With the inevitable demise of cookies, marketers are scrambling for ways to deliver personalized experiences with user consent, all without compromising convenience or security. Today, many are turning to the login box as a critical first step in executing an effective first-party data strategy. It’s no longer just a security requirement – it’s now the doorway into their brand’s digital user experience.
Join Salman Ladha, senior product marketing manager from Okta, as he shares techniques that marketing and digital teams can use to remove friction from their login experience – leading to improved acquisition, retention, and increased revenues.
Twitter has just announced the end of CoTweets. They put out a statement in their Help Center that the new feature, which started in July, will be sunset by the end of the day on January 31, 2023.
A CoTweet is a tweet that has two authors’ profile pictures and user names. A CoTweet appears on both users’ profiles and is shown to all of their followers.
Twitter warned us about this. When the CoTweet experiment was announced, it was also made known that this may not be a permanent feature and that it could go away.
Why we care. This feature was a short-lived experiment with the potential for brands and individuals to reach wider audiences. Clearly, Twitter deemed the feature a loser under Elon Musk after not meeting expectations.
You can now customize SEO titles and descriptions for any LinkedIn articles you will publish or have already published.
Why we care. Whether you’re using LinkedIn to grow an audience for yourself, your company or your clients, you want to take advantage of every opportunity you can to increase your search visibility and discoverability. This is super basic SEO – and it’s likely you were probably already creating your headlines with search in mind already. But it is a nice option to let you optimize your content specifically for search.
How it works. Click on Write article. Under the Publishing menu in the article navigation pulldown menu, click on Settings.
Here’s you’ll see two fields:
SEO title: You have 60 characters to work with. LinkedIn says: “We’ll use your added SEO title in place of your article title for search engine result pages, such as Google search.”
SEO description: You have 160 characters to work with here.LinkedIn says: “We’ll use the SEO description in place of the first few lines of your article on search engine result pages. We suggest utilizing keywords, summarizing your writing, and aiming to write between 140-160 characters.”
What it looks like. Here’s a screenshot:
Newsletters gain visibility in search. LinkedIn is also increasing the prominence of Newsletters in search results. Now if a LinkedIn creator offers a newsletter, it will appear under the author’s name, along with a Subscribe button. Here’s an example:
Scheduled articles coming soon. LinkedIn also announced the article and newsletter authors will be able to schedule articles. These will work in the same way as scheduled posts.
Internal linking is a crucial aspect of any website, but it is especially important for ecommerce websites.
Internal linking helps improve the navigation and user experience for your website visitors and can also help improve your website’s search engine optimization (SEO).
This article will discuss the best practices for internally linking pages on ecommerce websites. To help illustrate these opportunities, I’ll use some of my favorite examples of ecommerce SEO done well – the portfolio of Williams Sonoma brands. (Disclaimer: I have no affiliation and have never worked on any of these sites.)
But first, let’s lay the groundwork for why these tactics are so important.
What is internal linking?
Internal linking refers to linking one webpage to another on the same website domain. When a user clicks on an internal link, they will be taken to a different page on your website. These links can be words, phrases, or images.
Internal linking is important because it helps people find the information they are looking for on your website and helps them move from one page to another.
It also helps search engines understand the structure and hierarchy of your website, making it easier to find in search results.
What internal linking is not
Internal linking is not the same as external linking.
External linking is when you put links on your website that take users to other websites. This can help them find relevant information from other sources.
Using both types of linking is essential, but they have different purposes.
Why is internal linking important for ecommerce websites?
While there are probably many more reasons than I’ve listed below, these are the four primary reasons that are always top of mind when working on an ecommerce website with tens of thousands, if not millions, of pages.
Ecommerce websites often have a large number of pages, including product pages, category pages, and other informational pages. Internal linking helps users navigate these pages and find the information they want.
Ecommerce websites often have a lot of competition and potentially many vendors offering the same or highly similar products. Internal linking can help improve the SEO of the website, making it more visible in search results.
Internal linking can help improve the discoverability of ecommerce websites by helping search engines discover and crawl all of the pages on the website. This can lead to more traffic and potential customers for the website.
Internal linking can highlight promotions and sales, new products, and customer reviews on ecommerce websites. This can draw attention to these items and encourage users to take advantage of them.
It helps improve the visibility and ranking of a website on search engine results pages (SERPs) and improves the user experience by allowing visitors to navigate the website easily.
But, before we get into general best practices, as noted in the items above, it is essential to note the difference between navigational internal linking and in-content internal linking.
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In-content vs. navigation internal linking: What’s the difference?
In-content internal linking includes links within the content of a page (typically a blog post), while navigation internal linking is when you have links in your website's navigation menu.
