As part of our ongoing efforts to
simplify the Google Search results page, we will be phasing out support for a few
structured data features in
Search. We regularly evaluate the usefulness of Search features, both for users and website owners.
Read more at Read More
HTML links (also called hyperlinks) are some of the most important functions of the internet. Google literally relies on them to find, crawl, index, and rank pages.
Links have a lot of power, both in terms of user experience and your site’s SEO.
So, understanding how to code HTML links properly is key if you want to create links that help (not hinder) your website’s performance.
You create an HTML link using the anchor element: .
You then use attributes and values to change how the link functions.
Here’s what the complete HTML code for a clickable link looks like:
<a href="https://example.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Visit Example.com for more info.</a>
Let’s break that down:
I’ll talk more about the role these elements play later in this guide. For now, let’s look at some of the most common ways to add HTML links.
The basic method of adding links with HTML code involves placing the URL you want to link to within a link anchor tag. Just like the example above.
But here are a few of the most common use cases for adding links in HTML:
Text links are the most common type of hyperlink you’ll create. You can use them to link to other pages on your site (internal links) or on other sites (external links).
Here’s the standard implementation:
<a href="https://example.com">Visit our website</a>
This creates a basic text link that users can click to navigate to the specified URL.
You can enhance text links with additional attributes for specific use cases. For example, here’s how you would set a link to open in a new tab:
<a href="https://example.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Visit Example.com</a>
If it’s an affiliate link, you might use something like this:
<a href="https://example.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer sponsored">Visit Example.com</a>
(More on these attributes later.)
Images can serve as powerful, eye-catching links that often attract more attention than plain text.
The basic structure for an HTML image link wraps an <img> tag inside an anchor tag:
<a href="https://example.com"> <img src="logo.png" alt="Company Logo"> </a>
This transforms the entire image into a clickable link that navigates to the specified URL.
The “img src” attribute specifies the location of the image file. While the “alt” attribute specifies alternative text for the image.
For image links to be accessible and SEO-friendly, you should include descriptive alt text. Like this:
<a href="/product/camera"> <img src="camera.jpg" alt="Canon EOS R6 Mark II Camera"> </a>
The alt text serves two critical purposes:
You should only make your images clickable if they actually take the user somewhere useful. Like to the image’s source website.
It’s worth noting that for image links and a few of the other types below, you might implement them in different ways.
For example, here’s how we implement some image links here on Backlinko (using CSS classes):
But here’s an image link on The Spruce:
In this case, the image link is still contained within an <a> tag. But there are other elements (like <div>) and classes (like img-placeholder) as well.
How exactly you implement image links largely depends on your website setup. If you use WordPress, your theme and plugins will likely dictate how you code your image links.
Further reading: Image SEO: 15 Essential Optimization Tips
Email links use a special protocol that launches the user’s default email client. They’re perfect for making it easier for users to reach you.
Use the mailto: protocol to create email links:
<a href="mailto:contact@example.com">Email Us</a>
When a user clicks this link, it opens their default email program with the recipient field already populated.
You can enhance email links with additional parameters too. Like this:
<a href="mailto:sales@example.com?subject=Product%20Inquiry&body=I%27m%20interested%20in%20learning%20more">Email Sales Team</a>
This pre-fills the subject line with “Product Inquiry” and adds initial text to the email body that says “I’m interested in learning more.”
(Note that you need to encode spaces and special characters, like %20 for a space.)
Pro tip: Make it clear what will happen when a user clicks the link with descriptive anchor text. This way, they won’t be confused when their email client opens.
For phone numbers, use the tel: protocol:
<a href="tel:+15555555555">Call (555) 555-5555</a>
When a user taps this link on their mobile device, it opens the phone dialer with the number ready to call.
For international phone numbers, always include the country code with a plus sign:
<a href="tel:+442071234567">Call our London office: +44 20 7123 4567</a>
You can also use the “sms” value to open up a text message:
<a href="sms:+442071234567">Send us a text</a>
As with email links, be clear in your anchor text for phone and SMS links about what will happen when the user taps the link.
Jump links, also known as anchor links, help users navigate to specific sections within the same page. They’re especially useful for long-form content.
If your site uses a table of contents (like this site does), it works using jump links in this way.
The basic structure requires two parts:
For example, in our article on keyword mapping, which is a step-by-step list, we use jump links to make it easier for users to navigate.
First, we added “id” tags to the headings, like this:
<h3 id="add-keywords">3. Add the Keywords to Your Map</h3>
You don’t see this id attribute on the page, but it’s in the site’s code:
Then, in the second step of the list, which some users might not need to follow, we include a link to skip ahead to the third step (which has the id “add-keywords”).
The HTML link code looks like this:
<a href="#add-keywords">step 3</a>
And the link on the page looks like this:
When a user clicks the link, the browser will instantly scroll to the element with the matching id (in this case, step 3). It’ll also update the URL in the address bar:
Jump links are perfect for:
HTML links over buttons combine the functionality of an <a> tag with the appearance of a button.
They’re perfect for calls to action that need to stand out and attract clicks.
The key difference between a button-style link and a regular link is that you’ll typically code HTML button links with CSS:
<a href="yourdomain.com/signup" class="button-link">Get Started</a>
This HTML looks like a standard text link, but with CSS, you can transform it:
.button-link {
display: inline-block;
padding: 10px 20px;
background-color: #0066cc;
color: white;
text-decoration: none;
border-radius: 4px;
font-weight: bold;
text-align: center;
}
.button-link:hover {
background-color: #004080;
}
These styles create a rectangular button with:
For mobile users, make sure your button-style links are large enough to easily tap:
@media (max-width: 768px) {
.button-link {
padding: 12px 24px;
width: 100%;
margin-bottom: 10px;
}
}
It’s worth noting that in a lot of cases, you won’t need to code button links yourself. If you’re using a CMS like WordPress, for example, you might use button templates of some kind.
Or perhaps, your developer will use CSS classes to create buttons rather than using HTML link codes.
Download links let your users easily save files from your website to their devices.
The basic HTML for a download link uses the download attribute:
<a href="report.pdf" download>Download PDF Report</a>
For files that browsers typically display rather than download (like PDFs), the download attribute ensures they’re saved instead of opened.
Many browsers will download other file types by default, without the need for a separate download attribute. This is often true for things like Excel and Word documents.
Note: Sometimes your server configuration will dictate whether a file will open or download by default. If you’re not sure, speak to your developer.
There are a few HTML link attributes you should be aware of for your site’s SEO. These don’t create hyperlinks, but they do go inside an HTML link element in the <head> portion of your page’s code.
This element looks like <link> rather than <a>.
Canonical tags (technically attributes) tell search engines which version of a page is the “primary” one when you have similar or duplicate content across multiple URLs. They help prevent duplicate content issues that can hurt your SEO.
But it’s good practice to implement them on all of your pages.
You implement canonical tags using a <link> element in the <head> section of your HTML:
<head> <link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/original-page"> </head>
This effectively tells search engines: “This page is a copy or variation of the page at the specified URL. Please attribute all ranking signals to that URL instead.”
Canonicalization can help when you have URL parameters for tracking, filtering, or sorting (e.g., ?source=email or ?sort=price).
The hreflang HTML link attribute helps search engines understand the language and regional targeting of your pages. This helps them understand which version of your page to display to users in search results.
As with canonical tags, you implement it using link elements in the <head> section of your HTML:
<head> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us" href="https://example.com/en-us/page"> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="es" href="https://example.com/es/page"> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="fr" href="https://example.com/fr/page"> <link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default" href="https://example.com/"> </head>
These link elements tell search engines:
The hreflang attribute uses language codes (like “en” for English) and optional region codes (like “us” for the United States).
Hreflang tags are only an issue for sites with different language versions and an international presence. They can be tricky to get right, so for more detailed info, check out our dedicated guide to hreflang tags.
