Blog | Regan McGregor

Gemini CLI for SEO: A Helpful Six-Stage Guide

Fri, 15 May 2026 04:55:30 GMT

You wasted hours this week on work Gemini could have done for you.

Recently, I gave a 7-minute lightning talk on that idea at Google Search Central Live Sydney 2026. The talk was a teaser: enough to show what’s possible, not enough to actually get you set up.

This guide is the full version: the exact commands, real examples, and the stuff that I couldn’t fit on my slides.

Why I’m telling you this

When I’m not presenting at Google events I’m the SEO Lead at Airtasker, Australia’s leading local services marketplace. There I manage multiple sites, hundreds of thousands of pages across six global markets. Like many SEO on large sites I’ve spent countless hours scrolling through spreadsheets with 10,000s of rows at 3am looking for patterns after a core update screaming Why Google? Why? 😂

The first time I heard someone say “just let AI do it” I found the idea jarring. I remember thinking to myself “yeah sure mate”. The pitch sounded like every other automation promise that never quite worked. But once I actually spent time with tools like Gemini CLI (properly, not just opening it once and giving up), I genuinely can’t do my job without them now.

That’s the version I’d want someone to give me if I were starting today. Skip the hype, skip the chatbot demos, get straight to the stuff that’s actually changed how I work.

Why coding agents are the new SEO stack

For the last couple of years, most of the AI conversation in SEO has been about chat interfaces. Type a question, get an answer. Useful for some things, genuinely limited for others.

As it stands Gemini has probably the best brain on the market right now, especially for anything touching Google products. But the Gemini chat interface is just a brain in a jar. It can think about your problem. It can’t actually do anything about it. The CLI is where it gets hands.

The Gemini chat app can’t access your Search Console data; it just asks you to export and paste the data manually

Coding agents are different. They’re not chatbots with a nicer interface; they’re agents that can use your file system, run shell commands, connect to external services, and act on your behalf. You give them a goal, and they figure out the steps.

Gemini CLI’s built-in tool list: shell, file read/write, web search, and more, available before any MCPs are added

If you’ve heard of Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, or Cursor, you’re in the same territory. These tools have changed how developers work. Gemini CLI is Google’s entry into that space, and for SEO specifically, it’s worth paying attention to.

Here’s why SEO is a natural fit: our work has always involved touching a lot of systems. Search Console, Analytics, Ahrefs, Semrush, spreadsheets, CMS, and internal tools. An agent that can reach all of those, reason across them, and take action without you manually copying data between tabs is genuinely useful in a way that a chat window isn’t.

The wrong unlock

Most of the AI-for-SEO discourse has been about generating content. Spin up a thousand pages, scale your output, watch the traffic roll in. We’ve all seen how that ends: commodity content, no real experience behind it, no E-E-A-T, no value.

IMO, content is exactly where you, as a human, add the most value. It’s the part you shouldn’t be outsourcing.

The real unlock is the other half of your week. Sifting through tens of thousands of rows of GSC data and matching keywords across five tools. Running the same Monday-morning audit you’ve run every Monday for the last two years. That’s where AI earns its keep: the tedious, repeatable, mundane work. Save your brain for the things that actually need it.

In this post, I’m going to dive into six stages of working with Gemini CLI or any coding agent, really. But first, let’s get Gemini set up.

Getting started

Install is straightforward.

If you’re on Mac with Homebrew:

brew install gemini-cli

Or via npm:

npm install -g @google/gemini-cli

Then just run:

gemini

For auth, the easiest path is signing in with your personal Google account; this gives you access to a generous free tier (1,000 requests per user per day). If you’d rather use an API key, grab one from Google AI Studio and set it as an environment variable:

export GEMINI_API_KEY=your_key_here

Either way, you’re up and running in a couple of minutes. No complex setup, no local model downloads.

The six stages, and why this order

Each stage builds on the one before it. Context sharpens the built-in tools. MCPs add live data that those tools can act on. The extensions package wraps entire workflows. Plan Mode orchestrates everything you’ve installed. Skills make any plan you’ve nailed repeatable.

You can use Gemini CLI without going past Stage 2 and still get value. But the compounding effect is the point: the further you go, the less you have to set up next time.

Stage 1: Context (GEMINI.md)

Tell Gemini who you are.

The first thing to do before you run any actual SEO work is to set up your context files.

Gemini CLI uses GEMINI.md files to load context automatically at the start of every session. There’s a global one at ~/.gemini/GEMINI.md that applies everywhere, and you can add a project-level one inside any folder you’re working in. Both load without you having to ask.

The mental model that works best: think of GEMINI.md as a shortcut list, not documentation. You’re not trying to explain everything; you’re trying to save the agent from asking the same questions over and over.

Here’s a starter GEMINI.md you can copy and adapt:

# SEO Consultant — Working Profile

This file gives Gemini the context it needs every time I open the CLI. Set once, loaded automatically.

## Who I am

I'm an SEO consultant. I work across multiple client sites and my own projects. Australian-based, working from Sydney.

## Properties I work with

Default to these unless I say otherwise.

- **My site:** reganmcgregor.com.au
  - GSC property: `sc-domain:reganmcgregor.com.au`
  - GA4 property ID: `123456789`
- **Client list:** see `~/seo/clients/` — each client has its own folder with a `_context.md`
- **Working directory for ad-hoc analysis:** `~/seo/scratch/`

When I name a client by first name (e.g. "the Acme audit"), look up `~/seo/clients/acme/_context.md` first to pick up their property IDs and engagement notes.

## Non-negotiables

These apply to every response, every session.

- **Australian English** spelling. Organise, colour, analyse, optimisation. Never American.
- **Don't generate page content.** That's where I add value as a human. Help me analyse, classify, plan — never write the article.
- **Don't write to any file or Sheet without confirming the row count first.** Show me what you're about to do, wait for me to say go.
- **Don't fall back to web search when an MCP query fails.** Surface the failure and stop. I'd rather know the data is missing than have you guess.
- **Don't classify pages with fewer than 50 impressions.** Below that the signal is too noisy.

## Tool shortcuts

When I say… → use…

- "the attached Sheet" / "the spreadsheet" → Google Workspace extension
- "stuck pages" → pages with high impressions but average position 4–20
- "core update analysis" → compare 30 days before/after the named update date
- "the client" → look up the active client's `_context.md` for property IDs

## See also

- **Tone & style:** `~/seo/style-guide.md` — full voice rules for any client-facing output
- **Skills:** `~/.gemini/skills/` — saved workflows that auto-activate from natural prompts
- **Notion task DB:** [your Notion DB ID] — for any task tracking or status queries

What to put in yours

A few things that make a real difference:

Your role and goal: Something simple like “I’m an SEO consultant. I work across multiple client sites. Default to Australian English.” This stops you from repeating it every session and makes a big difference to the context of the responses you’ll get.
Property IDs and site identifiers: If you’re working on a specific project, put the GSC site URL, GA property ID, and any other relevant identifiers directly in the project-level GEMINI.md. Every time the agent has to go and figure out which property is the right one, that’s MCP calls and tokens you’re burning. Pre-loading this stuff cuts down on unnecessary back-and-forth.
Site structure references: If your site has a specific URL structure or folder convention that matters for audits, note it (e.g. /service/{type}/{location}). The agent doesn’t need to explore and infer it every session.
Shortcuts for your tools. This is one that saves me so much frustration by stopping the agent from going down some delusional path. In my GEMINI.md I have something like: “When I refer to ‘the attached Sheet’ or ‘the Spreadsheet’, use Google Workspace tools.” This means I don’t have to spell out which tools to reach for every time.

The key discipline is keeping it short, as this file is loaded with each chat interaction. A bloated GEMINI.md that tries to document everything just adds noise. Short, specific, actionable.

Stage 2: Tools

Stop updating spreadsheets manually.

Out of the box, before you add any MCPs or extensions, Gemini CLI has a solid set of built-in tools:

Read and write files on your local system
Run shell commands
Fetch web pages
Google Search

That’s enough to do real work. Here’s a practical example: a content audit.

Export a CSV from Search Console (pages, clicks, impressions, and position changes for the last 90 days). Drop it in your working directory. Then:

Take the file gsc-export.csv and classify each page as "keep", "improve", or "remove" based on traffic trend and impressions. Write the classifications back to a new file called gsc-classified.csv with the original columns plus a "recommendation" column and a short reason for each.

Gemini reads every row, makes a call based on the data, and writes the output file. What used to take a few hours of manual work runs in the background while you’re doing something else.

The file tool, in particular, changes a lot. Once you stop copying and pasting between tools and let the agent read and write directly, a whole category of tedious work just disappears.

GSC CSV fed to Gemini, classified as keep/improve/remove, output file written to disk

Stage 3: MCP

Close all your tabs.

MCP (Model Context Protocol) is how Gemini connects to external services:** your SEO tools, analytics platforms, and data sources. Instead of exporting a CSV and importing it somewhere else, you can query these tools directly.

To add an MCP server:

gemini mcp add

It’ll walk you through the config. For SEO work, the useful ones are:

Google Analytics (official): github.com/googleanalytics/google-analytics-mcp
Ahrefs: ahrefs.com/mcp
Semrush: semrush.com/kb/1619-getting-started-with-mcp
DataForSEO: dataforseo.com/help-center/connect-gemini-cli-to-dataforseo-mcp-server
GSC (community): github.com/AminForou/mcp-gsc

Setting up the Ahrefs MCP

One thing that catches people out with the Ahrefs MCP specifically: gemini mcp add sets up the connection config, but doesn’t handle auth for you. Ahrefs uses API key authentication, so you need to generate an API key and add it manually.

To get your key: log into Ahrefs → Account → API → generate a key.

Setting up the Ahrefs MCP

To get your key: log into Ahrefs → Account → API → generate a key.

Then open ~/.gemini/settings.json and add the key as an Authorization header:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "ahrefs": {
      "httpUrl": "https://api.ahrefs.com/mcp/mcp",
      "type": "http",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_AHREFS_API_KEY"
      }
    }
  }
}

Replace YOUR_AHREFS_API_KEY with the key you just generated. Save the file and restart your Gemini session. It’ll pick up the auth on next launch.

Setting up the Semrush MCP

If you’re a Semrush user instead of (or as well as) Ahrefs, the setup is almost identical: same HTTP transport, just a different URL and a different auth header prefix.

Grab your API key from your Semrush profile, then run:

gemini mcp add --transport http \
  --header "Authorization: Apikey YOUR_SEMRUSH_API_KEY" \
  semrush https://mcp.semrush.com/v1/mcp

Or, if you prefer to edit ~/.gemini/settings.json directly:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "semrush": {
      "httpUrl": "https://mcp.semrush.com/v1/mcp",
      "type": "http",
      "headers": {
        "Authorization": "Apikey YOUR_SEMRUSH_API_KEY"
      }
    }
  }
}

Note the Apikey prefix: Ahrefs uses Bearer, Semrush uses Apikey. Otherwise, the shape is the same.

The Semrush MCP exposes the Trends API, the SEO API, and the read-only Project API methods.

Heads up: requests consume API units, so the same “wrap it in a skill” advice applies here, too.

Setting up the GSC MCP

The community GSC server from AminForou is the one worth using. It queries the Search Console API directly: performance data, URL inspection, sitemaps, all of it.

The recommended install is via uvx: no cloning, no virtual environments, no Python setup.

First, you’ll need credentials from Google Cloud Console:

Go to console.cloud.google.com and create (or pick) a project
Enable the Search Console API
Go to Credentials → Create Credentials → OAuth client ID → Desktop app → download the JSON and save it somewhere permanent (e.g. ~/Documents/client_secrets.json)

If you don’t have uv installed:

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
source $HOME/.local/bin/env

Then add it to ~/.gemini/settings.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "gsc": {
      "command": "/Users/yourname/.local/bin/uvx",
      "args": ["mcp-search-console"],
      "env": {
        "GSC_OAUTH_CLIENT_SECRETS_FILE": "/full/path/to/client_secrets.json"
      }
    }
  }
}

Replace /Users/yourname with your actual home directory (echo $HOME will tell you). Use the full path, not ~/, as Gemini CLI won’t expand it. First run opens a browser for the OAuth flow; after that it’s silent.

Setting up the Google Analytics MCP

The official Google Analytics MCP server uses application default credentials, the same auth method as gcloud. The MCP needs the analytics read-only scope, so even if you’ve run gcloud auth application-default login before, you’ll likely need to re-run it with the right scopes:

gcloud auth application-default login \
  --scopes https://www.googleapis.com/auth/analytics.readonly,https://www.googleapis.com/auth/cloud-platform

You’ll also need to enable the Google Analytics Admin API and Google Analytics Data API in your Google Cloud project.

The MCP runs via pipx, so make sure that’s installed (brew install pipx).

Add it to ~/.gemini/settings.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "analytics-mcp": {
      "command": "pipx",
      "args": ["run", "analytics-mcp"],
      "env": {
        "GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS": "/Users/yourname/.config/gcloud/application_default_credentials.json",
        "GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT": "your-gcp-project-id"
      }
    }
  }
}

One thing that trips people up: GOOGLE_CLOUD_PROJECT is your Google Cloud project ID, not your GA4 property ID. They’re different things. Your GA property ID belongs in GEMINI.md as context so the agent knows which property to default to, not in the MCP config.

The server key (analytics-mcp in the example above) is what shows up when you run /mcp in Gemini CLI. If you’d rather call it google-analytics to match the others, rename the key. It’s purely a label.

Setting up the DataForSEO MCP

DataForSEO covers keyword data, SERP results, competitor pages, and backlinks. It’s what I use for the enrichment step in the content audit skill above: pulling search volume and difficulty for stuck pages, and fetching top competitor URLs for keyword gap analysis.

The MCP server runs via npx, so there’s nothing to install separately. Add it to ~/.gemini/settings.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "dataforseo": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "dataforseo-mcp-server"],
      "env": {
        "DATAFORSEO_USERNAME": "your@email.com",
        "DATAFORSEO_PASSWORD": "your_api_password",
        "DATAFORSEO_SIMPLE_FILTER": "true"
      }
    }
  }
}

Auth is the username and password from your DataForSEO account. Get them at app.dataforseo.com/api-access. Unlike the other MCPs above, there’s no OAuth flow. It just works once you drop in the credentials.

The DATAFORSEO_SIMPLE_FILTER flag is recommended in DataForSEO’s official Gemini CLI guide. It switches to a simpler filter syntax that LLMs construct correctly more often.

Worth noting: DataForSEO charges per API call. The MCP exposes a lot of endpoints, and a verbose agent can rack up calls quickly in a long session. The same advice applies here as for any MCP: wrap workflows in skills with explicit steps so the agent isn’t making speculative calls trying to figure out what you want.

Once they’re added, you query in plain English. No export, no spreadsheet, no tab-switching:ettings.json:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "dataforseo": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "dataforseo-mcp-server"],
      "env": {
        "DATAFORSEO_USERNAME": "your@email.com",
        "DATAFORSEO_PASSWORD": "your_api_password"
      }
    }
  }
}

Auth is username and password from your DataForSEO account. Get them at app.dataforseo.com/api-access. Unlike the other MCPs above, there’s no OAuth flow. It just works once you drop in the credentials.

