Either Hire an Outside Marketing Team or Hire In-House, Right? Not Exactly.

Let’s start by addressing the elephant in the room. You see the title of this article. You’re on our website. You can tell what we do. So yes, we ideally want you to choose to work with us over hiring an in-house marketing team. But only if it’s genuinely the right strategic move for your firm. 

No, really. There are some legitimate reasons why certain companies should have their marketing in-house. But what we think you’ll find when you read on is that companies overestimate the benefits of the CMO or in-house marketing team route and underestimate the value of having an outside digital marketing team. And ultimately, the answer about who to turn to for your marketing might be not to choose between these two options at all, but rather build a bridge between the two.

Without further ado, here are the top benefits to consider as you explore potential external marketing partnerships:

Add It All Up — External Marketing Agencies Cost Less

It’s not uncommon for our prospects to believe it’s a better value to bring marketers in-house and forgo the marketing consultant option. If you’re Apple, Microsoft, or Google, you can afford to build a deep bench of true marketing experts and sustain a full department over time. If you can as well, go for it. It’s likely the best path if you’re able to swing a stacked internal team.

But this scenario isn’t the norm for most businesses. Your pockets aren’t as deep as Apple’s. Whose are? Bringing in a team of marketing professionals with the level and breadth of experience necessary to serve your company completely would be insanely expensive — about one million dollars per year by some estimates. 

The other option would be to hire just a CMO or a CMO plus a couple of green marketing assistants. But even the best CMO out there simply cannot lead everything marketing-related for your firm. There aren’t enough hours in the day. Not to mention no one is an expert at every piece of marketing. Paid media, content, email strategy, design — one person can’t wear all of those hats with equal expertise. Though if you know one who can, send them our way, will you? 

Kidding aside, expecting a CMO alone to keep your marketing engine humming will burn them out, even if they have the support of a coordinator-level person or two. With burnout often comes employee turnover. And with turnover comes unexpected (typically high) costs. 

A full-service, external marketing company will stack your roster with experts for each marketing discipline. You won’t assume the risks of hiring someone in-house either. If a person at your partner marketing firm leaves, they’re immediately replaced without service disruptions or an impact on your bottom line.  

When you take all of that into consideration, hiring in-house just doesn’t pan out to be cheaper.

Broad, Industry-Spanning Expertise, Brought Directly to You

An external marketing partner should be able to cite client examples of success. These success stories should come from a variety of businesses within their target audience. 

One of the main arguments for hiring in-house marketers is that people who work for your company are (or will become) experts in your specific field and unique brand. And that’s fair enough. But how about a partner who has their finger on the pulse of what success looks like for varying businesses — including ones like yours? 

This kind of broad expertise brings valuable insights, real benchmarks, and unique perspectives to your otherwise semi-insulated team.

Outside Marketers Scale Your Scope, Sans Risk

We already alluded to the costs caused by adding employees to your team. There’s the search for new talent. Then there’s onboarding, training, and providing benefits for them. And what happens if someone leaves before you realize a return on your investment? That can be a tough blow to your business. 

When an employee leaves, you also lose bandwidth within your marketing department. If you only had a CMO, you lose your entire department. Herein lies a huge benefit of outsourcing your marketing: scalability without risk. 

In general, you can expand and contract your marketing services when you work with an external partner. Your scope can flex with your needs — and even the economy — once your partnership is established. 

For example, you can choose to invest more in paid media strategies when your sales pipeline is nearing empty. Then when your pipeline fills again, you can reallocate that spend to implementation tasks so your team can focus on your new client work. Add the fact that you don’t assume the hiring costs when you’re not doing the hiring and the prospect of working with an outside expert becomes even more appealing.

Inherit Technology and Benefit From Proven Processes With an External Marketing Partner

There is admittedly an abundance of articles addressing the topic of external vs. internal marketing options. But you know what many of them leave out? The advantage of proven processes and robust technology that comes with outsourcing your marketing to a full-service partner.

When clients return to Newfangled after attempting to bring marketing in-house, it’s often because they can’t build and sustain the necessary infrastructure to keep every marketing task running smoothly.

A good external partner already has sophisticated marketing infrastructure in place and keeps it running with tried-and-true processes and software. This well-oiled marketing machine works for all of their clients. As mentioned, they’ll be able to show you concrete success stories and walk you through how these processes will be successful for you, too. 


Devil’s advocate: Let’s say you do manage to mount a marketing machine to support your initiatives. There’s still the reality of paying for the technology to feed that machine. There’s a huge economy of scale when you work with an agency. You don’t have to pay the ticket price for tools because you share that cost with all of the agency’s clients. That’s a plain practical nudge toward working with an outside firm.

The Livelihoods of Marketing Consultants Depend on Delivering Cutting-Edge Solutions

An external agency has its finger on the pulse of what strategies and tactics actually work because they have to. Why? Because effective marketing partners know they have no choice but to keep up with the latest marketing insights so they can deliver results to their clients. Because without results, marketing firms get fired. It’s as simple as that. 

Aside from retaining business, keeping up with trends and marketing best practices is critical to staying relevant and maintaining your expert position. Because content saturates the internet in higher quantities each year — heck, each week, day, second — this expert position is becoming harder and harder to hold on to. And the problem of being found online is only getting more difficult and more complicated now that AI is on the scene. 

All to say, you’ll be happy you have an external marketing sounding board with a vested interest in your brand’s success and an ear to many industries as time keeps rolling rapidly on.

The Insider Marketing Knowledge You Need Can Only Come from the Outside 

AI and other emerging technologies can make your head spin. Maybe now more than ever, you need an outside perspective to inform your marketing strategy. An outside partner can’t afford to sugarcoat hard truths or turn a blind eye to intimidating tech advancements. They’ll lose your business.

 
All of that aside, there’s the classic argument in favor of outsourcing: You can’t read the label from inside the bottle. Internal marketing teams understandably get caught up in internal happenings. Meanwhile, outsiders are closer to your actual prospects. And you won’t hear things like “this is how we’ve always done it” from an outside team.