For example, if you are writing a blog post about men's shoes, you may want to link to a page about sneakers. This would help users find additional information related to the current page's content.
In contrast, navigation internal linking helps people find the main pages on your website and navigate your website more easily.
With that explanation out of the way, here are 9 best practices for internally linking pages on ecommerce websites, broken down by in-content or navigational.
Navigation internal linking best practices
Let’s start with some of the basics for a solid ecommerce website.
1. Sitewide navigation menu
The organization and utilization of your primary navigation are table stakes for a robust internal linking strategy.
When a page is linked from the sitewide menu, it essentially means that it is linked from every page on the site, which can signal to Google that the page is essential. However, it's necessary to be mindful of not overcrowding your menu.
Across the Williams Sonoma portfolio of sites, the main navigation is a master class of effective internal linking strategy. I’ll use the below example from West Elm’s Kids section to illustrate.
1 and 2 – Category / Sub-Category Linking: West Elm links to crucial category pages from the sitewide menu, boosting these pages' internal authority. The sub-category links assist in providing Google with a better understanding of the organization of the website and the semantic relationships between them.
3 – Focusing on the user journey: Having dealt with this myself, I know design paralysis is a big blocker to purchasing furniture. With the Design Resources section, West Elm not only provides search engines an entry to all products in the category (All Kids & Baby Collections) but also answers common blockers to purchase (inspiration, in stock, etc.).
Ross Hudgens summarizes the additional benefits of including this content more eloquently than I could:
“Integrating content into navigation categories can help drive significantly more outcomes. Most people don’t care to visit “Resources” or “Blog.” This will lead them to ignore dropdowns like that.
They want to solve a specific problem and are more likely to be driven down the path of reading up on it if it’s naturally embedded within each category.
This will help drive users down the funnel, especially for products with a long sales cycle. In the nav, you can link directly to the hub category for the section that discusses that content.
If it doesn’t exist, that’s a hint your content hub could use better architecture around the actual problems people have.
You can see how this powerfully ties together from an internal linking and engagement benefit point of view.”
4 – Internally link to support business priorities: The critical thing to note about this example is the internal link doesn’t just say “Sale.” It is a specific sale (“Up To 40% Off Furniture”) aligned with the category.
As you navigate each sub-menu, you’ll find that the sale references align with the primary category. Great use of deep linking, even within the sale section.
5 – Internal link to support secondary KPIs: In an age where first-party data collection must be a priority, West Elm provides a clear CTA driving users into their design center to schedule an appointment.
While I cannot validate this, I would expect the data collected to be used to fuel additional marketing efforts.
Ultimately, if someone chose to utilize these services, I expect these average order sizes to be much larger (I know it was for me), which is also likely why they can offer these design services at no cost.
6 – Portfolio-wide internal linking strategy: I’ve worked on many ecommerce sites that were part of portfolio companies. The typical approach is to add a bunch of footer links to the portfolio domains and call it a day.
This is the first time I have seen such a focused effort on utilizing an internal linking structure to elevate all domains in a portfolio. The important element to note here is that even the cross-domain internal link is highly relevant (e.g., West Elm Kids Furniture → Pottery Barn Baby & Kids Furniture).
The Williams Sonoma site portfolio uses a mix of global navigation menus. I’ll focus on the two in the screenshot below.
At the top, again, we see a list of external links to ecommerce sites in the portfolio. (Gap also does this well.)
Directly below the logo, Mark & Graham utilizes a row of “quick links” that are updated to support seasonal efforts, promotions and sales, new product categories, and other deep links to category pages that otherwise might not have a home in the fixed navigation menu (i.e., Occasions, Interests, etc.)
This is an excellent example of secondary navigation that adds value to the user (and search engines) beyond just Find a Store, Shopping Cart, etc.
3. HTML breadcrumb navigation
HTML breadcrumbs are typically displayed at the top of the category and product pages. They include a series of links that show the path a user has taken to reach the current page.
They help users understand where they are on the website and make navigating to previous pages easy.
Improved crawlability: Breadcrumb internal linking helps search engines discover and crawl the pages on your website and can help minimize orphaned pages. This can improve the overall visibility of your website in search results.
Enhanced user experience: Breadcrumb internal linking can improve the user experience of your website by making it easier for users to navigate and find the information they are looking for. This can lead to increased engagement with your website and can also help improve your rankings in search results.
Increased relevancy: By using internal breadcrumb linking to show the relationship between different pages on your website, you can help search engines understand the site structure of your pages – especially when marked up with breadcrumb schema.
