Social Media Calendar Guide: Plan, Post, & Grow (Free Template)

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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:

  • Map out content ideas weeks or months in advance
  • Deliver messaging that resonates with your audience
  • Drive measurable results from your social efforts

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.

Backlinko – Social Media Calendar Template – Sample

Where Most Teams Go Wrong with Social Media Content Calendars

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:

Overcomplicated Setup

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:

  • Post ideas
  • Publish dates
  • Approval statuses

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

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.

Structure vs. Spontaneity

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.

LinkedIn – HubSpot post

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.

Unrealistic Production and Review Process

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.

How to Create a Social Media Calendar that Works

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.

1. Create a Minimum Viable Calendar

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.

Building a Minimum Viable Calendar for Social Media

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:

  • A simplified setup for a short period and 1-2 platforms
  • Faster implementation and publishing
  • Easier tracking and optimization

Let’s find out how you can create a minimum viable calendar to get your marketing efforts off the ground.

Define Your Goals and Target Audience

Start with two questions:

  • What business objectives will your social channels support?
  • Who exactly are you trying to reach and influence?

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.”

Identify Target Platforms

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.

Outline Content Pillars

Finally, you want to establish 3-5 content pillars that align with:

  • Your audience’s interests
  • Your business goals

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.

Discover Ideal Posting Times

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:

Semrush Social – Hourly engagement data

With this data, you can schedule posts based on specific time slots when your audience engagement peaks on your chosen platforms.

Do It with Our Template

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:

Backlinko – Social Media Calendar Template – Strategy

2. Use the One-Third Rule for Brainstorming Ideas

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:

1/3 Repurposed Content

Repurpose different marketing assets to share your message across multiple touchpoints.

Here’s a simple workflow for content repurposing:

  • Consolidate your content: Create a spreadsheet or content bank to list every blog post, video, podcast, or content asset you’ve produced
  • Group content by themes: Organize this content into groups based on the topics they cover, so you can repurpose in batches
  • Pick your repurposing formats: Pick 2–3 formats (like carousels, quote cards, and 30‑second video clips) and build simple templates for each
  • Add slots for repurposing: Create space for repurposed posts in your social calendar and add which topic and post you want to recreate

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.

LinkedIn – Semrush post about SEO

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

1/3 User-Generated Content

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:

  • Making it easy for users to share content with branded hashtags or other channels
  • Offering rewards and meaningful prizes to incentivize users for contributing UGC
  • Establishing a clear workflow to request usage rights from customers

Here’s how Wild One, a dog fashion brand, features user-generated content to show its product in action:

Instagram – WildOne – UGC

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

1/3 Original Content Creation

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:

  • Behind-the-scenes looks into your team and process
  • Interactive content to engage your audience
  • Educational series, like weekly tips
  • Product and service showcases
  • Relatable memes

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.

Social Content AI – Backlinko – Find Ideas

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.

Social Content AI – Backlinko – News & Ideas

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

Do It with Our Template

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.

3. Build a Content Production Pipeline

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:

  • Eliminate the chaos of last-minute scrambling
  • Help you meet timelines and post consistently

To build this production process, define clear handoffs for every stage — from ideation to publication.

Social Content Production Pipeline

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:

  • Content type: You can move a simple social post from idea to published in 3–5 days. But a carousel post or video montage could take a few weeks.
  • Team size: Involve every contributor in the discussion to determine the time they need to do their best work. Then set time-based milestones accordingly.

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:

  • Content production stages
  • Designated owner for each stage
  • Due dates for moving to the next stage
  • Any dependencies or prerequisites for a stage

You can build this workflow with many tools (more on that later).

Do It with Our Template

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:

  • Ideation: Add your core idea with a brief description. Assign the owner for each idea, then pick the platform(s) and format.
  • Execution: After the ideation stage, you want to define a publish date. Then, work backwards to assign deadlines for design and review.

Here’s a sample view of what this workflow looks like:

Backlinko – Social Media Calendar Template – Sample

4. Design a Quick-Response Workflow for Trendjacking

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.

Trending themes on top posts

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:

  • Relevance check: Does this trend naturally connect to your products/services?
  • Audience alignment: Will your audience care about or engage with this trend?
  • Brand alignment: Does this trend align with your brand values and reputation?
  • Resources required: Can you create good content with the available resources and timeframe?

How to Evaluate Trends for Your Social Media Calendar

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.

5. Add Space for Feedback and Analysis

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:

  • Awareness: Impressions, reach, shares, and follower growth
  • Engagement: Likes, comments, shares, and saves
  • Conversion: Click-through rate, direct conversions, and social traffic

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.

Social Analytics tool – Preview

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 tool – Add accounts

Social Analytics creates unique dashboards for every platform.

  • Instagram: Data for audience, profile interactions, stories, and posts
  • Facebook: Metrics for page likes, engagement, and posts
  • LinkedIn: Data for audience, engagement, and posts
  • TikTok: Covers engagement and posts

Take a look at the TikTok dashboard to see the depth of insights available:

TikTok – Dashboard – Available insights

When to Review Your Calendar

You need a multi-layered approach for reviewing your social calendar.

Each round of review should serve a specific purpose:

  • Weekly: Focus on immediate feedback. Review the past week’s performance to adjust the posting times or caption styles for higher engagement.
  • Monthly: Evaluate patterns to find which content types consistently perform better than others
  • Quarterly: Take a closer look at your data to potentially restructure your calendar. Consider your business goals, performance, and other factors.

Social Media Performance Review Cycle

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.

Tools for Building a Social Calendar

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.

Backlinko’s Template

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.

Backlinko – Social Media Calendar Template – Sample

Semrush Social Poster

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.

Semrush – Social Poster – Dynamic Calendar

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

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.

Notion – Social Media Calendar

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

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.

Buffer – Monthly calendar – Color codes

Create Winning Social Media Content

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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Integrating human insight with AI-generated content: How to maintain E-E-A-T

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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.

Table of contents

AI is a tool, not a replacement for you

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 can help you start, but humans make it credible

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.

What to do?

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.

Relying too much on AI can lead to risk

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?

False authority and misinformation

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.

Outdated or incomplete information

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.

Content redundancy

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.

Legal and compliance issues

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.

Trust breakdown with your audience

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.

Add experience to strengthen the E’s

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.”

Make it easy for Google (and your audience) to trust you

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).

Always show who’s behind the content

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].”

Final thoughts

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.

  • Generative AI can support research and help structure original content—but using it to mass-produce low-value pages may violate Google’s spam policies, especially those related to scaled content abuse.
  • Content must meet Google’s Search Essentials and spam policy standards, even when AI tools are involved.
  • Focus on accuracy, originality, and value—this includes metadata like </code> tags, meta descriptions, structured data, and image alt text.</li>
  • Always ensure your structured data aligns with both general and feature-specific guidelines, and validate your markup to remain eligible for rich results.
  • Add transparency by explaining how the content was created—especially if automation was involved. This could include background details and appropriate image metadata.
  • Ecommerce sites must follow Google Merchant Center’s policies, including correctly tagging AI-generated product data and images (e.g., using IPTC metadata).
  • Review Search Quality Rater Guidelines sections 4.6.5 and 4.6.6 to understand how low-effort or unoriginal AI-generated content may be evaluated by Google’s systems.

Source

The post Integrating human insight with AI-generated content: How to maintain E-E-A-T appeared first on Yoast.

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The beginner’s guide to SEO reporting

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When you work on your site’s SEO, reflecting on those efforts should be part of your ongoing strategy. Whether it’s for a client, your manager, or your team, creating an SEO report is the best way to do so. This helps you justify your efforts, keep track of performance and figure out what needs to be tackled next. And it’s not as hard as you would think. In this blog post, we’ll explain what SEO reporting is and take you through the process step by step.

Table of contents

Search engine optimization (SEO) helps drive more traffic to your site and improve your brand image. It should be part of anyone’s marketing strategy whose goal is to grow their (online) audience. Originally focused on performance in organic search, SEO now entails much more than that. It helps you build a strong brand name, become an authority in your field, and be visible on the platforms where your audience can be found. All this is to increase customer loyalty and grow your business.

What is SEO reporting exactly?

SEO reporting is best described as evaluating your online marketing efforts and presenting the outcomes in a report. This can be a report you create for yourself, your team, management, or a client. Often, a company has a specific template they use to do SEO reporting regularly (for example, every month). This can be in the form of a slide deck, online document, Excel sheet, or online dashboard. But it can also be any other reporting tool you feel comfortable with or your company uses for presentations.