External Marketing Firms Are Removed From Internal Management Tasks

One of the things no one wants to tell you is that digital marketing success is 75% consistency. Remember, internal teams have to address internal issues as they arise. They might have to pause or shift focus from fueling your marketing engine. 

But external teams? 
They have to drive new business for your company or you cut ties with them. They have to keep producing while varying their approaches based on metrics. There’s no pausing for internal initiatives. There’s no pausing at all. Just a consistent churn of fresh marketing fuel for that engine.

You Don’t Have to Choose: A Hybrid Model Means Harmony Between External and In-House Marketers

Like most things, selecting in-house vs. external marketers isn’t black and white. So don’t make the choice binary if it’s not serving you. More often than not, our most successful clients use a hybrid model. They have a marketer on staff and work with us. 

They’re not paying for a full internal team. But they have a marketer who has the attention of stakeholders and a close-up view of the brand. This person also manages the relationship with us, the external marketing partner. 

As your outside marketing team, we fulfill all of the benefits discussed above, including: 

  • A more cost-effective, holistic marketing approach
  • Scalability as your marketing efforts demand 
  • Established processes and shared-cost software 
  • Broad expertise and a vested interest in understanding marketing best practices
  • An outside perspective and single-minded focus on delivering you results 

A hybrid approach to your marketing just might be the best of both worlds.

An Expert Agency Gets You Results. Period.

If you remain unsure about working with an external agency over bringing in marketing professionals (or doing both), ask questions. 

A real-deal outside marketing firm will have the answers you need to instill confidence in your choice — no matter what that choice is.  Specifically, any agency worth its salt will be able to prove their ability to deliver you results. And if they can deliver results, does it matter how the sausage gets made? The debate between internal vs. external teams becomes quickly moot when your company is attracting the new business it needs.

Google Analytics 4 (GA4) is here. Released in October 2020, it’s designed to be the “future of measurement” for websites and mobile apps.

So what does this mean for companies like yours that are currently using Google’s Universal Analytics (UA) property for your web analytics? I’m glad you asked!

GA4 will completely replace UA effective July 1, 2023. After that time, UA (Google’s standard analytics property since 2013) will no longer track data. Instead, all data will flow through GA4.

That means there’s work you need to do now. In fact, I’ve mapped out four steps you should take to prepare. But first, let’s do a quick rundown of the bigger changes you’ll see in GA4.

What’s Different About GA4?

GA4 is not intended to be the next iteration of UA. In fact, it’s an entirely new platform.

That means you’ll see several differences when you first access GA4 — especially if you work a lot in UA today. And the new property introduces a modified interface (including a new data model and new metrics), a highly customizable reporting structure, and an increased level of insights.

Universal Analytics vs. GA4 Homepage layout:

Universal Analytics vs. GA4 Acquisition Overview layout:

Universal Analytics vs. GA4 Traffic Acquisition layout:

New Data Model and New Metrics in an Updated Analytics Interface

The overall navigation and tabs available in GA4 are different from what is available in UA. That’s because the GA4 data model is a significant change from the UA data model. Instead of processing data based on sessions and pageviews, GA4 data collection is based on events. Each event represents a unique user interaction with your website or app — when they scroll down a page, click on a link, or watch a video, for example.

The event-based data model also introduces three new metrics to track user engagement: engaged session, average engagement time per session, and engagement rate. These replace the UA metrics of average session duration, pages/session, and bounce rate.

The addition of these new metrics in GA4 and the elimination of metrics from UA means that reporting will also be different.

Fewer Pre-built Reports, but More Flexibility for Custom Reports

Most of the pre-built reports you’re used to seeing in UA (including the Behavior Flow report, my go-to for better understanding the user journeys on your website) are no longer automatically part of the new GA4 interface. Instead, users have the ability to create custom reports or export data for further analysis.

This reporting flexibility means businesses like yours can build reports with the data points that matter most to you. And unlike the dashboards in UA, your GA4 dashboards will provide more data. UA only pulls a portion of your website data, so what you’re reviewing now is actually sampled data. But with GA4, all of your website traffic flows in. That means more actual data can be used in reports. And that availability of unlimited data will provide more helpful insights that can be leveraged in your marketing initiatives.

More User Journey Insights and Predictive Analytics

Additional insights in GA4 give you the ability to gain a better sense of a user’s full experience — from their first visit to conversion. And since data is event-based, you’ll be able to see how users engage with your content across channels (web and app).

GA4 leverages machine learning and artificial intelligence to provide predictive insights. Using the dataset collected from your website or app, GA4 will equip you with enough information to predict some of the future behaviors of your users. For example, based on previous events, GA4 can predict the likelihood of a return visit from a user who was recently active on your site (their “churn probability” metric).

GA4 can also create predictive audiences based on these predictive metrics. So as you learn more about user behavior you can create custom audiences (most likely to x, least likely to y, etc.). These audiences can then be used with Google Ads or in other ways for specific targeting.

While it’s a number of significant changes, they’re all designed to enable marketers to make better decisions. That’s why it’s crucial to start preparing for the change today.

What to Do Today to Prepare for the GA4 Transition

Even though you can continue to use and collect new data in your UA instance through July 2023, there are a few things that you should do now so that you are ready for the day when UA is no longer an analytics option.

1. Set up your GA4 instance to establish historical data.

Keep running your UA instance, but start running GA4 concurrently as soon as possible.

The new property starts tracking data the day you set it up, but there’s no way to port any earlier data from UA. So setting up GA4 now means you’ll have data flowing in as soon as possible. This is particularly important if you want to compare results month over month or quarter over quarter.

Be sure to link your Google Search Console account to GA4 so that you can analyze your organic search data. You’ll also want to link your GA4 property to your Google Ads account to start sharing data and audiences. (Quick note: If you have multiple Google Ads accounts, GA4 will automatically share audiences with all accounts. This is different from UA where you could choose which ad account to share your audiences with.)