A perfect illustration of this is Williams Sonoma’s utilization of breadcrumbs to build natural internal links to essential category pages based on my navigational path to the same product:
Williams Sonoma's "OXO" brand breadcrumb
Williams Sonoma's "mandoline slicers" breadcrumbWilliams Sonoma's "all food prep tools" breadcrumb
4. HTML sitemap
An HTML sitemap is a page that lists all pages on your website and provides links to these pages.
For example, you might include a sitemap on your website that lists all of the pages on your website and provides links to these pages, or you could use internal linking to highlight the most critical pages on your website.
Creating a well-structured HTML sitemap and linking to it from the footer, as Pottery Barn Kids has done, ensures that most site pages are only a few clicks away, which aids in both user accessibility and SEO.
Since search engines crawl sites in a sequential manner and follow contextual cues, it is beneficial to have a single page that links to the site’s primary and secondary pages.
This can be helpful for users looking for specific pages on your website and help search engines discover and crawl all of the pages on your website.
Once created, it is essential to maintain an updated HTML sitemap on the site to ensure users and search engines can reach any page via minimal navigation.
In-content internal linking best practices
Ecommerce sites are notorious for lacking content – especially across category and sub-category pages. As a result, it could be argued some of these examples are "navigational" in nature.
However, I might argue these implementations are less ‘standard’ for navigational purposes and typically buried at the bottom of the page (where content is generally added for category pages).
5. Supporting category page content
There are many ways to build in supporting content on category pages – that could be a separate article.
In the example below, West Elm adds a few supporting paragraphs at the bottom of their category pages with additional heading tags and content that adds value to the user experience.
Within that content, they naturally include links to other category and sub-category pages, individual product pages, and even educational/blog content where it makes sense.
6. Internal linking modules
Above the supporting page content, Pottery Barn, Mark & Graham, and West Elm utilize a row of Related Searches (read more about internal link modules here).
Pottery Barn Kids utilizes this same row directly above the footer.
In all cases, these text links take the form of long-tailed keyword-rich internal links to sub-categories and product detail pages (PDPs).
As you can see from the example above, this provides opportunities to build rich anchor text links to pages around color, texture, and even sizing – incredibly valuable for those long-tailed but highly-qualified searches.
7. Related products/browsing
Ecommerce SEO 101 requires a related products widget of some sort. This can help users discover additional products they may be interested in and is one of the foundational tactics for internal link building.
However, what was traditionally reserved for the product detail page, has expanded to category pages, and even the “types” of related products have grown exponentially.
For example, Williams Sonoma uses the standard “Related Products,” while Pottery Barn uses a “Top Picks for You” widget on their category pages.
On product detail pages, this implementation expands to a wide variety of implementations and names, typically with multiple rows per page in a carousel allowing for a more extensive list of internal links per page:
“People Also Viewed” (Pottery Barn Kids)
“People Also Bought” (Pottery Barn Kids)
“Also in This Collection” (Pottery Barn)
“Pairs Well With” (West Elm)
“People Also Browsed” (West Elm)
“Customers Also Viewed” (Williams Sonoma)
“Customers Also Bought” (Williams Sonoma)
“Related Products” (Williams Sonoma)
“You May Also Like” (Rejuvenation)
And more!
These links are invaluable for cross-selling, upselling, and flattening the overall website architecture.
8. Product attributes
Where breadcrumbs might not be possible, product attributes can fill the void.
When both can be used, they are an effective complement for each other and can reference any/all attributes a product might have:
Size
Style
Color
Brand
Flavor
Texture
While this type of internal link is perhaps better showcased on another site (check out REI.com), I was able to find an example of this on West Elm:
In this case, “Learn more” links to the collaboration page for Scout Regalia. I would argue that a better anchor text implementation could be done here.
There are broader opportunities across the collective sites to take advantage of interlinking among collaborations and brand pages on product detail pages themselves.
9. User-generated content (UGC)
UGC content can take on many forms:
Reviews.
Testimonials.
Question and Answers.
It’s hard to find fault in Williams Sonoma’s SEO strategy. This, however, is one area where there might be a significant opportunity.
In the example above, a Pottery Barn associate left a response to a comment with a naked URL. However, the link is not clickable.
Generally, the Q&A section across the domains offers many opportunities for internal linking automation.
What are general internal linking best practices?
Now that you have a roundup of the why and where to incorporate internal links, you might wonder “what to do” and “how to do it.”
A myriad of articles outlines these internal linking best practices very well, including Moz, Semrush, and, of course, Google.
I suggest you dive into the links above for a more detailed breakdown. In my opinion, the five most crucial internal linking best practices to follow, in no particular order, are below:
Link to deep pages.
