Product pages are where the final decision to purchase a product is made. By optimizing them for SEO (and adding a sprinkling of UX), you’ll increase the chances of attracting more visitors and converting them into loyal customers.

In this beginner’s guide, I’ll share 16 elements that collectively make up the anatomy of a well-optimized product page. I’ll also explain how to audit your product pages for issues.

What makes a great product page?

Product pages are one of the more definable content page types in SEO because they contain certain common elements people expect to see.

Let’s explore the anatomy of a well-optimized product page:

Before you start to check onsite elements, it’s a good idea to check if your product page is able to be crawled and indexed by search engines. If not, you’ll be wasting your time optimizing your product page for everything else.

The quickest way to check this is to navigate to the product page and open it up in the Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar. Then click on the Indexability tab.

If there are any issues, the toolbar will flag them in a red circle in the sidebar.

There are a few basic checks you should make. Make sure that the product page:

Once you’ve passed these initial technical SEO hurdles, it’s time to get started.

A title tag (also known as a page title) is a piece of HTML code that specifies the title of a webpage. They appear in Google’s search results and are a minor Google ranking factor.

They look like this:

Your product page title should be clear, say what the product is, and use relevant keywords that accurately describe the product. This helps searchers and search engines understand what your product page is about.

If users search for your products using stock-keeping units (SKUs) or other product identifiers, then it’s a good idea to include this information in your product page title tag and your URL.

One of the best examples of where this would be important is for a brand like Lego.

Here’s an example of the Lego Land Rover Classic Defender 90 product. The SKU is included in both their page title and their URL:

Even if you just search for “10317” using a tool like Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer, you can see that their site appears at the top of the SERP.

TLDR; if SKUs or product identifiers are important for your business—and customers are searching for them—then it may be useful to include them both in the URL and title tags of your products.

URLs are located in the address bar of your browser. An SEO-friendly URL should be easy to understand and clearly indicate the page’s content. Creating well-thought-out URLs early on will help create a logical website structure in time.

Google’s advice when it comes to URLs is:

 

“Create a simple URL structure. Consider organizing your content so that URLs are constructed logically and in a manner that is most intelligible to humans.”

Here’s what a well-structured URL looks like:

And here are some more tips for creating URLs:

• Use relevant keywords that accurately reflect the product to help search engines understand the page’s context
• Keep URLs concise and avoid unnecessary characters or complex structures, as simpler URLs are easier for users to digest
• Use hyphens to separate words rather than underscores or spaces to make the URL easily readable
• Be consistent in your URL structure — it’ll make your website easier to navigate and enhance the user’s experience by providing a clear idea of what to expect on the page
• Don’t bury important keywords lower down in your URL hierarchy

Breadcrumbs are internal links that show users their location in the site’s hierarchy and help them navigate quickly through the website.

They look like this:

They’re useful for SEO because they create a logical structure that search engines can crawl and understand.

Breadcrumbs allow users to check their position on your site and to backtrack if necessary. This is useful for ecommerce stores because users often navigate between category pages and many product pages when deciding which product to buy.

The H1 tag is an HTML element that signals to users and search engines what the page is about.

The main difference between H1 tags and title tags is where they appear—H1 tags do not appear in Google search results, but appear on the page.

This is what an H1 tag looks like in the code:

<h1>This is the h1 tag</h1>

The fastest way to check whether a page has an H1 is to use the Ahrefs SEO Toolbar. Here, you can easily spot-check the hierarchy of the headings.

Product images are photographs or digital representations of your products. Usually, one image or a gallery is shown on a product page to showcase the product.

They’re essential because they provide extra detail about the product that written descriptions can’t always capture—like how the product should be used, the exact color of the product, and so on.

From a search perspective, product images are essential as they can rank in Google’s image search results—so there’s a traffic incentive to optimize your product images for SEO.

So, how can you optimize your product images for SEO?

Here are the basics you need to optimize for:

• Add alt text
• Use descriptive file names
• Use responsive images
• Compress your images and use image formats like jpg, jpeg, png, webp, or avif

You can do many things to improve your image’s performance in search engines. Check out our image SEO guide to learn more.

Videos increase user engagement with your product pages—and like images, they’re valuable as they can independently drive traffic to your site.

Videos can appear in four places on Google:

• Google’s search results
• Google Images tab
• Google Videos tab
• Google Discover

But, to become indexed, videos must fulfill certain criteria.

