Google Search currently has a bug when the local pack, the local search results box, is not being served in its desktop of mobile search results. This is affecting a lot of searchers right now and seems to have started at about 8:40 am ET on Wednesday, February 14.

Some searchers are able to see the local packs but here in the United States and in many other countries, it seems the local pack is not rendering for any searcher.

Searches like lawyers near me, density near me, florists near me, pizza near me, car repair near me, and so on – none of those are returning the local pack in the Google Search results right now.

It also does not work when searching directly in Google Maps:

What it should look like. Here is a screenshot from one searcher who is able to see the local pack in the UK. That local pack should show up at the top or middle of the normal search results.

There has been no word from Google on this issue yet but this can have a serious impact for local businesses that get a lot of traffic from these local packs.

Why we care. If you are a local business and depend on driving traffic and sales through Google’s local pack and local search results, know there is a bug. I suspect Google will fix this bug relatively quickly but it has already been over an hour since we noticed the bug and it is still not resolved.

Fixed. It took over two hours but it is now working again, here is a screenshot:

YouTube introduced a range of updates designed to assist brands and creators in enhancing conversions, expanding their reach, and facilitating the sharing of content:

• Product tagging in live streams.
• Post only feeds.
• Video and Short uploads from mobile.

Product tagging. Creators in the YouTube Shopping Affiliate program can now tag products from participating merchants across in live streams, as well as videos and Shorts. Tagging featured products in live streams displays the “Shopping” button, creating a more visible way to shop. Creators can also pin specific products to highlight them during live streams.

By accessing the Shopping tab in YouTube Studio, creators can track product impressions and click data for their channel, as demonstrated in the screenshot below:

Why we care. This new capability could help brands boost conversion as it makes it easier for consumers to view promoted products and make a purchase.

Post only feeds. YouTube has launched a dedicated post-only feed for Android and iOS devices. Users can access this feed by tapping the “view all posts” button, which displays posts from channels they’ve previously engaged with, as well as recommended posts curated by YouTube.

Why we care. The introduction of a dedicated post-only feed could help brands enhance their reach. As users who have previously demonstrated interest in similar content are more likely to engage, the recommendation of brand posts within this feed may lead to increased exposure and higher levels of interaction.

Mobile video and Short uploads. Creators can now select a file from their device’s gallery, choose the desired monetization option, and complete the videos or Shorts upload process entirely within the Studio mobile app. This simplifies the process of uploading content, making it more convenient for creators to share their work across all platforms.

Why we care. Streamlining the content upload process will enable brands and creators to share videos and Shorts more efficiently. By simplifying the upload workflow, this feature allows content creators to save valuable time that can be redirected towards other essential tasks.

Deep dive. Watch YouTube vlog in full for more information.

© 2024 Third Door Media, Inc. All rights reserved.

Third Door Media, Inc. is a publisher and marketing solutions provider incorporated in Delaware, USA, with an address 88 Schoolhouse Road, PO Box 3103, Edgartown, MA 02539. Third Door Media operates business-to-business media properties and produces events. It is the publisher of Search Engine Land the leading Search Engine Optimization digital publication.

Even experienced PPC advertisers can struggle with bid strategies in Google Ads.

There are over half a dozen options, each serving different objectives and use cases. You can easily lose track of when to use what.

Each bid strategy gives Google’s systems a different mandate around spend, target metrics and profit. Media buyers constantly bounce from one bid strategy to the next, and it’s not uncommon for a campaign to switch between strategies depending on where it’s at in the lifecycle.

Save this guide as your main resource for understanding which bid strategies to use, when and how to use them, and why they’re important.

1. Manual CPC

Manual cost-per-click (CPC) bidding is not really a place that I believe most campaigns want to stay, but it has two clear uses.

First is brand campaigns, where the goal is less about performance and more about making sure that searches for your brand end up on your website, not those of your competitors. With brand campaigns, you want to capture a certain amount of impression share.

• How many searches are there for my brand each month?
• Am I showing up at least 80-90% of the time?
• Am I capturing and profiting from these queries?

In my experience, you’re better off with Phrase and Exact Match when using manual bidding, while limiting Broad Match to just a few very relevant terms.

Broad Match is much more liberal and when you combine that with Smart Bidding, Google knows which of the 100 people searching for the same keyword are most likely to convert. They can tweak those bids in real time.

The other use case for Manual CPC is low-volume keywords, typically in lead generation campaigns. When you’re running a Search campaign and trying to stay profitable, but you don’t have a large budget and or a large enough data signal, manual bidding often works well.

If your budget is $50 a day and you start bidding $7 per click, and you see that you’re spending the full $50 a day, you can bid less per click. If that works, you keep lowering your bid until you see that Google is no longer spending the full budget. That’s when you know to push back in the other direction.

In those cases where you’re using manual bidding, it’s important to look at performance by device or time of day to see if you need to implement specific bid adjustments. I typically do this until I have enough conversion volume, and then I try to switch to Maximize Conversions or Target CPA.

Even with a limited budget, sufficient conversion data is my barometer for deciding to move to Smart Bidding. If I’m on manual bidding several months or years into a campaign’s lifetime, it’s because there truly are no better options.