Use descriptive anchor text.
Link to relevant/related pages.
Link to the canonical version of the URL.
Don’t use the same anchor text for multiple pages.
How do I implement internal linking on my ecommerce site?
Much of this may require some grunt work and a partnership with your development team to implement these strategies effectively.
The implementation with the most bang for your buck (and potentially the highest level of effort) is internal linking modules. I linked it above, but I highly recommend reading this article from Holly Miller Anderson for more details.
Alternatively, auditing your existing internal links to determine which pages could benefit from increased internal linking is always a great place to start.
Paul Shapiro defines this process as determining “internal PageRank,” which is an intelligent way of thinking about it.
No matter how you define it, the outcome of this exercise will no doubt provide valuable insights to get started.
Maximizing internal linking for ecommerce
Internal linking is an essential aspect of any ecommerce website.
By following the best practices discussed in this article, you can ensure that your website is easy to navigate for users and is optimized for search engines.
As Instagram and Facebook continue to lead the social platform arena, Meta remains a media channel where advertisers must stay visible and competitive in 2023. Much has changed over the past year, with Meta releasing many new tools and features. Advertisers now have more resources to scale their campaigns faster than ever.
Meta continues to dominate machine learning, launching new automated campaign types proven incredibly efficient. Advertisers have more options to control certain elements in campaigns.
The media giant also improved the experience of working with influencers, a value-add to advertisers who seek to focus on their brand awareness budgets over direct response.
With all the new updates in 2022, several best practices were uncovered through rigorous testing, many of which prove vital for any brand’s long-term Meta advertising strategy.
Here are five recommendations to consider when running Facebook and Instagram advertising campaigns in 2023.
1. Leverage Advantage+ campaigns
Advantage+ campaigns is a new feature Meta released in 2022. I’ve always advocated for Meta’s machine learning because they have mastered it. Advantage+ campaigns are a great addition to app and shopping initiatives.
Meta does the work for advertisers by finding the right audience and the right creative. We have succeeded across app install and shopping (dynamic product ads).
To capitalize on Advantage+ campaigns, it’s essential to ensure you have a healthy amount of creative to get these running effectively. Meta recommends the creative assets they think will perform the best, but marketers can manually select the ones they desire.
Experiment with your options and try a combination of ads known to perform well while also letting Meta choose ads. By testing and optimizing what works, you’ll likely see an improvement in your cost-per-acquisition running with Advantage+ campaigns. Keep your eye on these for 2023.
2. Work with influencers
Not a new tactic, but Meta has recently put forth new playbooks and guides to help advertisers work with influencers.
Influencers are a large part of B2C advertising budgets, and Meta has recognized that marketers want to leverage user-generated content on brand channels with paid media.
The process isn’t perfect, but here are a few key best practices to make your strategy go as smoothly as possible.
Connect your influencers as partners under your company page’s “Paid Partnership.” This function allows you to promote their content on your brand channels.
When promoting on Instagram, ensure influencers include the paid partnership label with your brand – “Paid Partnership with [Brand Name].” This is very important as it ensures you can pull the partner’s content onto your own pages to advertise within the ads manager. Make sure each partner specifically includes your brand name in the partnership label because if they only include the generic label that says “Paid Partnership” you will likely run into trouble getting their content promoted and will have to have them edit the post.
For Instagram Reels and Stories, verify that there are no stickers or copyrighted music in videos created. Otherwise, Meta will not approve your ads. In addition, you’ll have to work with influencers to re-record their content, which can be a major inconvenience if your campaigns are timely. Typically, the quality of content decreases when we have to go back to influencers and ask for last-minute changes to content that was initially in final approval.
Also, keep in mind that if you’re promoting Reels, advertisers can only add links to these if you create a dark post. If it’s important that you have a link, but you don’t want a dark post, Facebook recommends going with the “Story” placement.
Advertisers working with influencers can additionally find success with the “Instagram Explore” placement, so it’s highly recommended to keep an eye on that one for 2023. We’ve seen our lowest CPMs and CPAs from Instagram’s new “Explore” placement and plan to increase spend here on future influencer initiatives.
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Yes, there are still many pain points and kinks to be worked out when setting up Meta’s Conversion API (CAPI). However, Meta has recently rolled out various setup methods to help more advertisers get up and running.
While CAPI isn’t mandatory, it’s worth keeping in mind since it’s a deeper level of optimization. With the new setup methods, it also appears Meta is (hopefully) working to offer more integrations for advertisers to get set up faster without needing a full dev team.
After successfully getting CAPI set up and launched, we delivered our lowest cost-per-acquisition of the year in Q4. Our CPA decreased by 34% in our first month and 70% in our second month while optimizing for conversions using CAPI. We were able to feed a deeper data point to Facebook’s algorithm.