In an SEO report, you will find metrics related to a website’s performance and other marketing activities related to SEO. This helps you track how your SEO strategy is performing and where tweaks are needed. That’s why an important part of any SEO report is the interpretation of metrics and conclusions that come out of that.

What to include in your SEO report

Whether you’re creating an SEO report for internal use, or for your client(s), it’s good to have a template. This allows you to compare recent findings with earlier ones, regardless of the frequency with which you’ll be reporting. Of course, you can make changes to this template along the way. But having a template saves you time and helps you recognize bigger issues and opportunities over time.

Naturally, it depends on your business goals what should be in your SEO report. The most important thing is that your SEO report reflects your (or your client’s) goals. This is to understand how your marketing efforts are contributing to reaching these goals and what actions need to be taken. But there are a few basics that most of us will want to include.

A general data overview

Start with an overview of the most important data for your business or website. This gives you an idea of how you’re doing right away. Especially when you’re reporting regularly, this overview will tell you or your client how the website (and online business) is performing. You can also choose to include data from the previous period (or the previous year) for comparison.

Website data to include:

  • The number of site visitors
  • Number of purchases (or other actions you want people to take)
  • A visualization of your traffic over the selected period 
  • Keyword rankings for a few important pages
  • A traffic overview by source or medium 
  • The type of visitors (new or returning)
example of a overview in an SEO report
Example of a general overview in an SEO report

Data on (content) performance

The general overview gives a quick insight into the current state of play, but to figure out how you got there, you must go into more detail. That’s why your report should include a closer look at content performance. Make sure to include data on your most important pages, such as product pages, popular blog posts, or other landing pages that attract a lot of people. 

Collect data such as page views, visitors, engagement, event count, revenue, and traffic sources. You don’t have to include everything, as this will be overwhelming and will probably cause people to lose interest. Look at the data of your most important pages, pick out the numbers that stand out (growth or decline) and add those to your report. It can be tempting to focus solely on the positive numbers but also include the negative ones to paint a realistic picture. This speaks to your credibility, makes it easier to spot issues before they get out of hand and helps the company in the long run.

Other elements to include here are an overview of new backlinks to the website, stats related to site health and the Core Web Vitals, and an overview of keyword rankings. But do remember that keyword rankings can change on a daily basis, and obsessing over individual drops in rankings isn’t going to help your overall SEO. Use these averages to get an idea of whether your overall rankings are dropping and what you can do to get your organic traffic back up again.

Activities previous period

When you have had a look at the data, it’s time to summarize what has gone out that month (or period of your choice). Use this section to highlight how many posts have gone out on social media, how the audience has interacted with those, what blog posts have been written or updated, and how your running ads are performing. But you can also include other online or offline marketing activities to show what has been done. 

Where possible, you can tie this in with any peaks in traffic or engagement. Or it can help you explain why some areas have gotten less attention than others. Either way, use this to make sense of the data and to highlight the hard work that has been put in by the team.

A summary with recommendations

Always end your SEO report with specific action points that come out of that month’s evaluation. It helps to start with a summary of the ‘highs and lows’ that were brought up in the report so far. For example, if you have noticed a noticeable drop in rankings, and therefore organic traffic, to one of your most important pages, it will make sense to focus on getting to the bottom of that in the coming weeks. And making improvements based on your findings. Or if a new type of social media post did very well, another action point could be to create a series of those and see if you can keep this success going. 

But this last part is also a moment of reflection on a bigger level. Are you still on track with the business goals, or any specific SEO goals you’ve set for yourself? And don’t forget to go through the action points you thought up in the previous SEO report. Were you able to get those done? Are a few of them still in progress? Or are there any blockers that you need help with? Make sure to end with an action plan for the upcoming month and a team (or client) that’s on board with everything discussed.

Creating an SEO report: step by step

Now that you know what to include, let’s talk about how to get started with your SEO reporting. Before you start pulling together the data, it’s important to set clear KPIs and create a setup that works for your company.

1. Set up your KPIs

The first step is to define KPIs, which stands for key performance indicators. These should be measurable goals, based on the marketing goals and/or business objectives within the company. To give a simple example, if one of the marketing goals is to grow traffic to your website, a corresponding KPI can be to increase your organic traffic by 10% that year. Other popular KPIs are conversion rate, overall rankings, click-through rates, bounce rate, page load time, and branded/non-branded traffic.

Make these KPIs realistic, especially when you’re setting expectations with a client, and reflect on the progress in your SEO reports to stay on track. I would suggest not focusing too much on maintaining certain rankings or data on specific pages. Rankings are heavily subjected to external factors and can change daily, and zooming in on one page too much can make you lose perspective. Of course, a drop in traffic for an important page is something to keep an eye on and can be a reason to make some adjustments. But keep the overall KPIs in mind and be aware of the bigger picture, while tweaking what’s needed without obsessing.

2. Set up the structure for your report

Choose a tool for your SEO reporting. This can be a presentation tool that your team often uses, an information-gathering tool such as Excel or an Analytics dashboard, or one that your client is familiar with. Just make sure that you can set it up yourself and make tweaks when needed. 

Add the sections that we’ve discussed above: a general overview, data on performance, marketing activities, and a summary with recommendations. I would suggest looking at your KPIs to figure out exactly what you want to show in the general overview and data on performance section. So, if your main KPI is growing your conversion rate, make sure that you add the data on this KPI to the general overview.

Test drive your new report by filling in this month’s data (or whatever period of time you choose). See the next step on how to tackle this. But this will help you figure out if the setup works for you in its current form. Always tweak when needed, whether that’s right now or a few months along the line. This report should work for you, you shouldn’t be jumping through hoops to get it to make sense. 

3. Gather and fill in the data

It’s time to start retrieving the data you need. There are a few tools you can use. For the general overview and data on performance, you can mainly rely on Google Analytics and Google Search Console. To get an easy overview of your marketing activities for that month, your own marketing calendar and the platforms that you posted on will give you the insights that are needed.

Data on website performance

For the general overview and data on performance, we are going to use Google Analytics and Search Console. Here you’ll find data such as visitor numbers, engagement, number of purchases (you will have to set this as an event), visualizations of your traffic, keyword rankings, traffic overview by source/medium, and type of visitors. Stats related to site health and your Core Web Vitals can also be found in Google Search Console. Lastly, if you want to get an overview of your backlinks, Semrush can provide you with that. 

A screenshot of the ‘performance on search results’ section in Google Search Console

While you’re putting those numbers into your report, remember to be mindful of how you present them. Don’t just throw everything in there and overwhelm (yourself and) others with raw data. Highlight important data and make visualizations of certain data to break up the wall of text. You can also just copy and paste a few graphs and add those in. Using a graph to show overall traffic or pie chart to show traffic by source/medium can already make a big difference.

Write down what speaks to you while filling in the data. What has been a success this month and what are areas that need more attention? And if you see something that you can’t explain right away (f.e. a drop in traffic, or a post that has an enormous amount of views), try to figure out what happened there so you can answer questions that people will inevitably ask about them.  

Data on marketing activities

If you keep a marketing calendar, this is a great way to reflect on what you’ve published in the last month. Use this to summarize how many blog posts, social media posts, videos, newsletters and other marketing-related activities you’ve worked on. This includes other activities such as attending events, workshops, appearances you’ve made, or perhaps even print media.

When it comes to blog posts you’ve published, you could highlight one that stands out and use data from Analytics and Search Console to explain how it’s performing so far. Or you could just add the numbers up and give an idea of the overall effect of this content. Keep in mind that content needs some time to get noticed by people, so don’t fret if it hasn’t done that much yet. 

Also, use this section to evaluate your social media posts and videos that you’ve uploaded to channels such as YouTube. I would recommend going to the platforms where you’ve posted content and using their analytics tools to see how well they’ve performed. This shows you what content works best and helps you draw conclusions from data from the source itself. 

For other marketing activities that have happened that month, it really depends on the activity how to mention it in your report. If it’s an offline event or workshop, try to get some feedback from (potential) customers on their experience. When it comes to print media, you could try and get some idea of the effect by how many people have contacted you after seeing it. Just make sure to think about these things beforehand, to get an idea of the effect of these activities.

4. Evaluate and take action

When you’ve added the relevant data and summarized your marketing efforts, it’s time to properly evaluate. Go through your report and write down any patterns, issues, successes and opportunities. Add these to your overall summary and compare these findings to the ones you found last month (or the months before that) to recognize bigger issues and successes. This will allow you to properly evaluate your findings and turn them into actionable recommendations and action points.

