Building a Templated Approach to SEO

SEO, in my opinion, is in many ways about scale. You want to rank for as many relevant keywords as possible as content is the leading factor in achieving that scale. Because let’s face it, who can rank for thousands of keywords with one blog post or piece of content? You want to ensure that ‘content’ can be positioned in such a way that it’s scalable and can do such things. This is where the templated approach for SEO comes in. Whether it’s about optimizing product descriptions or creating filtered pages, it’s often the way to go to target many (both head terms and long-tail) keywords simultaneously.

Getting Started

Step 1: Keyword Research

Especially for industries with lots of search volume, the big topics arise quickly. Quick initial keyword research provides an insight in most cases on where to start with creating templates, while at Postmates, it wasn’t rocket science to figure out that the most popular keyword themes were around:

• {food category} delivery, for example, sushi delivery, Chinese food delivery.
• {food category} {city name} delivery, example: burger San Francisco delivery
• {food category} near me, example: sushi delivery near me

Note: There were many more other categories, but as the ambition was to compete for crucial high volume head terms, this is certainly where we got started.

Step 2: URL Structure

Decide on your URL structure, this isn’t too complicated either. But often, I’d recommend laying out what you’re planning on long-term with other projects as well so that specific projects don’t create overlap. You want to avoid that certain pages will be cannibalized over time by other terms that are served on similar URL structures.

In the case of our examples, we used:

Step 3a: Engineering Briefing

• https://postmates.com/delivery/miami
• https://postmates.com/delivery/miami/burgers 
• https://postmates.com/delivery-near-me/american 

• Internal Linking: Probably one of the most important pieces of a templated approach as you want to make sure that enough other pages are 
• Headings, Titles & Content: Most of the content, including headings and titles, will be pre-formatted in a certain way so that it can be easily replicated across all the pages that you’re going live with. Usually, templated pages contain listings (restaurants, homes, products, you name it).
• Random tags
  • META Description: Obvious, should this be templated, or do you have a way to write this manually for many pages?
  • META Robots & Canonical: Likely always has a default, although you want to override this information in some cases.
• XML & HTML Sitemaps
  • Build an XML sitemap for all the URLs that are part of your templated approach.
  • HTML Sitemap: Is your overall structure big enough for it to need an HTML sitemap? For a big rollout of potentially thousands or more pages, you might want to think about doing this.
  • Robots.txt: Add the sitemap to the robots.txt, and don’t forget to list it in the XML sitemap index file.

Step 3a: Content Briefing

What type of content do you want to show up on the page? What should the headings and titles be? As you likely have to start on this with a templated approach as well you need to make sure that you can rely on a Content team to take care of this. Depending on the briefing this can be a longer or shorter briefing to gather the right assets.

Step 4: Launch & Iteration

Launch early & often is often my strategy around SEO so that it can be picked up as soon as possible by search engines. The same applies to the templated approach, getting them indexed is the first priority after which you can worry about optimized crawl patterns and getting them to rank higher in the search engines.

Examples

The templated approach isn’t new for many SEO teams in a B2C world, as it’s common to have a large inventory of products or services that can be segmented in many ways. In B2B, the approach is a little less common (but still often a good practice). Where I often see strategies fail around templated approaches is the entire focus of teams on content creation this way versus writing blog posts. They work hand in hand, but often, the long-term value lies more towards templated pages than content as it’s more scalable.

The caveat, a templated approach for smaller sites might take longer to perform than an actual blog post, for which you can right after hitting publish, start racking up visits via other channels (social, email) as well.

Let’s look at an example of good templated pages that have kept SEO in mind:

The Things to Do Places approach of Airbnb (especially for Places) is a great example (previously part of the Neighborhoods project, I believe) of a templated product approach that consistently works for SEO. While in their case, I bet it’s not just made for SEO, it does have a lot of great features that are easy to call out as being important for SEO.

• Content Structure: It’s clear what the essential headings & titles on the page are.
• Internal Linking: Take a look at how it collects all the relevant links to Places to Stay, Experiences, etc. There is a reason why they’re there.
• Find the other ones yourself ;-). It was always a great learning exercise for me to dive into category pages and figure out why every little element on the page is there and how it could add value for SEO.