Before investing time and effort in creating videos, consider whether it would benefit your audience.

For example, in the fashion industry, visitors expect to see a video to get a better look at how the clothes fit, so it’s no surprise that clothing stores like ASOS have short videos prominently placed on their product pages.

But if you were in the business of selling storage sheds—there’s not much additional benefit for your audience of including a video, as most people know what a storage shed looks like.

Product price, availability, ratings, and reviews are an essential part of the user experience. If you don’t have these elements, users will bounce from the page, impacting your rankings and weakening your SEO efforts.

The good news is that most ecommerce-focused CMSs like Shopify or Wix handle this out of the box, so there’s usually little configuration required to get these elements set up.

The rating and reviews are essential for potential customers as they can get an idea of what the product is like before buying it.

Therefore, it’s a good idea to prominently display customer ratings, as they offer valuable social proof, which can help influence purchasing decisions.

Ensure they are easily accessible and readable to enhance user experience and credibility, which can lead to increased engagement and sales.

This user-generated content enriches your site with diverse, relevant keywords and phrases, further boosting SEO efforts.

You’ve probably clicked a million call-to-action (CTA) buttons in your online life—but unless you’re well-versed in user experience (UX), you probably aren’t aware of how important they are in encouraging visitors to buy your products.

For example, Amazon.com has some of the most recognizable CTAs on the internet:

To create an effective CTA, use concise, strong, actionable verbs such as:

• Buy Now
• Learn More
• Add to Cart

This direct approach makes it clear to users what they should do next.

While CTAs don’t directly impact SEO rankings, they play an important role in user experience of your product page. Without obvious CTAs, visitors might get confused and bounce from the page. This type of behavior, if repeated, could signal to search engines that this page is not a good experience.

Ensure your delivery information is visible and easy to find; don’t make your visitors hunt for it—otherwise, they might leave the page before they buy the product. If visitors consistently bounce from your page, your rankings may suffer over time.

Most ecommerce content management systems (CMSs) automatically add delivery information to your product pages.

Position your delivery information near the purchase button or price, and use icons or brief bullet points to make it easy to understand. Regularly update the delivery section with current shipping times, costs, and options to build customer confidence and satisfaction.

Clear, easy-to-understand delivery details reassure customers and create a positive user experience. Doing so will reduce visitors bouncing from the page before buying your product.

A good product description is content that describes the product and sells it.

But what makes a product description stand out?

• Create a unique product description instead of copying from other manufacturers’ websites.
• Be direct in your product description to avoid wasting time and effectively sell the product to potential buyers.

A well-written product description enhances user experience and can increase conversion rates, positively impacting your site’s SEO performance.

Product specifications help humans and search engines understand the nuances of your product. For search engines, including these specifics means that the page can rank for more topically relevant longer-tail search queries.

Product specifications are best presented clearly and concisely using HTML bullet points to make them search-friendly.

Product page FAQs help visitors answer questions they have before they make a purchase. If you often get the same sets of questions asked about specific products, then it might save your business time.

If your products come with many customer questions, adding a FAQ section to your product pages is a good idea. FAQs help your visitors answer any questions they may have and increase the chances of ranking for related keywords.

You can discover the types of questions people are searching for your product by putting it into Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer and casting your eyes over the Questions section.

FAQs can help improve visitors’ user experience by answering questions you have on the product page, rather than having them return to Google to find the answer.

Displaying related products improves user experience and encourages clicks on other related products.

You can encourage product upsells by showcasing relevant, complementary items while naturally using internal links to link to relevant products.

This improves user engagement and contributes to SEO by passing link equity and increasing page views and time spent on the site.

This strategy not only boosts the potential for cross-selling but also enriches the overall user experience on your site.

User-generated content (UGC) is one of the most compelling ways to show potential customers what the products look like away from the carefully crafted product images and videos.

User-generated images are essential for industries like fashion—when you want to see the fit of the clothes on people who are not professional models. Adding UGC is a strong signal for customers as it shows your shop is trustworthy and not a scam.

Schema markup is code that can be used to visually enhance elements of your website within the search results. Google uses it to display rich snippets.

The main advantage of adding it is that products with schema markup are much more likely to get a higher click-through rate due to their size and visual appeal.

When we talk about schema with product page SEO, I would always include product schema myself.

We’ve covered what you should include in your product pages, but how can you audit them?