Stay on the lookout for more Meta updates regarding CAPI setup. This is one feature you don’t want to miss out on.
4. Use ‘open’ and ‘broad’ targeting
Aligning even more with Meta’s machine learning algorithm, “Open” or “Broad” targeting will continue to be king when scaling your campaigns.
Meta’s algorithm can efficiently find the audience most likely interested in your ads and taking action when doing either of these two options:
Leaving your targeting open, meaning you don’t add any targeting beyond demographics.
Leaving your targeting very broad, using minimal interest targeting that keeps audience scale in the millions.
Open and broad targeting feeds Meta the most audience data to allow it to make the best optimizations, which is the best way to make machine learning work for your advertising efforts.
5. Make the best of lead gen forms
Long has been the theme of “less is more” regarding lead gen forms. This remains true in many cases. But if you’re struggling with the quality of leads, consider adding more questions to qualify the customer.
We’ve seen this successful when needing to drive quality over quantity. Yes, your front-end cost per lead will likely increase. Still, we’ve found that the quality on the backend significantly improves and decreases the efficiency of qualified leads while driving increased revenue for businesses.
It’s also recommended to test manual fill for first name, last name and/or email address if you’re struggling with the quality. There is a balance to be found when it comes to manual fill vs. autofill so you’ll likely want to test a few variations to find what works best for your business.
Don’t have too many manual fill questions to avoid accidentally increasing the volume of abandoned forms. Consider additionally giving the consumer a short and sweet introduction on the form that details what they will get from filling out the form. This can be a snippet of a whitepaper or a few bullets about the company – whatever makes the most sense for your ad.
Moreover, ensure your thank you page or the landing page you are driving the consumer to is engaging with helpful information and resources. This provides more education for the consumer to make decisions and can help build your retargeting audiences for nurture campaigns.
Lastly, keep the creative for your lead gen forms scroll-stopping. You have seconds to grab someone’s attention in their feed and make them stop to open your form, so be bold!
The takeaway
As Meta continues to evolve and unroll new features, one thing is certain – automation will become a core campaign tactic.
With automation at the forefront, advertisers have more ability to test and learn at a faster pace than ever with tools like CAPI and Advantage+ campaigns.
Furthermore, don’t hesitate to lean into open and broad targeting, where possible, to feed audience optimization.
2023 will be a big year for testing to see where advertisers can uncover additional efficiencies and remain competitive on Facebook and Instagram.
In 2022, Google released a new API under the Search Console APIs for the URL Inspection Tool. The new URL Inspection API let you programmatically access the data and reporting you’d get from the URL Inspection Tool but through software.
SEO tools and agencies can provide ongoing monitoring for important pages and single page debugging options. For example, checking if there are differences between user-declared and Google-selected canonicals, or debugging structured data issues from a group of pages.
CMS and plugin developers can add page or template-level insights and ongoing checks for existing pages. For example, monitoring changes over time for key pages to diagnose issues and help prioritize fixes.
2022: This change may have resulted in seeing more or less errors in your Breadcrumbs and HowTo structured data Search Console enhancement and error reports.
2022: Designed for small and mid-sized enterprises, the app automated weekly site crawls and detects issues ranging from broken pages to content that doesn’t meet best-practice guidelines for SEO.
2019: Previously you were able to submit up to 10 URLs per day and maximum of 50 URLs per month. Bing increased these limits by 1000x and removed the monthly quota.
2019: Marketing Land’s Digital Agency Survey found the sector was weathering digital transformation well, but the growth of data-driven marketing made it clear where they needed to hire.
2019: Quora introduced three new metrics (Auctions Lost to Competition, Impression Share, Absolute Impression Share) to help advertisers understand how they performed in the ad auctions.
2014: The latest images culled from the web, showing what people eat at the search engine companies, how they play, who they meet, where they speak, what toys they have, and more.
2013: Google added three new measurement features to the AdWords for video reporting interface (Reach & Frequency, Column Sets Tailored to Marketing Goals, Geographic Visualization).
2012: A program that guaranteed top listings for local searches on Google, Yahoo and Bing? An “officially approved” one in “cooperation” with those search engines? Not true, said Google and Bing.
2012: Search ad spend was expected to grow 27% from 2011 to 2012, up from $15.36 billion to $19.51 billion. And by 2016, it was expected to reach almost $30 billion annually.
2011: You could analyze domains, Twitter usernames, or keywords — and they can be compared over four timeframes: one day, a week, two weeks or a month.