How to do this yourself?

Are you running an e-commerce store, are you a media company, or are you a marketplace? Chances are, you’re already more than likely set up to support this within your existing business model and organizational structure. So give it a shot if you haven’t explored this and let me know how it’s working out for you!

What’s next after SEO?

Often questions that industry peers ask me resonate with me right away as they’re focused on where they are in their career, where they should go, my role over the past years, and how that has shaped what I do today.

Lately, I got asked the following questions, and I thought it would be good to go a bit deeper into it:

• How did you get out of SEO, and what skills do you need to get there?
• How did your previous SEO roles get you where you are today (a marketing leadership role)?

SEO is a career for many. Many (top) industry experts have climbed the career ladder on either the agency or in-house side and are at the top of their field. When I left Postmates, I knew that I didn’t want to go back into yet another SEO role, though. For me, the diversity of additional acquisition channels and marketing functions was more interesting than diving into another SEO playbook. But that’s not the case for everyone, and I want to highlight that this is my personal decision. Lately, I’ve hired for an SEO role (once) again, and it’s great to see so many people build their careers that way. In this post, I want to spend some more time giving an insight into what I think could help diversify skills to help in other areas of Marketing & Growth.

How did you get out of SEO?

• Build a more diverse skillset. In most cases, SEOs already have to build up additional skills that can also apply to other functions. Think about: web analytics, technical skills (coding), copywriting, understanding of search behavior, CRO. You’re likely not an expert in them right away, but knowing what’s out there is just as important. It’s a matter of building up the T-shaped skills that many have written about before (This post from Rand Fishkin many years covers the concept.).
• IC versus Management route: How do you want to grow up as a professional in your career, and when do you make those choices? None of the two options is right or wrong as they can both get you there. In many cases, after leading teams, you can also go back to being an IC again.
• The rise on the Management track: While you grow up as a Manager, if you chose that route (not saying it’s the best route to pick), you eventually lead more people. From being responsible for one function, you can end up leading many as an executive (either on Growth or Marketing).
• Networking: Regardless of the route you take, building out your network is always valuable. Having moved across the globe once (NL > USA), it made it even more evident that when you get somewhere new, you sometimes have to start from scratch again and can’t entirely rely on your existing network.
• Size of Organizations: What organizational size suits you best? If you want to grow into bigger companies you might sometimes be better off picking a smaller company first and building out your skills there. The opposite works as well, big companies can give you the insight into how things operate at scale with many specialists being on your teams. If you then move back to a smaller type of organization it can help you get a better sense of what to focus on as well as you likely need to wear more hats.
• Stage of an Organization: As I’ve spent all my career working in tech companies there is a big difference if your company is in the Seed stage versus past Series C. Teams are bigger, responsibilities are different, for not just SEO roles but for many of them. You’re working on small or long term goals depending on the stage. But it also helps you level set what is important for a career after SEO. In a company that is smoothly transitioning through the proper stages you will likely have the ability to adjust your own role over time. When I was at TNW the different stages of the company enabled me to start a marketing organization and help grow the business. Similar things have applied to my current role at RVshare which is quite different from how I started three years ago.
• Performance versus Brand Marketing: I’ll take the stance that SEO clearly helps with performance marketing, it certainly can help brands as well but in most cases you’re going after business value by chasing keyword segments and intent from users that leads to transactions.

What skills to build? It’s up to you and the route you want to take. Leave a comment with insight into how you are making your skillset and career for a potential exit out of SEO.

The top metrics & KPIs other teams care about for SEO

SEOs care about many metrics, often the wrong ones (rankings, DA, PA, you name it, etc.). What is often forgotten are the metrics that are important for the other teams/departments within their organization. In the end, building a company isn’t just done by one company. Over the years, it’s been clear that you work with many departments simultaneously on the same effort, and often they care about your channels’ metrics. Just not always the same ones, so in this blog post, I wanted to shine some additional light on what metrics you should think about for other departments. It’s the followup to this tweet that got quite the attention, and this post gives me the ability to go a bit more into depth on the whys?