And while your first focus is on creating historical data in GA4, you don’t want to neglect the information in your UA instance. After July 1, 2023, you’ll be able to access your previously processed data in your UA property for at least six months. After that time, though, it’s unlikely you’ll have access to those reports. Your data is important, so I strongly encourage you to export your historical UA reports now, too.

2. Validate reporting and create your custom reports.

Running both properties together means you can compare the GA4 data and reporting with your already established UA instance. Continue to use UA as your source of truth as you verify the integrity of your GA4 data and reports. (Another quick tip: Don’t forget to exclude your internal IP addresses during your GA4 setup to keep your data clean and accurate.)

Once your GA4 instance is set up and tracking data, start creating your custom reports. Remember, you may have to create custom reports in GA4 for some of the default reports you currently access in UA.

Taking the time to review the data and reports now means you can be confident in your dashboards come July when GA4 will be your only source for web and app analytics.

3. Verify that event tracking is set up — and firing correctly.

Since events are at the core of how GA4 pulls data, you’ll want to pay close attention to your event tracking configuration. The goal is for everything you are currently tracking in UA to also be tracked in GA4. Google sets up some event information by default. You can also modify or create custom events.

Dual tagging will build a historical record for events (essentially duplicating what’s in UA in GA4) and will pass data to both platforms. This does require some updates to your existing account, but Google does a great job outlining several different ways this can be done.

Your best approach depends on the other technologies or platforms you are using. As an example, for our clients using Gravity Forms, we recommend deploying goals through Google Tag Manager in order to send events to each property while keeping your data clean.

4. Earn your GA4 certification.

Google recently announced the availability of a GA4 certification for users. And it’s perfect timing! Now the hours you invest to familiarize yourself with GA4 will also prepare you for the certification exam.

Exam preparation resources and learning paths will help you better understand the platform. And the added knowledge from the certification will give you the ability to better understand your company’s data so that you can make better decisions for your marketing efforts.

The transition to GA4 may feel overwhelming now. But with a few proactive steps today you’ll be set up for success come summer 2023!

Your firm puts a great deal of focus on SEO in your content marketing efforts. After all, solid SEO leads to more site traffic and higher conversion rates. But are all of the SEO “best practices” actually serving the audience you’re writing to? It’s tempting to throw every strategy at every new article or page you publish, but this can often lead to uninteresting or downright unreadable content.

The almighty Google Algorithm and its guidelines are constantly shifting, upping the ante for what “good SEO” looks like. Keeping tabs on this ever-changing landscape takes a good bit of work. So it’s important to establish a baseline of where SEO is headed this year and beyond. For a lot of content marketers, that means eschewing those outdated practices we learned years ago.

Common SEO Mistakes and Outdated Practices

Trying to hit every single SEO best practice on every single piece of content is going to drive you insane. I’ve seen many a content production cadence grind to a halt because the optimization process never feels complete. There’s always more to optimize. As a result, your blog space hasn’t seen a new post in months, you haven’t uploaded any new gated assets to drive conversions, and you’re seeing waning audience engagement. Even worse — those articles that are published wind up overly optimized and hard to read.


SEO requires a good amount of strategy, trial and error, and, most importantly, a deep understanding of what your audience wants from your content. When you put Google ahead of your target audience, you’re potentially alienating the latter. Here are some of the SEO “best” practices that often go too far. All are done with the best of intentions, but can easily wind up doing more harm than good. 

1. Writing Articles for Google Instead of Your Audience

Are you optimizing your page for every SEO trick in the book while putting too little focus on the content itself? Other than site traffic, what are you trying to achieve through your latest article? Plenty of articles optimize around a certain keyword, but the actual verbiage is toothless and does nothing to demonstrate an organization’s value or come close to answering the question it claims to. 


You need to be intentional about the content you’re creating and ensure it reflects the topics and questions your readers actually care about. Keyword research and past performance will help inform this, but your article needs to add something new to the conversation. It needs to further your positioning and genuinely answer your audience’s questions. It’s outdated to think of Google and site visitors as two separate audiences. In fact, they’re  more intertwined than ever. 


That’s because Google is getting a lot better at interpreting User Intent. In other words, Google’s algorithm has reached a point where it’s reading your articles like an actual person would and can more intuitively assess whether or not your particular article answers the question the user meant to ask. All this to say, one of the best ways you can optimize your content for search engines is to write to your audience first. 


Not sure who your audience is? It might be time to revisit your buyer personas. Get a sense of who you’re trying to target in your content and write to them. Ask your past or current customers what they search for and what they’re interested in reading. As amazing as Google is, your audience knows how to find what they need, too. 

2. Going for SEO Quantity, Not Quality (Over-Optimizing)

I see a lot of firms try to hedge their SEO bets by throwing every tactic at the wall just to see what sticks. In reality, all you’ve done is create a cluttered and probably annoying article your reader will bounce right off of — regardless of how great your topic actually is. 


When you load up every article on your site with a bevy of outbound/internal links, images, GIFs, embedded videos, in line forms, content offers, chatbot pop-ups, and related content, you’re going to overwhelm your reader. Be judicious about the media, CTAs, and further content you’re promoting on your pages. Sure, Google puts a lot of stock into video content, but is the YouTube clip you’ve embedded actually relevant to the article topic? 


Here are some of the most common offenders we see. Remember, these are, on paper, SEO best practices. However, including any of them arbitrarily is not the best strategy.

Too Many (Irrelevant) Images

A long held truism of SEO is that it’s best practice to include an image every 200-500 words. In reality, Google’s stance is to use as many as you need. How do you like that for some noncommittal guidance?

What’s more important is to ensure the images you are including are optimized in their own right and propel the content you’re writing. More often, arbitrary images do nothing to further a reader’s understanding of your article. Adding superfluous images for the sake of hitting one every 500 words leads to a cluttered piece of content, can negatively impact your load time, and frankly, looks lazy.