Following these best practices will ensure your links are effective, secure, and accessible to all users. And it’ll help improve your SEO too.
Here’s the correct syntax for an HTML link:
<a href="url">Anchor Text</a>
Here are a few syntax rules to remember:
Anchor text is the clickable text of your link. It’s the words users actually see and click on. It plays a crucial role in both user experience and SEO.
Good anchor text clearly tells users what to expect when they click a link. It also provided
Here’s an example of poor anchor text:
<a href="https://example.com/pricing">Click here</a>
And here’s an example of good, descriptive anchor text:
<a href="https://example.com/pricing">View our pricing plans</a>
The second example gives users (and search engines) clear information about where the link will take them.
When writing anchor text, follow these guidelines:
There’s also a “title” attribute you can add to links. But you generally don’t need this if you use descriptive anchor text.
In fact, using it can reduce readability and accessibility if it just repeats the anchor text. Screen readers usually won’t read it out, and users hovering over the link will see a tooltip that may just block other content on the screen. Plus, it won’t display on mobile devices at all.
So, unless you can meaningfully add important information about the link, don’t use the title attribute. And instead just make your anchor text descriptive.
ARIA (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) labels enhance accessibility by providing additional context for screen readers and other assistive technologies.
The aria-label attribute provides an accessible name for a link when the visible text isn’t descriptive enough, or for links over icons rather than text:
<a href="https://yourdomain.com/settings" aria-label="Go to settings"> <svg><!-- settings icon --></svg> </a>
In this example, a screen reader would announce “Go to settings” but the site would only visually display a settings icon.
The target attribute determines how your link opens when a user clicks on it.
The default link behavior opens the link in the same tab (i.e., you go from the current page to the linked page).
The default value is “_self” but you don’t need to specify that.
If you want to open the link in a new tab, use the “_blank” target value:
<a href="https://example.com" target="_blank">Example</a>
You used to need to add rel=“noopener” to links with a blank target value for security reasons. But you no longer need to do this. (More on noopener below.)
Opening your link in a new tab is particularly useful when:
Opinions vary on whether this is best for accessibility. Some believe this creates a disruptive user experience, especially on mobile and for those using assistive technologies (like screen readers).
For internal links that are part of the natural navigation flow, it’s usually best to stick with the default behavior (opening in the same tab).
Note: There used to be other target values (_parent and _top), but these are deprecated in HTML5.
The rel attribute defines the relationship between your current page and the page you’re linking to. It’s an important attribute that affects both security and SEO.
The default behavior is to not add any rel values. But here are a few of the most common ones:
You use the sponsored rel value when another brand has paid to have a link on your site.
For example, let’s say you have an affiliate link to a product you promote.
This is a form of paid or sponsored link, because you might earn money from purchases users make through that link. Google recommends you use the “sponsored” attribute for paid link placements:
<a href="https://example.com" rel="sponsored">Paid link</a>
Here’s an example of this on WireCutter, a popular product comparison website:
You would also use this attribute for links other companies have explicitly paid you to include on your site.
Use the user-generated content rel value on links in comments and forum posts. These are links you don’t necessarily control, and this tells Google that you don’t endorse them.
<a href="https://example.com" target="_blank" rel="ugc">External site you haven’t verified</a>
Use nofollow when none of the other rel values apply and you don’t want Google to associate your site with the one you’re linking to. Or when you don’t want Google to crawl the page you’re linking to.
<a href="https://example.com" rel="nofollow">Link to a site you don’t endorse</a>
Let’s say you’re not the one creating the links on your site so you can’t verify them before they go live. Maybe you have a team of writers, or you’re accepting guest posts.
But you know the links are not sponsored or in user-generated content. In this case, you’d use nofollow.
The “noopener” rel value tells your browser to go to the target link without giving the new location access to the page with the link.
If you’re using target=“_blank” then modern browsers will essentially treat it as if you have added noopener. But you can also use it on other links you don’t necessarily trust but aren’t using the _blank target value for. Like those you’re also adding nofollow to.
Using the “noreferrer” value hides the origin of any traffic sent through that link in the analytics of the site you’re linking to.
You can combine multiple rel values by separating them with spaces:
<a href="https://example.com" rel="noopener noreferrer sponsored">Affiliate link</a>
When creating an HTML link, you need to decide whether to use an absolute or relative URL in the href attribute. Each has specific use cases and advantages.
Absolute URLs include the complete web address, starting with the protocol:
<a href="https://example.com/products/item1">Product page</a>
Relative URLs are shorter and reference locations relative to the current page:
<a href="/products/item1">Product page</a>
Generally, I’d recommend you use absolute URLs in most cases.
Using relative URLs can speed up production if you’re working with lots of them. Plus, if you move pages or domains but keep the same URL structure, your internal URLs should all continue working without you having to change them all to the new domain.
But honestly, unless you’re planning a major website migration at the time you’re setting up your site (unlikely), you aren’t likely to foresee and then benefit from this relatively minor advantage.
You might want to use relative URLs when working with a staging site that’s on a different domain from the site you’re developing.
In this case, it can avoid you or your developers having to rewrite all the internal links when you push your site live.
You can manually check the code of an HTML link in your browser with the inspect tool. Just right-click over the link you want to check and select “Inspect” to open up the developer console:
This is handy for quickly verifying your attributes and rel values.
But what if you want to check your links at scale?
That’s where a tool like Semrush’s Site Audit comes in.
Just plug your domain in, let the audit run, and head to the “Issues” tab. Then type in “link” to highlight any issues with your site’s HTML links.
Go through and fix any issues to improve your site’s SEO and user experience.
Note: A free Semrush lets you audit up to 100 URLs. Or you can use this link to access a 14-day trial on a Semrush Pro subscription.
The post HTML Link Code: How to Create Hyperlinks on Your Site appeared first on Backlinko.
Read more at Read More
Member benefits, such as lower prices and earning loyalty points are a major factor considered by
shoppers when buying products online. Today we’re adding support for defining loyalty programs under
Organization structured data
combined with loyalty benefits under Product
structured data.
Read more at Read More
AI tools are everywhere — from chatbots that answer customer questions to language models that summarize everything from documentation to legal text. But if you’ve ever asked a model like ChatGPT to explain your site, your product, or your API, the results might not feel quite right. In fact, sometimes they’re way off. And no, that’s not your fault.
Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini are trained to understand a wide range of content. But when they try to interpret your website at runtime, that is, when someone is actively asking them a question, they run into a few core problems:
So, when you ask an AI tool to “explain what this company does” or “summarize this library API”, it often gets stuck. It either skips key context or grabs the wrong signals from cluttered markup.
It’s not bad intent; it’s a design limitation.
You’ve probably invested time and effort into search engine optimization. Maybe your robots.txt and sitemap.xml are in place. You’ve got meta tags, structured data, and clean internal links. Good, but LLMs don’t always work like Google.
Traditional SEO helps your site get found. However, it doesn’t guarantee that AI tools will understand what a human user would. That’s where a new proposal comes in.
A growing number of developers and AI researchers are adopting a lightweight, human-readable standard called llms.txt.
llms.txt is a plain Markdown file placed at the root of your site that provides language models with a summary of your project and direct links to clean, LLM-readable versions of important pages. It’s designed for inference-time use, helping AI tools quickly understand a site’s structure, purpose, and content without relying on cluttered HTML or metadata intended for search engines.
What it does:
Right now, no major LLM provider officially supports llms.txt. Tools like GPTBot (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), and Google’s AI crawlers don’t reference or follow it as part of their crawling behavior. Some companies like Anthropic publish llms.txt files themselves, but there’s no evidence that any crawler is actively using them in retrieval or training.
Still, it’s a low-effort, no-risk addition that helps prepare your site for a future where structured LLM access becomes more standardized. And LLM-facing tools, or even your own AI agents, can make use of it today.