Here are the two approaches I’d recommend:

1. Use Ahrefs’ SEO toolbar for quick spot checks

The fastest way to check product pages for common SEO issues is with the Ahrefs’ SEO toolbar.

1. Navigate to a product page
2. Open up the toolbar
3. Look for any potential issues

Product pages usually follow a templated structure, so chances are, if you spot a problem on a product page, it could also apply to other product pages.

2. Get a site-wide view with Ahrefs’ Site Audit

If you’re completing an SEO audit, you’ll want to understand the current state of all products on the website. The best way to do this is with a tool like Ahrefs’ Site Audit.

1. Run your crawl
2. Once it’s finished, head to Page explorer in the sidebar of Site Audit
3. In the search bar, enter your product URL identifier, e.g. /products/
4. Order by Organic traffic to see the most popular pages
5. Click on Columns to add other elements you want to examine
6. Analyze!

Final thoughts

Optimizing product pages for SEO is important for any ecommerce business looking to enhance visibility and drive more conversions.

By integrating relevant keywords, crafting compelling and descriptive product titles, and ensuring high-quality, informative content, businesses can improve their product page’s rankings. This, in turn, leads to increased organic traffic and better user engagement, essential for boosting sales and customer loyalty.

Got questions? Ping me on X.

Ranking in Google is the same (or at least very similar) for everyone. That’s why it’s essential to have an SEO plan template you can use time and time again.

So… we created one for you.

It gives you a proven SEO plan based on how we do things here at Ahrefs. And because it’s a template, it’s repeatable. Just go through it for every new page you create.

Our template is also:

• Easy to follow (each step has clear instructions).
• Easy to outsource (send it to an employee, freelancer, or VA).
• Interactive (fill in each section as you go).

Our template covers four broad areas:

1. Finding the right keyword
2. Creating and optimizing content
3. Building links
4. Tracking results

Follow the steps below or watch the video walkthrough.

1. Fill in keyword ideas

Keywords are the words and phrases people type into Google to find what they want. Unless you target a keyword with some popularity, there’s no point in even ranking number one as you’ll get no traffic.

To find keywords worth targeting, you need to do keyword research.

If you’re new to the process, start by entering a broad topic related to your industry into Ahrefs’ free keyword generator. It’ll find the top 100 keywords by monthly search volume that contain your term.

For example, if you have a website about coffee, you might enter “coffee”:

Pick five keywords from this list that might make sense for your business to target and record them in the template:

TIP: Keep the ‘business potential’ of your keyword choices in mind

“Business potential” is how easy it would be to pitch your product (or any third-party products you’re promoting) while covering a keyword. It’s important to consider because, for most websites, the purpose of ranking content in Google is to make money.

Here’s the scale we use to judge a keyword’s “business potential”:

2. Record search intent

Search intent is the reason behind the Google search. In other words, what is the searcher looking for? Unless you create content that aligns with search intent, you’re going to have a hard time ranking for your target keyword.

How do you know what searchers are looking for? Look at the current top 10 search results. The content types and formats you see here are usually a good indication of what people want.

Here are the most common content types:

• Blog post
• Video
• Product page
• Category page

Here are the most common content formats:

• How-to guides
• Step-by-step tutorials
• Reviews
• Comparisons
• Listicles
• Opinion pieces

For example, if we check the results for “best coffee makers” in the US with Ahrefs’ free SERP checker, nearly all of them are blog posts in the listicle format:

If we do the same thing for “coffee table with storage,” they’re all product category pages from ecommerce stores:

Record the results for all five keywords in the template. If you’re unsure about a keyword, choose “not sure”.

3. Pick the best keyword

For each of the five keywords on your list, ask yourself two questions:

1. Can I create the type of content searchers are looking for?
2. Would ranking that type of content be lucrative for my business?

Pick the keyword with the best balance of traffic and money-making potential and record it in the template.

If you’re struggling to answer the questions above, read the advice below.

Can I create the type of content searchers are looking for?

Let’s say that you run a coffee blog, and one of your keywords is “coffee table with storage.”

You’ll remember from above that all top-ranking results were product category pages from online stores. So, in this case, the answer to the question is “no” because you can’t create this type of content on a blog.

However, the answer would be “yes” for the keyword “coffee maker with grinder” because all the top-ranking results are listicle blog posts.

Would ranking that type of content be lucrative for my business?

