Zillow Group leading those SEO teams. We would roll out a change on Zillow. That would be great. And then we roll it out on Trulia. That would not perform the same way or vice versa for some random reason. And so it is helpful to validate brand by brand as well.

if you do work with multiple brands or you have multiple clients or teams, that can also be a really helpful barometer to just validate what you're working on and not operating under assumptions as well.

I do think that not every SEO test is going to be a winner. For example, I just rolled out a title tech test with a marketplace client of mine and we optimized for click-through rate with including inventory count or having capitalized words in the title and rewriting

we did not come up with a winning combination over the control group. And so we're kind of back to the drawing board at that point. But you can also have tests where you are managing, let's say, for example, your e-commerce brand, and you want to bump up the amount of products you have listed on a category page. It's helpful to test whether you have 24, 36, or 48 products you're listing on a category page. You can roll that out live across the sub

set of pages and then validate which group performs the best. Randomly, that's a test I've ran and 36 ended up being the winner for some reason with this brand I was working with. And that's a balance across other different areas. But

SEO testing really fundamentally just can help validate those assumptions before they're rolled out site-wide. And SEO testing is a little different than A/B testing, which we all know that in order to do SEO testing, you actually have to make these changes live. They can't just be client-side or cookie-based changes.

Absolutely. And I think it is a good differentiation kind of that last point of like a we're never going to have necessarily like a full true A, B statistically accurate like test and that true is kind of purest nature. But it's like we're just looking for validation of like these signals that we're kind of working towards. But I think kind of going back, it's

I really like that list of kind of like buckets that you gave us earlier. And that last one on like the testing to me is kind of like the mindset that you're taking with this, that like that's spanning across all activities of what you're doing in SEO. And then you had kind of like the two, I don't know, I would almost call them like the backbones were like content refinements. So again, you're pushing that

envelope forward, the technical cleanup from kind of, do we have any leaks or kind of like holes in the boat? But like with the user metrics, that one also kind of caught my attention because I agree with you, validate it with the news kind of coming out, didn't necessarily change the perspective, but that one in this group kind of feels like more of like an emerging platform

pillar it's it's gaining some kind of credibility as being like a standalone initiative group like has with the news from the doj trials to the google leak are you thinking about like this category of seo activities differently now than maybe you were like two or three years ago

Oh, absolutely. And I think you bring up a good point with this kind of emerging pillar here of SEO. And this is something where, you know, I personally would try to focus on to some extent, but with buy-ins across brands,

as an SEO, you kind of get isolated at times from that user experience component without that hard concrete data of like, yes, user experience impacts SEO more than just conversions on the site. And so you kind of had, I'd say you being like me as an SEO practice, would kind of have ability to dip a toe in the UX arena, but not necessarily have as strong of an influence

Not being said with the confirmations from the DOJ hearings, I think that does give concrete proof for SEOs to have more of a say in a stakeholder, I guess, stakeholdership and the user experience component of any website that you're working on. And it's something that I've seen brands embrace more heavily, even just in the last six months, year, six months or so, I've seen that really accelerate more where brands are

are more bullish on UX and SEO being hand in hand and working on that together. So that's really great to see because

Because UX really does impact that user behavior, those user signals. We all know that across the board. It does help with conversions. And so if you are an SEO trying to make an impact, it really does help your work and that traffic generation have a larger business impact if you are able to connect with that user experience and conversion even more. Because we all want that bottom line business impact.

And so with working on UX, I have seen that be more fruitful lately in terms of traffic trends and growth. For example, I have a client that has been focusing on above the fold content. And so there are ways to improve the above the fold content with just editorial content,

shrinking here images, adding descriptions. There's been studies on this lately, but I do think that above the full concept applies to all different types of content. For example, one of my SaaS clients has a scaled content section to support their product. And

and not something where we've focused on bringing up the key highlights and information or interactive elements of a page above the fold. And we've seen positive traffic and ranking traction since releasing above the fold changes and impact. So really helping users get to their answers as quickly as possible.

give the users what they want right away. And this is something where another one of my marketplace clients, they have a suite of brands and one of their brands has a map listing hybrid. A couple of their brands haven't been performing very well, but they don't have this map listing hybrid. The only brand that's performing well is the one with the map listing hybrid. All the other companies

competitors that are doing well have the map listing hybrid layout. And so it's really, I think, a very clear example of, okay, that user experience and layout makes such a huge difference in terms of the interaction with those pages and those feedback signals that Google is getting.