2. Maximize Clicks

I use Maximize Clicks out of the gate when I want a campaign to simply spend its budget: Shopping, Search, and Dynamic Search. When I want to collect conversion data and speed up the learning process, I set it to Maximize Clicks for a few weeks.

The difference between Manual CPC and Maximize Clicks is the latter doesn’t give Google any limitations on how much to bid. You can set a bid cap, but the idea of this bid strategy is to simply exhaust a daily budget and get as many clicks as possible.

I recommend using it sparingly – only when your goal is to push traffic to collect data.

That being said, you might find it useful for upper-funnel campaigns focused on prospecting, such as Demand Gen or even certain Search campaigns where you want to generate new traffic from specific audiences.

Remember to take those results with a pinch of salt, because this bid strategy has no guardrails on the quality of clicks.

Dig deeper: Bidding and bid adjustments in paid search campaigns

3. Target Impression Share

Target Impression Share has only one use case, in my opinion: Branded search. I’m sure there are other scenarios where it makes sense to different folks.

The goal of branded search is maintaining visibility – you don’t want that traffic to wind up on a competitor’s site. If the traffic converts, it converts; Smart Bidding is not really going to influence the level of intent.

When you show up 90% of the time and capture 90% of clicks, there’s no reason to use a CPA or ROAS target. Both of those will push aggressively and make you pay more for a click that you can buy for much less.

Again, make sure you’re only using Phrase and Exact Match, or the system will go overboard.

Don’t use this strategy if the play is to get more of your competitor’s impression share. Bidding on your own brand means you have high relevance, so you get cheaper CPCs than your competitors.

Now flip that equation: You don’t have high relevance for your competitor’s brand, so you’ll have to bid much more aggressively. In this situation, I’d use a CPA or ROAS target to make sure this tactic remains profitable.

4. Smart Bidding (and why I prioritize it)

My goal with most campaigns is to move toward some form of Smart Bidding eventually. Google has a tremendous amount of user data that influences its ability to push your account in the right direction, but you’ll never see that if you stick to manual bidding.

Many advertisers and media buyers are skeptical of Smart Bidding and have every right to be. But I don’t believe that campaigns that rely overly on manual controls will continue to deliver outsized results in the years to come.

Maximize Conversions (Target CPA) and Maximize Conversion Value (Target ROAS)

The difference between Google’s two primary Smart Bidding strategies is simple:

• Maximize Conversions focuses on the number of transactions or conversion actions
• Maximize Conversion Value focuses on any value that you provide (typically revenue)

What often ends up happening is lead gen service providers lean in on Maximize Conversions while ecommerce brands go for Maximize Conversion Value. But if you do lead generation and can import your offline conversion values – pipeline and sales data – then you can use Maximize Conversion Value to great effect.

The ultimate goal of Google Ads is to bid based on value, so that you can look at your cost versus revenue and optimize for profit margin.

With both bid strategies, you can include a target goal: CPA for Maximize Conversions and ROAS for Maximize Conversion Value.

Without these targets, you’re telling Google to spend your whole budget – whether that’s $100 a day or $100,000. And the system will try its best to do that while getting you as many conversions or conversion value as possible.

Give it a Target CPA or a Target ROAS, and you’re no longer telling the system its first objective is to spend the budget but to meet your goal while spending as much of the budget as possible within those confines.

For most campaigns seeking profitability, Maximize Conversions with Target CPA or Maximize Conversion Value with Target ROAS are typically where you want to get unless you have specific objectives around reach, frequency or metrics. 

Finding the sweet spot for a ROAS or CPA target

There’s a science to finding the optimal ROAS or CPA target for Smart Bidding to work with.

I like to start either bid strategy with no target. This pushes it to spend and gather data, allowing me to establish a benchmark for what that target comes in. If the CPA is $100 and I want it to be less, I set the target to $95 and see how much I can still spend.

If I still get full use of my daily budget, I keep pulling it back slowly while seeing if I can still pull in a similar amount of traffic and conversions at a lower cost. Keep tweaking those metrics until it lands at a place that makes sense for you while following these best practices:

• Reduce the target by no more than 10-20% at a time and give the system a few weeks to acclimatize. Accounts with more conversion data can get away with bigger and more frequent changes.
• Watch for the cliff. Maybe you’ll end up doing 90% of original volume while spending only 60-70% of the original spend (and still exhausting nearly the full daily budget). Maybe you’ll see a massive drop and need to roll it back.
• Lower your bids whenever a campaign is reaching its daily budget every single day. You do this on Smart Bidding by lowering your Target CPA or increasing your Target ROAS, which changes the ultimate bid that goes into the auction. If your campaign is set to $100 a day and spends $105 every day, you can likely lower your bids.

Value-based bidding

With Maximize Conversion Value, Google gives you the opportunity to feed it with business data that illustrates which leads are most valuable to you.

While it’s often used by ecommerce businesses that quantify the dollar value of things, it can also be used in lead generation.