You control the content and the structure. LLMs benefit from curated, LLM-aware context. And users asking questions about your site get better answers.
If you’re already using our Yoast SEO (free or Premium) plugin, generating a llms.txt file is easy. Just enable the feature in your settings, and the plugin will automatically create and serve a complete llms.txt file for your site. You can view it anytime at yourdomain.com/llms.txt.
Unlock powerful SEO insights with our Premium plugin, including advanced content features, AI optimization tools, and real-time data built for the next generation of search.
This doesn’t replace SEO. Think of llms.txt as a companion to robots.txt. It tells AI bots: “Here’s the good stuff. Skip the noise.”
Sitemaps help crawlers find everything. llms.txt tells LLMs what to focus on.
It’s especially useful for:
All this requires is creating two things:
No new tools, plugins, or frameworks needed, although some ecosystems are already adding support.
Here’s an example of a file automatically built by Yoast SEO, as it has an llms.txt generator built in:
Generated by Yoast SEO v25.3, this is an llms.txt file, meant for consumption by LLMs. This is the (https://everydayimtravelling.com/sitemap_index.xml) of this website.
# everydayimtravelling.com: Stories from our travels
## Posts
- [Test video](https://everydayimtravelling.com/test-video/)
- [A Journey Through Portugal’s Wine Country: A Suggested Wine Tour Route](https://everydayimtravelling.com/a-wine-tour-through-portugal/)
- [Travel essentials for backpackers FAQ](https://everydayimtravelling.com/travel-essentials-for-backpackers-faq/)
## Pages
- [Checkout](https://everydayimtravelling.com/checkout/)
- [Contact us](https://everydayimtravelling.com/contact-us/)
- [How we started this blog](https://everydayimtravelling.com/pagina-harry-potter/)
- [My account](https://everydayimtravelling.com/my-account/)
- [Cart](https://everydayimtravelling.com/cart/)
## Categories
- [Europe](https://everydayimtravelling.com/category/europe/)
- [Asia](https://everydayimtravelling.com/category/asia/)
- [South America](https://everydayimtravelling.com/category/south-america/)
- [Food](https://everydayimtravelling.com/category/food/)
- [Western Europe](https://everydayimtravelling.com/category/europe/west-europe/)
## Tags
- [Budget](https://everydayimtravelling.com/tag/budget/) 
So, if AI is misinterpreting your website, producing erroneous summaries, or skipping critical content, there’s a reason, and it’s fixable.
It’s not always your copy. Not your design or your metadata. It’s just that these language tools need a little guidance. In the future, llms.txt could be the way to give it to them, and you do so on your terms.
Do you need help creating an llms.txt file or converting your existing content to Markdown for LLMs? Yoast SEO can automatically generate an llms.txt file for you.
The post What AI gets wrong about your site, and why it’s not your fault: meet llms.txt appeared first on Yoast.
Read more at Read More
Increased usage of AI is changing how people discover businesses and services online. While your website may be optimized for traditional search engines, large language models (LLMs) process your website’s information differently. Our new feature, llms.txt offers to bridge the gap. Yoast SEO generates a file that highlights the most important, up-to-date content on your website as an invitation for LLMs to get the right picture. It’s automatic, requires no technical setup, and is ready in one click.
Unlike search engines that regularly crawl and index websites, LLMs like ChatGPT and Google Gemini work differently. They don’t store website content for future use. Instead, they gather information in real time when responding to user queries.
This means LLMs often only access a small portion of a website while looking for answers. This is especially true for large websites such as news platforms or ecommerce stores. This can lead to incomplete or even inaccurate AI-generated responses. Not ideal if you’re aiming to improve your visibility in LLM-generated answers as part of your marketing strategy.
If you want to better understand what LLMs tend to look for when accessing websites, this guide on optimizing content for LLMs offers a helpful overview.
The llms.txt file gives LLMs a suggested, pre-prepared slice of your website, highlighting your most important and up-to-date content.
Think of it like a helpful guide at the entrance of a large department store. Imagine you’re walking in looking for socks. Someone greets you and hands you a store map that highlights where the socks are, along with other key departments like shoes, checkout, and customer service. You don’t have to use the map, you can wander around on your own, but it makes it much easier to quickly find what you’re looking for.
In the same way, this file helps LLMs quickly identify the most relevant and useful parts of your website. While the models can still explore other areas, giving them clear guidance increases the chances that they’ll surface the right information in their responses.
When you turn the feature on, it automatically generates an llms.txt file for your website, using a mix of relevant website data. It draws from:
This offers large language models a website summary to understand what your website is about and what content is most important.
The plugin automatically creates and maintains the llms.txt file for you, refreshing every week. You can preview the file to ensure it accurately reflects your brand and prioritizes the right content before implementation.
Want full control or prefer to manage it yourself? Learn how to manually add an llms.txt file to your website by visiting our developer documentation.
Setting up an llms.txt file manually may only be accessible to a technical few. By automating the process, we make it easier for all website owners to benefit from this new technology, without needing to dive into code.
At Yoast, we believe that everyone should have a say in how their content is seen and used. Especially as AI plays a bigger role in how people discover information online. That’s why we’ve introduced this feature as opt-in, so you can decide if and when it makes sense for your website. We’ve seen early signs that this is something more website owners are starting to think about.
Just as robots.txt tries to help search engines understand what to index, llms.txt suggests which parts of your website large language models should pay attention to.If you’d like to see what an llms.txt file looks like in practice, you can view the live version on yoast.com.
The post New: Future proof your website for tomorrow’s visitors with Yoast SEO llms.txt appeared first on Yoast.
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Imagine you’re looking for after shave oil.
You type a few keywords into Amazon. A brand called Truly Beauty pops up. You’ve never heard of them.
So you go to YouTube to find the “best after shave oil”.
At the top of the results, someone has reviewed Truly Beauty’s product.
Okay, interesting…
Let’s stay on YouTube. Next, you type “truly beauty after shave oil” into the search.
What the? The whole page has people reviewing Truly Beauty products!
Is this brand legitimate, or are all these ads in disguise?
Time to go to Reddit to get some unfiltered opinions.
You search for “after shave oil reviews reddit” and notice that once again, Truly Beauty shows up in the results.
Sure enough, other people share your skepticism. But there’s some positive feedback too.
You decide to give them a try.
This kind of journey happens millions of times every day — across every industry, on every platform.
Side note: I run a men’s apparel brand, but I often research women’s beauty. It’s insanely competitive and usually way ahead in digital strategy.
If you’re in SEO, there’s a clear takeaway here:
You’re not just optimizing for Google anymore.
You need to show up across the entire decision-making journey. Wherever your audience searches, scrolls, or compares.
This is exactly what Truly Beauty figured out.
They didn’t just optimize for Google. They built visibility across the entire search ecosystem. Amazon for discovery. YouTube for social proof. Reddit for authentic reviews.
And it’s working amazingly well.
In this guide, I’ll break down how to optimize your brand for how people actually search today. With concrete examples. Including Truly Beauty’s strategy.
Free resource: To make things easier, I’ve created a checklist to track your progress
Let’s start with what’s really happening here.
What Truly Beauty did isn’t luck. It’s strategy.
They understood something most brands still miss:
Search has changed.
Today’s customers don’t follow a clean, Google-only path. They bounce from TikTok to YouTube, Reddit to Amazon, back to Google, then maybe ChatGPT for one last check.
Credit where it’s due: Rand Fishkin captured this evolution perfectly in his recent post.
Search Everywhere Optimization is about helping people find, evaluate, and trust your brand across every platform where discovery happens. That includes Google — but also YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Amazon, LinkedIn, and even AI tools like ChatGPT.
Every one of those platforms can shape a decision. Miss one? You risk losing the customer to someone who showed up where you didn’t.
Your job isn’t just to rank on Google.