Make sure your imagery is relevant. Charts and infographics are great ways to supplement the information you’re sharing. Stock photos from free services? Not so much. 

Embedded Videos, Slideshows, and Other Media

You’ve written a great article, but now it’s sandwiched between a YouTube video you expect readers to stop and watch, there’s a gif flashing in their peripheral vision, a media player with your latest podcast episode, and oh look! An embedded Prezi deck with your sales pitch for some reason? 


What’s your visitor’s incentive to keep reading your words? There are clearly other actions you want them to take. Give your readers a little credit. It’s easy to figure out when an organization is trying to pull a bait-and-switch. That may not be your intention, but content for content’s sake can definitely give off that impression. 


Who are you trying to attract and engage? Who’s going to actually convert on your site? Google or your target audience?

External and internal links serve a crucial purpose from both an SEO and UX perspective. But again, all things in moderation. Google’s stance on links is pretty straightforward: use as many as you need. Use your external links to bolster your claims and cite your sources. Internal links should help your audience discover more about your topics. 

External links demonstrate your willingness to engage with the larger online community and defer to other subject matter experts. That’s a big plus to Google. They don’t want your site to exist in a vacuum. Inbound links help direct your audience to more relevant and valuable content and show search engines a hierarchy of your site (which pages you prioritize).

But this isn’t an invitation to link to every conceivable page out there. Every time you add a hyperlink you’re conceivably upping the chances that someone is going to follow it and thus spend less time engaging with your content. Plus, when half of your copy is a different color, it’s jarring and looks downright messy.

So before you start adding everything but the kitchen sink to your articles, take a step back and make sure these extra components aren’t just good for SEO. They need to be relevant and support your articles. They need to enhance your writing, not distract from it. 

3. Chasing Keywords for All Your SEO Equity

In line with writing to Google instead of your audience, putting all of your SEO muscle into the perfect keyword won’t always do the trick. Using one of the ubiquitous keyword research tools, you’ve probably compiled a list of search terms around which you’d like to optimize your website’s content. Good start. Drop that keyword in your H1, SEO title, slug, and meta description. Pepper your phrase into the body of your article and subheaders (but not so much that you’re keyword stuffing, of course), and there you go.


Here’s the issue. This is a passive approach to SEO. Even with all the work you’ve put into your keyword research, relying on one specific phrase to drive traffic is a gamble. Sure, that keyword has performed well on SERPs, but is your article going to add anything new to the conversation? 


When you’re ideating new topics for articles, certainly consider your keyword research and previous successful search terms, but don’t build your entire article around one, verbatim phrase. Again, user intent is getting a lot more sophisticated. Instead, let the article inform what you’re trying to optimize for. There are 3.5 billion Google searches per day. That offers pretty good odds that your content will resonate with at least a few thousand people. 


After you’ve written your article, take a look at what themes or phrases make the most sense for which to optimize. You can throw this phrase in a keyword tool like Ubersuggest or Answer the Public to help refine the wording based on search volume. One little trick is to simply google the phrase and see what it returns. While not foolproof, this exercise helps determine what others are writing about and how they’re phrasing it — and what Google is prioritizing. 

4. Using Organic Traffic as Your Main KPI

You can drive all the traffic you want to your site, but if visitors aren’t taking any further action, what’s the point? Your organic site traffic is a vanity metric when not put into a greater context. Seeing a million visitors to your article isn’t worth much if they’re not doing anything else once they get there. Don’t put all of your time and resources into checking off every SEO box if it means you’re neglecting other, more meaningful aspects of inbound marketing such as conversion opportunities. 


Unless you’ve created the ideal piece of organic content, smashing that publish button on an article and calling it a day pretty much condemns your content to die on the vine. Sure, you’ll hopefully see that organic traffic start rolling in, but that might not be for weeks, even months. What’s your plan to actively get your content in front of your audience?


What’s your plan to promote the amazing content your team is creating? Whether it’s through email marketing, social media, or paid search, help your audience find your content and boost some of those other traffic sources. 

5. Not Leveraging the SEO Equity You Already Have

Content Marketing can often feel like a “what have you done for me lately” undertaking. We’re always moving onto the next article, the next conversion, the next lead. Just remember, your website is a living artifact. Chances are you’ve seen some organic success on a few pages. Take a look at some of the content that has consistently performed well for you — pages and articles that see good traffic, high time on page, and drive conversions. Use a tool like SEMrush to see what organic keywords these pages are ranking for. 


There are no rules about revisiting older pieces of content. In fact, Google loves to see sites consistently updating and improving. Once you’ve identified a few articles, consider making the following updates:

  • Ensure the information you’re presenting is still relevant to your audience and your positioning. 
  • Add a conversion opportunity if there isn’t one
  • Consider writing new articles on similar topics. Just remember that while your site builds domain authority over time, it’s still your individual pages that rank in search engines. Don’t optimize for the same keyword in new articles so you’re essentially competing against yourself. 
  • Search for and identify commonalities in your organic performers. Topics? Length? Authorship? Embedded videos? What’s resonating with your audience (and Google) across the board?


You can also use your higher-performing articles to help support your new posts. Go back to these articles and work in links to your newer articles or ones you think need a traffic boost. But as I mentioned earlier, just make sure you’re not overdoing it with the linking. 

Be Flexible With Your SEO Strategy

You should absolutely follow SEO best practices for your content. But do so in a way that makes the most sense for your audience. You can get all the organic traffic you want, but if the user experience and the actual knowledge you’re imparting doesn’t hold up, you’re not going to see an uptick in the metrics that actually move the needle for your marketing efforts. What’s it matter if a blog article sees 1,500 organic visitors but your time on page is 00:20 seconds and doesn’t lead to a single conversion? 

Try new things, let go of outdated strategies, and keep your ear to the ground to make sure what you know about SEO is still relevant. But most importantly, write to your audience, not to search engines. 