Once they’re added, you query in plain English. No export, no spreadsheet, no tab-switching:

Show me pages with high impressions stuck between positions 4 and 20 for the last 90 days.

Plain English query for stuck-position keywords on backlinko.com, table results live, no export

The thing nobody tells you about MCPs

Every call to an MCP uses tokens. Every back-and-forth exchange adds to your context window. In a long session with multiple MCP queries, this adds up fast.

Where CLI tools are available as an alternative, they’re worth using; they tend to be more efficient and don’t incur the same context cost. The Google Workspace CLI, for example, is worth looking at instead of the individual Google MCPs.

More importantly: MCPs work much better when you wrap them in skills. A bare MCP call is fine for one-off queries, but the agent doesn’t inherently know which database, which property, or which filter makes sense for your workflow. That’s where a lot of “the MCP isn’t working properly” frustration comes from; the agent is doing too much guessing.

When you define a skill that uses an MCP (more on skills below) and pre-load the relevant IDs in GEMINI.md, the agent stops guessing and starts just doing the right thing.

I’m planning a separate post with a full breakdown of MCPs for SEO: which ones are worth adding, how to configure them, and the ones I use regularly. Will link it here when it’s live.

Stage 4: Extensions

Stop the copy and paste.

Extensions go further than MCPs. They bundle prompts, commands, MCPs, hooks, and pre-built skills into a single installable package. You’re not just getting a tool; you’re getting the instructions on how to use it.

The flagship one for SEO work is the Google Workspace extension:

gemini extensions install https://github.com/googleworkspace/cli

This gives you direct access to Sheets, Docs, and Slides, plus a large set of pre-built skills. I don’t use all of them, but the ones I use regularly are the ones that close the loop between analysis and output. Clustering keyword data by topic and pushing it directly to a Sheet, for example. Or pulling a content brief into a Doc without manually copying anything.

The same GEMINI.md shortcut principle applies here. I have an entry that says something like: “When I mention ‘the attached Sheet’ or ‘the Doc’, use Google Workspace tools.” The agent then knows what to reach for without me having to specify the tool every time.

Worth exploring: there are other extensions beyond Google Workspace that are useful for SEO workflows. Browse the full catalogue at geminicli.com/extensions. The same wrapping-with-skills approach applies to all of them.

Workspace extension clustering keywords and pushing them to a Google Sheet

Stage 5: Plan Mode

Do tasks in the background.

Plan Mode is where it all comes together. You describe what you want (the goal, the tools to use, what the output should look like), and Gemini drafts a step-by-step plan. You review it, adjust it, approve it, and the agent executes autonomously. It’s also the most underused feature in the CLI.

To enter it, type /plan in the CLI or hit Shift+Tab.

Most people skip Plan Mode for anything that feels small. That’s a huge mistake.

Here’s what happens when you skip it: the agent works on assumptions. It half-infers what you mean from the session context, fills in the gaps with guesses, and starts executing. When something goes wrong, and it will, you’re already three steps into a workflow built on a shaky foundation.

Plan Mode forces the agent to gather context before committing to anything. For SEO tasks that touch multiple data sources, that upfront context gathering is the difference between a clean run and having to start over.

A few things that consistently produce better plans:

Give it links to specific files and websites to use: “Use the file at ./gsc-export.csv and the Ahrefs MCP for keyword data.” The more specific you are about inputs, the less it invents.
Tell it explicitly not to invent anything: “If you’re unsure about a value, come back and ask rather than assuming.”
Tell it what to clarify before acting: “Before you start, confirm the output format with me.”
Tell it what not to do: “Don’t write to any file without showing me the output first.”

When the plan starts going in the wrong direction, correct it immediately. If you let the agent continue down a false assumption, the plan compounds the error; every subsequent step builds on something that’s wrong.

Iterate on the plan until you’re genuinely happy with it. Yes, this takes longer upfront. That’s the point. The time you spend getting the plan right is time you don’t spend cleaning up a bad execution.

One more thing: if you find yourself running the same plan repeatedly, that’s your signal. That plan should become a skill.

Plan Mode drafting a four-MCP content audit plan

Stage 6: Agent Skills

Do it whenever you like.

Skills are reusable, self-contained packages of instructions. The practical workflow: you spend time in Plan Mode getting something right (a content audit, a keyword gap analysis, a technical crawl summary). Once you’ve done it properly a couple of times, save it as a skill.

Next month, you have two ways to fire it. You can call it explicitly with a slash command:

/content-audit let's run a content audit on the AU market

Or you can just describe what you want. Gemini reads the description on every saved skill and activates the matching one automatically. So “let’s audit the AU market for stuck pages” works too, even without the slash.

Either way, same structure, same thresholds, same output format, no re-explaining.

What makes a skill worth creating:

Anything you’ve run more than twice
Anything that requires specific context (property IDs, site structure, output format preferences)
Any multi-step workflow that took real effort to get right in Plan Mode

Skills are how you compound the time you’ve already invested. Each one you save is a plan you never have to write again.

What a skill actually looks like

A skill is a directory, not a single file. The minimum is one SKILL.md inside a folder named after the skill. You can also bundle scripts, references, or assets alongside it. They’re all available to the agent when the skill activates.

~/.gemini/skills/content-audit/
├── SKILL.md       (required)
├── scripts/       (optional) executable scripts
├── references/    (optional) static documentation
└── assets/        (optional) templates and other resources

The SKILL.md itself uses YAML frontmatter with two fields. The name matches the directory name. The description is doing real work: Gemini reads it to decide whether to activate the skill from natural language. Be specific about the trigger phrases.

Here’s the example content-audit skill I used in the slides:

---
name: content-audit
description: Run a full SEO content audit focused on quick wins. Identify "striking distance" pages (positions 4–20) with high impressions but low clicks, enrich with engagement signals, search volume, and competitor data, then output a prioritised content plan to a Google Sheet. Use when the user asks for a "content audit", "content plan", "striking distance" pages, "quick wins", "what should we update", or wants to "find stuck pages".
---

# Content Audit — Quick Wins

## Objective
Identify striking-distance pages — high impressions but stuck in positions 4–20 — and recommend specific actions to capture quick SEO wins.

## Inputs
- Market — default to the GSC site / GA4 property in ~/.gemini/GEMINI.md unless the user names another.
- Time window — default last 90 days.
- Output Sheet — create a new Google Sheet unless the user names an existing one.

## Target filters & thresholds
- Position range: 4.0–20.0
- Impressions: greater than 1,000 over the time window
- Sort by highest impressions descending

## Steps

### 1. Identify target URLs — gsc MCP
Pull query + page performance from GSC. Filters: country code, time window. Apply the position + impression thresholds above.

### 2. Engagement signals — google-analytics MCP
For each target URL, retrieve organic engagement metrics. Flag URLs with bounce rate > 70% or engagement time < 30s as likely UX/relevance issues.

### 3. Search potential & SERP context — dataforseo MCP
Evaluate the primary keywords driving impressions. Prioritise pages with SV > 500 and manageable KD. Note SERP-feature changes that suggest a different content format.

### 4. Competitor & backlink gap — ahrefs MCP
For each target URL, compare against the top 3 ranking competitors. Identify content gaps — angles, semantic topics, or formats competitors cover that we miss.

### 5. Cluster & classify
Group URLs by semantic topic cluster. Classify each as one of:
- Improve (content refresh) — high SV, good UR, poor engagement or outdated vs competitors
- Improve (technical/UX) — good content + SERP alignment, but high bounce rate
- Create (new angle) — competitors winning with a different intent or format

### 6. Output to Sheets — Google Workspace extension
Show me the row count and the top 5 priorities. Wait for confirmation, then write to a new Google Sheet with columns: Topic Cluster, URL, Target Keyword, Current Position, Impressions, Search Volume, KD, Bounce Rate, Competitor Gap (Yes/No), Recommended Action.

## Don'ts
- Don't invent volumes, difficulty scores, or competitor metrics. Mark missing fields n/a.
- Don't write to the Sheet without confirming the row count first.
- Don't fall back to web search when an MCP query fails — surface the error and stop.
- Don't include URLs outside the position 4–20 range or under the impression threshold.

A few things to notice. The skill names the four MCPs by handle (gsc, google-analytics, dataforseo, ahrefs) so Gemini knows exactly which server to call at each step. The Don'ts section guards against the obvious failure modes: anything that writes data, guesses values, or silently broadens the criteria. And the description is loaded with trigger phrases (“content audit”, “striking distance”, “quick wins”, “find stuck pages”) so the skill activates from a natural request, not a special command.

This skill came directly out of Plan Mode. I drafted the plan, iterated until the thresholds felt right for the data I was working with, and saved the result. That’s the workflow: Plan Mode is the design surface, the skill is the saved version of a plan that worked.

For the full reference on creating skills (directory structure, advanced features like bundled scripts and references, and the underlying Agent Skills standard), see the Gemini CLI creating skills guide.

The saved SKILL.md open in vim, then a fresh session firing the skill via /content-audit and pulling data from Search Console

How my workflow has actually changed

I’ve been using coding agents (not just Gemini CLI, but also Claude Code and Codex) as a core part of how I work for a while now. So here’s what’s actually different in my day-to-day.

The biggest shift is delegation. I’m continuously sending agents off to research, investigate, and analyse in the background while I focus on other things. A keyword gap analysis, a crawl summary, a competitor content audit: these used to require me to sit in front of a spreadsheet for an hour. Now I launch the workflow and come back to the results.

The other shift is moving from reactive to proactive. I used to investigate when something looked wrong. Now I’ve set up regular hygiene workflows that surface insights on a schedule. The insights come to me. I’m not chasing problems; I’m getting a consistent read on what’s happening and deciding what warrants attention.

What it replaced: a lot of copy-paste hacks, custom scripts, and automation tools I’d built over the years that did specific things in a janky way. The kinds of things that worked until they didn’t, that required maintenance, and that were always slightly brittle. Most of that is just gone now. Running things as a terminal workflow is more reliable and easier to iterate on.

The honest version: there’s still a learning curve. Getting good at Plan Mode takes practice. Writing useful GEMINI.md files takes iteration. The first few times you use an MCP, it probably won’t do exactly what you want. But the compounding effect of building good skills and context files means it gets faster over time, not slower.

Just give it to Gemini

Next time you’re trawling through thousands of rows in a spreadsheet, just give it to Gemini.

That’s it. The rest is just learning the surface area.

Resources

Everything referenced in this post:

Gemini CLI docs
GEMINI.md context files
MCP setup
Extensions docs
Extensions directory: browse the catalogue
Plan Mode
Agent Skills overview
Creating skills guide: directory structure, bundled scripts, advanced features
Google Analytics MCP
GSC MCP (community)
Google Workspace CLI
DataForSEO MCP
Ahrefs MCP
Semrush MCP

From Clicks to Citations: Building a Brand That Algorithms Can't Ignore

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 23:00:00 GMT

A buyer learned about your business this week from something you didn’t write.

I gave a talk on that idea at Edge of Search in Newcastle in September 2025. It’s about a shift I think most brands haven’t caught up to yet: from a search world built on clicks to one built on citations, and what that means for how you get found, understood, and trusted by both people and algorithms.

Search Is Evolving

We used to live in the Google age. Google crawled the web, indexed it, and handed you 10 or more blue links. You did the work of deciding what to trust.

Fast forward to today and we’re in the AI age. AI reads, generates, and delivers one answer. No choices. Just: “Here’s the truth, trust me.”

That’s not a small shift. It changes what “being found” even means. Being mentioned is becoming more valuable than being visited.

Here’s why I’m convinced of that.

Three years, from novelty to daily habit

Just under 60% of Google searches now end without a single click, 58.5% in the US and 59.7% in the EU, and almost half of mobile searches end the browsing session entirely: roughly double the desktop rate. People are asking questions and getting answers without ever landing on a website.

AI answers are everywhere. ChatGPT has exploded to around 700 million weekly active users. Perplexity handled 780 million queries in May 2025, and was growing more than 20% month-on-month. Google AI Overviews are now showing in 13% of searches.

The number that reframes everything else in this post

Usage is climbing a lot faster than trust is

But even though AI is everywhere, trust is nowhere. Only 16% of people say they trust AI tools more than Google for getting information. We’re using tools we fundamentally don’t trust.

Why the trust deficit? Partly because the web underneath these answers is getting messier. AI content has surged 8,362% since ChatGPT launched, and by mid-2025 close to 20% of top-20 search results contained AI-generated content, up from around 8% at the end of 2023. Google’s response has been to start pulling the worst of it out of the index entirely: 837 sites were pulled out of the index entirely in the first week of the March 2024 core update, out of roughly 49,000 tracked.

The supply side of the trust problem

And here’s the part that should worry every brand: none of this is making search easier for the people using it. 54% of people say they look through more search results than they did five years ago. 51% say they’re spending more time searching for services online. Most of us now need three or more sources before we’ll actually trust an answer.

Users are working harder for worse answers. That’s the peak of the frustration curve we’re all sitting on right now.

The demand side, people working harder to trust anything they find

So what do we call this new discipline? GEO? AEO? Every few months another acronym turns up promising to be the next SEO. Fine. SEO is dead, long live __O.

Except that’s not really the point, and I don’t think chasing the next three-letter label gets anyone anywhere. This isn’t about acronyms. It’s about the actions users actually take.

Here’s the tell: ask an AI tool a question and watch what it does next. It goes and searches the web for answers. The web hasn’t disappeared; it’s just being read differently, by a different kind of reader.

Users desperately want reliable information. Algorithms need clear signals of authority. And when everything else fails, they both turn to brands they already trust.

Long-term visibility equals trust, not tricks.

So how do you build that trust: how do you become a brand that both users and algorithms choose? It comes down to three pillars: Content, Context, and Confidence. The solution isn’t about fighting algorithms. It’s about becoming undeniably trustworthy. Get this right and your brand becomes not just present, but preferred.

These three pillars aren’t a checklist you tick off once. As I’ll get to at the end, they’re a flywheel: each one feeding the next. But let’s start at the beginning, with content.

Pillar 1. Content: Be Found Everywhere

Without content, you can’t be found online. Content is still king. Whether it’s Google, ChatGPT, or Perplexity, without content there’s no way for these algorithms to understand your brand.

So let’s put the acronyms aside and work through the fundamental truths, or at least the truths the way I see them.

Truth #1: You Are the Ultimate Expert on Your Brand

When people optimise for search, they usually jump straight into commercial keywords. But in an age of depleting trust, start with the people who are already looking at your brand.

You need to completely own your brand SERP. When somebody searches about you, you need to show up first time, every time. Here’s the good news: Google and AI already see you as the number one authority on your brand. You just haven’t given them the right content to serve.

Own your brand SERP:

Brand name
Brand + reviews
Brand vs competitor
Brand + FAQ
Brand + problem
SERP features

Zendesk owns its own reviews query instead of leaving it to G2

Same brand, a different SERP feature, still theirs

One quick win: create a page for “your brand + reviews.” Don’t leave it to Trustpilot or G2 to own this brand SERP and control the narrative.

Then there’s the classic brand-vs-competitor search. There’s only two people who are the top authorities for these terms. Don’t let your competitor have all the fun.

And when people go to ChatGPT, they answer questions, not keywords. Review your brand SERP and your competitors’, see what questions are actually being asked, and write the official answer for your brand.

