In an interview with the Best SEO Initiative Award winners, Search Engine Land Editor George Nguyen delves deep into effective SEO strategies and tactics for your campaigns. Here are the category winners:
Lindsay Neilson from NP Digital, who collaborated with PROS, tackled the challenges of promoting a conceptual product and finding search volume in the market to win the Best B2B Search Marketing Initiative – SEO. She states, “We aimed to balance the product marketing buzzwords with the conceptual essence of what their product does, in terms users and various industries actually use.”
Lily Ray, Director of SEO at Path Interactive, assisted an insurance client hit by a Google core algorithm update, winning Best Overall SEO Initiative – Enterprise. “There was a need to update the website content to meet Google’s expectations regarding E-A-T. Additionally, we focused on technical improvements, content optimization, website architecture, and backlinks.”
Abby Reimer from Uproer worked with CaringBridge, driving more traffic through their resources and blog sections, securing the Best Overall SEO Initiative – Small Business award. “As a nonprofit, they lacked the resources a large corporation might have. We leveraged expertise, authority, and trust by considering contributions from CaringBridge users who experienced health crises.”
Kaushal Thakkar, Founder of INFIDIGIT, collaborated with Superbalist to maximize traction during Black Friday, winning the Best Retail Search Marketing Initiative – SEO category. “Superbalist wasn’t ranking for key keywords in 2018; in 2019, we aimed for top positions related to Black Friday keywords and succeeded with featured snippets for numerous terms.”
These winners offer valuable tips on optimizing for difficult industries, using paid data to inform organic search, leveraging UGC in search campaigns, and achieving substantial results for Black Friday e-commerce.
### Overcoming Buzzwords in B2B and SaaS Marketing
Lindsay Neilson explains, “It’s challenging to connect SaaS buzzwords like ‘empowering digital transformation’ to the solutions users seek. Our approach involved a more granular focus, despite long sales cycles, and organic attribution challenges.”
By leveraging internal thought leaders and subject matter experts, they restructured or optimized content to align with specific long-tail keywords, better reflecting user behavior.
### Recovering from an Algorithm Update
Lily Ray discusses strategies for sites affected by updates, noting that excessive old content not meeting current quality standards was an issue. The approach focused on ensuring high-quality content for indexing, improving trustworthiness, especially critical for sites in the “your money or your life” (YMYL) space.
### Improving E-A-T of Content
For a client requiring medical or expert review, Lily Ray emphasizes adding expert validation to content and removing outdated information. Such actions enhance trust and ensure that the site communicates reliability.
### Guidelines for Retiring Content
Data-driven decisions are essential, notes Lily Ray. Analyzing traffic, page views, and ranking performance helps determine whether content should be deleted, consolidated, or redirected.
### Using Paid Data for SEO
Lily advocates using paid search data to refine page titles and meta descriptions, offering direct insights into the language that converts, and refining content based on geographic search behavior.
### Leveraging User-Generated Content
Abby Reimer explains that user-generated content was key for CaringBridge, utilizing the experiences of their community to provide authentic expert advice. Social media engagement was instrumental in generating valuable insights.
### Competing in SERPs
Abby highlights that showing clients actual search results often clarifies competitive positioning, determining whether content fits within the desired search landscape.
### Black Friday Campaign Considerations
Kaushal Thakkar advises anticipating competition from diverse websites, ensuring optimal page speed, technical SEO, site health, and comprehensive keyword support to maintain top rankings.
### Implementing Black Friday Content
Kaushal’s team utilized infographics and video content to enhance schema markup, significantly increasing CTR and achieving remarkable results, outpacing paid search traffic.
Make sure to watch the full video to learn all the best tips from the Search Engine Land SEO initiative winners.