It’s to help people find, evaluate, and trust your brand everywhere they search.
Some call this omnichannel SEO, cross-platform optimization, AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), or GEO (Generative Engine Optimization).
The way I see it:
Search Everywhere Optimization.
Because the search journey now includes everything from YouTube Shorts to AI summaries.
And your job is to build visibility, credibility, and conversion power across it all.
It’s not just about being found.
It’s about being trusted. On every platform where decisions happen.
That’s what makes Search Everywhere Optimization different — it evolves SEO beyond a siloed tactic into a full-funnel growth strategy.
So, you’re not just optimizing pages anymore.
You’re shaping how people find, evaluate, and trust what you offer across every stage of the journey, on every platform they turn to for answers.
Done right, Search Everywhere Optimization helps you:
That’s the shift:
From rankings to relevance. From clicks to action. From Google-only to everywhere that matters.
To make Search Everywhere Optimization work, you need to understand where your audience is discovering products.
And how much control you have over those moments.
That’s where this framework comes in.
We divide the modern search experience into two key areas:
This distinction helps you prioritize efforts across platforms you own… and platforms where you earn visibility.
These are touchpoints you can directly control.
Your website is still your most important owned asset. But you also manage your social media profiles, product listings, app store pages, and more.
This is where things gets tactical. You’re shaping the journey with:
On your website, you can go even deeper — refining structure, page speed, copy, and trust signals.
The goal? Deliver a fast, credible, and conversion-ready experience every time someone finds you through search.
Now, let’s talk about where you don’t control the narrative.
These are the moments shaped by others: customers, creators, communities, algorithms.
Earned and influenced experiences are touchpoints you don’t directly control.
But they still shape how people perceive and trust your brand.
This includes:
You can’t control these spaces… but you can influence them.
Search Everywhere Optimization is about increasing your visibility, credibility, and perceived value in places you don’t own.
That might mean:
Truly Beauty does this well. Their TikTok is a managed asset. The brand controls the content, caption, and messaging.
This isn’t about control. It’s more about visibility, relevance, and credibility in places people already go to decide.
Luckily, you can help shape perception through helpful content, real engagement, and clear value.
You can pay influencers to review and interact with your product, publish high-quality guest posts. So, you don’t have full control over them, but you can light the fire.
For example, Truly Beauty has a strong presence across owned and earned/influenced platforms.
This includes the brand’s official TikTok account, an owned experience.
The brand controls the content, caption, and messaging.
But when someone searches for Truly on TikTok and sees unsponsored reviews? That’s an influenced experience.
Both matter. Because both shape how people perceive your brand.
Search Everywhere Optimization ensures you show up in both worlds (managed and influenced) so you’re part of the journey no matter where it happens.
Traditional SEO has mostly focused on one thing — ranking on search engines like Google.
That still matters.
But it’s no longer enough.
Search Everywhere Optimization expands your SEO strategy beyond Google to include every platform where people search, compare, and decide.
So instead of optimizing just for rankings…
You’re optimizing the entire discovery journey.
This shift doesn’t replace SEO. It levels it up.
Here’s how they work together:
| Traditional SEO |
Search Everywhere Optimization | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary Goal | Drive qualified traffic from Google and other search engines | Help people find, evaluate, and take action across platforms |
| Tactics | Focus on content, keywords, backlinks, and technical fixes | Tailor messaging and format to each platform and stage of the journey |
| Performance Metrics | Metrics include rankings, impressions, CTR, and conversions | Metrics include engagement, watch time, scroll depth, reviews, and cross-platform performance |
Think of it this way:
When you combine both, you create a strategy that moves with your audience.
Across platforms. Across formats. Across every step of their journey.
Creating search personas lets you outline what your ideal audience wants and needs, and what drives their decisions.
This helps you design content and experiences based on real search behavior, rather than assumptions.
Pro tip: Already have marketing personas? Add a “Search Behavior” section to show how your audience searches, discovers, and evaluates solutions online.
Before you can build your personas, you need real-world insights.
Go straight to the source by asking existing customers questions like:
Tools like Typeform let you create and distribute surveys.
Start with their ready-to-use consumer behavior templates to make the process fast and easy.
No one knows buyer questions better than your frontline team.
Ask them:
This input gives you practical insights you can’t get from keyword tools alone.
Tools like Semrush’s Traffic & Market Toolkit let you analyze your target market’s demographics.
Here’s how it works:
Enter your domain and up to four competitors’ domains.
Click “Analyze.”
View the “Audience” report to get a breakdown of unique visitors to each domain by age and sex.
Then, scroll to the “Geo Distribution” report to see an overview of visits and unique visitors by country.
Next, click “Audience Overlap” to learn about your audience’s online habits.
Including their most-visited domains. This gives you insights into their preferences, pain points, and needs.
Once you’ve gathered your data, organize everything into a clean visual persona.
Free tools like Semrush’s persona builder make this easy.
Or just use a doc or spreadsheet — whatever helps you capture the key insights clearly.
By the end, you should know:
These insights give you a clear picture of who your searchers are and what matters to them.
Note: You can create multiple personas if your product serves more than one audience. For example, a beginner and a power user won’t search the same way or want the same content.
Map how each search persona moves from discovery to decision across platforms, questions, and content types.
We want to start by breaking the journey into three simple stages.
Quick note:
I’m showing these stages as a linear progression for simplicity. Real search journeys usually aren’t straightforward.
Users frequently jump between platforms and stages, circling back and moving forward unpredictably. This framework simply helps organize our understanding of the core phases searchers experience.
Expand this journey into more stages and variations as needed.
Like awareness, consideration, evaluation, or post-purchase.
For simplicity, we’ll stick with three core stages.
Then, for each stage, identify:
Let’s say we’re mapping the search journey of a shopper discovering Truly Beauty.
A user might first come across this brand when searching for “best after shave oil” on TikTok.
From there, they Google “after shave oil” and see Truly in the top results.
Next, they visit the brand’s site to view product details, images, and pricing.
After that, they head to YouTube.
They search “truly after shave oil review” to find reviews from real people.
Finally, they visit Amazon, search for the product, and check reviews again before placing their order.
This is a simplified version of your audience’s actual journey.
In reality, searchers might visit more platforms during the discovery and compare stages — spanning days or even weeks.
This is why it helps to map the complete journey.
Like this:
Have more than one persona or product category? Create a separate map for each.
Many platforms offer free customer journey map templates, such as Canva and Miro.
Here’s where you’ll identify what your brand is missing across the search journey and what to fix first.
Using your journey map from Step 2, go through each stage and ask:
Let me walk you through an example.
I conducted a quick manual audit for Truly Beauty across multiple platforms.
On TikTok and Instagram, they consistently appear for branded searches like “Truly Beauty.”
And product-specific searches like “vanilla baby body oil.”
Next, I examined user-generated forums to see if people discuss the brand organically.
On Reddit, I found some positive threads where users recommend Truly products.
And some negative threads, too.
Overall, Truly Beauty could have a stronger presence in earned and influenced spaces.
I then analyzed Truly’s product pages.
Their website features several conversion elements:
Their Amazon listings maintain this strategy while adapting to the marketplace’s format.
This way, they create a consistent purchase experience regardless of where customers shop.
You’ll want to adjust this process based on your specific industry, audience, and platforms.
The key is documenting all touchpoints where your audience searches.
Once you’ve audited all platforms, organize your findings in a simple spreadsheet.
Include a “Status” column to label your presence on each platform:
Here’s an example to show how you might organize your audit insights.
Feel free to structure it however works best for you.
Bonus: We added the above audit template to our downloadable checklist to help you complete this step. Download it now, if you haven’t already.
Now, it’s time to decide which platforms need attention first:
In Truly Beauty’s case, they could strengthen their presence in earned spaces.
Responding to positive and negative feedback builds trust with potential customers.
This might mean recommending products where appropriate.