The simplest way to do this is for lead gen is to:

• Understand your brand’s full sales funnel – how prospects become leads, how leads become qualified leads, how qualified leads become opportunities, and how opportunities become sales.
• Work with your team or clients to determine what a sale is worth, then work backward through the funnel, noting down the typical conversion rates from one stage to the next. If you do this right, you can determine the value of a conversion in Google Ads based on how much revenue a deal generates.
• Use offline conversions to manually or automatically feed that information and those values back into Google Ads, allowing the system to find more of the kinds of leads that lead to closed deals, signed contracts and money in the bank.

Additionally, Conversion Value Rules lets you add positive and negative weightage to locations, devices and audiences, effectively serving as another layer of bid adjustments for Smart Bidding.

Dig deeper: Value-based bidding: Why it’s key to boosting your Google Ads

Match bid strategy to your campaign’s goals

I’m pro-Smart Bidding and pro-automation in general. However, I understand that thousands of Google Ads marketers still prefer the old-school method of controlling everything themselves.

Ultimately, it’s important that we’re all able to do what’s best for our clients and brands. That’s why I believe the most essential part of picking a bid strategy is lining it up with what you want to achieve.

Performance Max, for example, only allows you to use Smart Bidding and is a poor fit for accounts with limited conversion data. If you aren’t willing to adapt, stick to Manual CPC and its limits.

Criticism of automation and AI is fair when it’s in the right context, but for those using these new technologies with the right support and setup, better performance is a question of “when” rather than “if”.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping social media marketing in significant ways.

Where brands once had to rely on assuming what content and messaging might resonate with audiences, AI now enables data-driven personalization, automation, and experimentation.

The results speak for themselves through boosted engagement, reduced costs, and streamlined operations.

This article explores five key applications of AI in social media marketing and how brands, both big and small, are seeing tangible improvements from its adoption

AI tools are revolutionizing social media marketing, enabling marketers to analyze data for insights into consumer behavior and preferences. It speeds up creative development, ensuring targeted messages reach the right audience optimally.

Take Coca-Cola, for example. With the combination of storytelling and AI, they were able to create this visually pleasing campaign to tap into the consumers’ senses. 

1. Content personalization: The heart of AI-driven social media

AI algorithms can sift through user data, including past interactions, likes, shares, and comments, so you can tailor content that resonates with your audience and enhance user engagement.

For instance, imagine an ecommerce company using AI to analyze user interactions. The AI system can identify patterns, such as a preference for yoga over high-intensity workouts.

With this knowledge, the brand can personalize its content, focusing on yoga-related products and tips, thereby striking a chord with its target audience.

One case study to show this was around a large UK-based “deal of the day” ecommerce company named Wowcher. They utilized AI by creating compelling and personalized ad copy.

Using an AI copywriting tool, the brand spruced up its Facebook ads. For example, if you often click on Facebook ads for vacation deals, AI will detect this pattern and match your interest, showcasing their deals. The brand saw a 31% reduction in cost per lead, in addition to improved relevancy scores.

2. Chatbots improving the customer experience 

AI and chatbots are drastically improving customer service by offering 24/7 availability, instant responses, and the ability to handle high volumes of queries, significantly enhancing the customer experience. 

They provide personalized interactions through data analysis, ensuring consistency and accuracy in information. These technologies are particularly adept at routine task automation, such as appointment scheduling and basic inquiries, and even providing the right product recommendations.

One example is the makeup brand Sephora, which uses AI to improve the customer experience. After researching, the brand discovered that users were overwhelmed by their vast number of products. 

In response to the results from the research, Sephora introduced an engaging quiz using chatbots to assist customers in their shopping journey. These chatbots provide customized advice and recommendations based on individual responses. 

AI can segment audiences more accurately based on demographics, interests, behaviors, and other psychographic factors. This allows for more precise targeting of ads.

I recently spoke with the brand Care + Giving on how they are utilizing AI to help with their marketing efforts. 

They use Instagram for segmentation and prefer boosting content to those who have interacted/liked before. It’s a time-saver and effective in reaching their niche audience.

4. Data integration and management: A/B split testing + AI

AI streamlines the process of creating, deploying, optimizing, and analyzing A/B tests, enabling organizations to achieve their objectives more rapidly and efficiently.

Twilio Segment and Evolv AI collect and manage data from multiple sources, including social media platforms. AI can be used to analyze this data, identifying patterns and insights that can inform the A/B testing strategy.

Experiences can be refined in real time, targeting various audiences or segments across multiple platforms. Unlike traditional A/B testing, AI modifies ongoing experiments on the fly. It eliminates underperforming elements and integrates new variants seamlessly without restarting experiments. 

For instance, if a particularly effective combination boosts orders but reduces the number of items per order, AI can introduce a variant to encourage more items in the cart without setting up a separate test.

Traditional A/B testing is time-consuming, involving multiple steps from conception to execution and analysis. AI streamlines this process by identifying effective strategies, suggesting optimal user experience actions, and rapidly adding new variants to tests.

5. Visual content development

Recently, I was experimenting with AI for existing photographs. Using Remini, an AI photo enhancer, I was able to clean up old slides that my father had created in the ’50s and ’60s. While this could easily be done in Adobe Lightroom, I don’t have access to that tool. 

