Question Time: Our experts answer the internet’s burning questions
Happy June! Summer is officially with us (although, looking out the window in Manchester today, you wouldn’t know it). With June comes a whole host of things to celebrate - the Euros, Pride, Wimbledon, longer days, Glastonbury for the lucky few who managed to secure a ticket. Now, for this month’s newsletter, you’re going to have to forgive us for a very on the nose pun. With summer officially beginning on the 2nd, and the weather hotting up, we thought there’s no better time to answer some ‘burning questions’ (told you it was cliche).?
We’ve pulled data from Google autocomplete searches, search volumes, and social media and got our experts to answer them. This edition will look at both the basics and more tricky technical queries - it’s full of answers useful for both beginner marketers and seasoned pros.
So, without further ado, let's see what the internet has been asking….
SEO
Why do internal links matter?
Answered by: Ella, Senior SEO Executive?
“Internal links are crucial elements of any site, essential for both user navigation and crawlers. They can help you to connect relevant content and influence how your site is seen by search engines. They matter for so many reasons but here are a few that take SEO performance into consideration:?
-> They place emphasis on your most important pages, making them super easy for both users and crawlers to discover and understand the significance of the page in relation to your site's hierarchy. Used thoughtfully, internal links can help to increase the performance of your key focus pages.?
-> Internal links disperse link equity to the connected pages and, if used strategically and logically, can help to boost page authority and support your goals of increased visibility.
-> They're good for users! By connecting easy-to-find related content, visitors are more likely to spend longer on your site, exploring more pages. You can also use internal links to direct them to a page that encourages them to complete a purchase.”
Why is SEO important for small businesses?
Answered by: Amanda, Director
“SEO is important for all businesses but for small businesses who are looking to promote their products and services, SEO can play a key role in opening up a new audience and ensuring that you are fully visible to the right audience.
But SEO isn't just about attracting visitors, it's about attracting the right kind of visitors. Through keyword research, you can tailor your website content to target users specifically interested in your products or services. This ensures your website gets traffic that can convert into sales.
Compared to traditional advertising, SEO is a cost-effective way to reach new customers. This levels the playing field, allowing even small businesses to compete with larger companies. Local SEO strategies can further enhance your reach by attracting customers in your area searching for what you offer.”
Which SEO metrics are important to track?
Answered by: Marcy, SEO Executive?
“In SEO, measuring and monitoring is crucial to show you how your site is performing and how it can be improved. Here are the 6 metrics that I believe are most important to track:
1. Organic traffic - this is fairly obvious but tracking your organic traffic will allow you to see how many users you are getting from organic search and whether your SEO efforts are paying off. The two tools I find most useful to track organic traffic are GA4 and Ahrefs, but there are a whole range out there.
2. Keyword rankings - tracking your site’s organic ranking position in the SERPs will allow you to monitor the SEO performance for your most important and high intent keywords over a period of time. Again, Ahrefs is a great tool for this.
3. Organic click through rate - tracking CTR allows you to monitor how relevant your page is in the SERPs, which keywords are driving the most traffic and whether you should be optimising your meta data (title and description). You can track this metric in Google Search Console.
4. Organic conversions - it’s essential to keep track of how your SEO efforts are impacting revenue. Tracking conversions allow you to see which high intent pages are contributing the most to your organic revenue, and which pages need optimising.
5. Referring domains -it’s important to monitor the websites that are linking to you because an effective digital PR strategy is fundamental to SEO; an upward trend in your referring domains shows you that your strategy is working and that you’re providing good authority to your site.
6. Core Web Vitals - this is a set of technical SEO metrics related to your website's speed and is important to measure to ensure that you are providing a good user experience - you don’t want users getting frustrated because your website is too slow!”
Do I need a blog on my website?
Answered by: Chloe, Junior Content Executive?
"Yes! All businesses, whether small or large, would benefit from blog posts. As a content writer I may be slightly biased, but they really are the most important element of your content marketing strategy and will strengthen your website’s SEO.????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????????
->It’s a great way to add organic content to your website, showing Google that your site is up to date.
->They allow you to target and rank for more long-tail keywords. There’s only so many keywords you can target on a product or category page whilst blog posts open up so much more opportunity.
->Blogging about relevant topics in your industry and answering your audience’s questions builds trust and strengthens E-E-A-T signals.
->They’re an easy way to get internal links in naturally to your converting pages.
This all being said, it's no good just churning out AI-generated blog posts and hoping to rank. For a blog post to do well, it needs to be authentic and SEO-optimised. Take the time to understand your audience’s buying journey, then publish blog posts that target the things they really want to know. Also, have a look at what blogs are already ranking and make sure you’re creating content that’s even better!”
Digital PR
I'm stuck for campaign ideas, what should I do?
Answered by: Elle, Digital PR & Content Executive?