And addressing any user concerns and complaints.
Prioritize your own gaps based on:
This focused approach ensures you tackle the most impactful improvements first.
Further reading: How to Run a Content Audit in 6 Easy Steps
A key part of any strategy is planning content for each search stage and platform.
Use your audit insights from Step 3 to build a content plan that satisfies user needs.
Before creating new content, maximize what you already have.
Check Google Analytics or Google Search Console (GSC) for pages that are underperforming.
For example, in GSC, look for:
Consider this Truly Beauty blog post as an example.
It already targets commercial keywords, like “best moisturizer for mature skin.”
But it ranks on page 4, 5, and beyond.
This means it’s nearly invisible in search.
So, how do you fix that?
Check what they include that you don’t, like additional examples, FAQs, or expert commentary.
Then, improve the content by:
For instance, Truly Beauty could improve this post by adding:
These updates would help align the content with what searchers expect. And give it a better shot at ranking.
Further reading: Google E-E-A-T: How to Create People-First Content + Free Audit
Creating new content for every platform should be an ongoing part of your strategy.
For each platform, ask:
Semrush’s Topic Research Tool helps you find new content ideas.
Open the tool and enter a topic. Like “best body scrub for glowing skin.”
Then, select your target location and click “Get content ideas.”
Click on a relevant subtopic.
And go through the “Questions” column to see what users are actively searching for.
For example, Truly Beauty could turn common questions into helpful content that drives conversions.
Like “What are some good homemade body scrubs?” and “How do you make a homemade scrub?”
Analyzing competitor content can also help you come up with great topic ideas.
Look at top-performing content across platforms where your audience searches.
Pay special attention to:
For instance, Truly Beauty’s audience might search “best body scrubs for glowing skin” on TikTok.
The brand could explore top-performing videos around that phrase.
And analyze what makes them successful.
Then, they could use what they find to create videos that mirror those formats — while tailoring them to their product and audience.
(And you can, too.)
Don’t let great content live in one place.
The most efficient strategy turns one strong piece into many platform-specific assets.
Start with your highest-performing content.
Then, adapt it to match how your audience consumes information on different platforms.
For example, Truly Beauty could transform their “12 Best Foods for Your Skin” blog post into the following:
One idea → multiple formats → broader discovery.
This way, you can easily scale content across the entire search experience for every platform.
When someone lands on your site, they expect it to:
In fact, search engines like Google look at user experience signals when ranking pages.
That’s why this step focuses on performance, structure, and clarity, so your site works for users and ranks highly.
Slow-loading pages lead to higher bounce rates, missed conversions, and lower rankings.
Use PageSpeed Insights to analyze your site.
And view your Core Web Vitals scores, which are Google user experience metrics.
These metrics measure user responsiveness, visual stability, and the speed at which your main content loads.
For example, Truly Beauty’s website failed the Core Web Vitals assessment on both mobile and desktop.
The good news?
PageSpeed Insights also shows exactly what’s slowing your site down and how you can fix the issues.
So, Truly Beauty can improve site performance by taking steps like reducing JavaScript execution time and minimizing main-thread work.
For a deeper look at your site’s speed and usability, use Semrush’s Site Audit tool.
Note: A free Semrush account allows you to crawl up to 100 URLs using Site Audit. Or you can use this link to access a 14-day trial on a Semrush Pro subscription.
Enter your domain and configure the tool to set up your first crawl.
Once your report is ready, you’ll see a “Site Performance” score in the “Overview” tab.
For instance, Truly Beauty has a site performance score of 95%.
Click “View details” for more information.
Here, you’ll see the average load speed of your site.
Truly Beauty has an average page load speed of 0.31 seconds, which is outstanding.
You’ll also learn if Site Audit detected any issues with your site, categorized by priority:
Click “Learn more” for details on how to fix each issue.
Once you’ve addressed the issues, re-run the audit.
You’ll likely see improved site speed and performance (if you’ve correctly fixed the issues).
These technical improvements will strengthen your search experience optimization efforts.
And improve the experience for your users.
Further reading: Technical SEO: The Ultimate Guide
Trust elements give users the confidence to take action, whether that’s making a purchase, booking a demo, or signing up.
Add them anywhere users evaluate options or make decisions.
Including product pages, landing pages, checkout screens, pricing pages, and even comparison blog posts.
Trust elements include:
For example, Truly Beauty shows a variety of trust elements on its product pages.
Like ratings, reviews, and customer-submitted photos.
This creates a compelling social proof ecosystem that reduces purchase anxiety and enhances your brand perception.
Messy layouts confuse users and slow them down.
In contrast, a clean and consistent structure makes your page easier to read, navigate, and act on.
Take a look at how formatting impacts readability on mobile:
Which one do you think is more readable?
Shorter paragraphs and clear spacing make content easier to scan and understand.
Here’s how to improve your site’s structure and layout:
For example, this Truly Beauty blog post does some things well.
Including scannable headings, bullet lists, and plenty of white space.
But they could increase the font size to make the content easier to read and skim.
Further reading: 9 Ecommerce Website Optimization Tactics [Expert Insights]
Some of the most important search moments happen off your website.
In this step, you’ll focus on optimizing how you appear on social media sites, niche forums, and more.
Your profile should instantly tell visitors who you are and why they matter to you.
So, review your bio, visuals, and links on every priority platform.
Each one should reflect your brand clearly and feel native to how people use that platform.
Truly Beauty’s Instagram bio is short and clear. But there’s room for improvement.
It doesn’t highlight what sets the brand apart, including a strong hook or call to action.
They also don’t have pinned posts.
And their Highlight covers aren’t clear or consistent with their brand visuals.
Conversely, makeup brand Too Faced does a great job here.
Their Instagram bio is short but expressive:
Their Instagram Highlights are organized by category — from new product drops to event looks.
They even include multiple links and a “Shop” button to drive action directly from the page.
On TikTok, Too Faced takes a different but equally strategic approach.
The brand uses playlists to categorize videos by product type.
And the pinned posts showcase high-performing videos with bold thumbnails and direct product demos.
Which is perfect for TikTok’s users, who prefer short, visual content before buying.
Getting questions or comments on your social media posts?
This is a great opportunity to engage with your audience and offer helpful information.
Truly Beauty engages with users in the comments.
And responds to feedback, answers questions, and shows appreciation for its customers.
This kind of interaction builds trust and shows followers there’s a real team behind the brand.
Want a fast way to build credibility?
Partner with the creators your audience already trusts.
Find the voices influencing those spaces — and team up.
Truly Beauty works with influencers to promote products.
But when it comes to creator partnerships, makeup brand Morphe takes this strategy to another level.
They regularly collaborate with beauty creators to launch products, demo looks, and drive buzz.
Like this influencer collab that got them over 2.4K likes and 60+ comments:
You can’t optimize what you don’t track.
To improve your performance over time, you need visibility into how people discover and engage with your content, products, or services.
And what happens next.
Start by identifying which metrics you want to prioritize.
Here are some examples:
Then, choose the right tools to track these metrics.
Google Analytics 4 and Google Search Console provide essential data to track your SEO performance and user experience improvements.
For instance, on GA4, you can navigate to “Reports” > “Acquisition” > “Traffic Acquisition” to view your site’s traffic sources.
YouTube Studio, TikTok Insights, and Instagram Insights provide platform-specific data.
Like views, watch time, and subscribers.
Use what you learn to improve weak content and fix UX issues.
You may also want to add specialized tools for social media and website performance.
Like heat mapping, session recording, and conversion analysis.
The search journey in 2025 isn’t linear anymore. And your strategy shouldn’t be either.
The brands that win won’t be the ones with the most blog posts.
They’ll be the ones who show up with the right content, in the right format, on the right platform — at the moment it matters.
To make that happen, you need a strategy built for how people actually search.
Use our free checklist to turn what you’ve learned into a clear, actionable strategy.