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- It's such a good call out. And I don't know if it's like a chicken or the egg kind of scenario, but it feels like almost independently of this further validation of user signals, I feel like over the last three to five years,

you've been just hearing more and more of this overlap and this collaboration of like CRO or UX work and SEO. And to me, it makes a ton of sense, but it does feel like just a growing trend that those two kind of functions are working a bit closer and it's not as much kind of just viewed as like

the SEO and content, but it's like UX is really becoming part of that fold quite a bit more in the industry.

Yeah, definitely. And the user experience can lean into so many different components that do impact SEO. You know, your page speed improvements and enhancements called the action, personalization, content layout, interactive elements, all these things can really add to that user experience that do impact SEO as well. Absolutely. Now, obviously, I'm a fan of kind of, you know, your perspective on this. It's,

In some ways, like we're adding an additional pillar to these kind of like core staples of SEO. And then we're pushing this kind of testing progression mindset across the board. Anything else that you'd want to kind of leave with the listeners as far as, you know, tactics that can have this really significant impact?

I think adding content refinement to that lesson optimization is something that can have a really big impact across brands and that traffic growth potential. So really matching that content researcher intent has is obviously even more important these days in 2024. And then having that topical authority and, you know, building out those content clusters, this can be really impactful.

I would say with the content refinement, I like to think about that as continuing to improve, optimize and refine what you have on your website already. Obviously focusing on content gaps

and building high quality, new, fresh content can help hit those gaps. That's great. That'll never go out of style with SEO. But I do see growth and success with that continual content refinement for brands that already have

a very strong base and foundation with content. And so I think optimizing existing content, whatever kind of content you have, you can break it up into groups or categories should be a cornerstone or consistent piece of that SEO program and strategy. And so that'll be, like I said, matching for search intent,

highly scrutinizing the actual content that's on the page, continuing to improve readability and grammatical flow of the sites. I love using those smart tools these days like Surfer SEO or Phrase to optimize.

With that reverse engineering for those top ranking results, that can be really fruitful. And so I really do think that just truly scrutinizing the content to make sure that it matches what people are searching for and genuinely and clearly answers what users are needing and their questions can provide a lot of growth versus just net new content creation without focusing on continuing to enhance what you already have.

Absolutely. And I know some kind of final thoughts, but one more from that with this, like, so content, it's been, it's been a core focus. And so it's, it's pushing, you're talking about like that advocation of like, for pushing the envelope farther, getting closer and closer to like, to the intent of it, utilizing some of the tools, like, is there anything else like in this arena of

content to intent that you feel like is shifting or changing or is different how you look at it now than maybe how you used to look at it in years past? Well, it's really leaning into knowing your users a bit better and not something where SEO does need to continue to understand that user behavior and wants and needs and

being smart about the research in terms of your keyword research and that search intent. A lot of tools these days provide that search intent. And so that's really easy to focus on if you want to focus on transactional or commercial or informational queries and really trying to understand your brand and your users, what they find helpful. I do think it's smart to

focus in different user groups and intent groups, because let's say you have a SaaS brand and you have your cornerstone product pages, but you do wanna build out more informational content around that. Just being really smart about how you pick your keyword strategy

And diving in deep to creating your outlines thoughtfully and how you want to optimize that content thoughtfully can really lean into that content optimization and that searcher intent.

Absolutely. Well, I appreciate the conversation, that perspective here. But with that, that's going to wrap up this episode of the Voice of Search podcast. Thanks again to Kristen Bauer from Bauer Growth Consulting for joining us. And if you'd like to get in touch with Kristen, you can find a link to her LinkedIn profile in the show notes or go on over and contact her on X where her handle is at Kristen underscore Bauer and

visit her website at kristenbauer.com.

Okay. Thanks to Tyson Stockton, our guest host. If you'd like to get in touch with Tyson, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes. You can contact him on Twitter where his handle is Tyson underscore Stockton. Or if your team is interested in SEO consulting or organizational education, you can always head to their company's website, which is previsible.io. That's P-R-E-V-I-S-I-B-L-E.io.

And a special thanks to Ahrefs for sponsoring this podcast. Monitoring your website used to require multiple expensive tools, but that's not the case anymore thanks to Ahrefs because they just launched their Ahrefs Webmaster Tools product, which monitors your SEO health, helps you keep track of your backlinks,

and gives you the insight into what keywords are performing for free. So check out Ahrefs Webmaster Tools at ahrefs.com slash AWT. That's Ahrefs, A-H-R-E-F-S dot com slash A-W-T.

Just one more link in our show notes I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to VoicesOfSearch.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter and you can even send us your topic suggestions or your marketing questions, which we'll answer live on our show. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is VoicesOfSearch on LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or you can contact me directly. My handle is Ben J. Schaap.

B-E-N-J-S-H-A-P. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of SEO and content marketing insights in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day during the work week. So hit that subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, remember, the answers are always in the data.