Let’s run with the coffee blog example…

If the keyword is “coffee maker with grinder, ” the answer is “yes” because searchers want a listicle of the best products. You can monetize your product recommendations with affiliate marketing.

If the keyword is “how much caffeine in coffee,” the answer is “no” because it would be tough to recommend any product or service naturally in the content itself. People just want a quick answer.

4. Plan your content

It isn’t enough to create the type and format of content people are looking for. You also need to make sure that it covers key subtopics.

How do you know what these are? Look for commonalities among the top-ranking pages.

For example, if we check the subheadings for the first two top-ranking pages for “best coffee makers” with Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar, we see that they both have sections on the best drip coffee makers and best pourover coffee makers:

You would definitely want to talk about these three things if you were targeting the keyword “best coffee makers.”

If you’re an Ahrefs user, you can find key subtopics more easily using Keywords Explorer. Just enter your target keyword, go to the Related terms report, and toggle to view keywords that the top-ranking pages “also rank for” in the “top 10”:

Look through this list for keywords that seem to represent subtopics, and record the top 5 in the template:

You also need to think about how you’ll make your content unique and demonstrate expertise.

There are a few ideas in the template. Tick any that you plan to use, or add your own:

For example, in my guide to expert roundups, I covered all the subtopics searchers would expect to see, like what they are and why they’re important. But I also shared my opinion that expert roundups aren’t worth it, as well as the results of a couple of Twitter polls I did.

5. Publish and optimize your content

Most of the “optimization” happens during the content creation process. Still, there are a few things worth doing to ensure your content performs as well as it can.

Follow the checklist in the template:

6. Plan link building efforts (if necessary)

Links are one of Google’s strongest ranking factors, so you’ll probably need to stand any chance at ranking high for any remotely competitive keyword.

Unfortunately, getting them can be very challenging.

If you’re completely new to the whole thing, the easiest starting point is to pitch guest posts to a few sites in your industry. This is far from the most trendy tactic, but it works (probably why it’s the third most popular link building tactic according to this 2022 survey).

Here’s a simple way to find sites to pitch with Ahrefs’ Content Explorer:

1. Enter a broad keyword or phrase related to your niche
2. Select “In title” from the drop-down menu
3. Run the search
4. Set your language to “English”
5. Go to the “Websites” tab

You’ll see a list of the top 100 websites with content about your topic by estimated search traffic:

Eyeball this for blogs you might be able to pitch a guest post.

For example, coffeeaffection.com is clearly a blog and gets an estimated 426K monthly search visits:

For any sites you want to pitch, you’ll need to browse the site to find the right person to contact (usually the editor or owner, depending on the size of the site). If their email address isn’t on the site, you can use an email lookup tool like Hunter to try to find it.

Record the sites you want to pitch, who you’ll reach out to, and their email addresses in the template:

7. Track your results

Google Search Console is a free way of tracking how your page is performing for your target keyword. Just go to the Search Performance report, then filter for your URL and target keyword.

If you want to see actual ranking positions rather than averages (which most of us do), sign up for a free Ahrefs Webmaster Tools (AWT) account, then go to the Organic Keywords report in Site Explorer and filter for your target keyword. You should see its actual ranking position.

Either way, don’t get too obsessed over rankings. Daily fluctuations are perfectly normal, so weekly checks are more than enough.

Both of the tools above show past data, but if you want to record rankings for your records, you can do so in the template:

Ranking new pages is vital for SEO success, but it takes a lot of work. That’s why we also recommend running a content audit to find existing content that you may be able to improve rankings for easily. These are often low-hanging fruit opportunities that take little effort.

Alternatively, if you already have an existing page in mind that you want to improve SEO for, read our step-by-step guide to ranking higher on Google.

If you’re an Ahrefs user, you can combine our data with ChatGPT to improve your SEO.

Here are some of the best use cases.

If a page is outranking you, it could be because it covers important subtopics searchers want to see (while you don’t).

Here’s how to find these subtopics:

1. Enter your target keyword into Keywords Explorer
2. Scroll down to SERP Overview
3. Check three relevant top-ranking pages
4. Click Open in and choose Content gap

The Content gap report shows you the common keyword rankings among these top-ranking pages. Export all keywords from the report. Then, go to ChatGPT and write a prompt like:

I’m going to give you two things.