Next up: Check out our definitive guide to on-page SEO, a crucial component of any effective SEO strategy.
The post Search Everywhere Optimization Guide (+ Free Checklist) appeared first on Backlinko.
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Ever feel frustrated having to jump between different apps just to check your site’s SEO performance? We’ve simplified things for you. Yoast now seamlessly integrates insights from Site Kit by Google (Google Analytics and Search Console) right into your Yoast Dashboard, giving you one clear view to manage your website’s SEO effectively.
Connect once, get instant clarity: Easily link your Yoast Dashboard and Site Kit by Google just once, avoiding multiple logins and complex workflows.
Instantly see where to focus your efforts: Efficiently recognize your best opportunities to boost visibility and rankings, allowing you to prioritize SEO tasks effectively.
Stay effortlessly informed: The Yoast Dashboard integration with Site Kit by Google connects your analytics and search data seamlessly in one place, so you can quickly see important metrics like organic traffic, impressions, clicks, and bounce rates without switching tabs.
Connect Site Kit by Google to your Yoast Dashboard today and simplify your SEO workflow!
Please note that we’re rolling out this new feature in phases. This means that you might not see the Site Kit integration in your Yoast Dashboard yet. Eventually, this integration will be available to everyone, so stay tuned!
The post Site Kit by Google insights in your Yoast SEO Dashboard appeared first on Yoast.
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We’re excited to announce that Yoast AI Optimize is now also available when using the Classic Editor in WordPress!
You’ve finished your copy, great! But those pesky Yoast SEO Analysis lights aren’t all green and you have to make manual changes. That’s where Yoast AI Optimize comes in. With Yoast SEO Premium, you can now get AI-powered suggestions right inside your Classic Editor to help fine-tune your content.
Yoast AI Optimize brings smart, targeted SEO support into your writing flow. It gives AI-powered suggestions for specific assessments in the Yoast SEO analysis, such as length, structure, and keyphrase distribution. You’ll see exactly where improvements can be made and get quick, editable suggestions to help you fix them. You can quickly apply or dismiss them; the final decision always remains yours.
Whether you’re using the Classic Editor or sticking with the Block Editor, Yoast AI Optimize helps you improve your SEO score faster, without losing the personal touch.
If you’re curious to know how we built this feature, check out our developer blog post with all the behind the scenes.
Ready to optimize smarter?
Update to Yoast SEO Premium to try AI Optimize in the Classic Editor today!
The post Yoast AI Optimize is now available for Classic Editor appeared first on Yoast.
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A social media calendar is a planning tool to organize your ideas, coordinate with your team, and manage a consistent posting schedule — all in one place.
With a solid calendar, you can:
In short: A social calendar replaces guesswork with an actionable roadmap.
But creating a calendar that actually works for your team? That’s where many marketers hit a wall.
I built this playbook to help you tackle this challenge and build a foolproof social media planning system.
Follow along with our free social media calendar template to create a customized setup that works for you.
When I worked as a one-person content team at a startup, I would spend countless hours every few months trying to make a practical social calendar.
All that trial and error helped me understand why most teams end up abandoning their calendars.
These are the four big reasons:
Too many tabs. Complicated color-coding. Overwhelming categorization.
When you spend more time maintaining a spreadsheet than you do planning content, something’s wrong.
The best social calendars capture just what matters without drowning in excessive detail. This includes:
Silvija Kemeraite, Social Media Manager at Omnisend, shares her take on how to overcome this challenge:
“Make a calendar that works for you and refine it as you go. There’s no point in creating a fancy calendar with hundreds of rows or columns that you don’t use or — even worse — use without a clear purpose.”
Siloed planning = Missed opportunities.
When you isolate social from your broader marketing plan, it creates a disconnect.
As a result, your marketing channels compete against each other. You end up driving attention to different messages.
You miss the chance to amplify your campaigns across different touchpoints.
Picture this:
Your latest email campaign spotlights the latest product launch. But your social accounts are only posting cat memes.
This dilutes the momentum.
A coordinated push across email marketing, social, blog posts, and other channels builds stronger visibility and reinforces your message multiple times for your audience.
The bottom line: Your brand’s social presence doesn’t exist in a vacuum, and neither should your calendar.
Structuring your calendar too rigidly leaves no room for you to adapt to or join the conversations happening right now. This can lead to missed opportunities at best, and make your brand appear tone-deaf at worst.
On the other hand, calendars that constantly pivot to chase every trend can dilute your brand identity. They also become a nightmare to manage.
You need to walk the middle path and balance these two approaches.
Stick to relevant content pillars and leave room for timely opportunities.
Take this post by HubSpot as an example.
The social team capitalized on a trending event (the SNL50 Special Episode) to introduce its just-launched integration with Canva.
The viral post racked up 5800+ reactions with 238 comments and 160 reposts. It became one of their best-performing LinkedIn posts — all because they left room for spontaneity.
Creating a calendar with three weekly posts for five platforms sounds ambitious on paper.
The reality? You’re setting your team up for missed deadlines, subpar content, and lots of frustration.
Quality takes a backseat when you prioritize quantity.
But you can’t get too hung up on quality either.
Your timelines take a hit if every post goes through a lengthy, multi-step review process.
A sustainable calendar takes into account the entire production cycle and available resources, ideally with a quick review process.
You’ve got plenty of ideas, but they’re all over the place. Some get posted, most get forgotten.
I’ve been there.
That’s why I curated these best practices on how to create a social media calendar that’s compatible with your bandwidth and timelines.
A Minimum Viable Calendar (MVC) focuses only on the essential elements of a social media content calendar.
Think of it as the “lite version” of your actual calendar. It’s stripped away of unnecessary complexities to give you a quick head start and improve follow-through.
Unlike a standard calendar, an MVC builds momentum through achievable steps.
Rather than doing too much with an overly ambitious plan, this version helps you establish consistency through:
Let’s find out how you can create a minimum viable calendar to get your marketing efforts off the ground.
Start with two questions:
For example, if you have a cookware brand, your goal might be to build brand awareness and drive sales. And you want to reach chefs and cooking enthusiasts in your target region.
While listening to the Social Pros Podcast, I found an interesting insight by Katie Robbert, CEO of Trust Insights.
Katie emphasizes the importance of defining your ideal customer profiles (ICPs):
“Whether or not we realize this, as marketers, we think we’re creating content for our customers, but we make it about ourselves. We have that bias of what we think their pain points are. Instead, we should be putting the customer first, and saying: ‘Your pain points are ABC, and here’s how we can solve them.”
The next step is to find where your audience hangs out the most.
Instead of posting on every possible platform, select 1-2 key channels where your audience is the most active.
For example, your cookware brand can focus on TikTok and Instagram to stay top of mind for cooking enthusiasts.
Find your fit: Check out the most popular social media platforms to pick the best ones for your brand.
Finally, you want to establish 3-5 content pillars that align with:
These pillars will guide your content brainstorming and creation efforts.
For example, your cookware brand might focus on pillars like recipes, maintenance, and home remedies.
This is also where you can experiment with different content formats to see what appeals the most to your audience.
Use your minimum viable calendar to experiment with posting frequencies for a few weeks.
This will help you decide the best time to post on each platform when your audience is the most active.
You can also use Semrush Social to find the best time to post specifically for your brand.
The tool shows when your audience is the most active on each platform.
Social Analytics goes further to display activity by hours.
Here’s a look at the Instagram dashboard showing hourly engagement data for all days of the week:
With this data, you can schedule posts based on specific time slots when your audience engagement peaks on your chosen platforms.
You’ve collected all the insights you need.
What’s next?
Our calendar template makes it easy to document everything from this step and keep it handy alongside your calendar.
Here’s a glimpse of how you can consolidate all the details in the template:
Are you struggling to create a consistent flow of ideas to fill your social calendar?