“Getting stuck for ideas for digital PR campaigns happens, but there are many tools to get the inspiration flowing! Newsletters from fellow DPR’s is my first port of call. The Grapevine by Iona Jess Townsley and The PR Insider by Thea Chippendale are great examples of newsletters that provide up-to-date digital PR campaigns and the links they have achieved. The best thing about these newsletters is that they organise the campaign by type (data-led or thought leadership) and make each campaign sector/topic clear. This helps when you’re quickly looking for ideas around a specific topic, like careers and business for example.
Getting guidance from your colleagues is tried and true. Book in brainstorms, with an agenda in place, to get the conversation flowing and bouncing ideas off of one another.
I’ve also been using Answer The Public a lot recently to see what people are searching for around a certain topic. This is great for thought leadership ideas because it shows the search volume of the most common questions asked that include your chosen keyword. Using your resident expert, all you have to do is answer these questions!”
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How can I improve my email response rate?
Answered by: Francesca, Senior Digital PR Executive
“Not getting a response to pitch emails can be disheartening, but sometimes it’s a good thing! We provide all the important information in our pitch email and press releases that the journalist could possibly need, which reduces the rate of the journalist needing to reply to us - as all the information is there for them to write an article about our client straight away.?
However, we always look at our pitch email open rates through BuzzStream, which can determine how we move forward with a campaign. We love an A/B test here at Cedarwood, and testing multiple subject lines in our outreach really helps us understand what angle we should be concentrating on. For example, if pitch A had a 30% open rate vs pitch B’s 70%, we know that pitch B is more inviting and interesting to journalists, so we continue using that angle. We’ll of course keep testing pitch A to ensure that angle isn’t lost, but it’s a great starting point to understanding what’s interesting for the journalist.”
Where can I find digital PR campaign inspiration?
Answered by: Amber, Digital PR Executive
“If you’re looking for inspiration for your next Digital PR campaign, there are a number of avenues to explore:?
Do unlinked brand mentions matter?
Answered by: Francesca, Senior Digital PR Executive
“In short, yes! Whilst typically not the goal for Digital PR strategies and campaigns, unlinked brand mentions are important to build general awareness for the brand, helping Google understand what the brand is and what topics are relevant for them.
Having a mixture of brand mentions, NoFollow and Follow links helps create a diverse backlink profile which looks natural to Google. If a site had all Follow links, this could look suspicious to Google and even look like the brand is buying Follow links.”?
Digital PR vs Traditional PR, what’s the difference?
Answered by: Elle, Digital PR & Content Executive?
“The focus of digital PR is to build backlinks (AKA link building) on websites with high domain ratings. Digital PR isn’t standalone; it’s a part of a wider digital marketing strategy, coinciding with the efforts of SEO. Traditional PR on the other hand uses more conventional methods and focuses on more traditional media outlets - think TV, radio, and newspapers - all to create brand awareness.”
PPC
Why is my cost per click increasing?
Answered by: Anna, Head of Paid Media & Operations
"CPC can increase for a variety of reasons, here are the three I see most frequently:?
~An increase in competition:? if there are more advertisers bidding on the same keywords (aka, within the same auctions) then the price can go up. This can happen if there are new competitors entering the space or if existing competitors are increasing their bids and becoming more aggressive. Checking the auction insights report can give you more information on these changes to understand why your CPC could be increasing.
~Quality score/Ad strength - the quality of your ads can also affect how much you pay per click. Ensuring that your ads are relevant and optimised, have a good CTR and a high quality landing page are all critical not only for generating visibility, but also keeping CPCs low. If your competitors have highly relevant and effective ads, this can push up your CPC to generate the same visibility within the auctions.?
~Keyword changes - all keywords have a different CPC so making changes within your account, like trialling new keywords or match types, can lead to increases in the average CPC. These new words may have higher competition, or you may be exposing your ads to a wider audience.”
What are negative keywords?
Answered by: Charlotte, Junior Paid Media Executive?
“Negative keywords are words or phrases you can add to your PPC campaigns to prevent your ads from appearing in search results that aren't relevant to your business, and to help you focus on keywords that have high intent.
Negative Keywords can:
-Save you money: they allow you to avoid targeting people who aren't interested in your product/service.
-Protect your brand image: without negative keywords, you can be appearing for every related search term even if it's something you don't consider your business relevant for.
-Increase quality score: negative keywords can make your ads more relevant to your landing page, therefore boosting your quality score.
Be careful not to choose too many negative keywords otherwise you might completely limit where you ads show, making it counterproductive! You should also make sure to review your negative keywords once a month to improve the quality of traffic to your website.”
Should I bid on my brand name?
Answered by: James, Senior PPC Executive
“Bidding on your brand name can be important, particularly in a competitive market where competitors may be bidding on your brand name as a way of getting extra traffic to their site.
In the age of PMax and broad match keywords, it's becoming increasingly common for your competitors to be appearing on searches for your brand, without them even actively targeting you (or realising they're doing it!) It's therefore important to protect your brand by bidding on it.”
Cedarwood Digital is an award-winning digital marketing agency based in Manchester. If your question wasn’t answered in this newsletter, why not drop us a line and see how we can help.