2010: “We did not enter the search business,” Jobs said. “They entered the phone business. Make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone. We won’t let them.”
2008: The overall industry average click fraud rate rose to 16.6% for Q4 2007. That was up from 14.2% for the same quarter in 2006, and 16.2% in Q3 2007.
2007: Google’s Shuman Ghosemajumdersome said third-party auditing firms don’t appear to be
matching up estimated fraud figures with refunds or even actual clicks registered by advertisers.
2007: The search engines had to make “moral judgments” about international authorities’ requests for information when they do not have to do the same for US requests.
Past contributions from Search Engine Land’s Subject Matter Experts (SMEs)
These columns are a snapshot in time and have not been updated since publishing, unless noted. Opinions expressed in these articles are those of the author and not necessarily Search Engine Land.
Ever since Elon Musk took over as CEO of Twitter, there have been a lot of changes to the platform.
Some people love it. Others are not so sure. Many marketers have even said their goodbyes to Twitter.
As far as brands are concerned, many have left the platform or temporarily paused ads due to increased hate speech, safety concerns, and Musk’s overall lax approach to content moderation, account suspensions, and other issues.
Here’s a rundown of all the changes that have happened so far. Whether you’re a fan or not, it’s worth keeping up with what’s happening with Twitter 2.0.
The latest in the Twitstorm:
In a beta available to all advertisers, Twitter launched a new Search Keyword Ads campaign objective.
Roll-Out Plan for Alternative Feeds, Updated Bookmarks UI and Long-Form Tweets is announced
Musk announces that Twitter is rolling out View Count, so you can see how many times your video is seen. Once we have official confirmation and more info, we’ll let you know.
Musk creates a poll asking users If he should step aside as CEO. Final results: 57.5% say yes; 42.5% say no.
Twitter stops policing Covid misinformation (Wall Street Journal) Twitter is loosening moderation guidelines and has stopped enforcing policies aimed at stopping Covid misinformation.
Apple has “mostly” stopped Twitter ads (Mac Rumors) “Apple has cut back on its Twitter advertising, according to Twitter CEO Elon Musk. In a tweet, Musk said that Apple has “mostly stopped” its Twitter ads, asking if Apple hates “free speech.”
In January, Elon Musk started investing in Twitter, securing a 9.2% stake, making him the largest shareholder in the company.
Musk reached an acquisition deal with Twitter in April but raised concerns over spam accounts on the platform, claiming Twitter had not provided him with an accurate estimate of their number.
Also, in April, Twitter announced that Musk would join the company’s board of directors. Shortly after, Musk said he would not be joining the board after all.
By mid-April, Musk offers to buy Twitter at $54.20 per share, valuing the company at about $43 billion, according to a securities filing.
Twitter adopts a poison pill provision to prevent the Musk acquisition but then accepts Musk’s offer to acquire the company and values the deal at $44 billion.
In May, when Musk said the deal was on “temporary hold” over bot concerns. Musk posted a Reuters report about a public filing from Twitter earlier in May that said fake accounts made up less than 5% of users on the platform. Musk then says he wants “details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts represent less than 5% of users.” Two hours later, Musk says he’s “still committed” to the deal.
Fast forward to July, Musk moves to terminate his acquisition of Twitter, pointing to the issue of fake accounts. Twitter sues Musk to force him to complete the deal.
By October, after a months-long effort to terminate the deal, Musk proposes to complete the deal at the original offer price of $54.20 a share at a total cost of roughly $44 billion.
At the end of October, Musk closed a deal to acquire Twitter on the final day before the trial would have moved forward. Additionally, many of Twitter’s top executives were fired, including CEO Parag Agrawal, chief financial officer Ned Segal, chief legal officer Vijaya Gadde and general counsel Sam Edgett, according to a source.
Musk said that he would forgo any significant content moderation or account reinstatement decisions until after forming a new committee devoted to the issues. “Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints,” Musk tweeted. “No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.”
In November, Twitter began massive layoffs, cutting its staff of 7,500 to nearly half.
First Microsoft Bing. Then Google. Now Baidu is reportedly planning on bringing ChatGPT-style AI to its search results.
Why we care. All the major search engines are seemingly in an arms race to add AI chat to search. Once search engines eventually add the chat features to search, it could have major implications for publishers (websites could see their traffic and visibility impacted, depending on how the AI chat is deployed within the search results) and searchers (will the information be accurate and reliable?). There are a lot of unknown unknowns here, which means search marketers should be watching all these developments.
A standalone app first, then search. Baidu is expected to launch its AI chatbot first as a standalone app (similar to ChatGPT). It would then be gradually merged into Baidu search by March, according to reports.