When you’ve completed your SEO report and know what actions come out of it, it’s a good idea to present it internally. Or to your client. This helps them understand what you (and the team) have been working on and will probably spark a discussion that helps you figure out what to pick up first. Finally, after sharing this report with the relevant people and agreeing on next steps, make sure to plan these so they don’t get lost. Make a realistic plan for yourself or the team and pick up the action points to set everything in motion. And plan in the next SEO report to keep this cycle going!

Conclusion

Any good SEO report, whether this is for yourself or a client, starts with clear KPIs. Make sure to get those done before you start evaluating your SEO efforts. This will allow you to set up a proper template for the report and figure out what data you need to look at. Use the right tools to get the data you need, but don’t get lost in trying to report on everything. Show the relevant data and present this to the relevant parties to get everyone on board. Use all of this to figure out what your next steps are and follow up on the action points to make sure you keep focusing on the right things. Happy SEO reporting!

Read more: How to track website traffic: how many people are visiting your site? »

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Turning data into actionable insights: a data-driven SEO strategy

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Modern SEO is all about data. Rankings can change overnight, user behavior as well, and search engines increasingly use AI to power the search results. To be able to respond, your decisions should be dictated by real, measurable insights. This article offers a practical way to turn SEO data into actionable insights.

Table of contents

The role of data in modern SEO

The search landscape is more complex than ever, so you need all the help you can get. By analyzing data, SEOs and business owners can learn and understand what works and what doesn’t. Metrics from tools like Google Analytics and Search Console provide glimpses of how visitors behave, keyword usage, and page performance. Using data to make decisions takes the guesswork out of the SEO work.

Good data gives you a clear picture of user engagement. For instance, tracking engagement time, engagement rates, and click-through rates will reveal whether content meets audience needs. These are crucial data insights that uncover gaps that might hinder performance. Data-driven insights help you understand what to focus on and what to prioritize.

Data doesn’t just identify issues, but also opportunities. Trends in keyword performance or a shift in traffic sources can lead to new content ideas or a new market to target. This is data-driven marketing, as you are making decisions based on evidence instead of hunches. These insights will lead to strategies focused on real user behaviors, which should lead to better results.

The goal isn’t to find interesting stats — it’s to find what you can do next. In SEO and AI-driven search, the data that matters is the data that leads to action: fix this page, shift that content, change how you’re showing up. If your insights don’t lead to decisions, they’re just noise.

Carolyn Shelby – Principal SEO at Yoast

A Yoast example

Let’s take a simple example from Yoast. We noticed one of our articles (What is SEO?) was gradually losing traffic and slipping in the rankings for key terms. The content hadn’t been updated for a while, so we took a closer look. We analyzed the search results and compared our article with those from competitors. We looked at intent, structures, relevance, and freshness. It was easy to see that our article lacked depth and context in key areas.

We wrote a good brief for the article and detailed the work needed. Then, we rewrote sections, updated examples, improved internal linking, and made it generally easier to read. We also added new custom graphics and on-topic expert quotes from our in-house Principal SEO, Alex Moss.

After republishing, the article quickly regained visibility. Plus, it climbed back towards the top of the search results, which brought in extra traffic. This was a clear reminder for us; when data shows a drop, improving the quality of the content backed by a good analysis can still win.

And an example of going from data to actionable insights to results

Turning data into insights

You need a process to quickly and systematically turn raw data into valuable insights. Eventually, you’ll get these insights once you ask the right SEO questions, gather the data, analyze it, and plan accordingly. 

Start with your goals, then ask: what’s holding us back? Actionable insights live in the gap between where you are and where you’re trying to go. That gap is different for every site and that’s what makes good analysis so powerful.

Carolyn Shelby – Principal SEO at Yoast

Step 1: What do you want to know?

Start by writing down the SEO questions you want answered. Do you want to improve performance, get more organic traffic, or better engagement? Analyze a traffic drop? For instance, an online store owner might want to understand why certain product pages don’t convert as well as expected. Thinking these things through before you start digging into the data makes it easier to focus on the metrics that matter.

Step 2: Gather the relevant data

Collect the data you need using tools like Google Analytics, Semrush, Wincher, Ahrefs, or other platforms that can power your data-driven SEO strategy. If you’d like to investigate a product page with subpar performance, you’ll look at page views, click-through rates, average engagement times, and engagement rates in GA4. Data like this should give you an idea to find and address the issues. 

Step 3: Analyze and spot trends

Dive into the data and try to spot patterns and trends. For example, an educational site might notice that articles on a particular topic get a lot of traffic but low engagement. Digging deeper might find that the titles of the articles attract visitors, but for some reason, the content doesn’t keep them interested. Trends like these help turn that data into insights that you can act upon. You can also use things like segmentation to find differences between groups of people from specific regions, who could engage wildly differently with your content. 

Step 4: Turn findings into actions

Once you’ve pinpointed the issues, it’s time to decide what you want to do. For instance, if you’ve found that an article has a low engagement rate because of the time it takes to load the page, you could fix the images and scripts on the page. Or, if you find that some keywords get traffic, but no conversions, you might need to improve the CTA on the page. Or it might be a search intent mismatch to fix. This is the thing that turns the insights from data into actionable insights.  

This is a nicely structured way of getting the insights needed to inform your data-driven SEO strategy. You can use every piece of information you find to improve your work as you go. This will not only help you understand the data but also make it easier to make the improvements needed to reach your SEO and business goals. 

An example: Addressing brand performance in LLMs

For this example, think of a tech publisher named Digital Mosaic. It’s a reputable source for in-depth news from the tech industry. Recently, their marketing team noticed something off. Users interacting with AI search engines and large language models (LLMs) like Google Gemini or ChatGPT rarely saw mentions of the Digital Mosaic brand. In other words, even when asked for the latest tech insights, the AI-driven sources and answers often omitted Digital Mosaic in favor of other options. 

After finding the issue, the team started analyzing data from various analytics platforms, brand mention trackers, and user surveys. They found their SEO and content work was pretty good, but the content was not properly optimized to help LLMs surface it. The data showed that their content lacked the language and brand signals needed to help LLMs understand the brand’s authority. 

When they found this, the teams got to work to improve how LLMs perceive their content:

Improving brand signals

The content team added clearer brand signals to their content, and each post received better metadata and structured data. The goal was to clearly tie the brand to the content to help LLMs recognize the sources. 

Changes in content

Next, the team restructured certain articles to include branded segments, such as “Digital Mosaic Exclusive Analysis” or “Today’s Tech Insights by Digital Mosaic”. This makes the brand more visible to users and gives LLMs a chance to associate the content with the brand, coming from a trusted source.

Investing in partnerships and collaboration 

The publisher set up a series of collaborations with well-known tech influencers and other outlets. They made co-branded content and were mentioned in many podcasts and webinars. This helped improve the brand’s presence in online conversations. LLMs love to look for what’s available on third-party sites about brands while generating responses. 

Rinse and repeat 

The team reviewed the changes’ performance to see if the LLMs would improve brand mentions. They used AI tools, like AI brand monitoring tools, to monitor and simulate the LLM outputs to see if the work was effective. Based on their findings, they would fine-tune their work and continue to improve performance. 

Within a few months, the results were encouraging. LLMs were increasingly showing content from and mentioning Digital Mosaic, and the brand’s footprint in LLMs was steadily improving. This did not just help visibility and increase the brand’s authority in the industry, but also led to a new source of traffic from AI search interfaces.

This fictional example shows how a publisher can use data insights to overcome a very specific challenge. Mixing traditional SEO solutions with new technologies helped Digital Mosaic turn data into actionable insights. Not only did it help the brand’s visibility right now, but it also prepared it for the AI-powered future.

Read more: How to optimize content for AI LLM comprehension using Yoast’s tools. 

Tools and techniques to get data insights

You need the right tools to turn data into actionable insights. This will be a mix of the tools we all know and love, and more specific ones to understand user behavior and site performance. 

We all start with Google Analytics 4 and Search Console. GA4 tracks many metrics, including user engagement, event counts, and traffic sources. Properly set up, it gives you a good overview of how users use your site. Search Console shows how your site performs in the SERPs, including keyword rankings, indexing status, and crawl errors. 