#1. A blog post on the [topic]

#2. A list of keywords that are related to the topic

I need you to tell me which keywords, entities, or subtopics I’ve missed in my content based on the keyword list.

ChatGPT will tell you what’s missing:

You don’t have to update your content with every “gap” ChatGPT identified. It’s only a suggestion, so identify which ones are most appropriate for your target keyword and refresh your content accordingly.

ChatGPT’s pretty good at creating blog post outlines. But you can make sure ChatGPT’s creating search-optimized outlines by providing it with important subtopics searchers want to see.

Do the same as above by exporting keywords from the Content gap report. Then enter this prompt into ChatGPT:

I’m going to give you a list of keywords related to [topic]. Create an outline for that topic based on these keywords.

Voila! Your outline is ready.

Search intent is the why behind a query. If you want to stand the best chance of ranking, you’ll need to align your content with search intent.

Typically, search intent is identified by looking at the top-ranking pages for your target keyword.

You can ask ChatGPT to do this for you. Enter your keyword into Keywords Explorer and export the SERPs from SERP Overview.

Copy the top 10 ranking titles and give ChatGPT a prompt like:

I’m going to give you a list of titles. These are the top-ranking pages for the keyword . Can you identify the search intent for me?

ChatGPT will analyze the search intent for you:

Too troublesome? Good news: We’ve incorporated this use case directly into Keywords Explorer. Just click Identify intents, and we’ll do it for you:

Seed keywords are words or phrases you can use as the starting point in a keyword research process to unlock more keywords.

There are obvious seed keywords for every niche, like “coffee” if you own a coffee site. But you may miss out on terms like “moka pot” or “aeropress,” especially if you’re unfamiliar with the space.

ChatGPT can help with that. Just ask it to give you terms.

Give me terms related to [topic]. Skip the descriptions.

You can then use these as seed keywords in Keywords Explorer to find more keyword ideas.

TIP

We’ve integrated AI into Keywords Explorer to help you find seed keywords easily. You can skip the entire ChatGPT part now.

If you do SEO for multiple markets, you may want to target the same keywords in different languages. This is no biggie if you’re a polyglot, but some of us struggle with languages. Fret not: ChatGPT can help.

Take your list of keyword ideas and ask ChatGPT to translate them.

I have a list of search queries in English. If a native Spanish speaker searched for these queries on Google, what keywords would they use? Please suggest one to five of the most common alternative local expressions for each query that reflect their meaning, considering both colloquial and formal terms.

Paste these terms into Keywords Explorer and set the country you’re researching to see if they have any search volume.

A common issue affecting many websites is missing titles, H1 tags, or meta descriptions. You can find out if your site has these issues by running a crawl with Site Audit.

Click the number to see the affected pages. Then click Export to get all the URLs.

Take these URLs to ChatGPT and ask it to create meta descriptions for you.

I have a list of URLs that do not have meta descriptions. Create meta descriptions for them. Keep them under 160 characters and use an active voice.

Branded keywords contain your company, service, or product name. Knowing the breakdown between branded and unbranded keywords is useful because:

• If you’re analyzing a competitor, you’ll want to know how much of their traffic is branded (which you can’t replicate).
• Branded traffic may not be directly controlled by SEOs, so you may want to be clear about the attribution.
• Bigger brands get more branded searches (duh!), so it could be a good proxy to see how well your brand is faring.

To see the breakdown, enter your site (or your competitor’s site) into Site Explorer, go to the Organic keywords report, and click Export.

Upload the file to ChatGPT and give this prompt:

Label each keyword in the “Keyword” column as branded or unbranded. Then, create a pie chart that shows the sum of “Current organic traffic” for both categories. Include a legend on the pie chart.

Final thoughts

Ahrefs is not just an SEO tool—it’s a big data machine. So, it’s all about extracting and exporting the most relevant data from our toolset and then using ChatGPT to help with the analysis.

Did I miss out on any cool use cases? Let me know on XTwitter or LinkedIn.

Marketing is full of things that can be measured (known as metrics), but not all metrics make good key performance indicators.