Baidu is reportedly using its deep learning model called ERNIE (which Baidu described as “a “pre-training language model with 260 billion parameters”) as the chatbot’s foundation and “training it on both Chinese- and English-language sources inside and outside China’s firewall,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Baidu also will limit the outputs of its chatbot to comply with China’s censorship rules.
Dig deeper. There’s more coverage of the news on Techmeme.
Creating content to satisfy long-tail search queries is an often-overlooked strategy. It’s easy to go after bigger wins, but focusing on the smaller gains can lead to powerful long-term results. Many times in SEO, slow and steady wins the race.
Search has been evolving and talking about keywords might seem old-fashioned. But long-tail queries have never been more important.
As search is second nature for many people these days and voice search gains popularity, searches are becoming more conversational. Creating content to satisfy this type of query can be really beneficial.
To get the best results from this strategy you need to approach it thoughtfully. In this article, I’ll cover some tips to get more SEO benefits from long-tail queries.
Long-tail keywords: What are they and why use them for SEO?
Long-tail keywords are specific words or phrases that tend to have a better conversion value. They are usually longer (three to five words) and have a lower search volume.
If long-tail keywords are not part of your strategy, you miss out on many opportunities. Nearly 95% of U.S. search queries get less than 10 searches per month, a large-scale study by Ahrefs revealed.
It’s also widely accepted that 15% of search queries on Google are new. This statistic has been confirmed by Google many times, most recently in 2022 as reported by Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Roundtable.
Long-tail queries can be easier to rank for and have the potential to eliminate ambiguity to drive qualified traffic and conversions.
What is a long-tail strategy?
A long-tail SEO strategy is a technique that places a focus on lower-volume search terms. This SEO tactic capitalizes on a lower competition rate to drive qualified website traffic.
It can be a really effective approach because the searcher’s intent is usually much clearer with long-tail terms. This gives you an opportunity to make sure you capture really relevant, valuable traffic.
9 tips to maximize the SEO benefits of long-tail keywords
While leveraging long-tail keywords can be powerful and effective, it’s important to go about this in a planned and considered way.
Here are my top tips for getting the best results from your long-tail opportunities.
1. Start small, gain traction
A long-tail keyword strategy is ideal for gaining traction in a new market.
If you’re starting a new site or covering a new topic, putting your focus on long-tail keyword phrases within your content can help to give you visibility with the right target audience.
By their nature, long-tail keywords are less frequently searched for and very specific. This means the people searching for them tend to have a very clear intent.
Creating great content to satisfy these queries is ideal for building your reputation with the right people. It’s also a great SEO strategy to get things off the ground and build rankings around topics relevant to your niche.
For example, here’s Amore Coffee, a small coffee machine rental company in the UK, making the most of the long-tail.
That’s just one example, but across their website, they have managed to rank for a variety of detailed, long-tail queries around their main topic of coffee in the UK:
Source: Sistrix
This forms a good basis for their target audience to discover them via search engines.
They’re unlikely to be driving huge amounts of traffic but they will be reaching people who are really interested in what they have to offer.
2. Stay relevant and build your presence
When working with long-tail queries, it’s important to be thoughtful with your choices. Don’t just create content for the sake of it.
Select topics that are very closely related to your area of expertise, or product offering. Don’t stray too far from your core business goals.
Make sure you can create highly relevant content that’s helpful and adds value. This will help you avoid the trap of taking a “search-engine-first” approach, which Google actively discourages in its helpful content guidelines.
The “don’ts” include:
• Did you decide to enter some niche topic area without any real expertise, but instead mainly because you thought you’d get search traffic?
• Are you producing lots of content on different topics in hopes that some of it might perform well in search results?
In most topic areas, there are many relevant long-tail queries to work on.
The road to success starts by choosing the right ones and keeping them unwaveringly fitting to your audience and goals.
3. Define your goals
Before you start working on your content, think about what you aim to do.
Are you writing an in-depth article that you’d like to achieve an organic ranking position?
Is there a featured snippet or People Also Ask (PAA) box you’d like to capture for that specific long-tail phrase?
Would showing up in voice search be more valuable to your business?
Your primary goal will influence the content you write.
To target a featured snippet or PAA your content will need to be objective, short and snappy.
For an overall organic ranking article, you’ll need to explore the topic in-depth and add your own unique perspective or expertise.
For voice search, you’ll want to target the featured snippet if there is one for your long-tail query. But with a focus on long-tail, you’ve already taken a step towards optimizing for voice search.
For the long-tail query “how much value will an extension add to my house” in the UK, Yopa clinched the featured snippet with their simple and objective answer:
Overall, Yopa now gets more organic traffic from their article:
Source: Ahrefs
However, Check a Trade’s more detailed article ranks well organically and has better overall search visibility.