Owning your brand story isn’t only about the traditional SERP either: it’s about training AI search on your truth. Users are asking deeper questions than ever, which means you need to stop thinking in keywords and start creating content that covers the key attributes of your brand.

Train AI on your truth:

Best for
Known for
Pros & cons
Feature comparison
Pricing
Ease of use
Customer base
Support
Ratings
Shipping

The whole argument in one screenshot: the AI is quoting Zendesk’s own page back at you

Here’s proof it works: from a “Zendesk vs Help Scout” comparison page, Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini, and Grok all cite Zendesk and Help Scout’s own content as sources for the query. Make sure AI learns from you, not just others.

Last but not least in this section: control what you can. When people Google you, they go beyond the first link: they’re looking for the dead bodies on page two. The good news is these results are largely within your control, and it matters even more in the AI search era, because these bots will go digging.

Control what you can:

Brand references
Social profiles
Review platforms
Business listings
Niche directories

Your homework list. Claim these before something else fills the gap for you

Update your Wikipedia page. Claim every social media profile. Claim every business listing. Make sure your information is consistent across directories.

Truth #2: Everything Is a Search Engine

If people are searching for things, stop thinking about Google. SEO has never just been about Google, and it never will be. Your audience is searching everywhere: it’s just their intent that changes by platform.

They go to Google for research, YouTube for in-depth reviews, TikTok and Instagram for style inspiration, Pinterest for planning, Reddit for honest opinions, and ChatGPT for direct comparisons. A running shoe brand might show up in a Google AI Overview for “best running shoes for flat feet,” a YouTube review for “Nike Invincible 3,” a TikTok or Instagram post on “how to style Nike Dunks,” a Pinterest board for “wedding shoes for men,” a Reddit thread asking “are Allbirds worth the money,” and a ChatGPT comparison of “Hoka Clifton 9 vs Brooks Ghost 15”, all in the same week, for the same audience.

You need to be on the right platform, in the right format, for the right intent. I know that’s easy to say. So how do you actually show up everywhere? Repurposing content for distribution is the key.

Don’t forget distribution:

Long-form articles
Short-form articles
Long-form video
Short-form video
Infographics
Images
Quotes
Audio

It starts here, with the long-form video

Same footage, cut down for a completely different audience

And the stills become pins that keep sending people back for years

Epic Gardening is a genuinely great example of this. They create informative, engaging long-form videos. They break those videos up and take the unique insights and imagery from them and embed them in articles. They turn the videos into shorts for TikTok. They take the images and turn them into carousels, reels, and stories for Instagram and Facebook. And they turn the same material into infographics for Pinterest, sending people back to the original articles on their site.

Does it actually work? Epic Gardening runs on YouTube (2.76 million subscribers), TikTok (2.9 million), Instagram (1.2 million), and Pinterest (92,000). Their branded search now sits around 8,100 searches a month. That’s not an accident. That’s what years of consistent repurposing looks like once it compounds.

Truth #3: Content Is Now a Commodity

Generic content is now a commodity. It’s deeper expertise, unique perspectives, and original insights that make your brand stand out online.

Sure, ChatGPT can tell you how to make a cabinet. It’ll get the materials, the tools, and some reasonable instructions in there. But compare that to an Instructables guide written by an actual experienced carpenter: real images, real video, actual opinions, questions from real people who tried it themselves.

AI might be able to replicate information, but it cannot replicate experience.

Pillar 2. Context: Be Understood Everywhere

Content will get you found, but context will get you understood. It’s not enough to exist online: algorithms need to understand where you fit in the puzzle.

Truth #4: Relevance Is the New Authority

It used to be all about PageRank: who linked to you, how many backlinks you had, your domain rating. Today, what matters most is relevance. Algorithms care less about the size of your site and more about the content that mentions you.

Here’s an example that’s stuck with me from researching this space: Rite Plumbing and Heating, a small New York plumbing outfit, ranks second for “plumber nyc”, above Curbed, Roto-Rooter and NYC.gov, and only behind Yelp’s directory page. They’re also quoted as the expert voice in Wirecutter’s guide to plunging a toilet. I can’t prove the citation caused the ranking, but a contextually perfect mention on a page that authoritative is the kind of signal that’s hard to buy.

Relevance is the new authority.

Truth #5: Consistency Creates Relevance

Context isn’t just about off-page signals. It’s about how consistent you are with your own content. One isolated article won’t build relevance. A pattern of content around the same theme will.

One cluster on colour theory, out-performing most entire websites

Take Canva. They didn’t just post once about colour theory; they built an entire cluster of more than 3,000 pages around colour palettes and design. That consistency built topical relevance at scale: 1.5 million visits a month, 139,400 keywords ranking, and an estimated $685,700 in traffic value, all tied back to a theme that fits naturally with their brand as a design tool. They didn’t just compete on colour content. They dominated it.

Consistency creates relevance.

Truth #6: Bots Have No Common Sense

Bots don’t think like humans. We read between the lines. We understand sarcasm. We infer meaning from context. Algorithms don’t. They process patterns and signals. If you leave gaps, they can’t fill them. They need clarity, and that’s why structure matters.

Think about bots as lazy readers. Don’t make them dig.

Structure for scannability:

Headings as signposts
Modular blocks (short paragraphs)
Prioritise readability
Answer first, explain later

This is where passage indexing comes in: algorithms reference passages, not just pages. If every paragraph stands on its own as a complete answer, you give algorithms bite-sized clarity, and they reward you for it.

Next: eliminate ambiguity. Be painfully explicit. Cut the fluff, and speak the language of the bots.

Eliminate ambiguity for AI agents:

Be painfully explicit
Remove irrelevant fluff
Speak their language (schema)

Schema, FAQs, and step-by-step instructions give algorithms clear context to follow, so bots aren’t left guessing what you mean.

Here’s a way to think about it: imagine asking a human to make you a cup of tea. You might say “milk and sugar”. You wouldn’t need to tell them to boil the kettle or grab a mug first. A bot needs all of that spelled out. You’d have to spoon-feed it the content.

The same logic applies to your website. Don’t just say “check out”: write a help centre article that details every single step of the process, because it looks different for every brand. And this isn’t just for human users. It’s for the coming wave of AI agents that will perform tasks on people’s behalf. Explicit instructions make your content LLM-friendly.

Pillar 3. Confidence: Be Trusted Everywhere

You can have the perfect content and flawless context. But without confidence, without trust, you’re just another website. Confidence is about what makes both people and algorithms choose you when there are 50 other options.

Truth #7: Transparency Builds Trust

Users and bots both want to know the same thing: who are you, and can I rely on you? Clear About and Team pages, visible contact details, and policies in plain sight aren’t just formalities or legal requirements. They’re trust signals. Show your human side: who’s behind the brand, and how people can reach you if something goes wrong.

Tell them what you’re about:

About Us
Team
Contact info
Site policies

NerdWallet does this brilliantly. Their “how we make money” page tells you exactly how they evaluate products and confirms that staff bonuses aren’t tied to revenue. That transparency builds authority, and it shows you can be trusted.

Trust also comes from showing your content is current, sourced, and written by real experts. Bylines, dates, disclosures, named reviewers: these signals tell both bots and users that this isn’t content built for clicks. It’s content you can count on.

Why they can trust you:

Current information
Transparency
Disclosures
Publishing principles
Sourcing
Author background
Expert reviewers
Fact-checked

NerdWallet’s Best Credit Cards page is a good live example: it’s obvious at a glance that the content is current, reviewed by named experts, and appropriately disclosed.

Truth #8: Trust Is Built Through Actions, Not Words

The most powerful trust signals are earned, not claimed. They’re moments people talk about when you’re not in the room.

Nobody was asked to post any of this

And later the AI repeats it back as fact, up against Amazon

Chewy is the example I keep coming back to for this. When a customer’s pet dies, Chewy sends flowers. Chewy also sends hand-painted pet portraits, more than a thousand a week, to customers generally rather than only on adoption, and worked out early that recipients post them, which is to say the gesture is the advertising. Customers talk about it on Reddit. Those posts get shared on X. They turn into news articles: one customer’s tweet about the flowers pulled 600,000 likes and turned into coverage in Fortune, the Boston Globe, TODAY and Newsweek.

One tweet, unprompted, turned into national news coverage. That’s not customer service. That’s a trust engine.

The real unlock is that if you build a business worth talking about, algorithms notice too. It doesn’t just win hearts; it wins rankings. Even against a giant like Amazon, Chewy holds its own in trust comparisons, because the actions back it up.

Truth #9: Your Silence Is Their Story

The flip side: if you don’t reply to reviews, if you let misinformation spread unchecked, you leave a vacuum. Algorithms hate a vacuum. They fill it with whatever they find. Your silence lets others write your brand story for you. And once that story sticks, it’s hard to take back.

Take an unanswered negative review. No reply, no acknowledgement. And to anyone reading it, including an algorithm trying to work out whether your brand can be trusted, the silence reads as confirmation. Whatever the reviewer said must be true, because nobody came back to say otherwise.

Now compare that to a business that replies to a one-star review politely, apologises up front, and gently corrects any misinformation in the post. Same star rating. Completely different story being told to everyone who reads it next, human or bot.

Your silence is their story.

The Flywheel: Why This Isn’t a Checklist

Each one feeds the next, which is why it compounds

These three pillars aren’t a checklist. They’re a flywheel.

Great content creates the material for context. Clear context builds the confidence that earns trust. And that trusted audience amplifies your content, making the next cycle stronger than the last.

It’s not linear. It’s a compounding loop.

The whole framework on one page, if you only save one thing

So here’s the blueprint, condensed: you are the ultimate expert on your brand. Everything is a search engine. Expertise beats commodity content. Relevance, not raw authority, wins. Bots only understand what you spell out for them. And most importantly, your transparency and your actions are what build lasting trust online.

Your 3 Actions Today

If I can leave you with three things to do today to improve your content, context, and confidence, it’s this.

Claim and update every business listing. A simple way to find them all: search your brand name, click the three dots on your website’s result, and look for “About this result” or “About this brand.” It’ll list everywhere you’ve been reviewed, every news article you’re mentioned in, and every social profile linked to your brand.
Start answering real questions about your brand, even the ones that aren’t sitting in “People Also Ask” yet. Think about what people actually want to know. Stop hiding your pricing. Be clear about who you serve and who you don’t.
Monitor and respond to every review, positive or negative. Show people you care about your business and about them.

These steps are small. But together, they train both users and algorithms to trust you.

So, stop chasing algorithms. Start building a brand they can’t ignore, because long-term visibility doesn’t come from tricks. It comes from trust.

Trust or Bust: Winning Over Users and Bots in SEO

Mon, 04 Mar 2024 22:00:00 GMT

Someone read your best page this week and decided not to believe it.

I gave a talk on that idea, Trust or Bust: Winning Over Users and Bots in SEO, at the Sydney SEO Conference, hosted by Prosperity Media. It’s the framework I keep coming back to with clients: there are two audiences you need to win over, users and the systems Google uses to assess content, and most people only ever optimise for one.

This is the full playbook version, with the checklists, case studies and examples that didn’t fit on the slides.

Here’s the problem, as I see it in 2024. Users are hungry, hungry for great content, but misinformation and spammy AI content have left a bad taste in users’ mouths. Most people now search Google expecting to wade through junk before finding something they can trust.

Google has the opposite problem. Googlebot crawls trillions of pages but only indexes about 400 billion of them, and even worse, less than 10% of people visit page two of the results (Search Engine Land; Protofuse). So Google needs to serve up the best, like a great restaurant with a small menu.

So let’s eat.

Three of the five signals describe your page. E-E-A-T is the lens on one of them

Trust is in the middle for a reason. The other three only matter because they build it

What E-E-A-T Actually Is (And Isn’t)

Let’s talk about what E-E-A-T isn’t, first, because most of the confusion in our industry starts here.

It’s Not a Ranking Factor

E-E-A-T isn’t a ranking factor. Google has said so directly, despite a lot of debate and social chat over whether it secretly is one anyway.

Google’s own wording, from their documentation as it stood in 2024

What Google actually says is that automated systems (Google Discover, Google News, the Search Generative Experience it was trialling at the time) use signals related to E-E-A-T to surface genuinely helpful content. It’s also baked into the Search Quality Rater Guidelines, the manual human raters use, which in turn trains the algorithms Google ships next.

So it’s not one score sitting inside the algorithm. It’s a lens Google uses across several systems, and one you can use too, both to guess how Google sees your site and to check how a sceptical human would.

It’s a Quality Classifier, Not a Score

Instead, think of it as an umbrella term. I like to look at it as a quality classifier.

Systems like helpful content, the review system, reliable information systems, and original content systems all sit under that umbrella. Treat E-E-A-T as a quality concept applying to a whole website, not a number bolted onto one URL, and it gets much easier to reason about how it affects your rankings.

The Quality Rater Guidelines score pages on a four-level scale (Lowest, Lacking, High, and Very High E-E-A-T), which is what feeds the quality signal above. Raters aren’t ranking your page directly. They’re producing the training data that teaches Google’s systems what “trustworthy” looks like at scale.

The Four Letters, and Why Trust Sits at the Centre

E stands for Experience, E for Expertise, A for Authoritativeness, and T for Trust. In the diagram from the Search Quality Rater Guidelines, trust sits at the centre of E-E-A-T, and everything else builds toward it.

Trust is Google’s way of asking: what’s the risk if a user trusts this website? Who’s behind it, are they reliable, and what can a user do if something goes wrong? I start with trust because Google’s Search Quality Rater Guidelines (§3.4, 16 November 2023) say it outright: “Trust is the most important member of the E-E-A-T family because untrustworthy pages have low E-E-A-T no matter how Experienced, Expert, or Authoritative they may seem. For example, a financial scam is untrustworthy, even if the content creator is a highly experienced and expert scammer who is considered the go-to on running scams!”

Authoritativeness asks whether a website or a content creator is the go-to resource for a topic.

Expertise asks whether somebody knows what they’re talking about: whether, when they source information, they’re not just regurgitating what’s already out there. Would you trust electrical advice from an electrician, or from somebody who’s a bit of a DIY enthusiast? Would you take SEO advice from an experienced practitioner, or from a random forum post insisting meta keywords are still the secret to ranking in 2024?

Experience, the newest addition to the acronym, asks about the genuineness of the content. Does this person have real, first-hand experience of the thing they’re writing about?

Experience, Expertise and Authoritativeness all layer up into that one assessment: Trust.

Building Trust With Users

You might be wondering why I’m starting with users, instead of jumping straight to how bots crawl and rank pages. To answer that, we need to go from trust to antitrust.

If you’ve followed the recent Google antitrust proceedings, you’ve probably seen the exhibit confirming what a lot of us already suspected: that Google has, at some point, used user signals to influence rankings. Maybe it still does, maybe it doesn’t. Either way, isn’t that exactly what the Search Quality Raters programme has always been about?

Users and bots aren’t two separate strategies. They’re assessing the same thing with different tools. Start with the humans.

Trust: What Do You Say About Your Site?

One of the first questions users are trying to answer, often without realising it, is: what do you say about your site?