Generative AI tools like Midjourney, DALL-E, and Runway are helping marketers create personalized images for targeted marketing campaigns. 

AI can suggest image modifications or generate images catering to specific customer segments’ preferences, past behavior, and demographics by analyzing customer data, increasing engagement and conversion rates.

They can also generate unique images and graphics based on textual descriptions. This lets you quickly create tailored visuals for campaigns, social media posts, or advertising without extensive graphic design resources. 

By understanding these real-world applications of AI, you can begin elevating your social media efforts.

Online shopping is a dynamic experience for customers, sparked by the awareness of a specific need or desire.

As explored in “Mapping the customer journey for SEO and marketing success,” understanding your customers’ purchase path is vital. 

This article explores the intricate relationship between customer journey mapping and SEO’s role in optimizing strategies for ecommerce.

From B2B to ecommerce: Navigating the customer journey

The customer’s buying journey begins with recognizing a gap in the customer’s daily experience, such as a missing item, a lifestyle upgrade, or a solution to a workplace challenge.

In my previous article, “B2B SaaS SEO: Mapping your keywords to the customer journey,” I discussed strategically influencing B2B SaaS customer journeys through keyword analysis and content tagging.

Ecommerce might seem different, but it’s often quite similar, especially when buyers are thinking about expensive items like furniture or home decor.

The ecommerce customer journey encompasses the complete end-to-end experience, starting from the first interaction with a brand’s online store and culminating in the final purchase. 

Understanding the five stages – Awareness, Consideration, Solution Selection, Conversion, Service, and Loyalty – is crucial. It highlights that the customer journey goes beyond the purchase, with service and loyalty being essential components.

What is a customer journey map for ecommerce?

An ecommerce customer journey map is a visual guide showing a customer’s entire experience with an online store, from the first interaction to the final purchase and beyond. It helps businesses understand and improve the different touchpoints and interactions customers have during their buying journey. 

Creating this map provides insights into customer behavior, preferences, and challenges. This information enables businesses to customize their marketing, products, and support to enhance the customer experience.

SEO within the 5 stages of the ecommerce funnel

In ecommerce, understanding the intricacies of the buyer’s journey is paramount, and SEO plays a pivotal role in each conversion funnel stage.

Let’s delve into how SEO strategically aligns with the five stages to enhance the online shopping experience and boost sales.

1. Awareness of need

• The funnel starts with the awareness stage, where potential customers first encounter your brand or products. SEO practices can be used to captivate potential customers. 
• These strategies elevate visibility through search engines, social media, and referrals, laying a robust foundation for a successful buyer’s journey.

2. Consideration

• SEO enters the spotlight during consideration as consumers actively research and evaluate various products or services. 
• Tactics include optimizing product pages and enhancing the overall user experience. 

3. Conversion

• The conversion stage, where a visitor takes a desired action, is crucial in the funnel.
• User-friendly checkout processes and persuasive product descriptions significantly contribute to conversion success.

4. Solution selection

• Users seeking validation from friends or significant others look for content justifying their spending, emphasizing pricing and overall value. 
• Some decide quickly, but high-priced stuff or unclear product pages can slow down the process.
• Your content here is like a supportive friend, giving reassurance just like when someone says, “That dress looks great on you” while shopping. 
• User reviews, reports, or influencer videos replace the friend’s feedback, helping them decide.

5. Retention

• Post-purchase, the focus shifts to customer retention, an essential aspect for long-term success and brand loyalty. 
• Consider maintaining communication, providing excellent customer service, and potentially offering incentives for repeat business. 
• These tactics fortify the relationship between the customer and the brand, fostering loyalty and sustained engagement.

Bonus: Advocacy

• In the advocacy stage, satisfied customers transform into brand advocates. 
• You can harness positive experiences through reviews, testimonials, and word-of-mouth referrals. 
• SEO-driven advocacy strategies contribute to new customer acquisition and fuel your ecommerce business’s overall growth.

Dig deeper: Ecommerce SEO & UX: 4 simple tips to boost traffic and sales

Tagging keywords in the ecommerce customer journey

Understanding your customer’s journey is crucial as you embark on the process of tagging keywords for your ecommerce platform. 

Following the step-by-step guide in keyword tagging for B2B, here’s how to tag your keywords for an ecommerce site that sells sneakers using Google Sheets.  

Product keywords

Creating a ‘Journey stages’ tab with data validation

• Introduce a tab outlining the customer journey stages and use it as a data validation drop-down for easy selection. 
• This aids collaboration with different teams, ensuring a shared understanding of the process and guidance for each stage.

Customer journey stages

Utilizing the ‘Stages’ tab for keyword tagging

• Make the “Stages” tab a data validation drop-down in your spreadsheet for efficient keyword tagging. This ensures that each keyword is associated with a specific stage in the customer journey. 
• In my example, I focus on the stages leading up to the purchase decision:
  • Awareness of need
  • Consideration
  • Solution selection
  • Conversion

Keyword tagging

With the setup complete, it’s time to start tagging your ecommerce keywords. Despite the potentially overwhelming task, the process becomes smoother as you identify words or phrases aligning with distinct stages.