Tools like Ahrefs and Semrush provide information about backlinks, rankings, and search trends. These search marketing tools also have many features for competitive analysis and keyword research. You’ll get a big database of historical data, so you can spot and interpret trends over time. This data helps you with your data-driven marketing on all fronts. 

Looker Studio is a great tool to tie various data sources together and build dashboards
Looker Studio is a great tool to tie various data sources together and build dashboards

Advanced techniques and technologies

The are so many options to dive ever-deeper into your data to find the insights you need. Beyond the basics, you can use:

  • Segmentation: It could help to break up your data into specific audience segments. For instance, you could look at visitor behavior based on demographics, location, or the type of device they use. Segmenting data helps you understand why certain groups behave differently. For instance, if mobile users show lower engagement than desktop users, there might be something wrong with your mobile site.  
  • Trend analysis: Don’t just focus on looking at data for a specific day. It’s often better to look at metrics over different time periods. Look at the monthly or quarterly performance. This gives you an idea of the long-term impact of changes. 
  • Build dashboards to visualize data: Make a dashboard with data from various sources. Use tools like Looker Studio to combine Google data with SEO tools like Semrush and Ahrefs. This will give you reports that will show all key data at a glance. A dashboard makes it easier to understand data and communicate it with other team members or management. 
  • Big data: Big data is becoming increasingly important for data-driven SEO. Huge data sets can provide insights that smaller sets can overlook. They allow you to examine user behavior, search trends, and site performance at scale. With machine learning and automation, you can use big data to get better and faster results to inform your SEO strategy.

Iterative optimization and reporting

SEO is an ongoing process, and you’ll have to adjust course regularly. Don’t treat your site’s performance as a snapshot, but as something dynamic that evolves over time. Regularly looking at your data keeps you on top of things, from changes in user behavior to emerging search trends. 

Make it a routine

Schedule when you review data. This might be daily checks for urgent work or weekly to track short-term changes. For long-term trends, do monthly or quarterly deep dives. Route analysis helps you spot patterns that might not be so obvious at first glance. 

Test and experiment

With an iterative optimization approach, you test what works. For example, you could A/B test different page layouts, CTA buttons, or various meta titles. You might also try different content formats to see what gets more engagement. These tests will get you the data and insights needed to make the most of your SEO work.   

Feedback loop

A true feedback loop helps validate your improvements. After turning data into actionable insights, implement the changes in your content or technical SEO work. Keep updating your data to see if you need to refine your strategy. If a new tactic works, adopt it as a standard practice. But if it doesn’t work as intended, find out why and try a variation of it. Measuring trial and error and adopting your tactics makes you flexible and responsive.

Internet marketing tools like Wincher give key data points about your content's performance, like rankings
Internet marketing tools like Wincher give key data points about your content’s performance

Towards a data-driven SEO strategy

Using the knowledge you gain from turning data into actionable insights can greatly improve your SEO performance. Be sure to structure the data-gathering process: ask the right questions, collect the right data, analyze the trends, and create a system that turns those insights into action. 

What you change on your site isn’t even that important; it might be updating metadata, improving content, or diving into technical SEO aspects. If only what you do is the correct answer to the questions you wanted to have answered. 

Every insight can lead to big improvements in rankings and user engagement. Use this data-driven marketing approach to make the right decisions that will keep your SEO strategy effective in the future.

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How to track website traffic: how many people are visiting your site?

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Just like most other website owners, you want your website to attract customers. But how can you see who visits your website? And how can you use this knowledge to increase website traffic over time? Luckily, there are loads of tools that can help you. Let’s get you started with the right one for your website without the need to become a data expert!

What is website traffic?

The term website traffic refers to the number of internet users visiting your website. Traffic can arrive from wide-ranging sources, such as directly typing in your website address, through other websites that link to your site, organic traffic (meaning they come to your site from the search results), paid traffic (people who click on your online ads), through your social media, and other channels. The total number of these users visiting your website combined is what we call website traffic.

How to check how many people enter a website

There are online tools that can help you make sense of your website traffic. These tools provide you with lots of different metrics, but we’ll go into the most important ones when it comes to website traffic.

Tools to track website visits

Numerous tools can help you track your website traffic. We’ll look at a few well-known tools that provide you with the insights you need.

Google Analytics

Google Analytics is the go-to tool for a lot of website owners when it comes to getting insights into their audience and website performance. What’s great about Analytics is that you can use it for free and it gives you loads of detailed insights. All the metrics mentioned above can be found in Analytics and give you the possibility to dive into visitor behavior and page performance. It allows you to mark key events, to track if people are performing the actions you want them to. 

The homepage gives an overview of data that Analytics deems relevant to you, based on your behavior in the tool. Some reports provide the metrics mentioned and much more, all focused on understanding your audience. Explorations allows you to create your own ‘reports’ to dive into one specific question you have or element you want a deeper understanding of. When you have Google Ads running, Analytics also provides insights into your ads and what actions to take there.

Screenshot Google Analytics 4
Screenshot of Google Analytics 4, found on Google’s blog

You will have to connect Analytics to your website, but luckily, there are tools out there that help you with that. Also, Google explains how to do this properly in their guide for beginners, which also gives you more information on this tool. One downside of Analytics, if you can call it that, is that all the information provided there can be overwhelming for some. They do expect you to find your way and figure out what data is relevant for your website. This makes it difficult to stay focused on the right things and not get lost in the woods.

Google Search Console

Another tool provided by Google, free of charge, is Google Search Console. Although there is some overlap with Analytics, this tool is focused more on showing your visibility in different parts of the Google ecosystem. Similar to Semrush, it’s very helpful when working on the performance of your pages and increasing website traffic. So if increasing organic traffic to your website is a big part of your marketing strategy, make sure to add this tool to your favorites. 

We have a beginner’s guide to Search Console, that goes into the details and explains how to set up an account. 

A screenshot of the ‘performance on search results’ section in Google Search Console

I wanted to mention this tool as it can help you boost your website traffic when used correctly. But if you’re mainly looking for a tool that provides you insights into your current website traffic, I would recommend investing your time in another tool first (f.e. Analytics). Search Console is great for figuring out what parts of your website you should work on, but if you want to take a step back and get familiar with your website stats first, then this might be for a later time.

Semrush

Semrush is another online tool that shows you how many people visit your site.e. This platform is used by a lot of people working on their website visibility. To give an idea, you can use Semrush to get data on your site’s performance, but it also allows you to do keyword research and compare yourself to competitors. 

Like Analytics, it provides a lot of information. But it does depend on your subscription on how extensively you can use this tool. There is a free version that may get you the data you need when starting out. It offers a site audit (of 100 pages), position tracking (for 10 keywords), personal recommendations, and traffic data such as visits, conversion, and bounce rate.

Semrush SEO dashboard
A screenshot of the ‘SEO Dashboard’ section in Semrush, from Semrush’s knowledge base

If you want to give Semrush a try, simply create a free account and fill in your website where the tool asks for your main domain. This will give you insights right away. You will notice that not all the data is available, and getting access to some more detailed stats will require an upgrade. But especially when you want to work on your SEO, Semrush gives you a lot of relevant information.

Metrics on website traffic

Every tool comes with different data, but there are a few relevant metrics that you will find in most of them. I’ll explain a few of them that will help you figure out who’s visiting your website and what they’re doing while on your pages.

Number of users

First of all, there’s the number of users. The number of total users tells you how many people have visited your website or a specific page in the selected period. In addition to the total number, you might also see the following metrics: active users, new users and/or returning users. 

Active users are the number of people who engaged with your page in that date range. Then there’s the difference between new users (the number of people who are first-time visitors of your site) and returning users (the number of people who have visited your site before).

Number of sessions

When a user opens your website, they start a new session. All the interactions that take place during the time they spend on your website are part of that one session. There’s no limit to how long a session can last, but it typically ends after 30 minutes of inactivity. If the user interacts with the website after that time or comes back at a later time, this will count as a different session.

Pageviews

When you encounter the metric pageviews, it tells you how many times a page is loaded or reloaded in a browser. Each time a user visits a page, it counts as one pageview—even if they refresh the page or navigate back to it multiple times. This metric helps measure how often your content is being viewed, regardless of how many unique users are visiting.

Source/medium

Source/medium tells you how users arrive at your website. The source is the specific origin of your traffic (e.g., Google, Facebook.com), while medium describes the general category of that source (e.g., organic, cpc, referral). Together, they give you insight into what channels are driving the most traffic and which ones could do better.