This list is likely incomplete and is using some generic names. Your organization might have different names or have additional departments that might not be covered here. Hopefully, this gives you a better insight into how to think about various departments related to SEO.

🏢 C-Level

Depending on what type of organization you work in and how broad your C-suite is, you are likely to report at some level into a COO/CMO that cares about the SEO metrics. But often in 100+ person companies, they don’t have the depth anymore to really deep dive into the SEO cases that you’re facing within an SEO team on a day-to-day basis.

Metrics:

• Revenue, average order value (this number should in most use cases not be too much different from the performance of other channels), and the number of Transactions.
• Sessions from organic search as an absolute number but also the percentage of total traffic. Primarily the latter as you want to keep a healthy/diverse balance for your marketing mix. Something that I blogged about before.

🛠 Product

What is Product building that you can benefit from, and how are you working with Product to prioritize the most important changes to the product to drive additional growth from organic search. No product is finished so there is always something that you can help prioritize from an SEO point-of-view.

Metrics:

• Load time: There has been enough buzz about the importance of site speed for good reason.
• Number of Pages per Template
• Growth in Sessions
• Best Performing Page Segments
• Conversion Rate from Organic Search, etc.

Not necessarily in that order, but usually, metrics that are impacted with/by the Product organization.

💻 Engineering

Sitespeed, code velocity, sitespeed and load times. Well you get the point. It’s all about how fast the site is and how quickly you can work with an engineering team to get changes that you want fixed implemented.

Metrics:

• Load times/site speed, traffic to specific sections of the site.
• Velocity of tickets/items that you want Engineering to implement.

💲 Finance

Metrics that show the potential for growth and the return on investment. In the end, in many companies, Finance is the gatekeeper of money flowing in and out. They want to get a better insight into what you’re spending and how that eventually contributes to the bottom line. Providing a simple version of a P&L for SEO will likely return a happy smile if you’re able to produce that.

Metrics:

• ROI % (how much have you spend on SEO resourcing: team, tools, other expenses for content) versus what will it return
• Budget Spend, Returned Revenue, and future growth.

🖼  Marketing

Likely your closest allies in the ‘battle of SEO’ together with Product. Depending on the organizational structure, you probably find the SEO team itself here or in Product. So having enough impact on the metrics that your marketing team cares about is important.

📝 Content: Do you have a separate content team? They’ll likely care about the organic traffic coming to their pages, and they should care about the impact on those business metrics too. Besides that, any insight into specific keywords (volume, CTR) is always useful for a team like this to help optimize existing content.

Metrics:

• Impact on branded search terms: sessions.
• Increase/decline so you can measure the uplift of other brand awareness campaigns.

🧳   Sales & Business Development

At what scale are you still able to set up partnerships and does that actually fit into the scope of SEO at scale? Likely the answer is, no. That’s why you want to partner with a sales/biz dev team that can help you solidify partnerships and companies to work within your space. They have better skills and you can likely provide them meanwhile with more useful input on who to go after.

Metrics:

• The number of big partnerships.
• A shortlist of partners that you want them to go after, not just for dumb link building (preferably not, in my opinion). Instead, create lasting relationships that impact the industry, TAM (Total Addressable Market), and market presence.

📞  Customer Service

The better, faster, and more quickly you can answer your customers’ questions likely the better your business will thrive in today’s environment. Often this means that providing the answer directly in search (think featured snippets). You can’t just do this alone as an SEO team, you need the input from people in Customer Service, they’re the ones talking to your customers about the (mainly) negative and positive situations. The more you can support them with the metrics that they care about, the more comfortable both your lives might become.

Metrics:

• Organic Traffic to Support related pages, the number of calls/chats that you avoid by better-optimized pages, etc.
• The top questions that you can answer directly via featured snippets.
• The top 100 pages on your support portal, based on organic search segmentation.

📈 Growth

When I was on the Growth team at Postmates the insane velocity that was produced there to grow faster was great to see. As SEO isn’t the fastest-growing channel often (especially not in the short-term, as I can throw 1M towards PPC tomorrow and create near-instant results) it’s important to show how it’s attributing to the mix of long and short-term initiatives of a growth team.