For example, in an ecommerce scenario, offering various terms like “best,” or “reviews,” may belong to the “Consideration” stage, and keywords that include brand names with the product name indicate a commitment to purchase.

Once you have followed the first few steps in keyword tagging, you should have a tab for “Stages” and the column next to “Volume” to start tagging. 

Here’s where ecommerce keyword tagging can go quicker than tagging for B2B. You can simply create a formula to figure out your tagging for you.

Set up a “Filter” in your spreadsheet, sort by common words, and tag keywords accordingly. 

For example, I created a tag in my Google Sheet for a word count since most searches with one word will be a broad or “awareness of need” stage search. Using the formula:

=LEN(A2)-LEN(SUBSTITUTE((A2), " ", ""))+1    

(Note: Substitute “A2” for the keyword cell.) 

For each word in a separate column, I can then use an “IF” formula saying that any keyword with one word equals “1 – Awareness of Need” and any keyword with two words equals “2 – Consideration.”

But we still have those brand/product-specific searches, which ultimately mean the user is ready to purchase. 

So in my “IF” formula, I include that any mention from the list of brands equals “4 – Conversion”, with the remaining keywords being in the “3 – Solution Selection” stage. 

Thus, the formula should look like this:

=IF(ARRAYFORMULA(PROPER(IFNA(REGEXEXTRACT(LOWER(A4), LOWER(TEXTJOIN("|", 1, Brands))))))<>"",Stage!$A$5,IF(D4=1,Stage!$A$2,IF(D4=2,Stage!$A$3,Stage!$A$4)))

You can access the Google Sheet I created, make a copy (please don’t request access), and play around with the data as needed. 

Once you have a handle on the keywords and their stage, you can use the data to start making smart marketing decisions and content that speaks to your audience. 

The part of understanding your buyer’s journey for ecommerce as opposed to B2B goes beyond tagging and the stages themselves. 

Users need more support from your website in an ecommerce environment. Meanwhile, B2B users get support from the sales team they interact with. 

That means there should be much more consideration of the content being created for ecommerce than for B2B. 

Actionable tips for each stage of the ecommerce customer journey 

Mastering the ecommerce customer journey involves navigating the entire online purchasing process. Touchpoints span from initial awareness to eventual retention, encompassing social media ads, website interactions, and product searches. 

Because there’s no direct interaction with a salesperson, your content must convincingly guide them, assuring them of a smart purchase decision and the trustworthiness of your website.

Improve customer delight

How it relates to SEO: Enhancing customer delight positively impacts website engagement metrics, a crucial factor in SEO algorithms. Engaging content and positive user experiences contribute to higher rankings.

• Offer unique rewards, events, and surprises to create memorable experiences.
• Foster a sense of community around your brand.

Create FOMO

How it relates to SEO: Urgency created through “fear of missing out” (FOMO) tactics can boost click-through rates and time spent on your site, signaling relevance to search engines.

• Highlight limited product quantities and showcase customer activity.
• Utilize timers for sales and emphasize scarcity to drive urgency.

Conduct surveys

How it relates to SEO: Understanding user preferences through surveys aids in tailoring content, potentially increasing organic traffic as your site becomes more aligned with user intent.

• Collect feedback through online and in-person surveys for personalized improvements

Raise social proof

How it relates to SEO: Positive customer reviews and testimonials contribute to a positive online reputation, a factor that search engines consider in rankings.

• Showcase customer testimonials and encourage user-generated content on social media.

Personalize every touchpoint

How it relates to SEO: Personalization enhances user experience, contributing to lower bounce rates and higher session durations, positively influencing SEO.

• Tailor offerings based on customer data and deploy exit pop-ups for personalized interactions.

Dig deeper: How to make your ecommerce content more helpful

At Ahrefs.com we’ve got 9.7k cases of multiple rankings. It’s when a site ranks for a keyword with more than one page.

Now, classic SEO theory says that if you rank with more than one page for a keyword, it’s a cannibalization issue, and you should fix it.

But when I spent a day carefully reviewing a sample of 80 keywords with multiple rankings, I found only one case that needed action.

So if all other cases were not bad, maybe they were actually good? Moreover, maybe you should target keywords with more than one page to squeeze out more traffic from a keyword?

Keyword cannibalization: bad multiple rankings

Keyword cannibalization is when a search engine constantly exchanges ranking between multiple pages or when multiple pages rank simultaneously for the same keyword but are similar enough to be consolidated.

These cases need fixing because Google will display only one page at a time or you could get more traffic by rolling content under one page.

Example: “seo case studies” 

For the keywords “seo case studies” and “seo case study”, we saw a group of blog posts constantly exchanging rankings in the SERPs.

Although each case study had a different URL, the phrase “case study” in each title and URL may have triggered cannibalization.

This meant that whenever we published a new case study, the old one was dropped from the SERPs and substituted with the new one.

We fixed the issue by creating a bare-bones pillar page with internal links to all of our case studies. Google ranked the pillar page as the main result with a selection of case studies as site links.

As a result of consolidating, we rank better with one page than we ever did with several. We almost instantly ranked in the top 10 and have remained in the top 3, most of the time giving way only to Google’s page on the same topic. Some of the case studies even ranked as site links to the pillar page.