Engagement and events

Engagement rate is the percentage of sessions that were actively engaged, meaning users spent at least 10 seconds on the site, had a conversion event, or viewed two or more pages. It helps measure how meaningful or valuable a user’s interaction is. 

Events, on the other hand, track specific user actions—like clicks, downloads, video plays, or form submissions—providing detailed insight into how users interact with your content. Metrics related to engagement and events give you an idea of whether people are engaging with your pages and taking the actions you want them to take.

Other interesting metrics

Those metrics give you a lot of information about your website traffic, but of course, most tools offer you other interesting metrics as well. You could also look at the bounce rate, which tells you the percentage of users that leave after viewing just one page. The average session duration shows you how much time users spend on your site. Traffic by device gives an overview of how many of your users visit your website through desktop, mobile and/or tablet. Finally, top (performing) pages tells you which pages get the most visits.

Why you should know who visits your website

As I touched on in the previous paragraphs, data on your website traffic gives you insight into the behavior of your website visitors. Understanding who visits your website, and how they interact with it, helps you make more informed decisions about your website. It’s not just about counting clicks or visitors. It’s about uncovering trends, identifying growth opportunities, and optimizing the user experience to increase conversions, engagement, or other goals.

Are you visible on the right channels?

Knowing where your visitors come from, whether that’s organic search, social media, direct traffic, referrals, or paid ads, helps you measure the effectiveness of your marketing efforts. For example, if you’re investing heavily in social media campaigns but see little traffic from those platforms, that might mean it’s time to reevaluate your social strategy. On the other hand, high traffic from a specific channel might indicate a strong presence you can build on. This insight allows you to allocate your time and resources more strategically.

Pages that perform (or don’t)

Website data shows you how people are interacting with your pages, which tells you what your top-performing pages are and what pages need improving. Your top-performing pages might show high engagement, conversions, or time on site, indicating content that resonates with visitors. Pages that underperform can show you where users are dropping off or losing interest. This insight is invaluable for identifying what content needs updating, restructuring, or even retiring to improve your overall site performance.

Website performance over time

Tracking your traffic trends over days, weeks, or months allows you to assess the health of your online presence. Are you seeing growth? Seasonal spikes? Or sudden drops in traffic to your website? These patterns help you understand what’s working, what’s not, and how external factors might be affecting you. It also gives you a baseline to measure the success of any changes you’ve made to your website or other marketing activities.

Understanding your audience

Essentially, looking at the data that tells you who is visiting your website helps you get a deeper understanding of your audience and how your website is doing. This doesn’t mean you should be obsessing over these numbers daily, but having a monthly evaluation to go over everything helps you make informed decisions. Decisions that will improve your (online) presence and attract more people to your website.

Which tool is the best choice for you?

These tools are just the tip of the iceberg, but they are a great starting point when you want to keep track of your website visits over time. So, which one should you start using? If you’re looking for one tool that provides you with detailed insights into your website traffic (and therefore audience), I would recommend setting up Google Analytics first. It is the tool that’s focused on tracking website traffic and has the biggest variety of data.

To conclude

In this blog post, we discussed the importance of gaining insight into your website traffic. This can help you understand your audience and their behaviour and it helps you make improvements to your website. There are loads of tools out there, but the ones mentioned above are a great starting point. So make sure to choose one and get a grip on your website traffic!

Read more: How to measure the success of your content SEO strategy? »

The post How to track website traffic: how many people are visiting your site? appeared first on Yoast.

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Web Design and Development San Diego

Top ways to ensure your content performs well in Google’s AI experiences on Search

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As a site owner, publisher or creator, you may be wondering how to best succeed in our AI search
experiences, such as AI Overviews and our new AI Mode.
The underpinnings of what Google has long advised carries across to these new experiences. Focus
on your visitors and provide them with unique, satisfying content. Then you should be well
positioned as Google Search evolves, as our core goal remains the same: to help people find
outstanding, original content that adds unique value. With that in mind, here are some things to
consider for success in Google Search all around, including our AI experiences.

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How to Change Location on Google 🌍 Tips & Tricks

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Have you ever wondered how to trick Google into thinking that you’re somewhere else? 🌎 Changing your location in Google Search can be incredibly useful, especially for performing SEO…

The post How to Change Location on Google 🌍 Tips & Tricks appeared first on Mangools.

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What is Site Kit by Google? A guide for WordPress users

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Site Kit by Google is a free WordPress plugin that connects your site to important tools like Analytics, Search Console, and Ads. After installing, it’s easy to verify your accounts, after which you see data in your dashboard. That data is nice to have, but it has limits, especially if you need detailed reports.

Table of contents

What is Site Kit by Google and why use it?

Site Kit by Google is a fundamental analytics tool that helps you answer questions like:

  • How many people are visiting your site?
  • What page do they land on first?
  • Which keywords did they search to find you?
  • Are your ads earning clicks?

With Site Kit, Google puts the data right into WordPress, so you don’t need to go digging around different platforms to seek your data. The tool gets its data straight from each service, and shows the most important data in clear graphs, tables, and a flexible, customizable Key Metrics widget. 

Who is it for? (and when it’s not enough)

But Site Kit is not the analytics tool to rule them all in WordPress land. It covers the basics well, but it won’t work for everyone’s goals. What it does do is make it incredibly easy to set up and run various Google Analytics accounts. 

Site Kit by Google works well for:

  • WordPress users who want to track basic performance
  • People who prefer not to use extra plugins or code
  • Site owners who manage everything themselves

But it may feel limited if you:

  • Run ads at scale and need conversion-level insight
  • Use custom events or eCommerce tracking
  • Want to control every aspect of your website’s scripts and tags

It covers the basics well, but it’s not built for advanced setups.

What does it look like?

After installing and connecting Site Kit, you’ll find a new menu item in your WordPress dashboard. Clicking this will lead you to the dashboard where most of the statistics and settings live. You’ll also notice a new drop-down menu when you visit posts on your site. Thanks to this drop-down, you can quickly see statistics for this specific article without having to open Analytics.

Overview dashboard

The Dashboard gives you an overview of how your site is performing. Of course, depending on what services you connect your site to, you might see something like this:

  • Traffic and engagement insights from Google Analytics 
  • Clicks and impressions from search traffic provided by Search Console
  • An overview of the top-performing pages
  • Earnings from Ads or AdSense, if you run ads, that is
  • Site speed performance powered by PageSpeed Insights 
  • An overview of how different groups compare, for instance, new vs. returning visitors

Some sections also show trend indicators like arrows or percentage changes compared to the previous period. This will help you spot trends and act upon them. Click on any source to open a more detailed view in the corresponding Google tool.

Part of the Site Kit dashboard showing various stats and the Key Metrics widget at the top
Part of the Site Kit dashboard showing various stats and the Key Metrics widget at the top

Key Metrics widget

You can set up the Key Metrics section the way you want. Site Kit will ask you a couple of questions about your site’s goals and what you want to focus on. Then, it will suggest metrics to show at the top of the dashboard. You can choose which blocks you want to see, such as top converting traffic sources, new visitors, recent trending pages, and much more. 

Admin bar stats

After Site Kit is active, you’ll also see a small dropdown at the top of your WordPress admin bar when you’re viewing your site. Click it, and you’ll get a mini-report showing page-specific stats, including search impressions, clicks, and traffic over time.

Site Kit will help you quickly find out how your content is doing, straight from the WordPress admin bar
Site Kit will help you quickly find out how your content is doing, straight from the WordPress admin bar

What Google services can you connect?

Once installed, you can connect the following tools. Two of them — Search Console and Google Analytics 4 — are enabled during the initial setup. You can connect:

  • Google Analytics 4
  • Search Console
  • AdSense 
  • Reader Revenue Manager
  • Google Ads
  • Tag Manager

Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

Site Kit will add your GA4 tag automatically, after which it shows data such as:

  • The number of visitors
  • Sources of sessions (organic search, direct, referral)
  • Average engagement rate
  • Session durations

The data shown is summarized, so if you want custom reports or event tracking, you need to open GA4. 

a new dashoard in site kit showing the difference in interaction between various visitor groups
Visitor grouping is the newest addition to Site Kit by Google

Google Search Console

After installing and connecting, you’ll get some key data from Search Console right inside your WordPress dashboard:

  • The queries people searched to find your site
  • Number of clicks and impressions
  • Unique visitors from search
  • Page-level performance in search

This kind of data is very helpful for content optimization purposes and to inform your SEO strategy. 