SEO and content marketing are full of myths and half-truths. One of the most well known is the demonization of duplicate content. If you have spent any time in digital marketing, this is a concept you have probably heard of. So, what is it and is it as bad as people say it is?

What is Duplicate Content in Digital Marketing?

According to Google, duplicate content is when large chunks of your text appear on more than one unique url. It could be content that appears word for word or is very similar. Usually this is done when you syndicate your content, use the same product description in multiple places, and on occasion, if someone plagiarizes your work.

Is Duplicate Content a Bad Thing?

Obviously, if someone steals your content that is unacceptable. However, the duplicate content we are referring to is not plagiarized content, but the majority of content that falls into this bucket – the product descriptions, posts on forums, and syndicated content. 

So, is there a duplicate content penalty? No.

Google won’t penalize you for having similar content on multiple urls. The algorithm isn’t actively removing your content from search results because it is duplicate. 

The issues with duplicate content

While your content isn’t actively demoted in search results, having duplicate content can complicate your SEO strategy. 

One complication to your SEO strategy relates to content on your site competing against itself when it appears on a more well- known site. For example, if you publish your article on your own site and then publish it in its entirety on Medium or LinkedIn. Given the authority of those sites, your article at their url will outrank that same content appearing on your own site. If you use syndicated content as part of your marketing strategy you need to be sure you are doing it correctly (more on that later). 

Another possible issue with duplicate content relates to backlinks. Backlinks have been shown to be an important ranking factor, but duplicate content can lead to diluted link power. If you have multiple pages with the same content, your backlinks will most likely be spread across pages and dilute the link power. Google will try to consolidate all of these signals and give preference to what it deems “the original content.” If you leave it up to Google to decipher which version is best, you may not have your preferred content version appearing highest in search results. Or, with the signals divided up between the different versions, you may find that none of your content ranks as highly as it could.

How to Use Duplicate Content Correctly

We’ve established that there isn’t a penalty for duplicate content, but it can cause ranking issues by the nature of how organic search and ranking works. However, there are some important things you can do to help mitigate issues. 

Duplicate content on your site

Each page and post on your website should serve a specific purpose and hopefully help you avoid duplicate content. However, sometimes it is unavoidable. A few examples of common duplicate content on a single site:

  • Web version and print version of a blog post or upgrade
  • Products listed on several pages of a site with the same product description
  • Service descriptions that appear on several pages
  • URL structure issues such as letter casing and trailing slashes

You can avoid issues by redirecting old versions of your content to your new, preferred version. Use canonical tags in your html to signal to search engines which version is the original. Add nofollow tags to duplicate content (e.g. print versions)  to ensure all search traffic is funneled to the version you want to be featured.

Duplicate content across several sites

Republishing on other sites

First, simply duplicating all of your existing content on another site is not a good content strategy. Strategically syndicating your content on other sites can be a great way to get in front of your target audience where they already are. It can also help build authority with prospects and Google. However, it can also cause problems for your own site ranking if not done properly.

Google will rank content based on what they think best matches the searcher’s intent. Let’s say your content meets the searcher’s needs, but is published on your site and on an industry site. Which will Google rank higher? 

If the industry site is seen as authoritative on the topic and already gets more visitors than your site (which is often the case), the version of your content on the other site will rank higher than your own site’s version. However, if the site you are republishing on, Medium for example, offers canonical tagging, you can signal to search engines that the content is a copy of content that originates on this other url. Google will recognize that and give the credit to the original source. This does not mean that you eventually rank above the higher authority site, but it can help boost the authority of your site for related searches.

When choosing what sites to republish your content to, ensure they offer canonical tagging or will include a nofollow tag. And always link back to the original content on your own site.

A better way to pursue the use of higher authority sites is to create original content for that site so you aren’t competing with the exact same version on your own site. You could also create a shorter version of your original content and encourage people to head to your site for the full version or an upgrade.

Product descriptions

Another common place you see duplicate content is with e-commerce product descriptions. If your product is listed on your site and then scraped for inclusion on another website (or vice versa), the same product description often appears on both.

There are several steps you can take to mitigate the issues related to duplicate product descriptions. First,you should take care to optimize the description for your audience. Next,add product reviews to build authority, give potential customers social proof, and keep the page fresh for crawlers. 

Plagiarized content

Plagiarized content is the one form of duplicate content that is penalized. If someone is using your content without permission or without giving credit to the original author, Google wants to know about it. You should report this type of duplicate content to have it removed. In this case there is a penalty and the site runs the risk of being deindexed from search results. 

When it comes to duplicate content Google algorithms are pretty smart, but it is always best to put in the work to ensure the bots don’t have to guess. Use the tools you have available to track duplicate content and appropriately tag it. Don’t be afraid to use duplicate content to your advantage to increase brand awareness and authority. However, be sure you are playing within the system and doing your due diligence on the backend. Before trying to add syndication or distribution to your content strategy be sure to evaluate your goals. If you are trying to grow an audience of interested prospects, you are better off creating content that lives only on your site and fosters potential customers where they are in their purchase journey.

WordPress site speeds can vary greatly for a number of different reasons. While all sites are different, there are some basic guidelines to follow that provide a solid foundation and ensure the quickest speeds possible. These guidelines not only create a better user experience, but improve search rankings, too.

Specifically, we’re talking about Google’s Core Web Vitals (CWV). These are unique metrics Google considers relevant in measuring the quality of a user’s experience. Currently, there are a lot of questions about just how much of an impact these metrics will initially have on search rankings. However, there is no real argument that improving these metrics improves user experience.

Google’s Core Web Vitals Defined

What are Google’s Core Web Vitals? Google has defined these 3 specific metrics tying into speed, responsiveness, and visual stability.