Example: “broken link building” 

For this keyword, we used to have two guides. As you can see below, these rankings didn’t swap, they ranked simultaneously in the top 10 for a long time.

However, we managed to improve that result with a new guide that consolidated information from the old guides — this is the long pink line you can see in the chart below.

So, this was a case of cannibalization because these pages were close enough in terms of content. In such cases, consolidating content can bring better results.

Keyword diversification: good multiple rankings

Keyword diversification is when two or more pages rank for the same keyword simultaneously, and there is likely no benefit in consolidating.

There’s nothing to be fixed here. If Google ranked your site more than once, the system rewarded your content.

Example: “keyword rankings” 

For this keyword, we rank with:

• A glossary article ranking in the featured snippet.
• A landing page for a tool at #4 .

Do the pages swap rankings? No, they’ve been ranking simultaneously for over half a year.

Is there any benefit to consolidating? Unlikely. This way, we serve two kinds of intent: we cater to people who want to get a definition of the term as well as those who want to check their keyword rankings.

Example: “SEO audit” 

For this keyword, we rank with:

• A blog article at #4.
• A landing page for a tool at #7.

None of the pages swap rankings.

Consolidating them would make no sense because we would need to choose between catering to searchers who want a tool and those who want a guide.

Why rank once when you can rank twice, right?

Sure, if you rank two times in the top 10, you get traffic from both positions (as shown in traffic uplift in the table below). This may seem like an absolute gain in traffic, but it’s a bit tricky. In practice, the new traffic may not be worth it, and you’re also risking pushing down another valuable page.

Let me illustrate this. I took a bunch of keywords where we ranked with 2 URLs in the top ten (otherwise, we’d hardly get any traffic) and looked at the click distribution.

• Traffic uplift — the traffic we gained via ranking another page in top 10 (traffic to new page/traffic to old page).
• Traffic share of the old page — traffic share of the page that ranked first for the keyword.
• Traffic share of the new page — traffic share of the page that came later, i.e., the page that created diversification.

As you can see, pages that come later to the SERPs do not always get a bigger traffic share. Just by looking at this small sample, we can see that there are at least three possible scenarios:

• The new page can outrank the old page, either by jumping into a higher position than the original page or pushing the old page lower. More traffic will go to the new page, and in some cases (because that also depends on the CTR), you will gain significantly more traffic.
• The new page will outrank the old, but will get lower CTR, and less traffic. This is what happened in the case of “keyword rankings” — the featured snippet with a definition of a term ranked higher than a landing page with the free tool but got fewer clicks.
• The new page won’t outrank the old page or will rank in site links. Then your diversification efforts will add a few percent of new traffic at best.

Keep in mind that:

• All newly added pages ranked for their unique set of keywords, bringing in additional traffic not listed above.
• We’re only talking about the quantity of traffic here. How qualified that traffic was is a different story.

First off, it’s not something you can fully control. In our case, most of those instances were accidents — Google’s hard-coded propensity to rank some sites multiple times on the same SERP.

But let’s say you see this great opportunity to rank twice in the top 10. It’s definitely possible, but again, a bit tricky. Based on my observations:

1. The disparity in clicks between two ranking pages can be significant. Oftentimes, introducing a second page might result in only a marginal increase in traffic while potentially reducing clicks on the originally ranking page.
2. It’s more challenging than the good ol’ one-keyword-one-page tactic because the odds are against you since the site diversity update.
3. You may need more expensive types of content than what you already have ranking. For instance, a free tool that serves the intent better than an article that already ranks.
4. Maintaining top organic rankings for two pages is more difficult than sustaining a single high-ranking spot. In the case of ahrefs.com, situations where a second page maintains a long stable position in the top 10 are rare (see image below).

Most looked like this or worse — ranking and then dropping for months only to reappear for some reason.

Another thing you might try is to double dip in a keyword by ranking videos for keywords with video SERP features or create a hub of definition pages (like our glossary) to rank for featured snippets that require a definition.

But there’s a hack for diversification, too: buy or launch another website.

Google may claim that they are very cautious about ranking the same site twice, but that does not seem to apply to the same business.

To illustrate, when our competitor acquired a popular SEO blog, Google didn’t care about the connection. It has been treating them as two different sites despite being the same business. As a result of diversification, that play allowed them to “double dip” on 8700 keywords ranking in the top 10.

Naturally, they’re not the only example. Glen Allsopp does a fantastic job at following the works of media giants who diversified so well that they literally dominated the SERPs within their niches.

Obviously, more popular keywords will have enough volume to distribute considerable traffic across the top 10. However, that traffic will largely depend on the CTRs, and these are different for each keyword.

If you’re using Ahrefs, open the Traffic share by page report in Keywords Explorer and you’ll get an estimation of how much traffic you can get from each position in the SERPs.

This should give you a good idea of whether taking another position is worth the fight.

Going further, I checked if the metrics and characteristics below had any relation to keyword diversification.

No keyword is too popular for diversification

The median search volume for cannibalized keywords is virtually the same as for our single rankings (50 vs. 40), so we can infer that search volume doesn’t play a determining role.

