AI tools are everywhere — from chatbots that answer customer questions to language models that summarize everything from documentation to legal text. But if you’ve ever asked a model like ChatGPT to explain your site, your product, or your API, the results might not feel quite right. In fact, sometimes they’re way off. And no, that’s not your fault.
The disconnect between websites and LLMs
Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini are trained to understand a wide range of content. But when they try to interpret your website at runtime, that is, when someone is actively asking them a question, they run into a few core problems:
HTML is noisy. Navigation bars, cookie banners, modal popups, and analytics scripts clutter the page.
Context windows are limited. Most websites are too large for an LLM to process all at once.
Important details are spread across multiple pages or hidden in tables, code blocks, or comments.
Markdown docs may exist, but the model often can’t locate them, or even know they exist.
So, when you ask an AI tool to “explain what this company does” or “summarize this library API”, it often gets stuck. It either skips key context or grabs the wrong signals from cluttered markup.
It’s not bad intent; it’s a design limitation.
Why it’s not your SEO’s fault, either
You’ve probably invested time and effort into search engine optimization. Maybe your robots.txt and sitemap.xml are in place. You’ve got meta tags, structured data, and clean internal links. Good, but LLMs don’t always work like Google.
Traditional SEO helps your site get found. However, it doesn’t guarantee that AI tools will understand what a human user would. That’s where a new proposal comes in.
Meet llms.txt: A simple way to help AI understand your site
A growing number of developers and AI researchers are adopting a lightweight, human-readable standard called llms.txt.
What is llms.txt?
llms.txt is a plain Markdown file placed at the root of your site that provides language models with a summary of your project and direct links to clean, LLM-readable versions of important pages. It’s designed for inference-time use, helping AI tools quickly understand a site’s structure, purpose, and content without relying on cluttered HTML or metadata intended for search engines.
What it does:
Gives a short summary of your site or project
Links to clean, LLM-ready Markdown versions of key pages
Helps AI tools find exactly what matters, without parsing messy HTML
Is it widely supported? Not yet
Right now, no major LLM provider officially supports llms.txt. Tools like GPTBot (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), and Google’s AI crawlers don’t reference or follow it as part of their crawling behavior. Some companies like Anthropic publish llms.txt files themselves, but there’s no evidence that any crawler is actively using them in retrieval or training.
Still, it’s a low-effort, no-risk addition that helps prepare your site for a future where structured LLM access becomes more standardized. And LLM-facing tools, or even your own AI agents, can make use of it today.
Example use cases:
A dev library links to .md-formatted API docs and usage examples.
A university site highlights course descriptions and academic policies.
A personal blog offers a simplified timeline of key projects or topics.
You control the content and the structure. LLMs benefit from curated, LLM-aware context. And users asking questions about your site get better answers.
Using our Yoast SEO plugin?
If you’re already using our Yoast SEO (free or Premium) plugin, generating a llms.txt file is easy. Just enable the feature in your settings, and the plugin will automatically create and serve a complete llms.txt file for your site. You can view it anytime at yourdomain.com/llms.txt.
Get Yoast SEO Premium
Unlock powerful SEO insights with our Premium plugin, including advanced content features, AI optimization tools, and real-time data built for the next generation of search.
(https://everydayimtravelling.com/sitemap_index.xml) of this website.
# everydayimtravelling.com: Stories from our travels
## Posts
- [Test video](https://everydayimtravelling.com/test-video/)
- [A Journey Through Portugal’s Wine Country: A Suggested Wine Tour Route](https://everydayimtravelling.com/a-wine-tour-through-portugal/)
- [Travel essentials for backpackers FAQ](https://everydayimtravelling.com/travel-essentials-for-backpackers-faq/)
## Pages
- [Checkout](https://everydayimtravelling.com/checkout/)
- [Contact us](https://everydayimtravelling.com/contact-us/)
- [How we started this blog](https://everydayimtravelling.com/pagina-harry-potter/)
- [My account](https://everydayimtravelling.com/my-account/)
- [Cart](https://everydayimtravelling.com/cart/)
## Categories
- [Europe](https://everydayimtravelling.com/category/europe/)
- [Asia](https://everydayimtravelling.com/category/asia/)
- [South America](https://everydayimtravelling.com/category/south-america/)
- [Food](https://everydayimtravelling.com/category/food/)
- [Western Europe](https://everydayimtravelling.com/category/europe/west-europe/)
## Tags
- [Budget](https://everydayimtravelling.com/tag/budget/)
Yoast SEO has an llms.txt generator onboard; you can find it in the API settings
Helping AI help you
So, if AI is misinterpreting your website, producing erroneous summaries, or skipping critical content, there’s a reason, and it’s fixable.
It’s not always your copy. Not your design or your metadata. It’s just that these language tools need a little guidance. In the future, llms.txt could be the way to give it to them, and you do so on your terms.
Do you need help creating an llms.txt file or converting your existing content to Markdown for LLMs? Yoast SEO can automatically generate an llms.txt file for you.
http://dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/dubado-logo-1.png00http://dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/dubado-logo-1.png2025-06-10 09:44:442025-06-10 09:44:44What AI gets wrong about your site, and why it’s not your fault: meet llms.txt
Increased usage of AI is changing how people discover businesses and services online. While your website may be optimized for traditional search engines, large language models (LLMs) process your website’s information differently. Our new feature, llms.txt offers to bridge the gap. Yoast SEO generates a file that highlights the most important, up-to-date content on your website as an invitation for LLMs to get the right picture. It’s automatic, requires no technical setup, and is ready in one click.