AdSense/Ads (monetization)

If you use Google’s systems to run ads, Site Kit can show data on ad impressions, top-earning pages, and estimated revenue from auto ads, for instance. Simply connect the services to see the data. Remember that it doesn’t replace the AdSense dashboards, but it does give you quick insights.

Reader Revenue Manager

Reader Revenue Manager is a Google tool for adding subscription and contribution options to your website. It’s designed for publishers and content creators who want to monetize their content through reader support, such as recurring memberships or one-time donations.

With Site Kit, you can connect Reader Revenue Manager to your WordPress site in just a few clicks. Once linked, it adds the necessary code to your site automatically, so you don’t need to add tags or install it manually. This feature is optional in Site Kit and is mostly used by publishers offering paywalled or premium content.

PageSpeed Insights

Site Kit runs a PageSpeed test directly inside WordPress. In the PageSpeed Insights section, you’ll see both lab data and field data. Lab data is based on simulated testing in a controlled environment and helps you identify performance issues during development. Field data, on the other hand, reflects how real users experience your site across different devices and network conditions. Together, they provide a balanced view of how your pages perform.

The report shows load performance scores, data on Core Web Vitals (like LCP and CLS). It also gives suggestions for improving speed. But it only tests your homepage and doesn’t include custom settings. For full reports, you can still visit PageSpeed Insights separately.

Tag Manager

You can link a Google Tag Manager container through Site Kit. This lets you manage third-party scripts (like Facebook Pixel or custom tracking tags) from one place. The plugin doesn’t give you a full interface for editing tags — you’ll do that inside the Tag Manager platform.

Managing Analytics in Site Kit by Google

For most site owners or managers, Analytics and Search Console are the most important Google tools. Site Kit makes it easy to set those two services up properly. Of course, you can also use existing accounts.

Enhanced measurement support

GA4 also has Enhanced Measurement, which tracks scrolls, outbound links, file downloads, and other actions automatically. If you activate these in your GA4 property, Site Kit can track them. Unfortunately, it’s not possible to choose which ones to turn on from inside WordPress; you need to go into your GA4 settings for that. 

Event tracking and tag insertion

Site Kit doesn’t support event setup or tracking reports inside the WordPress dashboard. If you need full control over events, you have to use GA4 directly or use Tag Manager to set up the custom events.

Limitations of Analytics in Site Kit

You’ll probably understand by now that Site Kit is not a replacement for GA4 — it’s a neat tool that gives quick insights and nothing more. You don’t get access to funnel reports, attribution models, or filters. You can’t edit events or see predictive metrics, and there’s no support for GA4 audiences or Google Analytics 360.

What’s Enhanced Conversion tracking?

With Enhanced Conversions, you can connect Google Ads clicks to leads or form submissions. This improves the reporting of these events when users are on different devices or block cookies. After setting this up, Site Kit will detect form submissions and pass the data to Google Ads.

Site Kit currently supports some of the most popular WordPress contact form plugins, such as Contact Form 7, WPForms, and Ninja Forms. However, if you use an unsupported custom form, Site Kit can’t automatically add enhanced conversions. 

Again, Site Kit has many limitations in this area. For instance, it doesn’t support purchase-based eCommerce conversions or offline conversions. It also doesn’t support pixel-level tracking, third-party forms, popups, and embedded forms. So, it’s specifically designed for simple lead form submissions. 

Key Metrics widget for quick performance insights

Key Metrics are a very valuable addition as they give quick insights into data of your choosing. They’re quick to understand but not very in-depth. For key strategy decisions, you’re going to need more data.

This widget pulls together important GA4 and Search Console data into a block on your dashboard. You can choose which metrics to show and reorder them. To change your selection, click the Change metrics button in the corner of the Key Metrics section. You can also rerun the question from the Site Kit admin settings.

Each metric includes a figure and a trend comparison from the previous period. For example, you may see engagement is “up 6%” compared to the last 28 days. Click any of them to open the full source report in GA4 or Search Console.

The widget has limitations. It doesn’t show custom events or real-time reporting, campaign attribution breakdowns, or GA4-specific collections like audiences or conversions. The widget and Site Kit, in general, are for broad insights, not advanced analytics. 

The Site Kit Key Metrics widget shows various data that you can tailor to your needs and goals
The Site Kit Key Metrics widget shows various data that you can tailor to your needs and goals

Is Site Kit by Google enough for your goals?

Site Kit is a good starting point for most WordPress users. It brings together valuable Google data without having to do much work. But whether it’s enough depends on whether you need to get from your analytics and tracking tools. 

SEO and content insights

Site Kit is not an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO. However, you can get data from Search Console that will help you understand how people find your website in the search results. With this, you’ll form an understanding of which content works well and how your site performs in the search results. 

However, as mentioned, it’s not an SEO plugin, so you need to install a tool like Yoast SEO to do much of the heavy lifting. Plugins like these help with most SEO tasks, like fixing technical issues, adding structured data, and improving your content. 

Monetization

If you’re running ads, Site Kit shows basic ad metrics like impressions, estimated earnings, and top-earning pages. It helps you monitor your ads without having to log into another app. 

It doesn’t support advanced ad setups, and you can’t manually place ads. It’s also not possible to optimize layouts based on behavior or run A/B tests to find the best ad format. If you’re working with multiple ad networks, you’ll need a tool that can do a lot more than Site Kit.

Marketing analytics

For reporting basics, Site Kit will do just fine. You can see trends in users, sessions, referral sources, and engagement time — all brought to you by Google Analytics 4. 

However, Site Kit doesn’t give access to campaign statistics, UTM tracking, or event-based funnels. It also doesn’t offer the option to set goals or segment traffic by behavior. For these kinds of insights, you need to dive straight into GA4 or use a more in-depth reporting tool. If you run marketing campaigns, track conversions, or use CRM tools, Site Kit won’t provide enough data. 

eCommerce and advanced use cases

For eCommerce, Site Kit won’t cut it. It doesn’t integrate with WooCommerce and doesn’t offer a revenue tracking option. It also doesn’t have access to carts, products, transactions, or customer behavior. There’s no way to measure things like average order value or conversion rates. 

For advanced eCommerce tracking, you need to set this up in GA4 directly or use other methods to access this data. Site Kit doesn’t support this at all. 

Should you use Site Kit by Google?

Site Kit is a good option if you want a free tool to view traffic, search, and performance statistics without having to set up a bunch of tools. It’s very easy to use and useful enough for small websites. 

If you’re running a huge publication or an online store, need to track custom campaigns, or manage a large number of ad accounts, Site Kit won’t cut it. That’s not to say it’s useless for those cases. One of its biggest draws is that it makes setting up GA4, Search Console, Ads, and Tag Manager accounts incredibly easy. It’s a great starting point to build your analytic toolkit upon.

The post What is Site Kit by Google? A guide for WordPress users appeared first on Yoast.

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Title Tags: How to Write Them (+ Steal Our Formulas)

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You can create the most helpful, well-optimized content on the web.

But if you mess up the title tag, none of that will matter.

The title tag is the blue, clickable headline that shows up in search results.

It’s also your one shot at convincing a reader to choose your content over everyone else’s.

A subtle tweak to the title tag can make all the difference.

Take this example from the Backlinko blog: rain

Original title tag: “17 Ways to Get More Views on YouTube in 2025”

Position: 4th in search results

Keyword Overview – How to increase views on YouTube – SERP Analysis

Improved title tag: “17 Powerful Tactics To Get More YouTube Views in 2025″

Position: 1st in search results and the featured snippet

Google SERP – How to increase views on YouTube – Featured snippet

Same topic, same content. Wildly different result.

But, why did that second title tag work better?

And how can you get the same results?

In this guide, I’ll break down what makes a title tag work.

I’ll cover real examples, a simple framework for writing them, and tools you can use to improve your title tags — and search results — today.

Free resources + AI Prompt

Ready to start improving your title tags right away? Download our:

Prompt:

“Help me write a title tag for [YOUR KEYWORD] using the Backlinko formulas and checklist I’ve attached.”

What Is a Title Tag?

A title tag is a line of HTML code that tells search engines (and searchers) the title of your webpage.

Think of it as your content’s elevator pitch — your chance to convince a searcher that you have the answer to their questions.

A title tag isn’t something that readers will see on the webpage itself. It’s the text that appears:

  • As the blue hyperlink in search engine results

    Google SERP – SEO Strategy – Title

  • As the text on a browser tab m

    Backlinko – Text on browser tab

  • In some social media previews of your web content

    LinkedIn – Preview of web content

Behind the scenes, it looks like this in your website code:

<title>How to Create an Effective SEO Strategy in 2025</title>

Why Title Tags Matter

Google’s guide says title tags are key for both readers and search rankings.