To choose the right KPIs:

• Tailor them to your role. Different marketing roles need different levels of detail in their KPIs. An SEO lead might care about monthly backlink growth, but a CMO will care more about the sales revenue generated across all marketing efforts.
• Measure what you want to improve. Don’t spend energy tracking KPIs just for the sake of tracking them. Choose KPIs specifically to better understand the areas you most want to improve.
• Be realistic about what you can measure. Some KPIs sound great in theory but are almost impossible to measure in practice. Before committing to a KPI, make sure you can actually get the data you need and measure it consistently.
• Focus on KPIs that you can influence. Your KPIs should measure something that you can influence directly. “Net Promoter Score” is a great measure of how much people love your product, but how useful is it for content marketers who don’t actually control the product?
• Keep it simple. You don’t need to track 37 marketing KPIs. A handful of KPIs per department is usually enough to make progress where it matters (in fact, many companies use one “north star” metric).

There are an almost infinite number of KPIs, often varying in small details (like how they’re measured, or subtle differences in definition). Many KPIs also have overlapping audiences (SEOs and content marketers may track very similar things).

But with those caveats, let’s talk through core marketing KPIs for common marketing roles—and how to calculate them.

These KPIs help marketing leaders—CMOs, VPs or directors, heads of marketing—report on the efficacy of marketing as a whole. They try to measure the impact of marketing in cold, hard dollar terms.

Most of these KPIs can be calculated for marketing as a whole, or for individual marketing channels (like content marketing or events). In fact, that’s the point: a big part of a marketing leader’s job is to compare the results from different marketing channels, and work out which perform best.

For many content marketers, the best KPI is also the simplest: publishing frequency. Focus on what you can control, work to publish more content each month, and other important metrics (like traffic) will follow after.

Tip

How to estimate organic traffic growth

Google Analytics and other analytics tools will give you the data needed to measure traffic growth for websites you own. For other websites—like your competitors—you can use Ahrefs to estimate their organic traffic growth.

Head to Site Explorer, enter the website URL you’re interested in (setting the view to Path, Domain, or Subdomain, depending on which part of the website you’re analyzing), and choose the Monthly view for the Performance chart. Hover over the graph and you’ll see estimated organic traffic for each month.

Here, Clickup.com saw an estimated 645,000 organic pageviews in January:

Hovering over the next month, February’s organic traffic was an estimated 664,000 pageviews:

Using our formula for traffic growth rate, we can work out that Clickup’s organic traffic grew an estimated 3% between January and February ( (664234 - 645286) / 645286) * 100) = 2.94%).

You can also use the Portfolios feature to measure traffic growth to collections of specific URLs, like this portfolio of my published articles…

…allowing you to measure traffic growth by author, or topic, or content type:

Lead generation is all about turning anonymous visitors into recognisable, contactable leads, usually by capturing their email addresses. Most of their KPIs measure the quantity and quality of the leads they generate:

Most of these KPIs can be tracked across social media as a whole, but also on a per channel basis (for Twitter, and Instagram, and Facebook, and so on).

For search professionals, organic growth is the goal. These are some of the KPIs most commonly used to measure their progress and present their value to the rest of the company:

tip

How to calculate share of voice for keywords

One of the best ways to measure organic share of voice (SOV) is to track the number of clicks your website receives from important keywords, relative to the clicks your competitors receive. To get set up, add a list of important keywords into Rank Tracker, head to the Competitors overview tab and add the URLs of your competitors’ websites.

You’ll see an estimate of your site’s share of the total available clicks for your given keywords, as well your competitors’ SOV, and recent trends in performance:

Traditional press is usually concerned with the number of press mentions generated by a campaign, but add digital PR into the mix, and backlinks become another primary goal. Daria Samokish, Ahrefs’ Head of PR, tracks KPIs like:

Tip

How to measure the impact of digital PR

Ahrefs’ Site Explorer makes it easy to see how a digital PR campaign translates into new links. Here’s an example from the launch of our search engine, Yep.com.

The Calendar view in Site Explorer shows a spike in new referring domains on June 4th 2022—the day of the press campaign—with 219 new referring domains registered (up from a daily average of 1–2 in May).

You can also use Ahrefs’ Alerts to get an automated notification whenever you gain a new link. In the example below, we’ll get a weekly notification summarising all new backlinks for ahrefs.com/blog/ from websites with a domain rating of 80 or above:

Shermin Lim, our Events & Marketing Manager, cares primarily about working out the return on investment from her online and in-person events, balancing the costs of the event and the potential gain from new leads and customers. Three of her core performance indicators are:

Paid marketing is as close to science as marketing tends to get, with a very clear (and measurable) relationship between the cost of an advert and the revenue it generates. But while paid marketing KPIs can get very mathsy, very quickly, there are three core metrics underpinning it all:

Final thoughts

Marketing KPIs can help you communicate your wins to bosses and teammates, pinpoint tactics that work well (and those that don’t), and provide a clear focal point for your marketing team to rally around.