Metrics:

• Growth % of the SEO channel, compared to MoM, WoW or YoY.
• Long term contributions of growth, as lots of SEO growth is evergreen and at relatively low costs.

👩‍💻 Human Resources

Admittedly, this one is one of the most distanced departments from just SEO, but if you’re a big organization and recruiting for dozens or even hundreds or roles, how important it could be to help drive traffic to a Careers/Jobs section on a site. If that’s the case showing the importance of driving job applicants could be incredibly helpful to help understand what SEO can do for them.

Metrics:

• The number of job applicants that applied because they found the jobs via Search.
• Traffic to a specific segment of the site from Organic Search: Careers/Jobs.
• The number of pages marked up properly with structured data for Jobs.

What metrics are missing? What do you measure for your organization? There are so many different business models out there that likely this list is far from complete for; for example, B2B cases are likely to be missing here.

Saving Bing Search Query Data from the Bing Webmaster Tools’ API

Over the last year, we spent a lot of time working on getting data from several marketing channels into our marketing data warehouse. The series that we did on this with the team has received lots of love from the community (thanks for that!). Retrieving Search Query data from Bing has proven to be one of the ‘harder’ data points: there is a lack of documentation, there a no real connectors directly to a data warehouse, and as it turns out the returned data (quality) is … ‘interesting’ to say the least. That’s why I wanted to write this blog post, to provide the code to easily pull out your search query data from Bing Webmaster Tools and give more people to evaluate their data. Hopefully, this provides the overall community with a better insight into the data quality coming out of the API.

Getting Started

1. Create an account on Bing Webmaster Tools.
2. Add & Verify a site.
3. Create an API Key within the interface (help guide).
4. Save the API Key and the formatted site URL.

The code

These days I spent most of my time (whenever I get to write code) coding in Python, that’s why these.

import datetime
import requests
import csv
import json
import re

URL = "https://example.com"
API_KEY = ''

request_url = "https://ssl.bing.com/webmaster/api.svc/json/GetQueryStats?apikey={}&siteUrl={}".format(API_KEY, URL)

request = requests.get(request_url)
if request.status_code == 200:
    query_data = json.loads(request.text)

    with open("bing_query_stats_{}.csv".format(datetime.date.today()), mode='w') as new_file:
        write_row = csv.writer(new_file, delimiter=',', quotechar='"')
        write_row.writerow(['AvgClickPosition', 'AvgImpressionPosition', 'Clicks', 'Impressions', 'Query', 'Created', 'Date'])

        for key in query_data["d"]:
            # Get date
            match = re.search('/Date\\((.*)\\)/', key["Date"])

            write_row.writerow([key["AvgClickPosition"] / 10,
                                key["AvgImpressionPosition"] / 10,
                                key["Clicks"],
                                key["Impressions"],
                                key["Query"],
                                datetime.datetime.now(),
                                datetime.datetime.fromtimestamp(int(match.group(1)) // 1000)])

Or find the same code here in a Gist file on Github.

Steps to take

• Make sure you have all the needed dependencies installed: json, re, requests, csv.
  • pip install requests json re csv
• Run the script: python bing_query_stats.py and enter the API Key and Site URL in the constants at the top of the script.
• If everything is successful the information is saved in this file: bing_query_stats_YYYY-MM-DD.csv

Data Quality

As I mentioned in the intro, the data quality is questionable and leaves very much up to the imagination. It’s one of the reasons why I wanted to share this script, so others can get their data out and we can hopefully learn more together on what the data represents. The big caveat seems that the data is exported at the time of extraction with a date range of XX days and it’s not possible to select a date range. This means that you can only make this data useful if you save it over a longer period of time and based on that calculate daily performance. This is all doable in the setup we have where we’re using Airflow to save the data into our Google BigQuery data lake, but because it isn’t as straight forward this might be harder for others.

So please share your ideas on the data and what you ran into with me via @MartijnSch

Case Study: How Restructuring 6800 Content Pieces For SEO Worked

I presented the content in this blog post about a week ago for the Traffic Think Tank community (highly recommend it), but after a Twitter thread on this topic as well, it’s time to turn it into a blog post.