The first place most people land is your About page. Wirecutter’s is a great example: upfront about earning affiliate commissions, and just as upfront that they don’t get paid that commission if you return the product. That single disclosure tells the reader the recommendation is in their interest, not just Wirecutter’s.

Your team page matters too. Yoast’s is full of real, identifiable people who’ve clearly contributed to the industry: it reads nothing like a faceless affiliate site.

Then there’s the question users ask without ever putting it into words: what can I do if something goes wrong? That’s what contact pages answer. The Quality Rater Guidelines expect most legitimate businesses to have a real email address, a physical address, and a clear way to get in touch.

Last on the list is policies. I know it sounds boring and legal, but a visible returns policy tells users what happens if something goes wrong: people have been trained to scroll to the bottom of a page looking for exactly this.

Checklist: What You Say About Your Site

A genuine About Us page, including how you make money if that’s relevant
A team page with real, named, verifiable people
Clear contact information: email, address, a real way to reach you
Visible site policies, including returns and refunds

Trust: What Do Others Say About You?

You can talk about your own site however flatteringly you like. Most users are sceptical of that, which is why the next question they ask is what others say about you.

This is reiterated directly in the Search Quality Rater Guidelines, which give raters a whole set of methods for researching a site’s online reputation. One trick you can run right now: search yoursite.com -site:yoursite.com. This shows you everything Google understands about your website without your website in the results: a genuinely useful way to audit your brand presence before you try to optimise it.

Brand references are the obvious next step. If you’re a big enough business, Wikipedia is the target. Smaller sites can look at Crunchbase or CB Insights, which don’t have the same notability bar. Claiming your social profiles and filling out your business description properly is a simple way to own that first page of results for your own brand name.

Love them or hate them, independent review sites are here to stay. Trustpilot and ProductReview.com.au rank for most brands, alongside directories like Yelp, Yellow Pages and Facebook, and if you have an app, the app stores usually take the number two spot in a branded search. Claim these, respond to the negative reviews, and actively work on earning the positive ones.

News coverage carries more weight than anything you say about yourself, because it’s a channel you don’t control: search “OpenAI” and you’ll see how much news coverage shapes what shows up first for a brand. Building press isn’t easy; it usually means digital PR and outreach, but it’s one of the few ways to counterbalance negative coverage you can’t remove.

Specific niches often have their own credibility sources: Clutch for agencies, Fresha for beauty businesses, Rate My Agent for real estate, G2 for software. These carry weight with users who already know to look there.

Checklist: What Others Say About You

Brand references on Wikipedia, Crunchbase, or CB Insights
Claimed and actively managed independent review profiles
A genuine effort toward earning press and digital PR coverage
Presence on niche-specific credibility platforms for your industry

Trust: What’s Visible on the Page?

The last trust question is the simplest: what’s visible on the page right now?

Recency bias is a huge cognitive factor in trust. A clear, current date tells a reader the information is up to date, and it’s one of the easiest ways to stop someone pogo-sticking back to the results. NerdWallet leans into this well.

There’s also a first-impression effect before a reader reads a word: research out of Carleton University found people form a judgement about a web page’s visual appeal in around 50 milliseconds (Lindgaard et al., Behaviour & Information Technology, 2006). That’s not enough time to read anything: it’s layout, whitespace, and whether the page looks cared for.

Disclosures matter too, especially around how a site makes money. Bankrate does this well: their disclosure pops up inline, without sending the reader off the page, so they get the transparency without losing the reader’s attention.

Full transparency without ever sending the reader off the page

Checklist: What’s Visible on the Page

Clear, current publish and update dates
A page that looks and feels cared for, not abandoned
Transparent, inline disclosures about monetisation or editorial policy
Visible publishing principles or editorial standards

Authoritativeness: Are You the Go-To Resource?

For users, forget the technical definition of topical authority. What it actually means to a reader is simpler: do you show up, consistently, whenever they search around your topic?

Take Ahrefs as an example. Whenever I’m researching something SEO-related, they turn up, maybe not in position one, but they turn up. By the time I reach a transactional search, they’ve already built brand love with me, even if a competitor technically ranks above them.

As much as I love keyword tools, if you’re a small player trying to build authority, competition is the killer: keyword tools can’t compete with Google for speed and depth of topic understanding. So go beyond them. Use Google Trends, News, People Also Ask, related searches, and Suggest to get on top of what’s trending in your space. About 15% of the searches Google sees every day are ones it hasn’t seen before, so a keyword database alone will always be playing catch-up.

Go beyond keywords in format too. Maybe video isn’t your jam, and that’s fine: YouTube, forums, and industry newsletters all build the kind of insight a written article alone can’t.

Most of us think of domain authority in terms of Domain Rating and backlink counts. Users think in trust by association. When someone sees your brand linked from Wikipedia or a respected niche site, they carry that trust with them when they click through, and it funnels straight into how legitimate your content feels.

Case study: Epic Gardening. Epic Gardening built brand authority well beyond written content: a YouTube channel turning every article into a video, promoted heavily, has earned 2.76 million subscribers over the past decade, plus 2.9 million TikTok followers doing the same thing in short form. The backend numbers back it up: Domain Rating 73, roughly 229,000 backlinks from 10,100 referring domains, around 720,000 monthly organic traffic, and roughly 8,100 monthly branded searches (Ahrefs). Citations from Wikipedia and Tasting Table both work the trust-by-association angle above, and Epic Gardening now has its own Knowledge Panel as a result.

A decade of compounding, in one screen

Trust by association. You can’t buy a Wikipedia editor citing you as a source

It keeps happening on niche sites too, which is the signal that actually compounds

The payoff: Google treats the brand as a real entity

Case study: Kevin Espiritu. Kevin is the founder of Epic Gardening, and a great example of author authority specifically, separate from the brand. Self-taught, he’s built his authority by contributing to gardening news articles, joining podcasts and interviews in his niche, and publishing several books, plus a personal entrepreneurship narrative told across podcasts and video about building the business itself. His branded search volume has grown to around 500 searches a month, alongside 3.6 million social followers, 11 million podcast downloads, and 42 million self-reported blog visits.

The founder gets his own entity panel, separate from the brand’s

Press and podcasts collected in one place, so people and crawlers can both find them

Checklist: Authoritativeness

Show up consistently across the topics your business owns, not just your money keywords
Track trends, News, People Also Ask, and Suggest, not just a keyword database
Diversify format: video, forums, newsletters, where your audience already spends time
Earn citations from high-trust sites in your niche, not just link volume

Expertise: Does This Demonstrate Knowledge?

For expertise, the question users are asking is whether this content demonstrates real knowledge or skill.

If you’re going to make a claim, back it up with a source. Citations and external links to reputable sources (a health article linking to the CDC, say) are one of the simplest ways to build expertise into your content.

Author bios matter enormously. A proper bio gives a real sense of who wrote this, their background and education, and lets a reader verify they’re a real person through a linked social profile. Bankrate’s author pages, credited to named writers like Sarah Foster, do this well.

Sometimes the writer isn’t the expert, but an expert reviewer is available, and that’s where you borrow authority. Google’s guidance on creating helpful, reliable, people-first content asks it outright: is this content written or reviewed by an expert who demonstrably knows the topic well? A running coach who’s trained 30,000 runners is a great reviewer for an article on running form. He’s not the right reviewer once the topic shifts to health risk: that’s a YMYL (your money or your life) topic needing someone medically qualified, not just any subject-matter expert. That’s where a reviewer like Dr Vanessa Nzeh comes in, adding legitimacy a running coach’s review can’t.

What YMYL is supposed to look like: a named, credentialled reviewer right under the headline

A visible fact-checking process is the last layer. NerdWallet publishes theirs openly, including how readers can flag corrections, adding trust on top of the content itself.

Checklist: Expertise

Clear sourcing and citations for every claim that needs one
Real, verifiable author bios with background and credentials
Expert review for specialist content, escalated to a qualified medical or professional reviewer for YMYL topics specifically
A visible, transparent fact-checking process

Experience: Is This Genuine?

The last E, and the newest, asks whether the content is genuine: does this person have real first-hand experience of what they’re describing?

Houzz does this well in its contributor articles, where designers write in first person: “I did this,” “we did that,” signalling lived experience, not a rewrite of someone else’s article.

Ask yourself: what is different about your content than the other nine results in the SERP? Naplab answers that with unique insight: its mattress reviews score cooling, motion transfer and response time on proprietary scales you won’t find elsewhere, backed by a first-person verdict about the mattress the reviewer actually sleeps on.

Scoring this specific is hard to fake, which is exactly the point

Demonstrated history matters too. Instructables’ Jay Bates clearly has a long history building things out of timber, and adds extra value with video alongside his written instructions, pulling stills from that video into unique images that make his points easier to follow.

Eleven real builds. That’s a history, not a byline

Checklist: Experience

First-person voice where the writer genuinely did the thing
Unique insight or proprietary scoring the other nine results don’t have
A demonstrated history in the subject, not a one-off article
Original multimedia: photos, video, or both, rather than stock imagery

Building Trust With Bots

That’s how users assess trust. Now let’s flip to how bots, Google’s crawling, indexing and ranking systems, try to assess the exact same thing.

On-Page Signals

On-page signals are the easiest to influence, so they’re the best place to start.

Keywords

Keyword usage still matters, tied directly to Google’s helpful content questions: does the title accurately represent the content, and is coverage comprehensive? A backpack review that only ever says “backpack” and never touches “daypack” or “hiking pack” is missing coverage, not just keywords.

TF-IDF and N-Grams

TF-IDF, n-grams and NLP sit under this same banner. TF-IDF (term frequency-inverse document frequency) looks at word correlation across other pages ranking for the same query: long thought to help Google’s understanding of a page even if it isn’t a direct ranking input. More advanced systems like BERT and MUM use NLP to understand how words relate within a sentence, not just whether they’re present. A tool like Surfer is a reasonable way to get a handle on all three without doing the analysis by hand.

Search Intent

Search intent, which BERT helps Google understand, is the next layer. “Best backpacks” and “buy backpacks” clearly want different things: one review, one transactional, but it’s not always this obvious, and reviewing the SERP features Google already shows (comparison tables, star ratings, bylines) tells you what “comprehensive” looks like for that query.

Passage Indexing

Passage indexing changes the comprehensiveness calculus. You don’t need a dedicated article for every sub-question your topic raises. Search “is the North Face Borealis backpack waterproof” and you’ll get a full backpack review: Google has identified the one paragraph inside that answers the specific question, without it needing its own page.

Freshness

Freshness systems, sometimes called query deserves freshness, shift results based on what’s current. Search the biggest attendance at a Taylor Swift concert in January 2024 and you’d get one answer; search it in February and the answer moves. One warning: changing a date without changing the substance underneath is a red flag, not a freshness signal, and Google’s systems are built to catch exactly that.

Neural Matching

Neural matching connects content to a query without shared keywords at all. Search “why does my TV look strange” and you’ll get an article about the soap opera effect: no shared words, but it clearly answers the question. Users don’t search in keywords, and Google’s known that for a while.

Knowledge-Based Trust

Knowledge-Based Trust is a model from a Google research paper published in 2015, diagrammed here by BrightEdge. Five steps: crawl a site, compare it against a corpus of trusted sources, generate a trust score against accepted consensus, then reward sites that conform and penalise those that don’t.

Step five is the one nobody wants to think about

Checklist: On-Page Signals

Keyword usage that maps to genuine topic coverage, not just repetition
Content built with an eye on TF-IDF, n-grams and NLP relevance
Clear alignment to search intent, informed by what’s already ranking
Content structured so passages can answer sub-questions on their own
A live process for keeping genuinely time-sensitive content fresh
Coverage broad enough that neural matching can connect it to adjacent queries

Off-Page Signals

PageRank

PageRank is still very real. Google’s own 2019 whitepaper on disinformation confirms it remains one of the signals used to understand authoritativeness, based on the links between pages (How Google Fights Disinformation).

Link Distance

There’s a patent, often called the link-distance patent, describing a system that measures how far, in link steps, a site sits from a trusted seed site like Wikipedia. It was reportedly introduced to counter PageRank manipulation by anchoring authority to sources Google already trusts, looping straight back to why building brand references matters for users too.

Anchor Text

Anchor text still plays into how Google reads the entities in a piece of text, and whether that text makes sense both on the page it sits on and the page it points to.

Brand Mentions

There’s genuine debate over whether brand mentions carry weight without a link. A patent around “implied links” covers mentions that infer a link without containing one. Whether Google uses that specific patent is almost beside the point: large language models are trained on a huge corpus of popular websites, so a brand mention, linked or not, is still feeding that training data somewhere.

Sentiment

Sentiment analysis is part of this picture too. G2 groups reviews into concepts using natural language processing, not unlike how Google’s own Cloud NL tools score sentiment on a piece of text: positive, negative, or mixed on specific attributes.

Branded Search

Popularity, measured through branded search volume, is another off-page signal worth tracking. Matt Diggity, having looked at hundreds of sites either side of the September 2023 Helpful Content Update, flagged branded search volume as one of the factors that seemed to separate the survivors from the casualties. That’s a practitioner’s read on one update, not a permanent ranking signal, but it’s worth tracking.

Vector Classification

Vector classification rounds out the picture: the theory that Google builds vector representations of websites and individual authors, associating them with topics so its systems can assess signals like E-E-A-T at scale. Olaf Kopp has published diagrams illustrating this, and there are patents around generating website representation vectors and author vectors.

Roughly, the maths behind whether Google thinks an author actually knows the topic

Checklist: Off-Page Signals

A genuine link profile, not just volume, feeding into PageRank
Proximity, in link terms, to trusted seed sources in your niche
Anchor text that makes contextual sense on both ends of the link
Unlinked brand mentions treated as a real signal, not ignored
An eye on sentiment, not just volume, in reviews and mentions
Branded search volume tracked as a genuine popularity signal

The Knowledge Graph

Entities (people, places, organisations, and topics) sit at the centre of the Knowledge Graph, connected through relationships Google has established confidence in.

Most people have seen the Knowledge Panel, the box that appears alongside a search for a well-known entity. The panel is just a visualisation of the graph, not the graph itself. Not having a panel doesn’t mean you’re not in the graph: it just means Google hasn’t reached enough confidence yet to visualise it.

Your own website is generally the most trusted source about your own brand entity: what Jason Barnard of Kalicube calls your “Entity Home.” But Google leans on other trusted sources to corroborate what your site claims, and Wikipedia is the biggest one. Kalicube’s data puts roughly 65% of Knowledge Panel descriptions as coming from Wikipedia, with about 20% of panels carrying no description at all: it’s vendor data without a published methodology, so treat it as directional rather than precise. More interesting is Barnard’s own January 2024 research, which argues Wikipedia’s share has been falling sharply since mid-2023. That’s the same brand-reference advice from earlier, showing up again as a literal input into how confidently Google resolves who you are.

The graph is the database. The panel is just the window Google lets you look through

Wikipedia sits well above everything else on that list

Schema.org: Feeding the Graph Directly

If an About page builds trust with a human reading it, schema markup is how you tell a bot the exact same thing, explicitly.