Diversify but make sure to align with search intent

Theoretically, you could rank multiple pages either by aligning with search intents already present on the SERPs or creating something unique but extremely valuable.

If I had to answer this question having only our data, I’d say “follow the crowd”. As you will see in a bit, multiple rankings can happen both with keywords with a single dominant search intent as well as those with a more mixed intent but none of our pages broke outside of already existing types and formats of content.

To illustrate my point, here’s a breakdown of the same top 10 keywords you saw earlier, but this time with a search intent analysis (using our 3C’s framework). In all cases, our ranking content aligns with the existing content types:

So when there are only article ranking, your best chances might be by diversifying with articles. And if you see different types of pages ranking, say an article and a landing page, there’s a chance of ranking by creating both these types.

Tip

If you’re an Ahrefs user, there’s a nifty AI feature in Keywords Explorer and Site Explorer that estimates the traffic share to each type of intent in the top 10. Check it out.

You don’t need less specific keywords to diversify

We’d expect long-tail keywords to have fewer multiple ranking instances (be it cannibalization or diversification) because the intent would be more defined from the query.

To measure this, I compared word count distribution in keywords with single rankings and multiple rankings using boxplots.

As you can see, the boxplots are almost identical, so no correlation could be at play here.

However, an interesting takeaway here is that if we look at a histogram of word count frequency in the multiple URL data set, we see that most keywords occupied the 3–4 word count range. That indicates ranking multiple times for quite specific search queries is definitely possible.

Surprisingly, multiple rankings were more common for high KD keywords

I also wanted to see if it would be harder to get multiple rankings for keywords with high KD value (Ahrefs metric), i.e., keywords with SERPs dominated by pages with a strong backlink profile.

Again, I compared multiple rankings with single rankings.

Here, we can see a clear difference. The median of multiple rankings is way higher than single rankings (64 vs. 37).

One thing is for sure with such a result—you can rank multiple times, even for highly competitive keywords.

Final thoughts

Let’s sum up.

Multiple rankings in Google create two effects: cannibalization and diversification.

This means that classic SEO theory is wrong—you don’t need to go and fix each keyword with multiple rankings.

This also means that you can potentially take advantage of Google’s propensity for multiple rankings and can get more traffic out of a keyword. That said, I’d consider it a pro move, which may have a high opportunity cost compared to targeting some other keyword with just one page. That’s because:

• The additional rankings may not last long.
• You may “outrank yourself”, and the page you outrank will get fewer clicks.
• You may need more expensive types of content than what you already have. For instance, a free tool that serves the intent better than an article that already ranks.

Thanks for reading! If you have any questions or comments, find me on X or LinkedIn.

Let me guess: You’re here because you’ve published an article and want to know how to get more eyeballs on it.

But doing that is akin to the underground inventor who has made something and is looking for someone to buy it:

• They have no idea if anyone actually wants their thing
• They now have to force it onto people, hoping that someone will want it

In essence, when you’re asking “How do I promote my content?”, you’re in fact asking “How and where can I spam my article?”

It’s not the question you set out to ask, but it’s the question you ended up asking.

That’s not the right mentality when it comes to content promotion. So in this article, I want to reframe your mindset.

If we simplify most people’s definition of ‘content promotion’, it boils down to “getting people to click on an URL.”

But an article is simply a vessel. When we create content, we’re usually doing it in service of a larger goal: sharing an idea.

If we look at content promotion from this angle, we acquire two new perspectives:

1. Your idea matters — You can’t publish any ol’ post, share it somewhere, and expect it to go viral. If you want people to check out your article, share it on social, newsletters, or communities, and earn links, your work needs to be unique and original.
2. Promotion isn’t just getting people to click a link — If we remove that constraint, we unlock lots of new promotion methods. We could do things not traditionally associated with content promotion: Appear on podcasts (or make one), publish YouTube videos, speak at conferences, share freely on social media, and more.

This mindset is how we do things at Ahrefs.

The idea we want to spread is that Ahrefs is the best-in-class SEO tool. Every piece of content we produce is a vessel for that key goal. That’s why we don’t ‘promote’ content per se; we just aim to spread that idea. We do so by:

Getting people to see your idea means acquiring an audience. There are really only three ways to do this:

There’s no better way to promote your content than having the ability to share it with hundreds or thousands of people in one go.

Building an audience means people take action to follow you specifically: They could be subscribing to your newsletter or podcast, following you on X, connecting on LinkedIn, etc.

Not all are made equal, however, and my honest opinion is that you should focus on building an email list.

Reason being: No matter how big your audience is on social, you’re still at the mercy of the platforms. Go against their rules and you can be shut down anytime. Or they may tweak their algorithms and end up suppressing your content.

On the contrary, an email list is forever yours. You can contact them anytime as long as they give you permission.

So, even if you have a large social following, you’ll want to regularly get them to subscribe.

The key ingredient to building an email list is giving people a good reason to subscribe. That’s the reason why many businesses try to entice people by offering a ‘carrot’. This carrot could be an eBook, a PDF version of the post, or even an email course. For example, Intercom offers a free eBook at the end of their posts:

It doesn’t have to be that complicated, by the way. Trust can be a good reason too. Sometimes the best reason can simply be to “see more of the good ideas you’re sharing”.