  1. Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – This is the time it takes for the largest element within the viewport to show in its final state. Think of a banner image loading at the top of the page, or the ‘swap’ as a custom font is applied to a large block of text.
  2. First Input Delay (FID) – This is the time it takes for a page to respond, such as links and buttons becoming clickable. Anything “blocking” the main thread will increase this delay. To improve this, avoid actions like blocking JavaScript. 
  3. Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – This is a calculated number reflecting the amount of “jumping” that happens as content loads. A banner image without a specified height starts out with a height of zero. As it loads and pushes the page down, the CLS number increases.

Some of these metrics involve the idea of a “viewport,” which varies between mobile devices and desktop browsers. Google takes this into account, assigning each page a different set of values for both mobile and desktop viewports. Each faces different challenges. 

A mobile viewport may show a lower layout shift than a desktop browser, as the design contains fewer elements at this breakpoint. However, a mobile device may also take longer to download stylesheets and fonts, resulting in a longer LCP.

These metrics are nothing new, but Google is changing the way it uses them to determine ranking results. Beginning in May of 2021, your site’s scores on these metrics will inform that ranking. The initial impact of this change may be limited, but it is in your best interest to ensure your site is performing as fast as possible.

We can’t say for certain how this change will initially affect search rankings. But there is a lot of discussion about this change in the industry right now, with many qualified voices weighing in—including Google.

  1. Barry Schwartz at Search Engine Roundtable does not expect much of a change initially, as noted in the article linked just above. Why not? Because Martin Splitt from Google suggests in his Tweets from March 11th that “a page with CWV field data may have a tiny advantage over one without”. Splitt also warns that “We can’t take into account what we don’t know,” though.
  2. Despite this, Schwartz also reports that nearly 70% of SEOs “will still prioritize these efforts”. This number comes from a poll conducted by Aleyda Solis, a respected and well-known international SEO consultant. Schwartz makes the case that focusing on CWVs makes sense, even if your primary concern is not improving SEO rankings.
  3. In his February 28th Search Engine Journal article, Roger Monti breaks down the recent Search Central Fireside Chat touching on this issue. Here, Splitt again emphasizes the uncertainty surrounding the initial impact of the CWV update, even internally at Google. Danny Sullivan does stress that “the new ranking factor will not cause significant pain,” and that it is just one of many factors considered.

Taking active industry conversations into account, you start to understand this is not going to be a flip-of-the-switch change to how search engines rank results. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t optimize your site with these Core Web Vitals in mind, though. Faster sites still always provide the better digital experience.

Viewing Your Site’s Web Core Vitals Evaluation

Before you can optimize your site, you need to know where it stands. Not sure where to find your CWV results? There are actually a few different options for reviewing your site’s evaluation using these metrics.

  1. The “Lighthouse” tab in Chrome’s developer tools. This allows for quick testing on any given page. Results may differ slightly from what Google is actually considering, though.
  2. Google’s “Pagespeed Insights” tool. This is your best bet for an accurate reflection of Google’s evaluation. You can perform a real-time evaluation of any URL provided, while also viewing real-world data from the past month’s visitors. Check both the Mobile and Desktop tabs for specific areas of improvement.
  3. Google Search Console is the best option for long-term monitoring of these metrics.

Now you have an idea of what Google is looking at and how you can view their takeaways. Let’s dig into some practical ways of improving your existing WordPress site’s Core Web Vitals.

What Goes Into a Page Load?

Before you start making changes to improve your Core Vitals, it helps to consider the fundamentals. A lot of things have to happen between a visitor requesting your page and that page actually loading. 

  1. The server receives the request, returning the corresponding HTML. HTML production speed is critical. A cached page allows the server to respond with the cached HTML very quickly. If the page is not cached, the server needs to build it. This requires starting PHP, establishing a database connection, loading plugins, and more.
  2. The browser then reads through the entire HTML document, putting together a rough, un-styled version of the page in memory. The visitor still hasn’t seen anything as this is happening. 
  3. Now the browser loads any CSS from the HTML. Any CSS files referenced in the HTML are now requested, requiring a separate call to the server. Custom web fonts referenced in the CSS are requested as well.
  4. Should the page’s functionality require any JavaScript, this may also be loaded at this time. This may also require an additional server request.
  5. The browser matches up the styling to its rough outline once all necessary CSS and JavaScript is processed. The visitor sees these results. 
  6. Images and other elements in the HTML load as encountered. This can result in the page “jumping” during load times.
  7. Once loaded, font files are applied to the text on the page, resulting in the “swap” mentioned in our LCP definition.

This is a lot of activity, but you’ve loaded web pages before. You know that typically all of this happens quickly. Depending on your website’s configuration, though, there is a lot of possible variance in load time. That’s where optimization comes in.

Proper Hosting Environments Return HTML More Quickly

Of the variables that may affect your site’s perceived speed, the time that it takes the server to receive the request and return the corresponding HTML often has the biggest impact. It can take several seconds to complete the necessary process of: 

  1. Loading the WordPress framework
  2. Connecting to the database
  3. Processing content into its final structured form

When the HTML is cached and ready to return, you get the best overall performance. The server doesn’t need to generate it upon each page request. You can leverage this strategy by using the right hosting solution. WPEngine and Pantheon are great options. Both cache and serve WordPress sites specifically. 

Their networks and servers are configured for delivering optimal performance. But both offer a number of other beneficial features. Quick backup/restore functionality, for example, and the ability to create staging environments for testing quite easily.

WPEngine’s Advanced Cache Control Plugin Extends Your Cache Life

If you opt for WPEngine, use the Advanced Cache Control plugin to extend cached HTML life. WPEngine only caches pages for 10 minutes (or until updated) by default. This ensures the most recent content changes are visible. Unfortunately, this short cache lifespan can reduce cache effectiveness, particularly if your site is not heavily trafficked. 

When increasing the time before regenerating cached pages, there is a greater chance of “stale” content displaying. Typically, the cache for a page always regenerates whenever WordPress sees that content updated. However, that content may also appear on other tangential display areas where regeneration is not triggered.

Always look for a hosting provider that offers you ways to manually regenerate the page cache. The WPEngine provides several such methods for quickly clearing all cached pages.