WebSite and WebPage schema, including the more specific AboutPage, ContactPage and FAQPage types, are the structured-data version of the “what do you say about your site” signals covered earlier. Here’s an About page marked up as both at once, from Airtasker:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org/",
  "@type": ["WebPage", "AboutPage"],
  "name": "About Airtasker",
  "description": "Access thousands of skilled people ...",
  "dateModified": "2023-04-17T13:37:12+00:00",
  "datePublished": "2022-07-19T16:10:17+00:00",
  "publisher": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "name": "Airtasker"
  },
  "potentialAction": [
    {
      "@type": "ReadAction",
      "target": ["https://www.airtasker.com/au/about/"]
    }
  ]
}

Note the two dates. Article schema does the same job for content, tying a headline, an author and the publish and modified dates into something machine-readable, which echoes the recency signals that matter for human trust too. The properties worth caring about for E-E-A-T are the ones nobody bothers with:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "NewsArticle",
  "author": [{
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Jane Doe",
    "url": "https://example.com/profile/janedoe123"
  }],
  "editor": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "John Doe",
    "url": "https://example.com/profile/johndoe123"
  },
  "correction": {
    "@type": "CorrectionComment",
    "text": "An earlier version of this article misstated the number of ....",
    "datePublished": "2015-02-05T09:20:00+08:00"
  },
  "publishingPrinciples": "https://www.example.com/publishing-principles"
}

A named editor, a public correction, and a link to your publishing principles. That’s the transparency section from earlier, expressed in a way a crawler can parse.

Organization schema establishes the business entity itself. Person schema, particularly its knowsAbout, worksFor and alumniOf properties, is the structured equivalent of an author bio: credentials, affiliations, and topical focus, spelled out for a machine rather than implied through prose.

sameAs is the glue that ties it together. It links an entity, usually a person, to their other verified profiles (Wikipedia, LinkedIn, social accounts) so Google can merge them into a single, high-confidence node instead of treating each mention as a separate, weaker signal.

Put together, an author becomes a machine-readable claim about who they are and what they know:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Person",
  "name": "Angelo Huff",
  "description": "Defender of Truth",
  "jobTitle": "Professor",
  "knowsAbout": ["Investing", "Wealth management", "Behavioral finance", "Stock analysis"],
  "worksFor": {
    "@type": "Organization",
    "name": "Example Organization"
  },
  "alumniOf": {
    "@type": "EducationalOrganization",
    "name": "Example Educational Organization"
  },
  "sameAs": [
    "https://www.linkedin.com/in/your-profile",
    "https://x.com/your-handle"
  ]
}

knowsAbout is the one people skip, and it’s the most interesting: you are telling Google, in a structured field, which topics this person should be considered credible on.

A worked example makes this concrete: imagine a well-known entity like Jeff Bezos, his Person schema tagged with sameAs links to his Wikipedia page and other verified profiles. That combination lets Google merge every mention of him across the web into one confidently resolved entity, rather than a scatter of loosely related signals: the same mechanism available to anyone building author or founder authority, at a much smaller scale.

sameAs is the whole trick. It tells Google these scattered mentions are all one person

Checklist: Schema Types to Have in Place

WebSite and WebPage, including AboutPage, ContactPage and FAQPage where relevant
Article schema on every content page, with accurate dates
Organization schema for the business entity
Person schema for named authors, with knowsAbout, worksFor and alumniOf filled in
sameAs linking every entity to its verified external profiles

It’s All About Confidence

So, how do you build trust with users and bots at the same time?

Turns out you’ve been doing it the whole way through this post: it’s the same work, looked at from two directions. An honest About page builds trust with a sceptical reader and, tagged as AboutPage schema, feeds the same signal to Google. A Wikipedia citation reassures a human through trust by association, and it’s one of the biggest inputs into how confidently Google resolves your Knowledge Graph entity. User-facing and bot-facing aren’t two campaigns. They’re one campaign, told twice.

It’s all about confidence. Just like a great restaurant, if you consistently serve up a great experience, people come back, and they bring their friends next time. Google’s small-menu framing from the start of this post ends up meaning the same thing by the end: consistency earns trust, and trust compounds, whether the diner is a person or a crawler.

If you only take one thing from this, start with the cheapest wins: an honest About page, current dates, real author bios, and Organization and Person schema in place. Everything else here builds on that foundation.

Best Free Marketing Certifications in 2022

Thu, 25 Aug 2022 12:08:42 GMT

If you’re looking to break into the world of marketing, or you’re hoping to get promoted within your current company, you may be wondering if certification is a necessary step. And the answer is: it depends. While there are many great marketing certifications out there that can teach you a lot about the industry, they also tend to be expensive.

So what’s the solution? Luckily, there are some great free marketing certifications available online! In this article, I’ll review some of the best free digital marketing courses with certificates that you can take advantage of.

I’ve taken many certification courses over the past few years to expand my marketing knowledge and grow my career. In this article, I’ll tell you about each certificate and how it can help improve your skillset too.

Finally, towards the end of this article, I’ve compiled a huge list of 77 free digital marketing certifications covering a broad range of topics. So let’s start learning!

Best Free Marketing Certifications Reviewed

1. Google Analytics Certification

★★★★★

Time: 4h 36m

Difficulty: Intermediate

Expires: 1 Year

Google Analytics Certification

Pros:

Comprehensive course that covers a lot of ground
Great for people who want to learn about the latest version of Google Analytics
Demo account is provided so you can play around with real data

Cons:

Course lacks structure and focus in some areas
Not as comprehensive as it could be in terms of reports and explore capabilities
Would be more interesting with some video or audio content included

Maybe you’re a seasoned pro at Google Analytics, and you might have even completed the Google Analytics Individual Qualification in the past. Well, forget everything you know and get ready to dive into the world of Google Analytics 4 (GA4).

Google Analytics 4 is the new standard, with Google Analytics set to be deprecated in 2023. With its many amazing new features, it’s time to focus on becoming a certified Google Analytics 4 professional so potential employers and clients will place you above the rest.

Covered In This Certification

This Google Analytics 4 certification course is perfect for those already acquainted with the basics of Google Analytics and who want to be updated on the latest version.

This Google Analytics Certification course will teach you:

How to create and structure a Google Analytics 4 property for different circumstances, such as a website, app, or both

How to navigate your way around the Google Analytics 4 interface so you can locate the data that matters to you

How to measure and gain insights into your company goals, set up conversions and audiences in Analytics

How Google Analytics 4 uses data and modelling to meet your measurement requirements

My Experience Completing This Certification

The course attempts to address a wide range of themes. However, I felt it focused more on setting up and comprehending Google Analytics 4 than on the reports and explore capabilities. The course’s structure is also lacking. The certification course is based on written components and tries to incorporate perplexing interactive elements that provide no benefit. It would be much more interesting if there were some video/audio content in it.

On the bright side, it’s comprehensive enough to explain the distinctions and similarities between GA4 and Universal Analytics. Google also includes small quizzes throughout the course to confirm that you’re on the right track. Finally, the best news is that they provide you with a demo account so you can play around with real-world data straight away. This is especially beneficial if you don’t have a lot of visitors or want to view app data when you don’t have one.

Conclusion

Overall, the Google Analytics Certification is a great way to learn about the latest version of Google Analytics. Even though the course is lacking in some areas, it’s still comprehensive and provides you with a demo account to play around with. I recommend this course to anyone who wants to get up to speed on Google Analytics 4.

Get the Google Analytics Certification

2. HubSpot Content Marketing Certification

★★★★★

Time: 7h 24m

Difficulty: Beginner

Expires: 2 Years

HubSpot Content Marketing Certification

Pros:

Comprehensive course that covers many content-related topics
Engaging instructors who use real-world examples
Templates and worksheets allow you to apply what you’ve learned as you go
Community aspect helps you engage with others and continue learning after passing the certification

Cons:

Could cover more on distribution and repurposing
Lacks some depth in terms of E-A-T SEO framework
Takes a significant amount of time to complete (around seven hours)

If you’re looking to get ahead in your content marketing career, the HubSpot Content Marketing Certification is a great place to start. The course is comprehensive and covers a wide range of topics, from developing a content strategy to creating and promoting content.

Even if content marketing isn’t your end goal, don’t rule this certification out. Content is still an essential part of any digital marketing strategy, and this course covers many content-related areas, such as storytelling and SEO.

Covered In This Certification

The HubSpot Content Marketing Certification is an excellent course for anyone who wants to understand how content can become a driver of business goals. It will teach you frameworks for content production and how to distribute that content through multiple channels.

This HubSpot Content Marketing Certification course will teach you:

The power of storytelling to produce compelling content

How to build a repeatable framework for content creation

How to develop a long-term content strategy

How to come up with content ideas relevant to your business

How to produce quality content that’s engaging for your audience

How to promote and repurpose content through various channels and formats

How to optimise your content for search engines using the inbound methodology

What to measure and analyse for the success of your content marketing efforts

My Experience Completing This Certification

The HubSpot Content Marketing Certification sets the standard for an online certification course. They cover many topics in a logical progression and digestible format. Though out this course, they provide templates such as a Content Gap Analysis that allow you to take your learning and apply them to you as you complete the course.

The instructors are engaging and use real-world examples to drive home the points covered in the topics. They also do an excellent job of incorporating HubSpot where it is beneficial, without overselling the product to those who will not find it helpful. This allows the course content to focus on content marketing through quality videos.

More recently, Hubspot has introduced a community aspect to their academy, allowing you to engage with others while completing the certification and continue learning after you’ve passed your certification.

Although I believe this to be one of the more robust online certification courses, it could cover more content on distribution and repurposing. Furthermore, it would be beneficial to see them include more information on the E-A-T SEO framework and how it applies to the content you create.

It’s important to remember that, while the course is comprehensive, you shouldn’t expect it to be completed in an hour or two. It’ll take around 7 hours to finish, and I recommend doing it over a few days. HubSpot simplifies this by dividing the course into logical parts covering each topic.

Conclusion

The HubSpot Content Marketing Certification is one of the more comprehensive and well-structured online marketing certification courses available. It’s perfect for those who want to understand how to use content to drive business goals and get ahead in their content marketing career.

While it lacks some depth in terms of distribution and repurposing, it makes up for it in other areas, such as its focus on quality content and the use of SEO to drive traffic. If you’re looking for an online marketing certification, this is one of the best courses available.

Get the Hubspot Content Marketing Certification

3. Semrush SEO Fundamentals Exam

★★★★★

Time: 4h

Difficulty: Beginner

Expires: 1 Year

Pros:

Good introduction to SEO concepts
Engaging material with practical suggestions
Supplemental readings and quiz questions included

Cons:

Outdated in places
Requires some prior knowledge of certain topics

Whether you’re a newbie or an old hand, this completely free SEO Fundamentals certification course is for you. This free online course is ideal for anybody who wants to learn the core concepts of search engine optimization or brush up on specific topics to receive the certification. If you are looking for the most effective methods to optimise your website for search engines and increase visitors and sales to your site, then this course is for you.

Covered In This Certification

The Semrush SEO Fundamentals course is hosted by Greg Gifford, an experienced SEO consultant with two decades of online marketing and web design experience. This course provides a comprehensive overview of SEO while also providing students with actionable tactics they can implement immediately.

This Semrush SEO Fundamentals Certification course will teach you:

How the internet and search engines work

How search engines interact with pages

How to diagnose problems and improve websites

How to build and earn relevant backlinks to your website

The on-page optimisation process, from keyword research to optimising specific page elements

How to make your website work on mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets

What signals influence search rankings

How to help search engines to identify which countries you want to target and which languages you use for business

How to optimise a site to show up in searches in a particular geographic area

My Experience Completing This Certification

This course is an excellent introduction to SEO concepts and does a good job of exploring the main areas from Technical SEO to Local SEO.

The Semrush SEO Fundamentals certification is mainly for beginners without prior SEO knowledge. However, there are moments when the course touches on topics that require some understanding beforehand. Nevertheless, this shouldn’t be a deterrent as the Semrush Academy provides other courses to supplement your learning.

The material is highly engaging, with Greg Gifford delivering some fantastic nuggets of wisdom and plenty of practical suggestions. You’ll be given additional reading after each video to help you dive deeper into the subject. Finally, a short quiz on each theme to ensure you’ve absorbed the information.

Since SEO is constantly adapting, any course on the topic will eventually become outdated. For example, this course discusses the Mobile First Index as a future concept even though it was implemented in September 2020. Although this isn’t a huge deal, the section on page speed could use an update as it fails to mention Core Web Vitals as a ranking factor at all.

Conclusion

The Semrush SEO Fundamentals certification is a great starting point for those new to SEO. It covers all of the basics in an engaging and easy-to-understand manner. The course also provides supplemental readings and quiz questions to help reinforce the concepts taught. Although the material is a little outdated in places, it’s still hugely relevant for those just starting out.

Get Semrush SEO Fundamentals Certification

4. Google Ads Search Certification

★★★★★

Time: 3h 42m

Difficulty: Beginner

Expires: 1 Year

Google Ads Search Certification

Pros:

Covers all the basics of Google Search Ads
Engaging, interactive elements
Good mix of content and depth
Essential for those seeking a career in Google Ads

Cons:

Some content is outdated and confusing for those new to Google Ads
Sections on text ads and CPC bidding are downplayed
Not as engaging as other certifications with audio or video elements

The Google Ads Search Certification is a great place to start if you’re looking to get started with paid search. This certification will teach you how to create and manage effective search campaigns using the Google Ads platform.

Even if you’ve been doing paid search for a while, this certification is something you want on your resume. In fact, having your ads certification can help your company to become a Google Partner or Premier Partner in the Google Partners program. I’d go as far as to say if you’re looking to score a role at an agency, then this is a must-have certification.

Covered In This Certification

Upon completion of this certification, you will be able to show off your skills in building and optimising Google search campaigns. You’ll also be able to use automated solutions like Smart Bidding and Audience Solutions to improve campaign performance for specific marketing objectives.

This Google Ads Search Certification course will teach you:

How Google Search Ads can help you get more customers and achieve your business goals

How to use Google Search campaigns to reach the right people in the right moments

The key factors used in the Google Ads Auction

How to create compelling text ads that deliver the right message

How to use Search Ad Extensions to increase ad quality and user engagement

What automated bidding strategies are available, and how to use them to achieve your goals

What audience solutions are available for search campaigns

How to monitor your Optimisation Score and boost performance with Google Ads recommendations

How to increase conversions with a Performance Planner

My Experience Completing This Certification

This official Google Ads certification is essential for anyone who plans on working in a role that involves managing a paid search budget. Even if you don’t manage the Google Ads account directly, this certification will let you speak the same language as any agency or freelancer you have engaged.

This course is beginner focussed and does a pretty solid job keeping focused on high-level concepts. Throughout most of the course, the modules focus on different scenarios and then quiz you based on another. I found this a great way to let the concepts sink in rather than the traditional gotcha-type quizzes that contain similar options in a multiple-choice list.

The format is not as engaging as others that contain video or audio. But Google has done better at making the interactive elements relevant and interesting.

The overall content covers most parts of Google Search Ads and doesn’t focus on specific areas like setup. Unlike other Google Certifications, this course is the right mix of content and depth.

On a less positive note, the content of this certification is pretty outdated in some areas. This comes as a surprise to me, given the content is text-based. Some examples are the sections about phrase match and broad match modifier. Broad Match Modifier was deprecated by Google back in February 2021, with Phrase Match being updated simultaneously. Given how crucial this is to Google Search Ads, they should revisit this section.