“It’s often the primary piece of information people use to decide which result to click, so it’s important to use high-quality title text on your web pages.”


Our research backs that up.

We analyzed 11.8 million Google search results and found that most first-page results include some or most of their target keyword in the title tag.

In other words, a clear title tag that uses the keyword is your ticket to the first page.

Most Titles Contain 65 to 85 % of the Keyword

But simply ranking isn’t enough.

Even if your page shows up in the search results, it won’t matter unless people actually choose to visit it.

That’s why your title tag also needs to be human-friendly. It’s your one chance to win the click.

And that click really matters.

The No. 1 result in Google gets an average click-through rate (CTR) of 27.6%.

The result in position 10? Just 2.4%.

That’s more than 10x fewer clicks and a massive difference in traffic.

So, a strong title tag doesn’t just help your page show up in search results.

It also encourages more people to click on your link, which can help your page move even higher in the rankings.

Google organic CTR breakdown by position

Side note: Our CTR study was conducted in 2019. With the introduction of AI Overviews and other SERP changes, click patterns have evolved. However, the core principle remains: higher positions still attract significantly more clicks than lower ones. For the latest on how search is changing, see Semrush’s 2025 AI Overviews Study.

There’s one more reason title tags in SEO are so important:

If you get the title wrong, Google might just rewrite it.

Studies show Google rewrites around 61% of title tags in search results.

Usually because they’re too long, vague, or overloaded with keywords.

And when that happens, you lose control over what shows up in the search engine results page (SERP).

Sometimes Google will just grab the heading (H1) of the page.

Other times, it’ll generate something entirely new. And not always better.

If you want to make sure your pages look polished in the search results, writing a solid, search-optimized title tag is non-negotiable.

Title Tags vs H1 Tags

Personally, I used to muddle these up. So if you’re confused about the difference between title tags and H1s, you’re not alone.

Element Title Tag H1 Tag
Where it appears In SERPs and the browser tab At the top of the webpage where people can read it (e.g., the title of a blog post)
What it looks like (HTML code) <title>Your Page Title</title> <h1>Your Page Heading</h1>
Who is it for? Mainly for search engines and clicks Mainly for readers
What does it do for SEO? Improves rankings and CTR Supports on-page structure and confirms your page is relevant to the search query

Your title tags and H1 tags should both convey the same information.

They don’t need to be word-for-word the same, though.

For instance, we’ve written an article with the heading “What is Content Marketing?”

Backlinko – What is Content Marketing

That’s the H1 tag.

But our title tag is “What Is Content Marketing? Complete Beginner’s Guide.”

What is Content Marketing – Title tag

Different, but clearly covering the same information.

Write Better Title Tags With the 3C Framework

Your title tag has one job: get more clicks.

The 3C Framework gives you a simple way to create titles that rank well AND get clicked more than your competitors.

The 3C Framework for Better Title Tags 

Clear

The title should tell people what your page is about. No need to guess.

Bad:

“Solutions That Work for the Modern Business”

What does that even mean?

Better:

“CRM Software for Small Businesses | Free Trial Available”

It tells Google what the page is. And it tells humans why they should click.

Clickable

Ranking is only half the battle. The other half? Getting the click.

To do that, your title needs to stand out and make people want to learn more.

Bad:

“Marketing Strategy Guide”

It’s fine, but a bit blah.

Better:

“Marketing Strategy Guide: Get Explosive Growth in 7 Days”

It’s actionable, shows value, and uses an emotional power word (“explosive”).

Want some ideas for turning bland language into more clickable titles?

Generic Word Power Word Replacement Why It’s Better
Improve Boost / Transform Suggests dramatic results
Learn Master / Discover Suggests success, not progress
Guide Blueprint / Playbook Feels actionable
Increase Explode / Multiply Implies faster, bigger gains
Tips Hacks / Secrets Feels exclusive
Info Insider Info / Must-Know Draws on FOMO
Get Grab More action-oriented

Contextual

You need to give readers (and search engines) context — and that means keywords.

But tread carefully. No stuffing allowed.

Bad:

“Email, Email Marketing, Email Campaigns, Email Tips”

Likely to get rewritten. Also just annoying for readers.

Better:

“Email Marketing Guide for Beginners (2025 Edition)”

Front-loaded keyword, used once, in a natural way.

Want to try it out yourself?

Here’s an AI prompt you can use to incorporate these rules when writing your title tag:

You are a digital marketing specialist focusing on SEO and content strategy.

Your task is to craft a title tag that is clear, clickable, and offers context to enhance search engine ranking and user engagement.

Approach this step-by-step:

1. Determine the primary topic or keyword of the page to ensure the title is clear and relevant.

2. Use power words or emotional triggers to enhance the clickability and engagement of the title.

3. Naturally integrate the primary keyword to provide context, avoiding keyword stuffing.

Adhere to these guidelines:

1. Keep the title concise and between 50–60 characters.
2. Avoid vague or generic language that fails to clearly convey the page’s content.
3. Balance keyword usage with readability and natural language.

Keyword is: [INSERT YOUR KEYWORD HERE]

For example, for the keyword “marketing strategy,” ChatGPT gave me:

  • Marketing Strategy Guide: Build a Plan That Gets Results
  • Proven Marketing Strategy Tips to Grow Your Business
  • How to Create a Marketing Strategy That Works
  • Effective Marketing Strategy Examples + How to Use Them
  • Marketing Strategy Made Simple: A Step-by-Step Approach

Not bad for a few seconds of work, right?

Optimize Your Title Tags for Search Engines

You need titles that both Google and humans love.

These optimization tips help search engines understand and rank your content higher.

1. Match Your Title to What People Are Searching for

Before you write your title tag, look at what’s already showing up in Google for your keyword.

This helps you understand what searchers want and what kind of content Google is rewarding.

Here’s how to do it:

Google Your Keyword

Type your keyword into Google and look at the top 5–10 results.

Look for Patterns

Are most of the results lists?

That usually means people are exploring or comparing their options. Try a title like “Top 10…” or “Best Tools for…”

Google SERP – Top 10 CRM

Do they include the current year?

People want the latest updates. Add the year to your title to show it’s fresh.

Year in title shows it's fresh

Are the pages explaining a concept?

People are looking for information or education. A title like “What Is X? [+ Examples]” works well.

Explaining – The concept what is x

Do you see a lot of tutorials?

People want a walkthrough. Go with a how-to title like “How to Do X Step-by-Step”.

How to do x – Step by step

When your title matches what people are looking for, they’re more likely to click. And Google is more likely to show your page.

2. Keep It Short

If you go too long, you risk Google rewriting it.

If you go too short, you miss an opportunity to engage your readers.

When we analyzed 4 million search results, we found that titles between 40-60 characters have the best click-through rate.

Titles in this range get 8.9% more clicks on average.

Title tags between 40 to 60 characters have the highest CTR

So, that’s a good starting point. But here’s what really matters:

Google truncates title tags based on pixels (the actual width of the letters), not characters.

Google truncates title tags based on pixels

Around 580–600 pixels is the max width before your title gets cut off.

And on mobile, titles often get truncated even earlier.

So while ~40–60 characters works most of the time, it’s not guaranteed.

Want to check your title before hitting publish?

Use a free tool like the Mangools SERP Simulator. Just make sure to switch it to mobile view first.

Mangools – Google SERP Simulator – Mobile

3. Use Keywords First

This helps in two ways:

One exception here:

For listicles, it’s often better to lead with the number.

Think “5 Powerful AI Tools for Content Creation” rather than “Content Creation Tools: 5 Powerful Options.”

It gives readers a clear idea of what to expect.

Backlinko – Number in headline

4. Give Each Page a Unique Title Tag

Google doesn’t like duplicate or boilerplate titles:

“Titling every page on a commerce site “Cheap products for sale”, for example, makes it impossible for users to distinguish between two pages.

Long text in the <title> element that varies by only a single piece of information (“boilerplate” titles) is also bad.”


So if you duplicate your SEO title tags (or just change a single word), you’re more likely to have them rewritten.

Instead, take a moment to craft a unique title tag for every page.

One that accurately reflects the content and intent of that specific URL.

Pro tip: Skip your brand name in most title tags. It often shows up anyway and can count as duplicate content. If you include it, add it at the end with a dash, colon, or pipe.