It works for Justin Welsh. His call-to-action is simple and he has >200K subscribers:

No audience? No problem. We can borrow them from major platforms like Google, YouTube, Reddit, and more.

Borrowing an audience simply means finding places where your target audience already hangs out online; if you play by their rules, you have a chance at getting your content in front of them, even if they don’t know who you are or follow you. For example, you could be optimizing your content for search, posting interesting stuff in relevant subreddits, or publishing videos on YouTube.

In my opinion, the best place to borrow an audience is Google. Search traffic is predictable, compounding, cheap, and targeted. For us, it’s our main traffic driver too.

If you want to rank high on search engines, you need to optimize for it. On a basic level, that means:

• Finding out what people are searching for
• Giving them what they want
• Proving to Google it deserves to rank

Find what people are searching for

If you want search traffic, you’ll need to write about topics people are actually searching for on Google. In SEO, we call this keyword research. The easiest way to get started is to use a keyword research tool like Keywords Explorer.

Enter a keyword relevant to your website and go to the Matching terms report. So, if you’re an online store selling coffee equipment, a potential keyword might be “coffee” or “french press”.

This report shows you keyword ideas that contain the word “french press.”

From here, you’ll want to look through the report and see if there are any potential keywords you could target. For example, “how to make french press coffee” seems like a good keyword we could target for our coffee equipment store.

Give them what they want

Knowing why a searcher is looking for that particular keyword can help us create content that they want to see. This ‘why’ is known as search intent.

Since Google already ranks the most relevant results for any keyword, we can look at the top-ranking pages to figure out search intent. So, if we look at the SERPs for “how to make french press coffee”, we can see that searchers are looking for a how-to guide on making french press coffee:

Additionally, from the featured snippet, we can also see searchers want to see a step-by-step format:

So, if we want to target this keyword, we’ll do well to create a step-by-step guide on making french press coffee.

Finally, a quick glance at the People also ask section gives us some ideas on additional questions we might want to answer in our content:

• How much coffee do I put in a French press?
• How long do I let French press steep?
• Is French press a good way to make coffee?

Prove to Google it deserves to rank

To demonstrate this, you need links from other websites. This is because Google sees links as votes. The more websites that link to you, it tells Google your page is ‘important’. This gives Google more incentive to rank you higher.

This concept is essentially Google’s PageRank in a nutshell, and it’s the reason why they leapfrogged other search engines to become the one we use most today.

To acquire backlinks, you need to give people a reason to link to you. Every link building strategy is a variation of a reason. For example:

• Guest blogging: I give you a free piece of content and you link to me
• Broken link building: I point out that you’re linking to a dead page and offer you a better resource to link to
• Podcast link building: I offer free insights as a guest on your podcast and you link to me
• Skyscraper Technique: I have the most comprehensive piece of content on the planet and you link to me simply because I’m the best
• Unlinked mentions: You actually already mentioned me but didn’t add a link. Will you please? Pretty please?

You can decide how well each reason works for your specific case. It also depends on your industry. For example, the Skyscraper Technique works on a pretty flimsy reason (in my opinion) and it has also been beaten to death in most niches. So, even though it still works to some extent, most people will ignore your email.

Most importantly, what works—and will always work—is the idea behind your content. It goes back to what I said earlier: Your ideas matter. If you’re presenting unique data, original insights, or tell a personal story that no one has heard of, it wouldn’t be as difficult to acquire the backlinks you need.

Tim Ferriss writes, “If you’ve got enough money to solve the problem, you don’t have the problem.”

He’s right. If you have the budget, you can simply pay for eyeballs on your idea. You can do this in various forms: Google Ads, ads on social media (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, etc.), display ads, or heaven forbid (!), offline ads. You can also sponsor influencers and creators, like we did.

If you’re worried about it being too expensive per click, you can consider lesser-known ad platforms. For example, we run ads on Quora:

The beauty of ads, specifically pay-per-click (PPC) ones, is how fast it is. Not only is it fast to set up, it’s also fast in terms of feedback—You can set up a campaign and see if it’s working (almost) immediately. That gives you a lot of room to experiment and see what changes are effective.

The downside, however, is that ads are not infinitely scalable. Especially so if you’re using it to ‘promote content’, where the return on investment (ROI) may not be immediate. Which means you’ll always need to be spending money.

So, even if ads are a go-to for you, you’ll want to drive that traffic into an email list or build out an SEO strategy for your site.

We’re the perfect example here—Our blog traffic costs an estimated $796,000 per month, IF we were to target all the keywords we rank for on Google Ads.

Our content team of six are obviously not paid that much in salaries, so we’re saving a lot in terms of marketing budget.

Final thoughts

Content promotion isn’t about pushing an article into the void, hoping for engagement. Your article is merely a vessel; your end goal is to share a valuable idea with the world.

Thinking of promotion from that perspective will open up your world in terms of potential distribution channels. You no longer have to rely on the XX promotion tactics you find online, all dedicated to securing that one click.