Phrase match and broad match modifier is not the only outdated section in the course. The area on text ads is confusing, given that Google deprecated Expanded Text Ads in June 2022. This makes the tutorial on creating an ad pretty confusing for those who don’t know this.

Finally, as someone who has been doing Google Ads for some time, it’s evident that Google has purposely downplayed certain advanced areas of Google Ads like Manual CPC bidding. Perhaps to ensure simplicity or drive more users to their preferred methods of automated bidding.

Conclusion

The Google Ads Search Certification is a great place to start if you’re starting your Google Ads journey or are looking to get certified. It covers all the basics and provides enough detail to get you up and running.

However, if you’re already managing a Google Ads account, you might find the content a little basic. Additionally, some of the content is outdated, which might confuse those who don’t know any better.

Overall, the Google Ads Search Certification is a great way to get started with paid search. Just be sure to supplement your learning with other resources to stay up-to-date on the latest changes.

Get the Google Ads Search Certification

5. HubSpot Email Marketing Certification

★★★★★

Time: 3h 18m

Difficulty: Beginner

Expires: 2 Years

HubSpot Email Marketing Certification

Pros:

Well organised and easy to follow
Covers a lot of material in a short amount of time
Provides access to HubSpot’s free email marketing software

Cons:

Lacks depth in certain areas
Course might not be relevant to everyone
Automated emails could be covered in greater detail

As a marketer, you’ll undoubtedly have to deal with email marketing at some point in your career. The HubSpot Email Marketing Certification is the ideal training program for anyone seeking to advance beyond simply sending emails to a list.

In this course, not only will you learn the basics of email marketing but also more advanced topics such as email deliverability and A/B testing. Even if you have experience with email marketing, you’ll still gain new skills and knowledge from this certification.

Covered In This Certification

The HubSpot Email Marketing Certification course is hosted by Courtney Sembler, the Director of HubSpot Academy. She was also a previous Inbound Professor focused on email marketing, GDPR, and contact management. By the end of this course, you’ll have all the fundamental knowledge to launch high-performing email campaigns and a solid understanding of email deliverability and consent.

This HubSpot Email Marketing course will teach you:

How to build an effective email marketing strategy

How to develop a strategy for contact management

How to build an effective segmentation strategy

Why you should send the right email with the right context

What’s required to create a high-performing email

What is email deliverability, and why it’s important to building trust

How to design your marketing emails

How to analyse your marketing emails

How to test your marketing emails

How to develop relationships through lead nurturing

My Experience Completing This Certification

If you’re looking to broaden your skill set as a marketer or want to learn more about email marketing, this course is perfect for you. Although, if your focus is on paid advertising, social media marketing, or SEO specifically, then this might not be the right fit.

However, if you discover that your role requires you to send emails on a regular basis, this digital marketing certificate can help you achieve far greater success from your efforts.

No matter your email marketing skills, this course will start from the basics. You’ll also get access to HubSpot’s free email marketing software as you go along, so that you can apply what you’re learning immediately.

The course material is well organised and doesn’t take as much time to complete as some of the other HubSpot Academy certifications.

While the training is a fantastic overview of email marketing, it lacks some depth in certain areas. For example, I thought they might have spent additional time discussing privacy regulations like GDPR and the effects of not adhering to these.

Finally, I would have appreciated more time spent on automated emails and the many sorts of emails you could send to your audience while maintaining timeliness and relevance. This may have been an attempt to make the material appropriate for everyone. But I believe that more specific examples, even if they weren’t completely relevant to me, may have prompted me to try new things.

Conclusion

The HubSpot Email Marketing Certification is the ideal training program for anyone seeking to advance beyond simply sending emails to a list. In this course, not only will you learn the basics of email marketing but also more advanced topics such as email deliverability and A/B testing. Even if you have experience with email marketing, you’ll still gain new skills and knowledge from this certification.

If your role doesn’t require you to send emails, then this course might not be the right fit for you. However, if you’re looking to broaden your skill set as a marketer or want to learn more about email marketing, this certification is perfect for you. You’ll get access to HubSpot’s free email marketing software as you go along, so that you can apply what you’re learning immediately. The course material is well organised and doesn’t take as much time to complete as some of the other HubSpot Academy certifications.

Get the HubSpot Email Marketing Certification

77 Free Digital Marketing Certifications

Google Certifications

Certification	Time	Difficulty	Expires
Digital Garage: Fundamentals of Digital Marketing Certification	40h	Beginner	1 Year
Google Analytics Certification	4h 36m	Intermediate	1 Year
Google Ads Search Certification	3h 42m	Beginner	1 Year
Google Ads Display Certification	2h 36m	Beginner	1 Year
Google Ads Measurement Certification	4h 42m	Beginner	1 Year
Google Ads Video Certification	4h	Beginner	1 Year
Google Ads Shopping Certification	3h 6m	Beginner	1 Year
Google Ads Apps Certification	2h 48m	Beginner	1 Year
Google Ads Creative Certification	3h 50m	Beginner	1 Year
Google Ads Grow Offline Sales Certification	2h 36m	Beginner	1 Year
Search Ads 360 Certification Exam	1h	Intermediate	1 Year
Display & Video 360 Certification Exam	1h 18m	Intermediate	1 Year
Campaign manager 360 Certification Exam	1h 18m	Intermediate	1 Year

Microsoft Advertising Certifications

Certification	Time	Difficulty	Expires
Microsoft Advertising Search Certification	5h 04m	Beginner	1 Year
Microsoft Advertising Native & Display Certification	2h 42m	Beginner	1 Year
Microsoft Advertising Shopping Certification	4h 05m	Beginner	1 Year

HubSpot Academy Certifications

Certification	Time	Difficulty	Expires
HubSpot Marketing Software Certification	3h 24m	Beginner	1 Year
Inbound Marketing Certification	4h 54m	Beginner	2 Years
Content Marketing Certification	7h 24m	Beginner	2 Years
Inbound Certification	2h 02m	Beginner	2 Years
Social Media Marketing Certification	4h 05m	Beginner	2 Years
Digital Advertising Certification	2h 59m	Beginner	TBA
Digital Marketing Certification	4h 27m	Beginner	1 Year
Revenue Operation (RevOps) Certification	6h 17m	Intermediate	TBA
Inbound Marketing Optimization	3h 24m	Intermediate	1 Year
Contextual Marketing Certification	1h 18m	Beginner	1 Year
Email Marketing Certification	3h 18m	Beginner	2 Years
Sales Enablement Certification	4h 42m	Intermediate	1 Year
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Certification	2h 47m	Beginner	1 Year
HubSpot Reporting Certification	3h 21m	Beginner	TBA
Inbound Sales Certification	3h 12m	Beginner	2 Years
HubSpot CMS For Marketers Certification	2h 03m	Beginner	1 Year

Semrush Academy Certifications

Certification	Time	Difficulty	Expires
Semrush SEO Toolkit Exam	3h	Beginner	1 Year
SEO Toolkit Exam for Advanced Semrush Users	30m	Advanced	1 Year
SEO Fundamentals Exam	4h	Beginner	1 Year
Keyword Research Exam	1h	Beginner	1 Year
Backlink Management Exam	1h	Beginner	1 Year
Mobile SEO Exam	1h	Beginner	1 Year
Local SEO Exam	1h	Beginner	1 Year
Semrush Site Audit Exam	1h	Intermediate	1 Year
Technical SEO Exam	5h	Intermediate	1 Year
Semrush Content Marketing Toolkit Exam	3h	Intermediate	1 Year
Content Marketing Fundamentals Exam	2h	Beginner	1 Year
Content-Led SEO Exam	4h	Intermediate	1 Year
Mastering Digital PR Exam	3h	Intermediate	1 Year
Semrush SEO Crash Course Exam	1h	Beginner	1 Year
Advanced Content Marketing Exam	3h	Advanced	1 Year
Building a Social Listening Program Exam	2h	Beginner	1 Year
Semrush Advertising Toolkit Exam	2h	Beginner	1 Year
PPC Fundamentals Exam	5h	Beginner	1 Year
PPC Automation Exam	1h	Intermediate	1 Year
Semrush Social Media Toolkit Exam	30m	Beginner	1 Year
SMM Fundamentals Exam	4h	Beginner	1 Year
Competitor Analysis with Semrush Exam	1h	Intermediate	1 Year
Advanced Competitive Research Exam	1h	Advanced	1 Year
Digital Marketing for SMBs Certification	1h	Beginner	1 Year

Ahrefs Academy Certifications

Certification	Time	Difficulty	Expires
Ahrefs’ Certification Course (Beta)	7h 04m	Beginner	TBC

Note: Ahrefs’ certification course is currently in beta. All of the course materials are available to Ahrefs users, and a certification exam will be added in the future.

Product School Certifications

Certification	Time	Difficulty	Expires
Product Analytics Micro-Certification (PAC)™	1h 45m	Intermediate	TBC
Product-Led Growth Micro-Certification (PLGC)™️	2h	Intermediate	TBC

Twitter Flight School Certifications

Certification	Difficulty	Expires
Ads Manager Fundamentals Badge	Beginner	1 Year
Cross-Border Advertising Badge	Intermediate	1 Year
Get Started On Twitter Badge	Beginner	1 Year
Launch and Connect Badge	Advanced	1 Year
Performance Fundamentals Badge	Advanced	1 Year
#TwitterFlightSchool Video Badge	Advanced	1 Year
Twitter for Creatives Badge	Intermediate	1 Year

LinkedIn Marketing Labs Certifications

Certification	Time	Difficulty	Expires
LinkedIn Marketing Solutions Fundamentals Certification	4h	Beginner	1 Year
LinkedIn Marketing Strategy Certification	2h 30m	Intermediate	2 Years
LinkedIn Content and Creative Design Certification	2h 20m	Beginner	2 Years

YouTube Marketing Free Certificates

Certification	Time	Difficulty	Expires
YouTube Asset Monetization	5h 36m	Advanced	1 Year
YouTube Music Rights Management Certification	4h	Advanced	1 Year
YouTube Music Certification	4h	Advanced	1 Year
YouTube Content Ownership	5h	Advanced	1 Year

Drift Certifications

Certification	Time	Difficulty	Expires
Conversational Marketing Certification	1h	Beginner	1 Year
Playbook Basics Certification	1h	Beginner	1 Year
Conversational Sales Certification	3h	Beginner	1 Year

Final Thoughts

While there are many free marketing certifications available online, it’s important to choose one that is reputable and will teach you the skills you need to succeed in the industry. I hope this article has helped you narrow down your options and find a course that is right for you. With the right certification, you’ll be on your way to an exciting and successful career in marketing!

Now I’d like to hear from you: What was your experience completing these certifications? Did they help you progress in your career? Or maybe there are other certifications that you’d like me to add and review?

Let me know by leaving a quick comment below right now.

20 Hottest eCommerce Trends for 2019

Thu, 12 Jul 2018 11:03:00 GMT

The changing landscape of eCommerce presents online retailers with new and exciting ways to drive innovative change within their eCommerce businesses. With global retail eCommerce sales expected to reach $6.6 trillion (AUD) by 2021, how can your business lead the pack? We’ve put together the following list to display 20 of the hottest eCommerce trends to pay attention to for 2019 and beyond. Hopefully, these will spark ideas and increase the conversion rate for your eCommerce business, whilst improving your customers’ online shopping experience.

Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality
Advanced Product Filtering
Automation
B2B
Chatbots
Delivery Options
Digitising Real World Experiences
Easier Checkouts
Mobile-first Commerce
Multi-channel Attribution
Multi-channel Messaging
Omni-channel eCommerce
Payment Options
Personalisation
Social Shopping
Subscription Services
User-generated Content
Video Content
Voice Commerce
Website Performance

Augmented Reality & Virtual Reality

Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) are blurring the lines between the physical and digital, by offering new ways to see our world. For online retailers, this is providing your customers with new ways to experience products outside of a physical store.

So what is the difference between augmented and virtual reality? Augmented reality refers to technology that superimposes a computer-generated image on a user’s view of the world, creating a composite view.

Credit: IKEA Place

As augmented reality offers brands a way to enhance their customer’s experience in the purchase consideration phase. A 2016 study found 71% of shoppers said they would shop at a retailer more often if they offered augmented reality. IKEA’s Place app lets you virtually ‘place’ furniture in your space. These products are true to size, helping consumers make better choices.

Virtual reality is a computer-generated simulation of a 3D image or environment. Users are immersed in this digital world and can usually interact with it.

Credit: Samsung Gear VR

Virtual reality experiences allow customers to see products or activities in realistic settings. We’ve already started seeing this with travel companies who offer VR 360-degree tour ‘taster’ experiences for customers. Best Western is one such company who is using VR to give customers an inside look to their properties.

How can your brand use these technologies in 2019 to connect with customers?

Advanced Product Filtering

Implementing advanced product filtering allows your customers to find exactly what they need faster, with more options when searching. Filter attributes such as size, colour, material, price etc. help your users narrow their search. Advanced product filtering should hold up against 4 benchmarks of performance.

Available filters: how many filters are provided?
Filter logic: does the filter order flow naturally for the user?
Filter interface: are the filters clear and easy to select/sort?
Applied filters: do the filters work together, not against each other?

Credit: The Iconic

Using Australian eCommerce website, The Iconic as an example – we can see they provide a wide range of filters, the logic follows, the interface works well and users can easily combine filters.

For instance, I chose the following:

Credit: The Iconic

If I want to, I can get even more specific:

Credit: The Iconic

With endless options across the web, it’s important to provide your customers with ways to filter products, so they don’t look elsewhere. Thankfully, there have been great advances in eCommerce search with companies such as Algoia, Celebros and InstaSearch+ using natural language processing and machine learning to show highly relevant search results.

In 2019, help your customers find what they want/need. Advanced product filters can be the difference between your customer finding products on your site – as opposed to your competitor’s.

Automation

The power of automation is being seen across many industries and eCommerce is no exception. In fact, the eCommerce shopping experience has possibly the most to gain from automation.

Automation in this context refers to the creation and application of technology to streamline a number of processes, such as sales, marketing, inventory management, production and delivery services.

With so many users operating in virtual stores with minimal staffing, streamlined processes are key to a well-oiled eCommerce machine. From the very first interaction to the last, implementing automation can improve your customer experience, increase your conversion rate and free-up hours spent on manual tasks.

Credit: Shopify Plus

Shopify Plus has a solid automation product with Shopify Flow, and these are some of the things you can do with it:

Preload new products and publish them to your store, social media, apps, and sales channels simultaneously
Identify, tag, and segment customers who buy from specific sales channels, such as Amazon, Facebook, Pinterest, and more
Unpublish out-of-stock products and send a Slack message or email to your marketing team so they can pause advertising

Credit: Shopify Plus

For those that don’t use Shopify Plus, there are plenty of platform agnostic eCommerce automation solutions out there such as Drip and Klaviyo. For larger companies, dotmailer is a sound choice – it offers end to end marketing automation tailored to eCommerce users. All of these automation tools offer ways to track customer lifecycle journeys and send the right messaging at the right time.

Credit: Klaviyo

For 2019, think about how automation can work for your brand, whether that’s implementing a large-scale solution like Shopify Flow or dotmailer, or trying something more scalable like Drip or Klaviyo.