So, having a clear idea of what would be most beneficial to your business before you start work can help you to gain the results you need.
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Spend time and effort researching before you start. Some great keyword research tools that can help you find long-tail keywords include Answer the Public, Also Asked, and Answer Socrates.
You can mine long-tail keyword data from tools like Semrush and Ahrefs. Industry forums, Reddit and Quora, can help add another dimension to your research.
Nothing beats thorough research. It gives you extra insight into the way your target audience is searching, the topics that are interesting to them and common themes within a topic area. Don’t skimp on this step, even if the sheer volume of ideas might seem overwhelming at first.
Use your research to define long-tail keywords that really matter to you and your audience. Building a strong strategy to support your main aims (and back up those valuable short-tail keywords) is much more effective than taking a random approach.
Just look at all the questions you could answer about SEO strategy that can be generated in seconds:
Source: Answer The Public
Some of these will overlap and others will be relevant to certain companies or publications.
Take your time to assess the opportunities, do further research and really get into the mindset of your audience before you embark on your long-tail journey.
5. Don’t get hung up on search traffic
A common question about targeting specific long-tail keywords is “what about search volume?”
It’s a conundrum. As SEO professionals, it can seem counter-intuitive to spend time and effort creating content around search queries that have zero or low search volume according to keyword research tools.
The trick with a long-tail strategy is not to be concerned with search volume. It’s more important to ask yourself whether the query is relevant to your business and if it is something you can add value to.
Through a long-tail strategy, you can gain an in-depth understanding of the gaps in your audience’s knowledge and help to optimize their search experience.
Mark Williams-Cook covers the topic of zero-volume keywords and why they’re important in detail in his recent Brighton SEO presentation. You can also watch the accompanying video for some in-depth advice.
6. Combine your keywords
Each individual search term might have a low search volume. But there’s a reason for this. It’s often because longer keyword phrases can be input in many different ways. The search intent might be the same but different people will phrase this in different ways.
Moreover, many of these specific keywords are interrelated and cover different facets of the same topic. If you’re writing a long-form article, you can generate more traffic by covering a whole host of long-tail phrases in one detailed resource.
Every successful piece of content ranks for multiple keywords, so think about the combination of terms you’d like to include in your content rather than focusing on specific keywords.
Here’s an example of a popular article on Search Engine Land about how Google uses artificial intelligence. This snapshot shows a small selection of the long-tail keywords it ranks for:
You can see these all cover the same theme but may discuss different facets of this theme.
This is keyword clustering, but in real terms, it’s organizing things effectively for readers and following a logical structure.
7. Cluster closely related articles
To really harness the power of a long-tail strategy, create a series of related articles focusing on different, closely related keyword clusters.
Link these articles together to create clear pathways from one topic to the next, and build them all around a cornerstone page that targets your head term.
This approach is known as a hub-and-spoke or pillar page and topic cluster method.
Each article contains a series of related keywords that forms a useful resource. Linking them together helps search engines contextualize them and helps users to access information that might be useful to them without leaving your site.
For example, Express Doors Direct clusters all their useful articles around internal doors in a way that’s accessible from the main category page to support the user journey:
This way, if their website visitors have questions about their purchase they can get easy access to support.
Search engines can determine that all this content is related and supports the overall topic of internal doors.
8. Scale up
Targeting one long-tail term isn’t going to have an impact. If you want to embrace this approach, you need to think long-term.
Plan to spend time on your long-tail strategy every month and create the amount of high-quality content your limitations allow. For a small site, this might be one article, for bigger teams you could tackle many.
Be consistent, structured and organized. Make future plans and stick to them.
Idea generation, research, content creation and optimization should be ongoing processes. This is a long-term strategy and not a quick win. Putting the work in on a regular basis can really pay off.
9. Optimize
Test, learn and optimize. Once your content has been established, use Google Search Console data to discover the long-tail keywords it’s ranking for.
You might uncover phrases that you hadn’t originally thought of. This could provide opportunities for further optimization or additional content.
You’ll also find opportunities to improve if the content didn’t fulfill your original goals.
If you haven’t captured that featured snipped or PAA box you were after, review the length of your text, the objectivity and the entities you’ve included. Google’s Natural Language Processing tool is really useful for assessing this.
A little optimization goes a long way. It keeps content fresh and up to date, providing a better user experience.
Love the long-tail
My final tip is to embrace your long-tail strategy. Opportunities are rich and the results can be really rewarding.
Get started and see where it takes you. You might be surprised by what you learn about your audience and who you reach with your content.