Try the one-third approach to plan content without compromising quality for quantity.
This practical approach divides content planning into three parts:
Repurpose different marketing assets to share your message across multiple touchpoints.
Here’s a simple workflow for content repurposing:
Check out this quick framework for repurposing content assets:
| Content Type | Repurposing Strategy |
|---|---|
| Blog Posts | Pull key insights and expert quotes as standalone graphics |
| Turn how-to sections into step-by-step carousel posts | |
| Summarize “key takeaways” into a post or video | |
| Videos/Webinars/Podcasts | Create multiple 30–60 second clips as video highlights |
| Convert quotes from the transcript into graphics | |
| Compile multiple clips from different videos | |
| Case Studies/Whitepapers | Develop problem/solution posts highlighting key insights |
| Share key insights in a carousel post |
Here’s an example of content repurposing in action:
Semrush created a LinkedIn post and carousel rounding up key statistics from its research study on AI Overviews.
It racked up 200 reactions and 56 reposts, and it includes a link to the study for those who want the deep-dive version.
Further reading: How to Promote Content on Social Media
User-generated content (UGC) builds authentic social proof for your brand and saves production time.
You can leverage UGC to fill your social pipeline by:
Here’s how Wild One, a dog fashion brand, features user-generated content to show its product in action:
Besides content from real customers, UGC includes case studies, testimonials, and customer playbooks.
Check these stats: 24 Key User-Generated Content (UGC) Statistics for 2025
Original content is how you display your brand’s unique voice in crowded and noisy social feeds.
But coming up with original ideas can be exhausting, to say the least.
Here are a few places to start:
Kate Erwin’s advice will come in handy the next time you’re brainstorming fresh ideas.
She believes it’s important to listen to the conversations already happening on socials and share your take.
“You don’t want your point of view to come out of nowhere. Connect it to what your audience already cares about. Thankfully, people are already telling you what they care about all the time on social. They’re posting. They’re reacting. They’re commenting. They’re part of the conversation. It’s your job to join in.”
The takeaway? Original content doesn’t start with you; it starts with your audience
Actively listen to your audience and tune into their conversations with a perspective unique to your brand.
This is where Semrush’s Social Content AI tool can come in handy.
Just add your brand’s website and a description of the kind of content you want to create.
The tool will analyze your input and come up with a list of ideas for different content pillars.
It also shares the top news stories relevant to your input.
Remember that not every original idea will work out.
That’s why I created this quick scoring system to evaluate whether an idea is worth pursuing:
| Factor | 1 (Poor) | 5 (Excellent) | Score |
|---|---|---|---|
| Audience Alignment | Doesn’t match audience interests | Perfectly matches audience interests | |
| Brand Consistency | Contradicts brand voice/values | Strongly reinforces brand identity | |
| Engagement Potential | Unlikely to generate reactions | Highly likely to spark shares or discussions | |
| Production | Requires excessive resources | Quick with available resources | |
| Strategic Impact | Doesn’t support business goals | Directly advances primary goals | |
| Total score | |||
| Average score |
Rate each idea on a scale of 1 to 5, and calculate the average score for each idea.
Set a minimum threshold, such as an average of 4, for approving ideas.
Then, pick the most promising ones for production.
Find inspiration: 25 Creative Ways to Find New Content Ideas
Our template gives you a dedicated space to add new ideas as and when inspiration strikes.
Plus, multiple team members can contribute ideas or make requests.
Use the ideas bank to collect all your ideas, score them, and pick the ideas that score above your minimum threshold.
Creating great content consistently requires more than just good ideas.
You need a structured workflow to go from an idea to a published post without getting stuck.
A well-designed content production pipeline can:
To build this production process, define clear handoffs for every stage — from ideation to publication.
Next, you need realistic timelines to make your process sustainable in the long run.
Many social calendars fail because they’re built on overly optimistic estimates.
They don’t account for everyone’s bandwidth and unexpected delays.
When planning these timelines, work backward from publication dates and build in buffer time at every stage.
As a best practice, give each stage an owner and set clear handoff guidelines for moving ideas from one stage to the next.
You also want to base your production time on:
Pro tip: Build buffer time into your production process. Add 10–20% extra time after each handoff to handle delays, last‑minute feedback, or unanticipated hiccups.
At the end of each month or quarter, look at what slipped and why to optimize your workflow.
Once your production process is ready, build a visual workflow to bring everyone on the same page.
Apply this workflow while implementing your minimum viable calendar. It’ll reveal issues and bottlenecks that can potentially derail your calendar.
Your workflow should clearly show:
You can build this workflow with many tools (more on that later).
When I was trying to set up this workflow for my own B2B social media strategy, I experimented with a new tool every other week.
Asana, Notion, Trello, you name it.
The truth is:
There’s always a learning curve with these tools because they’re not purpose-built for social media marketing.
To save you all this time and effort, I designed our calendar template with two main sections:
Here’s a sample view of what this workflow looks like:
Even the most meticulously planned calendars need room for spontaneity.
Leaving space means you can use trendjacking (creating content around popular trends) to increase your visibility and engagement.
That’s why you have to create structure around spontaneity.
I spoke to Travis Tyler, Senior Social Media Manager at Motion, about building a social calendar.
His best advice? Give your calendar some flexibility.
“Sometimes your best social posts will be these random, ad hoc, last-minute, 11th-hour ideas that seem stupid or silly. And then they end up crushing!”
So, make sure you build in the flexibility to jump on trending opportunities.
For starters, block some time every week to proactively find social media trends.
Look for upcoming events or holidays, spy on your competitors’ feeds, and use social listening tools to spot emerging trends early.
You can also use Semrush’s Social Tracker to find your competitors’ top posts.
See what’s driving the highest engagement for these brands. Then (if it’s relevant to your own brand), see if you can come up with related ideas with your own spin on it.
Once you’ve identified some trending themes, you have to decide which trends are worth following.
Evaluate your ideas against these parameters to see how well the trend aligns with your brand:
When you’ve locked in a trending idea, don’t get stuck in your standard review cycle and miss the moment.
Give someone in your team the authority to make rapid approvals for trending ideas.
If your calendar doesn’t evolve based on performance insights, it’s just a rigid publishing schedule.
You need to designate time to analyze engagement data and modify your strategy based on these insights.
You can assess performance against different types of metrics:
Establish clear benchmarks for “good” performance for each metric.
Then, monitor your performance with weekly analyses and monthly audits to see where you can improve.
This is where Semrush’s Social Analytics tool can make life easy for you.
You don’t have to scramble to collect data from multiple platforms.
Social Analytics gathers organic and paid data from Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram.
Here’s a preview of the Overview tab on Social Analytics. It gives you a glimpse of each channel’s key metrics, like followers, reach, profile views, post engagement, and more.
To get started with Social Analytics, you need to connect your social media profiles to Social Poster.
This will automatically link your accounts and collate all performance data.
Social Analytics creates unique dashboards for every platform.
Take a look at the TikTok dashboard to see the depth of insights available:
You need a multi-layered approach for reviewing your social calendar.
Each round of review should serve a specific purpose:
While your review process doesn’t need to follow this exact structure, you want to be clear on what you’re doing with the data.
The success of all these best practices depends on how comfortable you are with the calendar tool you use.
Let me share a few tools I’ve used to create and manage a social media content calendar.
I designed our free template to give you an easy and convenient way of maintaining a social planner.
Instead of struggling to pick one option from dozens of social media calendar tools, you get the familiarity of a spreadsheet.
Simply add a new row for each new idea, then assign dates, owners, and other attributes.
Now, everyone can see your planned content, and it’s easy to collaborate with others too.
With Semrush’s Social Poster, you can schedule posts on a dynamic calendar for multiple platforms.
Choose a platform (or multiple), create a new post by adding the caption and media file(s), and schedule it for any date.
The best part?