B2B

In 2017, eCommerce B2B sales dwarfed B2C, by over $5 trillion (USD). Global B2B eCommerce revenue is expected to reach $6.7 trillion (USD) by 2020.

An interesting insight is that nearly half of B2B buyers are millennials and ignoring this market would be a massive mistake. In 2019, think about the channels your business customers are on and how best to reach them.

Credit: Alibaba

If you operate a B2B business and your eCommerce offering is undeveloped, now is the time to develop your strategy. Alibaba is a great example of B2B eCommerce done well.

This is because of a few key reasons:

It never competes with the customer
It focuses on the customer’s needs
It offers scalability

The main takeaway for B2B eCommerce in 2019 is to treat your business customers as individuals.

Chatbots

Chatbots have popped up across the web, with no sign of slowing down. A chatbot is simply a computer program designed to talk to users. As Artificial Intelligence (AI) driven online shopping empowers their understanding, we’ll be able to use chatbots with greater efficacy.

The applications for online retailers are vast, from basic customer support to personalised sales interactions. Chatbots aren’t depersonalising human interaction, they’re streamlining customer journeys by providing the right information and connecting customers to the best people. According to a 2016 Oracle report, 80% of respondents said they already used, or plan to use chatbots by 2020.

Retailers are using chatbots to power customer service interactions. H&M developed a chatbot to operate as a personal shopper assistant, providing style recommendations to users. Sephora also created a chatbot for KIK which helps users find beauty products and gives out makeup and style advice.

Credit: Sephora, KIK

2019 will bring with it streamlined communication with consumers. Consider how a chatbot may help save you and your customer’s time.

Delivery Options

There are more ways than ever for brands to send products and for customers to receive them. Traditional delivery efforts are still used, you can still have parcels delivered directly to your door but even that is quicker than ever, with many companies now offering same-day delivery or even 2-hour delivery in metro areas.

Speed and efficiency are the key drivers for online and cross-channel purchases for the fifth year in a row. With 44% of consumers have used some kind of same-day delivery service in the past year, it’s no surprise that brands are feeling pressure to optimise their supply chain.

Beyond the direct to door method, customers are looking for greater convenience. Online retailers are investing in new ways to make delivery easier for customers. For example, Amazon has started trialling drones in England to deliver packages.

Credit: Amazon

In Australia, postal lockers are popping up in Woolies and why not get your eBay purchases delivered there too? Additionally, Australia Post recently announced a new subscription-based service called Shipster that allows customers to pay a flat fee of $6.95 (AUD) a month and get free shipping from over 60 Australian retailers.

Credit: Shipster by Australia Post

With more ways than ever to send and receive packages, start thinking about how your online business could improve its delivery process for 2019.

Digitising Real World Experiences

Merge the digital world with the physical world. By including interactive digital experiences in-store you can create a sense of wonder for customers. Amazon is one of the companies who executed this, with their concept store, Amazon Go.

Credit: Amazon Go

Imagine a grocery store with no checkout, you simply take the products you want and leave. Amazon then charges your account. Another example is Walmart who have implemented “Scan & Go” technology that enables customers to scan products as they put them in their carts.

Additionally, customers at Tesla Motors’ Toronto (Canada) store, can configure their own Tesla car on a large touchscreen, then preview it on an 85-inch video wall in the back of the store.

Credit: Tesla Motors

A 2018 report found that on average 38% of people, and 51% of millennials would find a physical store visit more exciting if the retailer used technology. In 2019 we’ll see more brands using technology in store to keep visitors engaged.

Easier Checkouts

Providing an easy checkout experience is no longer an option, brands must make this process as simple as possible. Your customers will go to competitors that give them an easier purchase path.

Cart abandonment rate sat at around 79% in 2017. A study in 2017 found that the most common reason for cart abandonment is the extra costs, however most of the other top reasons directly related to the actual checkout experience. 37% said that the site wanted them to create an account and 28% said that the checkout process was too long/complicated.

So what can your brand do to provide an easier checkout experience? Here are a few suggestions:

One page checkout
Autofill fields
Use appropriate input fields
Don’t force registration
Allow users to scan credit cards with image recognition software

Below is a great example from The Iconic who use an easy to understand, one-page checkout:

Credit: The Iconic

If you feel that your checkout process is as good as it can be, but you’re still losing sales it may be time to invest in a UX specialist or team. Having an expert with fresh eyes can help your brand increase conversions.

In 2019, think about how you can make your customer’s checkout experience easier.

Mobile-first Commerce

As more people shop on the go, it will become essential to adopt a mobile-first strategy.
When we say mobile-first, we mean considering mobile design and implementation at the initial stage of website development. It can’t be an afterthought or something to do after you build out the desktop version.

Forrester predicts that by 2022, smartphones will account for $175.4 billion (USD) in retail sales. To put that into perspective, 2012 saw U.S. consumers spend $7.8 billion (USD) on retail sales. That’s a predicted increase of 2148%!

Mobile-first doesn’t have to be daunting, as a first step, review your mobile checkout process to ensure it’s user-friendly. For those looking to go a step further, consider Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), a framework that enables you to create super fast website pages across mobile devices. The main benefit of AMP is that it increases conversions by keeping your customers engaged as they move through your website.

WompMobile, in collaboration with Google, analysed their eCommerce clients and found that clients which used AMP pages increased conversion rates by 105%, decreased bounce rates by 31% and increased click-through rate from search engines by 29%. Those are some pretty impressive stats to think about for 2019.

Multi-channel Attribution

As the lines blur between the digital and physical world, multi-channel attribution will be more important than ever. This refers to understanding which marketing channels and campaigns are contributing the most towards driving visitors, and ultimately sales.

Knowing your customers’ touch points before the point of sale will better inform your brand’s strategy and budget. A 2017 study found that 60% of marketers now combine offline and online attribution, up from 45% in 2016.

For a beginner’s look into online attribution, Google Analytics offers attribution modelling to determine the relative value of different digital channels for conversions and ROI. For a more advanced look at attribution, you could use software like Bizible, or Looker. Discover which channels are causing blockers or driving conversions.

Credit: Google Analytics Solutions

Offline attribution can be a little trickier, however, one trick is to create campaign-specific landing pages, dedicated to driving traffic from the real world. By using custom urls or QR codes, you can track if customers are coming from offline or online.

In 2019, combine your offline and online attribution data to see what channels work best and which ones needs work. It can take a little bit of time, but there have never been more ways to track users over time.

Multi-channel Messaging

Users are on more channels than ever before and it’s important to reach them at the right time. Multi-channel messaging allows for this. Basically, this refers to having the regular customer outreach across all active channels.

Many companies still prioritise one channel communication over multiple, however, a recent study found that customers who received outreach in two or more channels, had levels of engagement 166% higher than the single-channel rate. So what does a multi-channel message strategy look like? Think about using email, mobile push notifications, SMS (text messages), and in-app messages in tandem. With each of these channels, you can use customer segments and analytics data to personalise the message and ensure that it is relevant to the recipient.

Australian ready-made meal delivery service, Youfoodz who used multi-channel messaging as one part of their strategy for grow +3,846% over 14 months.

Credit: Youfoodz

When asked to rate the effect multi-channel marketing had on their business, 77% of marketers indicated that multi-channel marketing has a ‘major impact’ on ‘increasing conversions’.

In 2019, multi-channel messaging will be essential to stand out from your competitors

Omni-channel eCommerce

Reach customers at more touch points with an omnichannel strategy. Omni-channel is a multi-channel approach to sales and marketing that aims to provide customers with a seamless shopping experience no matter where they. From mobile commerce to brick and mortar stores, your customer’s purchase path should be as painless as possible.

We know that eCommerce sales are growing, however, people are still shopping in stores. 51% think shopping online is best, while 49% prefer shopping in-store.

Here’s the interesting thing: although there’s a 50/50 split with shopping preference, when it comes to actual spend, those surveyed spent 64% of their shopping budget in store, and only 36% online.

Create convenient purchase journeys for customers who research online, purchase offline (ROPO). Do this by integrating their physical and digital store experiences.

Possibly the most widely-adopted example of omni-channel eCommerce is click and collect, whereby brands allow customers to purchase something online and then pick it up in a store that’s close to them. In Australia, 42% of retailers offer click and collect, with more expected to follow.

In 2019, avoid lost sales by considering how your customers interact with all of your channels.

Payment Options

Currently, there are a plethora of online payment methods available. Cryptocurrency (Bitcoin), digital wallets (Apple Pay, Google Pay or Samsung Pay) and instant layby (Afterpay or ZipPay) are some of these options.

Overstock has been selling goods for Cryptocurrency since 2014 and is one of the most well-known companies doing so. Users make an account and can link their coinbase wallet or bitcoin address to make a purchase.

Credit: Overstock

Digital wallets such as Google Pay, Apple Pay, Paypal etc. are an electronic device or online service that allows an individual to make electronic transactions. They provide a safe way for users to securely store sensitive credit card info online, removing the hassle of having to bring cards out every time they want to make a purchase. The Washington Post reported that 70% of people believe that mobile payments will overtake cash and cards by 2030.

Credit: Apple Pay, Google Pay, Samsung Pay

Instant layby options like Afterpay and ZipPay have arguably taken retail by storm, and eCommerce has surely felt the effect. These solutions allow customers to make a purchase with a deposit, sometimes without. They can have the product instantly, without waiting until the item is paid off.

Credit: Kogan

The rise of new forms of payment is to meet the consumer’s need for a more frictionless checkout experience. Retailers that force buyers to fill out long forms fail to understand that a convenient and fast payment method can increase conversions by more than 20%. Digital wallets alone can mean 3X mobile cart conversion.

To stay competitive, streamline and improve ways for your customers to pay in 2019.

Personalisation

Customers expect personal experiences when shopping. Brands like Amazon and The Iconic are good examples of how eCommerce can get personal. Personalisation for eCommerce broadly refers to all the ways online businesses personally target and appeal to customers.

Amazon.com can attribute 35% of their revenue to the product recommendations engine.

Credit: Amazon

The Iconic have emulated tech companies and even have a dedicated personalisation team for different departments. By 2020, personalisation technology that responds to customer intent could lead to more than a 15% increase in eCommerce profits for brands.

As your customers increasingly expect personal experiences, they also want a role in creating products that better reflect their identity. Nike is an example of how companies can offer a customized service by providing product personalisation with NIKEiD.

Credit: Nike

AI will drive how your brand targets and tracks customers to deliver personal experiences. In 2019, we’ll see an increase in machine learning algorithms working to show customers tailored landing pages, content and ads.

Increasingly, people are shopping on social media platforms. I’m sure if you’re on Facebook or Instagram, you’ve seen ads in your feed displaying various products and/or services.

Social shopping extends beyond advertising with new features on social channels added regularly. In March 2018, Instagram launched a new feature which allows brands to tag up to 5 products in a post. The tags display product information like price and a link to purchase.

Instagram isn’t the only platform for engaging and ‘easy-to-buy’ posts. Pinterest is another social platform that provides brands with a number of ways to share their products. Its point of difference is visual search. Opposed to Facebook and Instagram infeed ads, Pinterest users are actively looking for what they want.

Here are the types of pins to use:

Promoted pins display as normal pins, the only exception is you pay to have more people see your pins.
Rich product pins include real-time pricing, availability and where to buy info.
Buyable pins let people buy your products without ever leaving Pinterest.

Ultimately, 61% of ‘Pinners’ have made a purchase after seeing business content on Pinterest.

If you’re looking to reach a younger demographic, try Snapchat – their brand-friendly Lens feature allows companies to create promoted filters. Users can shop directly from the app and Snapchat are calling it “shoppable AR”, a combination of augmented reality and shopping.

Earlier this year, Snapchat showcased its eCommerce capabilities with a slam dunk. Nike, in partnership with Shopify and Darkstore, sold out limited edition Air Jordan III Tinkers in 23 minutes. Users at an NBA after party scanned special Snapcodes which brought up the in-app shopping for the Air Jordans, once purchased, they received the shoes that same night.

Credit: Snapchat, Nike

In 2019, think about creative ways you can use social platforms to enhance your eCommerce presence.

Subscription Services

The Subscription business model isn’t new, magazines and newspapers have been doing it for years, however increasingly, eCommerce is using this method to differentiate their offering.

Subscription services offer convenience and peace of mind for consumers. They know that their product will be there when they need it and it makes budgeting easier. For brands, you’ll be able to predict revenue, reduce churn and an ability to scale up or down as suites.

Birchbox is a cosmetics ‘beauty box’ subscription that provides people with a monthly box filled with 5 personalised samples for users. They offer an easy to follow subscription model and keep growing, 2017 saw the company ship 1.5 million beauty boxes with a 63% increase in subscribers.

Credit: Birchbox

Another example of a subscription service that does things differently is the Dollar Shave Club, which offers a simplistic and stylistic approach to men’s grooming.

Credit: Dollar Shave Club

The founder, Michael Dubin saw an opportunity in the market for men’s razors. He presented a fun and casual approach to grooming, in stark contrast to companies like Gillette who showed a serious, hyper-masculine, high-tech angle.

Subscription eCommerce sales totalled more than $2.6 billion (USD) in 2016, in 2011 it was worth $57 million (USD), that’s a 4,461% increase in sales.

If you’ve thought about a subscription-based approach to product distribution, 2019 may be the year to start.

User-generated Content

The rise of user-generated content (UGC) is enabling brands to be lead by their communities. If you’ve not heard of User Generated Content, it refers to any content that is created by users. Examples of this could be any media (videos, images, etc.) that a customer/fan/follower has created in relation to your brand.

Many cosmetics and lifestyle brands have realised the power of UGC and you only have to hop on Instagram or YouTube to see examples of this.

Credit: Mecca

Brands like Mecca will encourage their followers to share makeup looks and then ‘regram’ their followers’ posts. These have usually been hashtagged with a custom hashtag and/or the brand has been tagged in the image.

This active engagement results in a loyal customer following and fantastic word of mouth marketing. PWC recently found that social networks are the number one choice of online media, that survey respondents used to find inspiration for their purchases.

It’s not just social networks your brand can leverage, with a 20-30% increase in conversion rate when UGC is shown at the moment of purchase.

If you’re not already involving your customers, now is the perfect time to start in time for 2019.

Video Content

Video has taken the internet by storm, with 80% of all web traffic predicted to be video by 2019.

User’s appetite for video content is insatiable and brands should create videos to cater to this. Brands can use video in a number of ways, brand films, animation videos, educational videos, product videos, testimonials, FAQ videos. The main benefit of using video is that your customers will be more engaged and more receptive to the message.

In the realm of eCommerce, brands that provide product videos increase conversions and reduce product return rates. This makes sense as users are able to preview products more accurately. They can see the item being used/worn and can picture it in their own lives.

Asos have done this really well, most of their products have a video to showcase them.

Credit: Asos

If you’re wanting to take it a step further, you can do what Society6 did for their unique coffee mugs.

Credit: Society6

In 2019, use video to connect with your customers. Think outside the box and brainstorm ways to creatively highlight your product or service.

Voice Commerce

The rise of voice technology has led to new ways users search and interact with devices. Naturally, voice is now being used to search and purchase products. ‘Voice commerce’ is the term given to these transactions that occur through voice.