Sometimes you have to take a stand and make something better when it’s already performing well. Over the last months, the RVshare marketing team worked on some great projects; one of them that I was involved in was restructuring 6800 pieces of content that we created a while ago. The content and pages they were on were performing outstanding (growing +100% YOY without any real effort), but we wanted to do more, to help users and boost SEO traffic. So we got started…

Why restructure content?

A couple of years ago, we published the last WordPress page/post in a series of 600+, the intent: go after a category near and dear to the core of the RVshare business: help more people rent an RV. We did that by creating tons of articles specifically for cities/areas. Now over two and a half years later, the content is driving millions of people yearly, mainly from SEO, but we knew that there was more as it’s not our core business. We also weren’t leveraging all the SEO features that have become available since two years ago, think about additional structured data like FAQs but also monetization that we thought was important. All improvements that we had to go back into every post for if we wanted to take advantage of it.

What we did, leveraging Mechanical Turk.

One of the biggest obstacles wasn’t necessarily rebuilding pages, coming up with a better design, etc. WE have a great team that is nailing this on a daily basis. But having to deal with 650 posts that contained ten sub-elements itself was a struggle. The content was structured in a similar way but some quick proof of concepts identified that scraping wasn’t the solution as the error ratio was way too high as with most projects we wanted to ensure that the content could be restructured at low costs not to avoid this project not having a valid business case (does the actual opportunity outweigh the potential costs to restructure the content?).

Scraping versus Mechanical Turk

As we had initially structured the content the same way: headline, description, etc. we were able to have at least a way to get the data out. When we did some testing to see if we would be able to scrape it looked unfortunate, there were too many edge cases as the HTML itself around it was barely structured enough to get the actual content out of it.

We looked into Mechanical Turk as the second option as it gave us the ability to quickly get thousands of people on a task to look at the content and take out what we needed. We wrote the briefing, divided the project in a few chunks, and within 10-12 hours, we had the content individualized per piece. We did our best to deal with most of the data cleaning from the workers directly in the briefing and form but also had some cleaning scripts ready. After it was cleaned, we imported the data into our headless CMS Prismic.

How to do this yourself?

1. Create an account on Mechanical Turk.
2. Create a project focused around content extraction.
3. Identify what kind of content you want individualized, it works best if there is a current structure (list format, table) that can be followed by the Turks. This way, you can tell them to pick up content piece X, Y, Z, for a specific URL.
4. Identify the fields that you want to be copied.
5. Upload a list of URLs that you want them to cover and additionally the # that it has on the list.
6. Start the project and verify the results.
7. Upload the data automatically back into your CMS (we used a script that could directly put the content as a batch into our headless CMS Prismic.io)

Rebuilding

We decided to build the content from the ground up, which meant:

• Build out category pages with the top content pieces by state.
• Build out the main index page with the top content from all states.
• Build the ability to showcase this content on all of our other templated pages across RVshare.

By building out the specific templates, it gave us additional power to streamline internal linking, create better internal relevance, build-out structured data but mainly figure out a right way on how to leverage a headless CMS with all its capabilities instead of just having raw (read: ‘dumb’) content that can’t be appropriately structured. We already use the headless CMS Prismic.io to do this, in which you can create custom post types, as you see in this screenshot. You define the custom post type and can pick the kind of fields that you want, which turns itself just another CMS after that. The content can then be leveraged through their API.

How to do this yourself?

We were previously leveraging WordPress ourselves, but all entities were saved as 1 post. If you’re able to do this differently and save pieces individually it’s many times easier to create overview pages by using categories (and/or tags). This is not right away something that you can always do without development support.

Results

Because of the design changes, engagement increased with over 25% because of the new format. Monetization is making it more interesting to keep on iterating on the results. Sessions were unfortunately really hard to measure we launched the integrations a few weeks prior to the kick-off of COVID-19 resulting in a downwards spiral and a surge in demand right after. Hopefully, in the long-term, we’ll be able to tell more about this. We are sure though that we didn’t suffer on SEO results.

Want to see the new structure of the pages? You can find it here as our effort on the top 10 campgrounds across the United States.