You can schedule posts in bulk by uploading a simple CSV file with up to 100 premade posts.
Besides social content planning, you can use the wider Semrush Social toolkit to track platform-specific engagement, keep tabs on your competitors, and even brainstorm new ideas.
Notion offers many customizable social calendar templates.
The tool combines project management with collaborative documentation. That means teams can ideate, create, edit, and finalize content on the same platform.
Since Notion is free for up to 10 users in a workspace, it’s a good option for lean teams.
I’ll admit that, when compared to dedicated social media tools, I do miss the scheduling and analytics capabilities that Notion is lacking.
But I’ve found it to still be a great planning tool to organize your ideas and collaborate with a small team.
Buffer is a dedicated social media management tool.
I find it super easy to create new posts in any format, then drag and drop them on any date.
As a result, your weekly/monthly calendar is ready in just a few minutes.
What sets Buffer apart is the ability to create custom categories and use color codes to organize your posts. Think content pillars, goals, formats, and more.
Planning content for socials can be chaotic.
Trends pop up by the minute, and every day can feel like a fresh start.
A social media planner is your compass for navigating this constantly changing space.
But your calendar isn’t going to get you far without great content ideas.
Get inspired by these 23 outstanding content marketing examples.
The post Social Media Calendar Guide: Plan, Post, & Grow (Free Template) appeared first on Backlinko.
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Now that so many people use AI tools to create content, the questions about the credibility of those tools keep popping up. Can you really make AI-generated content and still meet Google’s E-E-A-T standards? Of course, the answer is yes, but there’s a limit to what you should let these tools do. Incorporating human insights in AI content can help uphold these standards.
AI helps you move faster and do more, but it can’t replace humans (yet). Do you want readers to trust your content and have it seen as a reliable source in traditional and AI-driven search? Then, you need to have people involved in every stage of the content production process.
In this article, we’ll discuss how to combine AI content with human editing to maintain experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. But we’ll also discuss what happens if you don’t do that.
AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini are trained on enormous data sets. These tools are very good at outlining topics, summarizing facts, and writing initial, high-level drafts of articles. However, the benefits stop there, and going much further will present a risk.
You must remember that AI does not have the intent, context, or experience in your industry. With all the low-quality content that’s spit out daily, that matters more than ever. Google, using the AI Overviews and AI Mode, is trying to surface content that shows real insights from real people.
But why does human involvement matter so much? AI is great, but it often misses nuances and is prone to add filler to your content. It’s also very good at oversimplifying topics. And, because of the way these systems were taught, they cannot pick up evolving best practices or shifts that happen in the real world.
What’s more, if you let the AI run wild, it can even produce content that’s factually wrong. These hallucinations are so confidently written that they sound like they are true, which makes it harder to detect misinformation.
It’s fine to use AI, but use it to help you structure content or brainstorm, and don’t publish anything directly. Always use real editors with real knowledge of the topics to fact-check, correct the tone, and make sure the message is on point. This helps you improve trustworthiness in E-E-A-T. You should show that you wrote your content with good intent and oversight.
Our Principal SEO, Carolyn Shelby, wrote The Role Of E-E-A-T In AI Narratives: Building Brand Authority For Search Success for Search Engine Journal. That article provides more insight into this topic.
Carolyn also wrote an insightful post on how to optimize content for AI LLM comprehension using Yoast’s tools.
Remember that AI-generated content is not perfect. In fact, if you use it without having actual people working on it, it could hurt your visibility or reputation. In the end, this could hurt your business. But what are some of those risks when you over-rely on AI content?
Search online and you’ll find many stories describing how AI wrote things that are just plain wrong. AI can misstate facts, make up statistics, and even come up with well-known experts that don’t exist. Publishing content like this in your brand’s name can damage your trustworthiness. What’s more, when search engines or visitors lose trust, it’s very hard to regain that.
While there are many developments on this front, with grounding/RAG and LLMs connected to search, most models aren’t updated in real-time. These models often don’t know the latest insights until you specifically tell them. It’s easy to create outdated AI content when you don’t keep a very close eye on this.
As you know, AI tools get data from existing sources, which will lead to content that looks a lot like content that’s already out there. If your content only repeats those same things, it’s very easy for search engines to ignore your site. It will be hard for Google to see your site as an authority on the topic.
There are many topics and industries that are very risky to publish on, for instance, the medical, financial, and legal fields. If your AI tool spits out incorrect advice and you publish without a human doing the fact-checking, your business could be found liable in court.
Remember that your readers are also developing a nose for AI content. When they sense that something sounds too generic or disconnected, they might move on to your competitor’s content, if that’s real. This will especially hurt industries that thrive on expertise and trust.
The biggest update of E-E-A-T was the addition of Experience. This is Google’s way of recognizing content created by people who have done or experienced what they wrote about. AI does not have this experience; real human beings do.
So, how do you do this? Be sure to include real stories from your team, clients, or projects, ideally with real names, results, and lessons learned. Give internal experts, such as engineers, consultants, or practitioners, a voice and direct input in your content. Don’t forget to interview team members and customers and use their perspectives in your content.
Giving your content more context can also make it stand out more, even in AI search. For instance, instead of simply writing “Solar panels reduce energy bills,” write, “After installing 28 commercial panels, our client in Portland, Oregon, cut annual costs by 35% — enough to pay off the system three years early.”
Google’s systems, including AI Overviews and AI Mode, look at a lot more than just the words on your page. Google looks at all of the signals surrounding your business and yourself. These signals can help it understand if you and your content are trustworthy.
Improving your credibility signals for users and search engines starts by adding clear bylines with author bios that link to real credentials. This way, it’s easier to find out who is behind the content and why it makes sense for them to write about the topic. Support this with proper structured data, like schema markup for authors, products, reviews, and what else makes sense. Search engines use this to understand your content.
Remember to cite high-quality sources when referring to data instead of vague phrases like “research shows.” Also, set up a system to gather and use reader feedback so you can immediately fix things when they are unclear or plain wrong. Try everything to build and maintain trust while keeping content quality high.
Keep an eye on your Knowledge Graph. Try to get your brand and your experts or owners recognized as entities in search through structured data, Wikidata, Google Publisher Center, or by getting other citations. Think of authority and trust in E-E-A-T as something more visible, both to users and large language models (LLMs).
AI content isn’t “real”. You, as a writer, are real. The best way to make your content real is by showing who wrote or reviewed it. Plus, you should show what makes them qualified to write about it. Transparency supports user trust and sets content apart from generic, anonymous posts.
Now, you don’t need a PhD from Harvard to be recognized as an expert for E-E-A-T, but you do need real-world, verifiable experience. In addition, you should publish author bios on your site with specific roles and industry backgrounds. You can also add an editorial or “reviewed by” credit for topics that your experts have fact-checked and edited.
Many big publishers have content guidelines and/or review policies that are available to read at any time. In those guidelines, you might have something simple, like what kind of disclosure you use when you’ve used AI to create a piece of content. That might be something simple like: “This article was drafted using generative AI and reviewed by [Editor Name], [Job Title] at [Company Name].”
AI is a helpful tool for quickly generating content, but it shouldn’t replace real experiences, insights, or proper editing. Without the human element, you’ll miss the quality and trustworthiness needed to succeed with your content.
If you want your brand to be mentioned in AI search results and stand out amongst the competition, you need to make it clear that there are real people behind this content — real people with real knowledge and experiences.
Feel free to use AI where it can to speed up your work. But do make sure that the essential parts that your readers and search engines will value most are always human.
Google’s guidance on using AI-generated content (for quick reference)
The bottom line is that using AI is fine as long as the final content is accurate, original, clearly labeled when necessary, and actually helpful to users.
</code> tags, meta descriptions, structured data, and image alt text.</li> The post Integrating human insight with AI-generated content: How to maintain E-E-A-T appeared first on Yoast.
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