A 2017 survey found that 41% of people who own devices like the Amazon Echo and Google Home plan to purchase something with voice technology in the future. OC&C Strategy Consultants estimates that by 2020, voice commerce will total $40 billion sales in the U.S. alone.

It’s no wonder that so many people are considering buying something though voice, as it provides much less friction than most check out experiences. Users can simply ask to purchase something.

Google and eBay have partnered up to allow users to talk to eBay through the Google Assistant app. I tried it and this is what it looked like:

Credit: eBay, Google Assistant

It was quick, and fun to use. eBay even had their own custom Australian male voice that responded to me.

In 2019, voice will only increase in adoption rate, it’s no longer a thing of the future, so kick start your voice commerce efforts now to see long-term results.

Website Performance

Optimising your website performance is essential, and as users demand better online experiences this will only increase in importance over time.

A Google poll revealed that the number 1 frustration users had when browsing on their mobile device was slow load time, with 60% expecting a page to load in 3 seconds and a whopping 75% abandoning after 5 seconds.

79% of shoppers who are dissatisfied with website performance are less likely to buy from the same site again. Even a 1-second delay in page response can lead to a 7% reduction in conversion rate.

Increasing your site speed improves your customers’ experience and your bottom line. On top of this, it’ll also help SEO, with Google’s ranking algorithm favouring optimised websites.

Credit: Google PageSpeed Insights, Kogan

A few quick tips would be to use images sparingly or decrease the number of JavaScript carousels. For more information, check out this article.

In 2019, make sure your website is as fast as it can be and that it works well across any device or browser.

Originally published at www.4mation.com.au on July 12, 2018.

Rank Your YouTube Videos On Google Voice Search

Thu, 08 Feb 2018 10:39:51 GMT

The Google Assistant-powered Google Home is a great device with lots of handy features. Within a month of purchasing one, I was using it at least once a day. Although she was hesitant at the beginning, my fiancée also began to enjoy using it. Soon, Google Home was part of the furniture and our day-to-day lives.

Google Home can do a lot of things from reading calendars, checking the weather and playing music. By combining it with a Google Chromecast, you can play YouTube videos on your TV with one command. After working out we could ask Google Home to play YouTube videos on the TV, our lives became much lazier.

My fiancée contributes to the 41% of women who watch beauty videos on YouTube or dedicated blogs. (According to a study by Pixability, this industry was worth over $700 million monthly worldwide views in 2015.) After watching her having to refine her searches three or four times, it got me thinking.

Given, 50% of all searches will be voice searches by 2020. What factors determine which video the Google Assistant will pick? How do Youtubers optimise their videos to maximise views? In this guide, I’ll teach you how to optimise your YouTube videos for voice search.

Optimise Your Youtube Channel Name

Your audience can ask Google Assistant to play videos by TV show / YouTube Channel / Artist. For example “Ok Google, Play TechCrunch videos”. YouTube will then begin playing Uploads from TechCrunch’s Channel.

Choosing a good channel name is the easiest way to increase the chances of your videos playing. But how? Let’s look at ways you can optimise your channel name.

Align With Your Channel With Your Brand

Is your brand a household name? Have you spent a lot of time and money building brand awareness? Does your audience seek out your brand name for its content?

If you’ve answered ‘yes’ to one of the above, then you should consider using your brand name for your channel. This is common as it helps to build brand awareness on and off YouTube.

Make Your Channel Its Own Brand

Another approach to naming your channel is for it to become its own brand. This method has proven success when:

Your parent brand is too broad
You have many different target audiences
Your audience would struggle to associate your brand with content creation
Your audience wouldn’t respond positively to your brand creating content

Remember the goal of naming your channel is for it to remain in the memories of as many people as possible.

For example, let’s look at Tasty a BuzzFeed brand. Tasty produces recipe videos that usually go viral on YouTube and Social Media. This is due to their uniqueness and appeal to the young foodie audience.
“BuzzFeed Food” would have been a possible name for the channel, but it wouldn’t have the same impact. By separating the brands, BuzzFeed serves the most relevant content and ads to each audience.

Relate Your Channel Name to Your Content

Although this is not necessary, another way to get your channel played is relating its name to your content. Choose a name that relates to your category or niche. This helps your audience by explaining what content it will receive.

For instance, Tasty’s audience will associate the name with food, helping to memorise the brand.

Avoid Names That Are Already Taken or Close Matches

As with any brand name, make sure that your channel name isn’t taken by someone else or a close match. Similar brand names will limit your visibility, as the other established channel might cannibalise your traffic. Not to mention, brands may have a registered trademark for the name you are using. By using these names or close matches on a YouTube channel, you could face legal issues.

Use Keywords in Your YouTube Channel Name

On-page optimisation works the same on YouTube as it does on any website. By using a keyword near the start of your title it will help you rank for searches containing that keyword. Voice searches are another way to search with this algorithm.

Try “Channel Name: Keyword” instead of “Channel Name”. Using a keyword containing your service, product or industry explains your brand to YouTube when ranking you for a search. However, make sure that adding this keyword provides real value to your channel name, rather than making it look spammy.

Optimise Your Video Title

Choosing the right title for your video can help you get your videos played by new audiences. Google Assistant users can say “Ok Google, Play …. video”. Google Assistant will then look for a video close to that title.

Make Your Video Title Memorable

A large number of YouTube users will remember Psy’s “Gangnam Style” or “Charlie bit my finger – again !”. These great titles are still memorable to this day due to their virality. Which goes to show creating a memorable title can go a long way to getting a YouTube video found.

Create How-To & Tutorial Videos

Some of the most sought after videos on YouTube are educational, “How To” videos. A survey conducted by Google showed that 93% of millennials go to YouTube to learn how to do something.
But how do you know what content to create? You can find ideas in many ways:

Use Google Keyword Planner to find “How To” & “Tutorial” content
Look for questions on Reddit and Quora
Write down all the questions your customers ask on the phone or in email
Repurpose blog content into videos
Ask your audience!

After you find the right ideas, remember to use natural language when writing your title. For example “Ok Google, Play How To Open a Can Without a Can Opener” or “Ok Google, Play Blog Writing Tutorial”.

Create Tips, Hacks, Hints or D.I.Y Videos

Sharing knowledge is a great way to provide value to your viewers and present your business as an expert. How-to videos can help you share practical information that your viewers can use to complete a task.
Again, you must remember to keep the title natural for voice. Try using a title like “Google Home Tips” or “DIY Desk”.

Handle Objections with Testimonial or Review Videos

Your target audience is looking for information to decide whether to choose you. You can address these objections by sharing customer reviews or testimonials.

If you resell products you could create unbiased review or comparison videos. Consider a sales rep selling TVs. Customers come into the store and ask “Which TV is best for my budget?”. The sales rep then tells them all the different features and the customer decides what they need.
You can do the same thing with videos. Remember they are the same customers with the same questions. Try using a title like:

“Business Name Review”
“Product Name Unboxing”
“Product Testimonial”
“Product 1” vs “Product 2”

Optimise for a Keyword

Optimising for a keyword is another way for you to get your YouTube videos played through voice search, much like text search.
You can apply the same ranking tactics as the ones for text search. However, voice keywords can be very different. For instance, a user might use the keyword “yoga” when typing their search, while their voice search query may sound something like “Ok Google, Play yoga videos”.

Use Conversational Keywords

With voice search, keywords are what some SEOs refer to as long-tail+. The idea behind “plus” is to refer to conversational phrases that are added when optimising for conversational voice search.

This means your YouTube keyword strategy needs to be more conversational in nature and mimic how real people talk and ask questions verbally. When deciding on a keyword, use the “Ok Google, Play” keyword “videos” format and ask yourself whether it sounds natural.

Use Channel Keyword Tags

Within the Creator Studio -> Channel -> Advanced Settings you’ll find Channel keywords. Here you can add up to 100 characters for appealing tags to give scope to your channel’s metadata.

By providing your keywords, you help both YouTube and Google rank and index your video content. This will allow them to show the right information to the right users. But remember: keep your keywords relevant and make sure they add value to your channel while avoiding keyword stuffing.

Publish Longer Videos

For YouTube algorithms, the most important ranking factor is watch time. Why? The longer users stay on YouTube, the more opportunity the platform has to serve ads to those users. Another important aspect to this is “audience retention”. This means you have provided enough value for your users for them to watch the whole video.

Don’t just make a YouTube video longer than your competitor’s. You need to provide more value by giving in-depth information. A key aspect of this is strategically spacing out value information throughout the duration of the video. Rather than just quickly explaining a topic, take the opportunity to dive deeper into the subject.

Focus on the First 15 Seconds

You’re probably giving viewers a big warm welcome at the start of your video. That’s great, but how does your audience know that they are going to get value. Most of the successful YouTube channels ascertain that focusing on the first 15 secs is crucial to getting the viewer to watch the whole video.

Why? Viewers will decide within that first 15 seconds whether your video is the real deal. Once you’ve got their buy-in, your video will naturally accrue greater watch time, improving your ranking signals.

How? YouTube marketing expert Sunny Lenarduzzi has a great method called H.O.T you can use for this. It is aimed at optimising the first 15 seconds of your video. Here’s how it works:

Hooked: Straight away tell your audience what they are going to get. This ensures them that they are on the right video.
Outcome: Guarantee what your audience is going to get out of the video.
Testimonial: Use some proof to show you can achieve what you’re teaching them. This might be something like showing the finished product of a D.I.Y.

Say Your Keywords in the Video

Google’s algorithm is now able to consider a wider variety of content types. Formerly un-crawlable, videos, images and transcriptions can now be crawled and analysed by bots. Physically saying your main keywords and other semantically related keywords can impact your ranking signals, especially in videos that include subtitles and annotations.

Create Playlists That Enhance Watch Time

Creating playlists is especially important with Voice search as a viewer is less likely to want to interact with Google Assistant again. Playlists can help boost your watch time with no additional interaction needed from the viewer.

With playlists, once a video ends, YouTube automatically moves the user to the next video. This means that your users’ attention is moved from one video to another, increasing your channel’s watch time. It’s a great opportunity to help users discover more of your content.

Ask! Your Users to Engage

User engagement is a huge ranking signal on YouTube. Getting your users to share, like and comment on your videos makes your content seem relevant and interesting to the eyes of YouTube.

Watch any of the most popular YouTube channels you will hear them all say “If you liked this video like and subscribe below”. You will probably also hear them ask for viewers to “comment the answer to a question” below. These two relatively easy tricks help engage your audience, break the fourth wall and make human connections.

Build a Community

Don’t just ask for your audience to like and comment: be part of the conversation. Thank your users, answer their questions and provide advice. Why stop at your own channel and audience? Look for other channels in your niche that create great content and be a part of that conversation as well.

Create a Buzz in the First 24 Hours

The 24 hours that follow the publication of your video are the most vital to YouTube when deciding where to rank your video. When you launch your new video, make sure to share your video with as many people as possible. Social Media is a great way to drive viewers to your videos and help your video go viral. You can also reach out to other bloggers and YouTubers who may find your video useful.

What Should You Remember?

Through this article, I have given you some actionable ideas to optimise your videos for voice search and the Google Assistant. The key takeaway I want to leave you with is asking yourself: “What and how would my audience ask Google?”

Fund Your Startup Faster by Prototyping Your Idea

Sat, 20 Jan 2018 05:35:00 GMT

So you think you’ve discovered the next Uber or AirBnB and now you have to build it.

In today’s market, a great idea is not enough. How can you be sure your concept works and people will pay for it? As 75% of venture-backed startups fail, you need to do your research. You need a way to validate your idea to investors, prove that there’s a market for it and assess its monetary value.
Prototyping helps to deliver a working model of your innovation to bring it to life. It gives you a tangible way to project its potential and help stakeholders understand it’s worth.

Prove That It Works

This is the number one risk to the success of your startup. Your idea should not exist in your mind alone. A working prototype will work as proof if your idea will or won’t work. It is an interactive, working model of the end product. Building a prototype gives you the ability to communicate your idea easier. You can see how it functions, visualise the design and layout, and discover errors early on. This is the first step to help achieve buy-in and attract investors.

Fix-It If It Doesn’t

But maybe your idea hasn’t gone to plan. Prototyping allows you to identify problems early on before making a massive investment. Testing the prototype helps to trigger new ideas to make your product even better. Alternatively, your idea might need to pivot in another direction that you hadn’t originally considered.

Take Twitter for example. One of the Tech Industries most successful pivots. It started off as Odeo, a podcasting company. Jack Dorsey, one of Odeo’s engineers, had developed a messaging service that allowed instant updates. The company founder gave back $5 million in seed capital he had raised to his investors, and Twttr (vowels were added later) was started.

The most important part of this stage is to drill deep into the problem you are solving and if you’re solving that problem in a way that appeals to your target audience.

Show People Want to Pay for It

Now that your prototype is built it is time to test. Testing is the most important step in the prototyping process as it will help you to prove whether:

It is something your target market needs, and;
It is something your target market will pay for.

Why is this step so important? Take a look at this article by Fortune. They report the “top reason” that startups fail is because “They make products that have no market need.”

At the end of the day, your audience will drive your decisions. Trial your prototype with users and potential customers to assess its value and use their feedback to refine it.

Prototype Everything

Evaluating your customers through prototyping has two main benefits. It is a low-risk way to validate your technology solution. It also speeds up your go-to-market timeline, delivering value to the market sooner. Prototyping can even be used as a great way to test your business model and value proposition.

Take Strategyzer and their Value Proposition Canvas. This is a perfect example of how to use basic prototyping to understand your customer needs. Their canvas uses sticky notes and brainstorming to understand what jobs your customer needs to be done, the pains you’re relieving and the gains you’re creating.
By doing this type of market research you can gauge the answers to the important questions such as:

Does it save them time, money or effort?
What challenges are they currently facing that your solution could relieve?
What needs are you satisfying or job are you helping them to complete?

Demonstrate It Is Marketable on Launch

Now you’ve got a good understanding of your market. Creating a working prototype has helped to prove that the answers to those questions were right and you have built a loyal audience. Your idea is now generating interest and your investors are keen to see how it will hit the ground running.
They will be impressed that you’ve developed a marketable strategy from the in-depth research you’ve done on your target audience. You’ll also be able to show that you can get your solution to the market quicker.

Never Stop Prototyping

Technology is the fastest-changing industry there is. It is why innovating and testing your ideas is so important. In the tech industry, it has become almost the standard to focus on creating a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to start delivering value to your customer sooner.
Prototyping new ideas mean you’re able to stay ahead of your competition and create more value for your customers. This is because you’re listening to what they want and not wasting time building features or products that they don’t.
The Lean Startup methodology provides an approach to creating and managing startups to get the desired product to customers’ hands faster. By using a rapid prototyping model the Lean Startup answers the questions:

“Should this product be built?” and;
“Can we build a sustainable business around this set of products and services?

This experiment is more than just theoretical inquiry; it is the first product. The main goal of this methodology is that by the time the product is ready to be widely distributed, it will already have established customers.
If you’re not convinced by the idea of rapid prototyping take the example of Dropbox. By applying the Lean Startup principles, Dropbox went from 100,000 registered users to over 4,000,000 in just 15 months.