But there’s a caveat to remember: don’t ignore marketing opportunities that don’t fit neatly into your KPIs.

Not every great marketing campaign can be easily measured. The goal of marketing is to grow your business. Use KPIs where they help… but don’t shy away from ignoring them on the rare occasions when they don’t.

For a few hundred bucks, you can hit the big red “publish” button and use generative AI to write every article you’ve ever wanted to write. It’s sorely tempting.

But beyond the short-term dopamine hit of publishing a thousand articles at once, for most businesses, the negatives of AI content will very quickly outweigh the positives.

First up—there is precedent for getting a Google manual action for publishing AI content at scale.

Back in November, the founder of an AI content tool tweeted about their “SEO heist”. They exported a competitor’s sitemap, turned every URL into an article title, and used AI to publish 1,800 articles:

In some ways, this is part of the cat-and-mouse game of SEO. A website identifies a traffic opportunity, their competitors follow suit. But in the month following the tweet, the site’s traffic tanked to virtually zero:

Most of the site’s rankings plummeted into non-existence, courtesy of a manual action:

Crucially, I don’t think that publishing AI content means an automatic penalty. AI content detectors don’t work, and even if they did, Google is apparently agnostic to AI use—but it is not agnostic to bad content or bad actors.

And AI makes it very easy to make bad content:

I think the penalty happened because:

• They published 1,800 pages of low-quality content, with no images, virtually no formatting, and many errors, and
• They tweeted about it and caught Google’s attention.

Even if you don’t tweet about your AI content efforts, the precedent matters: publishing tons of AI content with no oversight is penalty-worthy. For any business building its traffic and audience for the long term, even a small risk of a catastrophic outcome (like a penalty) should give pause for thought.

AI content is extremely, scientifically, mediocre

AI content is, by its nature, mediocre. Mediocrity should not be the end goal of your content strategy.

LLMs, like ChatGPT, work through a kind of averaging. Words are chosen based on how often they appear in a similar context in the model’s dataset, generating “new” content based largely on what everyone else has already said. As Britney Muller explains in her guide to LLMs:

 

“Instead of randomly drawing a word out of a hat, an LLM will focus only on the most probable next words… It’s like a musician reading sheet music, moving through the notes one at a time. The goal is to figure out what the next word is likely to be as the model processes each word in the sentence.”

To borrow a phrase from Britney, AI-generated content represents the literal “average of everything online.” That’s useful for topics where there’s a single, objective answer (“when was Abraham Lincoln born?”), but less useful for any topic that benefits from nuance, or differing perspectives, or firsthand experience.

You can play with different prompting strategies to alter and shape the structure and style of AI content. But even assuming you go to that length (many AI content tools don’t offer that freedom), you can’t escape a few realities of AI content:

• It contains no information gain: it can’t conduct research, or share personal experience, or vocalize a defensible opinion.
• It gets things wrong: it suffers from hallucinations and regurgitates common mistakes and errors.
• It doesn’t understand you or your business: try getting AI content to tactfully showcase your product in your content (like we do at Ahrefs).

…and this is before we worry about leaking sensitive information, accidental copyright infringement, or the million ways in which unsupervised content could perpetuate bias and misinformation.

It’s easy to look at traffic graphs for AI content and think that “mediocre” content is good enough. But returning to the example of the “SEO heist”, most of their (now lost) rankings were limited to very low competition keywords (as measured by Keyword Difficulty in Ahrefs):

Mediocre content might perform well in uncontested SERPs, but it isn’t enough to compete in SERPs where companies have invested actual effort and resources into their content.

And crucially, it leaves a bad impression on the living, breathing people who read it:

The information is also wrong, in that you have to go insert>formula>date, not insert>date, and it does not have a calendar pop up but an =date( ) formula, and if you just hit enter, it gives an N/A error. Also you do not need to save google sheets as it autosyncs on change.

— Michelle Keep (@jmkeep) November 27, 2023

You can’t build a brand with AI content

Let’s assume your AI content works. You publish hundreds of articles and generate thousands and thousands of visits. Is that really the boon it sounds like?