Brand name in title tag

5. Match the Title to the Content

Simple, but important.

Your title has to accurately reflect what’s on the page.

If you’ve promised “The 17 Most Important SEO Tips,” there had better be seventeen juicy bits of SEO wisdom there.

Google might rewrite your title if it doesn’t match your content.

More importantly, you’ll annoy your readers, and they’ll bounce right off the page.

Also, remember to be specific, not vague.

Generic titles like “Home” or “Services” don’t help readers know what they’ll see if they click.

6. Vary Your Title and H1 Tags

If your title and H1 are identical, you’re missing an opportunity to hit additional keywords.

Plus, you’ll typically want to use the title tag to say what the page is about, and the H1 to get more detailed or conversational.

For example:

Backlinko – How to Create a Website

vs.

Backlinko – 10 Steps to Create a Website

  • The title tag is contextual and clickable. It includes a number, a benefit, and a clear topic.
  • The H1 tag is more conversational and reader-friendly. It’s aimed at people who already know what’s on the page.

You can also include multiple variations of your keywords (e.g., “email marketing tips,” “email campaigns,” “email marketing”) without repeating yourself.

Start optimizing your title tags today with our title tag checklist.


Compare Good vs. Bad Title Tags (Across Industries)

Great title tags don’t just follow best practices. They match intent, highlight value, and stand out in crowded search results.

Let’s break down a few real examples (good and bad) to show what works — and what to avoid.

SaaS

Keyword: “project management for small businesses”

The first result we get is from Zapier:

Zapier – Keyword in title

Why it works:

  • It matches why someone would be searching and shows the benefit they’ll get from reading
  • It includes the keywords so the reader knows they’ll get exactly what they’re looking for
  • It includes the power word “best”

Compare that with this result from Scoro, way back on page 10.

Scoro – Google result from tenth page

Why it doesn’t work:

  • It’s too vague. The reader doesn’t know what they’ll get if they click.
  • It doesn’t match what the reader is looking for
  • It’s jargon-heavy. It assumes we’ll know what PSA Software is.

Ecommerce

Keyword: “buy leather backpack”

Here’s the first result:

Kodiak Leather – Buy leather backpack

Why it works:

  • Hits both “leather” and “backpack”
  • Addresses searcher needs — includes both genders, links backpacks to travel
  • “Best” works as a power word

And here’s one from page 10:

Mina Baie – Buy leather backpack

Why it doesn’t work:

  • Leading with “MINA BAIE” wastes valuable space (this isn’t a household name)
  • A diaper bag isn’t obviously the same as a backpack, so it misses search intent
  • “Modern” is vague and lacks emotional punch

Local Business

Keyword: “coffee shops in Austin”

Here’s a result from the top of the SERPS:

Do512 – Coffee shops in Austin

Why it works:

  • Matches exactly what this searcher might be looking for
  • “Awesome” is an appealing emotional power word
  • Location-based

And here’s one from page 10:

Switchyards – Coffee shops in Austin

Why it doesn’t work:

  • Too much brand, not enough benefit
  • Doesn’t match search intent
  • Jargon-heavy — what is a neighborhood work club anyway?

Landing Page

Keyword: “seo strategy template”

Backlinko – SEO strategy template

Why it works:

  • Clearly stated benefit — you get what you were looking for
  • Hits all three keywords
  • “High-level” sets an expectation about scope — if that’s what you need, you’ll find it here

Google breaking its own rules here:

Looker Studio – SEO strategy template

Why it doesn’t work:

  • Doesn’t clearly communicate that the page offers SEO strategy templates
  • Lacks a compelling reason to click
  • Overly branded — many searchers won’t recognize or be looking for Looker Studio

How to Analyze and Improve Your Title Tags

Got title tags already? Let’s find the ones losing you clicks.

These simple analysis methods show which titles need fixing ASAP for quick traffic wins.

Check Your Current Title Tags

Audit your existing title tags to spot issues like:

  • Titles that are too long, too short, or duplicated
  • Titles that don’t clearly describe the page
  • Titles that don’t match what people are searching for

A few tools you can use:

Google Search Console

First, open Google Search Console and select your website property.

If you’ve never used it before, or you have a new website, take a look at our Guide to Google Search Console to get started.

On the left-hand menu, under “Performance“, click on “Search results.” This report shows how your site appears in Google Search.

GSC – Performance – Search results

Click on the “Pages” tab.

This shows performance data for individual pages on your site.

Google Search Console – Backlinko – Performance – Pages

Look for pages with high impressions but low clicks.

Google Search Console – Backlinko – High impressions low clicks

High impressions + low clicks = your page is showing up but not convincing people to click.

These are the pages where improving your title tag could make a big difference.

Semrush On Page SEO Checker

Use Semrush’s On Page SEO Checker to make sure your title tags include your target keywords, without keyword stuffing.

First, configure the tool to crawl your site and collect data.

Then, head to the “Optimization Ideas” tab to see a list of your pages along with the number of suggestions for each one.

Click on the “# ideas” next to any page.

On Page SEO Checker – Techcrunch – Optimization Ideas

In the “Content” section, you’ll see whether your title tag uses your target keywords appropriately.

Content section – Title keywords in title tag

Semrush Site Audit

Use Semrush Site Audit to spot duplicate or missing title tags.

Set up the Site Audit from your Project dashboard.


Once the audit is complete, go to the “Issues” tab and type “title tag” into the search box.

The tool will show you a list of issues related to title tags — like duplicates, titles that are too long, or ones that match the H1 exactly.

Site Audit – Backlinko – Issues – Title tag

Click on the issue to see the list of affected pages.

Site Audit – Backlinko – Issues – Too much text within the title tags

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

You can also use Screaming Frog to spot title tag issues.

Download the free version of the app (available for Windows, Mac, or Linux). Then, follow the installation steps.

Open the tool, type your homepage URL into the search bar at the top, and click “Start.”

Screaming Frog – Backlinko

Screaming Frog will begin crawling your site. This can take a minute or two.

Once the crawl is done, click “Page Titles” to see a full list of your website’s title tags.

Screaming Frog – Backlinko – Page Titles

Use the filter dropdown or look at the “Issues” column to find problems.

Screaming Frog – Backlinko – Problems

Watch the Right Metrics

Here are the numbers to keep track of:

  • CTR: If you update a title and your CTR jumps, it’s probably working. You can check this in your Pages report in Google Search Console.
  • Impressions without clicks
    This means you’re showing up in search results, but nobody’s clicking. Go back to the 3Cs. Is it clear, clickable, and contextual?
  • Ranking changes
    If a page drops in search rankings after a title change, maybe Google doesn’t like the new version.

Or, maybe you’ve missed the user intent this time round.

Try this: Want to see if your new title works better? Pick one underperforming page, change the title tag, and track the CTR in Google Search Console over the next few weeks.

If clicks go up (and rankings stay steady), the new title is probably stronger.


Steal These Winning Title Tag Formulas

Writing title tags from scratch every time? No, thank you.

Below are three proven formulas that we use at Backlinko to craft headlines that stand out.

List or Number Formula

  • Formula: X [Unique Adjective] [Topic]
  • Why it works: Lists provide clarity and set expectations but need unique adjectives to grab attention.

    Backlinko – List or Number Formula – Title tag

The Keyword-Colon Formula

  • Formula: [Content Topic]: [Actionable promise]
  • Why it works: Directly addresses the topic and hooks the reader with an actionable promise.

    Backlinko – The Keyword-Colon Formula – Title tag

The Keyword-Question Formula

  • Formula: [Keyword Question]? [Promise]
  • Rationale: Answers the reader’s question head-on and draws them in with a clear benefit.

    Backlinko – The Keyword-Question Formula – Title tag

Need More Ideas?

We analyzed 150+ real title tags from top-ranking SEO content and combined that with AI-trained insights from thousands more.

The result?

Over 50 proven, plug-and-play formulas you can use to boost clicks and match search intent — no guesswork required.

Download our file of 50+ title tag formulas.

Time to Fix Those Title Tags

Your title tag is more than just metadata. It’s your best shot at earning the click.

So, don’t let it go to waste.

Pick your top three pages, apply what you learned here to improve your title tag SEO, and track the results.

Want to keep leveling up?

Head over to our On-Page SEO Guide for more ways to boost traffic, rankings, and engagement.

The post Title Tags: How to Write Them <br>(+ Steal Our Formulas) appeared first on Backlinko.

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