Reduce the Number of Additional Files Required to Render the Page

The browser isn’t ready to show anything immediately upon receiving the HTML for the page. Before displaying the page, the browser figures out how everything needs to look. This requires downloading and parsing all of the stylesheet data associated with the page. Cutting back on additional files helps the browser to render things faster.

Building your site to minimize the number of resources used in production is ideal. You might leverage a pipeline such as Gulp to compile scripts and styles into single resources, for instance. Even so, plugins often require their own scripts and styles, causing the external resources required for each page load to skyrocket. 

Using a lightweight plugin like Autoptimize addresses this issue by combining all of your Javascript and CSS into single files. Should this plugin cause JavaScript errors in the console, try excluding some of the files being combined. jQuery in particular may cause issues if not loaded in the correct order, and is often best excluded. This all requires some trial and error, but the end result is worth it.

Downloading fewer font files also boosts the perceived load time of a page. If the largest element in the viewport is a text block, the LCP metric is not calculated until the font file is downloaded and applied to the text. Cutting back on custom fonts helps here.

When building your new site, utilize critical CSS/fonts that load first to style the elements appearing in the viewport. Then, the CSS for elements appearing further down the page can be loaded later.

Optimize Images—Especially Large Marquee Assets

Above-the-fold images are often the largest element visitors see when first viewing a page. When that image takes several seconds to load, it makes the whole page appear slow to load—even with everything else appearing instantly! In a case like this, the LCP metric isn’t calculated until the image fully loads.

These assets load faster the smaller they are. There are a number of paid plugins that ensure such assets are as small as possible, both retroactively and for future uploads. Our Newfangled site uses Shortpixel. Other popular options include Smush, EWWWW, and Imagify. Experiment with your settings when using these plugins. Find the best balance between image size and quality.

Updating Sites Maximizes Speed, Even Without Caching

It’s not always possible for servers to return cached copies of pages. If visitors, Googlebots included, access pages after the cache expires, those pages regenerate. Certain dynamic content, including Newfangled-powered CTAs, requires that a non-cached version of the page be loaded to generate content specific to the current visitor.

Avoiding large, monolithic site-building plugins such as DIVI or WPBakery helps to render sites as fast as possible even when caching isn’t possible. These plugins add numerous database calls to every page on the site. Consider if these tools are worth the performance trade-off coming with them.

Take some time and audit your installed plugins. Uninstall unused items. Keep plugins updated to the latest version at all times, along with your WordPress core. This improves performance, and is also a great security practice.

Finally, use Query Monitor. Dive into database calls made on each page load. The Queries->By Component report groups the queries by plugin. Do this on your staging site only, as the plugin slows things down. 

Should You Manage Your Own Server? 

We’ve found the cost/benefit of using services like WPEngine makes the choice a no-brainer. But you may host your own sites and manage your own servers directly. If so, you can still implement these techniques. It just requires a little extra work.

  1. Use object caching. This reduces the number of database calls necessary to generate a page. Store commonly-referenced “objects” like individual posts and their related custom fields. If your server supports Memcache, this can be as simple as adding an ‘object-cache.php’ file to your /wp-content/ directory. We like this version, provided directly by Automattic (the creators of WordPress). 
  2. Use PHP’s Opcache. WordPress loads and compiles many PHP files when building a page. Opcaching stores this compiled code for a short period of time. This simple change can noticeably improve page generation time. The more complex your theme and the more plugins installed, the bigger the boost. 
  3. Use a reverse proxy. Popular options include Varnish and NGINX. These offer “page caching” functionality similar to what you get from WPEngine or Pantheon out of the box.

Always Prepare, Even for the Unknown

At this stage, we don’t know exactly how this latest algorithm update affects search rankings. But regardless of the Page Experience Update’s initial impacts, informed preparation always pays off. We know that optimizing sites for speed will only work in our favor. 

There are more answers to come down the road, and we’ll keep the updates coming here. For now, do what you can to keep your own site loading as quickly as possible. As detailed above, you do have the necessary tools and insights available.

When building out a paid search campaign, many marketers may decide to target the entire user journey in their campaigns — whether they realize it or not. Without thinking about which stage in the funnel a keyword falls in, there could be a lot of time and budget allocated to users who are just beginning their research. Many of which may never move down the funnel.

Every keyword you choose to target on Google Ads will cost you marketing dollars. Some keywords can have a high number of monthly searches or have a greater amount of competition, which can burn through your campaign’s budget more quickly than others. When selecting the keywords you want to target in your marketing strategy, it’s important to think about where they fall in the marketing funnel.

Depending on the stage in the funnel, there are different keyword targeting strategies to consider.

Where In the Marketing Funnel Should You Focus Your Keyword Research?

When we talk about “the marketing funnel,” we’re referring to the path that users take on their way to completing a high value conversion action. You’ll see a lot more users completing top-of-funnel actions than users who complete bottom-of-funnel actions. The top-of-funnel actions indicate the user is just beginning their research. This could mean downloading a broad piece of content on LinkedIn, reviewing posts on your blog, or a research-based search query on Google.

A great example of a bottom-of-the-funnel action is a contact form completion. When users are ready to reach out, there may be specific bottom-of-the-funnel, buyer keywords that you could target. Targeting this group means focusing on high-intent, usually longer, more specific keyword phrases (long-tail keywords). This strategy is generally cost effective if cost-per-lead is a KPI of your campaign. Although, neglecting the more expensive top-of-funnel terms may prevent more users from entering the top of your funnel and becoming familiar with your brand.

Why Should You Focus On High-Intent Keywords?

High-intent keywords are search queries that signify that the searcher is getting closer to the transaction — whether that be contacting a company for a service, purchasing an item, or starting a membership. These users are closing in on the bottom of the funnel.