For most companies that pursue SEO, blog posts quickly become the primary source of website visitors. For an extreme example, look at the pages that generate the most organic traffic for Zapier—they are almost entirely blog posts:

This is estimated organic traffic (and doesn’t include traffic from other sources), but the point is clear: most of the interactions people have with your company are mediated by content.

Many visitors won’t ever see your carefully crafted homepage or product landing pages. Their entire perception of your company—its ethos, beliefs, quality standards, helpfulness—will be shaped by the blog posts they read.

Are you happy with AI content making that first impression?

Think of the time and effort that went into your core website pages: endless variations of copy and messaging, illustrations and visual design, tone of voice, rounds of review and finessing… and compare it to the effort that goes into AI content, published en masse, unread, unedited.

It’s easy to think of content as “just an acquisition channel,” but in reality, your 800 AI-generated SEO posts will have a bigger impact on the public perception of your brand than your latest product landing page.

People don’t buy from junk content

The point of content marketing is to help sales. Everything you create should, in some way, help people to buy your product or service.

The types of keywords AI content is good at ranking for are typically low commercial value and unlikely to lead to a sale. By way of example, here’s the estimated traffic value for the “SEO heist” site’s organic traffic, at its peak:

Sidenote.

Traffic value measures the equivalent monthly cost if a site’s traffic from all keyword rankings was paid for through PPC advertising—so it acts as a good proxy for the commercial value of a keyword (a high traffic value means companies think the keyword is lucrative enough to bid on).

And here’s the Ahrefs blog, with a similar amount of estimated organic traffic… and a traffic value six times higher:

Most of the benefit of AI content boils down to lots of traffic, fast—the quality and purchase intent of that traffic is a distant second.

Great, if your entire business model is monetizing mountains of traffic through affiliate links or ad networks. But for every other type of business, traffic is only half the battle. In order to help sales and grow the business, content also needs to:

• Leave a lasting impression and help readers remember your company.
• Encourage people to visit again and again (and not bounce forever on the first post).
• Build trust in and affinity for the real people behind the brand.

Here’s another AI content example. How well does this guide to “Removing Dashes from ISBN Numbers in Excel” tick those boxes?

AI content is good for generating traffic but bad at building trust. There’s no recognisable voice, no firsthand experience or narrative, and no real person behind the writing (unless you take the Sports Illustrated route and also create AI-generated authors for your content).

At best, it’s like reading a Wikipedia page: even if you help the reader solve a problem, they won’t remember you for it. While traffic is great (and more traffic is usually better than less), it can’t come at the expense of trust.

There’s no moat for AI content

Here’s the most important problem with AI content: there is no barrier to entry. Anyone can do it, virtually for free. If it’s easy for you to publish 1,000 articles, it’s easy for your competitors to do the same, and their competitors, and their competitors…

So even assuming you get good results from AI content—how long will those results last?

At best, AI content is a form of short-term arbitrage, a small window of opportunity to build tons of traffic before a competitor, or a dozen competitors, decide to do the same. With most AI-generated content being pretty similar, there will be no “loyalty” from readers—they will read whatever ranks highest, and it will only be a matter of time before your content is challenged by a bigger fish, a company with a bigger budget and better SEO team.

Over time, you will be outcompeted by companies able to put more effort into their articles. So just skip right to the end of the cycle and create content that has a defensible moat:

• Interview real people and share new information that other publications haven’t covered,
• Collect original data in the form of industry surveys, polls, and data analysis,
• Tell personal stories and share the unique, firsthand experiences of the topic that nobody else can.

Or put another way:

The promise of most AI content folks is “we can get so much traffic” but they don’t stop and consider “how will it help the business?”

if Causual wrote one good resource that FP&A folks used & shared, I’d wager it would generate more pipe than all their AI SEO efforts to date.

— JH Scherck (@JHTScherck) November 26, 2023

Final thoughts

There are plenty of good use cases for LLMs in SEO and content marketing. You can brainstorm keywords and titles, generate metadata and alt text at scale, write regex queries and code snippets, and generally use LLMs as useful inputs into your creative process.

But for most businesses, hitting the big red “publish” button and publishing thousands of AI-generated articles is a pretty bad use of LLMs, and a pretty bad idea overall. And even if AI content gets good enough to render most of these objections irrelevant, we will still have the problem of zero barrier to entry; if it’s easy for you to do, it’s easy for your competitors.

AI content is short-term arbitrage, not a long-term strategy.