If there is enough search volume, targeting these high-intent keywords is cost-effective because you’re most likely to target users who are ready to convert. You’re getting in front of the users who are actively looking for a service you offer. The cost-per-click (CPC) may not necessarily be less than a more broad keyword, but the search volume would be less. With a limited budget, it is strategic to focus your spend on keywords that capture users near the end of their search and ready to convert. This strategy produces the most high-value conversion actions, for a lower cost.

How Can You Find These High-Intent/Bottom-of-the-Funnel Keywords?

It’s always important to review your search queries every few days. When reviewing the high-converting terms, you may be able to uncover some high-intent keywords. The user’s search terms may be long-tail keywords that you can target that may not have come up in your initial keyword research. You can find other high-intent keywords by testing a related search query on Google, and reviewing the results of the search as well as the “Searches related to…” at the bottom of the search engine results page (SERP).

High-intent keywords generally have a word or phrase in them indicating that the user is ready to take an action. Phrases like “where to buy” or “join membership” are examples of these action-oriented search queries.

Okay, I Have My Bottom-of-the-Funnel Keywords — What Now?

After finding quality, bottom-of-the-funnel keywords, you want to make sure that you’re testing ad copy that speaks to that specific search query. The more relevant the user feels the ad is, the higher CTR you should see on the ad. It’s best to test around three ads per ad group at all times, keeping a close eye on their performance, and pausing any underperforming ads. Ad relevance and expected CTR will impact the quality score of the keywords, so improving on these metrics will help you show higher on the SERP, and reduce your average CPC.

When To Use Full-Funnel Keywords

Although focusing on bottom-of-the-funnel keywords is cost efficient, there are benefits to targeting higher-funnel, broad keywords.

If brand awareness is a goal, then it would be strategic to target the top-of-funnel keywords. By utilizing “broad match,” you can capture a range of keywords within a theme. If you assign a keyword as a broad match, you’re giving Google Ads more freedom to show your ad, by allowing it to bid on similar or related terms along with your keyword.

By using broad-match keywords, you can cast a wider net with your targeting. This means a wider data set of search queries is made visible. To be effective, this requires a campaign manager to diligently exclude any irrelevant terms. If done right, you will discover additional long-tail, high-intent keywords.

Targeting full-funnel keywords can be costly, and you may have less control over the search queries you’re bidding on. After the user is introduced to your brand and services, the hope is they come back to the site with a bottom-of-the-funnel keyword like “where to buy ______.”

With any campaign, it is important to continuously test. Carefully monitor the search queries and stay on top of adding negative keywords, and adding related keywords. Keeping your Google Ads organized can help with this account maintenance. By organizing your keywords in close themes within each Ad Group, you can easily see where new Ad Groups need to be broken out, and which keyword groups perform best.

Targeting all relevant keywords can bring in plenty of traffic, but to make sure you’re getting the most qualified users to your website, you need to carefully consider the intent behind each keyword you’re bidding on. Narrowing your focus on only the high-intent terms can be an effective strategy and worth testing on campaigns that may be limited on budget or are serving ads for a highly competitive industry.

How to win featured snippets: step by step

1. Identify the keywords and queries you rank highest for already — these are your best bet!
2. Structure your responses based on the type of questions that get asked most often for your queries.
3. Place your search query in the header tag and structure your content in close proximity to the header using paragraph, list, or table formatting where appropriate.
4. Ensure that the keywords of any accompanying images include the targeted keywords in the file name, alt text, and title tags.
5. Fetch & render your page in Google Search Console

What are featured snippets?

You’ve likely seen featured snippets in your browser when asking a question in Google Search. They occupy position zero at the top of the page and offer answers in response to specific search queries pulled from a webpage. Google crawls indexed webpages to find the best answer to the search query, and populates that information as the featured snippet. There are several factors to take into account when optimizing your content for featured snippets such as your domain authority rank, the security of your site, and the ‘mobile-friendliness’ of your site.

Featured snippets are important for several reasons: If a user searches for the answer to a question and Google delivers your response before all others, that indicates to the user that you’re a credible source of information on that topic. Moreover, it’s a great way to boost traffic to your site—when implemented correctly.

Consider this scenario: a user wants to know about some of the features of marketing automation. They go to Google and type “features of automation” and a featured snippet is displayed from an article titled “The 5 Must-Use Marketing Automation Features.” Since snippets take up such a large portion of the SERP (Search Engine Results Page) and provide more content than the typical listing, they have much higher conversion rates than other listings.

It’s a good idea to optimize your content for featured snippets, even if your primary concern isn’t to be featured for answers. Benefits such as an improved SERP rank and are evident even if your contribution is not featured. Additionally, mobile-focused optimization is critical as more and more people continue to use their mobile devices as their primary screens. Improving the mobile friendliness of your site can certainly boost your online presence.

How do I optimize content for featured snippets?

From a content standpoint, you’ll want to consider how the answers to popular search queries are structured on your page. Use paragraphs to answer ‘does/is’ questions like “does rice have gluten?” or “is Mario a plumber?” These types of questions are best answered with a short description between 45-55 words. Lists work best to answer ‘how to’ questions that require a sequence of answers or steps like, “how to tie a tie.” When making comparisons between products or services, use a table to compare and contrast the different benefits of each option.

To maximize your chances of having a featured snippet displayed from your content, you’ll need to consider several elements from keywords to images. You’ll have a better chance of featuring for queries that contain keywords for which you already rank highly. You can take a look in Google Search Console under Search Traffic > Search Analytics to get an idea of some of the queries that are driving most clicks to your site, as well as the position you rank for the specified query. Once you’ve determined which queries to use, it’s time to think about structure again.

Make sure your query is in a header tag and place the structured content in close proximity to that header. Sometimes you’ll see a featured snippet from one domain and the image associated with it comes from another domain. This happens because Google is displaying images that are best optimized for that search query. When you create and upload your images, you’ll increase your chances of featuring by including your targeted query words not only in the file name, but also in the alt text and title tags. Once you’ve posted your article, head back to Google Search Console to fetch and render your new page.

 

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