Helping AI understand your website
Unlike search engines that regularly crawl and index websites, LLMs like ChatGPT and Google Gemini work differently. They don’t store website content for future use. Instead, they gather information in real time when responding to user queries.
This means LLMs often only access a small portion of a website while looking for answers. This is especially true for large websites such as news platforms or ecommerce stores. This can lead to incomplete or even inaccurate AI-generated responses. Not ideal if you’re aiming to improve your visibility in LLM-generated answers as part of your marketing strategy.
The llms.txt file gives LLMs a suggested, pre-prepared slice of your website, highlighting your most important and up-to-date content.
Think of it like a helpful guide at the entrance of a large department store. Imagine you’re walking in looking for socks. Someone greets you and hands you a store map that highlights where the socks are, along with other key departments like shoes, checkout, and customer service. You don’t have to use the map, you can wander around on your own, but it makes it much easier to quickly find what you’re looking for.
In the same way, this file helps LLMs quickly identify the most relevant and useful parts of your website. While the models can still explore other areas, giving them clear guidance increases the chances that they’ll surface the right information in their responses.
How is it different from robots.txt?
robots.txt
Tells bots what not to access
Focuses on permission
Used for search engine indexing and crawling
Supported by traditional search engines
llms.txt
Suggests what AI should read
Focuses on guidance and clarity
Helps AI answer user questions more accurately
Designed for large language models like ChatGPT
How does Yoast SEO llms.txt work?
When you turn the feature on, it automatically generates an llms.txt file for your website, using a mix of relevant website data. It draws from:
Your most recently updated content
Technical SEO elements like your sitemap for context
Descriptions you’ve added about your website
This offers large language models a website summary to understand what your website is about and what content is most important.
Managing your llms.txt file
The plugin automatically creates and maintains the llms.txt file for you, refreshing every week. You can preview the file to ensure it accurately reflects your brand and prioritizes the right content before implementation.
Want full control or prefer to manage it yourself? Learn how to manually add an llms.txt file to your website by visiting our developer documentation.
At Yoast, our mission is SEO for everyone
Setting up an llms.txt file manually may only be accessible to a technical few. By automating the process, we make it easier for all website owners to benefit from this new technology, without needing to dive into code.
At Yoast, we believe that everyone should have a say in how their content is seen and used. Especially as AI plays a bigger role in how people discover information online. That’s why we’ve introduced this feature as opt-in, so you can decide if and when it makes sense for your website. We’ve seen early signs that this is something more website owners are starting to think about.
Just as robots.txt tries to help search engines understand what to index, llms.txt suggests which parts of your website large language models should pay attention to.If you’d like to see what an llms.txt file looks like in practice, you can view the live version on yoast.com.
http://dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/dubado-logo-1.png00http://dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/dubado-logo-1.png2025-06-10 08:21:532025-06-10 08:21:53New: Future proof your website for tomorrow’s visitors with Yoast SEO llms.txt
You type a few keywords into Amazon. A brand called Truly Beauty pops up. You’ve never heard of them.
So you go to YouTube to find the “best after shave oil”.
At the top of the results, someone has reviewed Truly Beauty’s product.
Okay, interesting…
Let’s stay on YouTube. Next, you type “truly beauty after shave oil” into the search.
What the? The whole page has people reviewing Truly Beauty products!
Is this brand legitimate, or are all these ads in disguise?
Time to go to Reddit to get some unfiltered opinions.
You search for “after shave oil reviews reddit” and notice that once again, Truly Beauty shows up in the results.
Sure enough, other people share your skepticism. But there’s some positive feedback too.
You decide to give them a try.
This kind of journey happens millions of times every day — across every industry, on every platform.
Side note: I run a men’s apparel brand, but I often research women’s beauty. It’s insanely competitive and usually way ahead in digital strategy.
If you’re in SEO, there’s a clear takeaway here:
You’re not just optimizing for Google anymore.
You need to show up across the entire decision-making journey. Wherever your audience searches, scrolls, or compares.
This is exactly what Truly Beauty figured out.
They didn’t just optimize for Google. They built visibility across the entire search ecosystem. Amazon for discovery. YouTube for social proof. Reddit for authentic reviews.
And it’s working amazingly well.
In this guide, I’ll break down how to optimize your brand for how people actually search today. With concrete examples. Including Truly Beauty’s strategy.
Free resource: To make things easier, I’ve created a checklist to track your progress
Let’s start with what’s really happening here.
The New Reality: Search Everywhere Optimization
What Truly Beauty did isn’t luck. It’s strategy.
They understood something most brands still miss:
Search has changed.
Today’s customers don’t follow a clean, Google-only path. They bounce from TikTok to YouTube, Reddit to Amazon, back to Google, then maybe ChatGPT for one last check.
Credit where it’s due: Rand Fishkin captured this evolution perfectly in his recent post.
Search Everywhere Optimization is about helping people find, evaluate, and trust your brand across every platform where discovery happens. That includes Google — but also YouTube, TikTok, Reddit, Amazon, LinkedIn, and even AI tools like ChatGPT.
Every one of those platforms can shape a decision. Miss one? You risk losing the customer to someone who showed up where you didn’t.
Your job isn’t just to rank on Google.
It’s to help people find, evaluate, and trust your brand everywhere they search.
Some call this omnichannel SEO, cross-platform optimization, AEO (Answer Engine Optimization), or GEO (Generative Engine Optimization).
The way I see it:
Search Everywhere Optimization.
Because the search journey now includes everything from YouTube Shorts to AI summaries.
And your job is to build visibility, credibility, and conversion power across it all.
It’s not just about being found.
It’s about being trusted. On every platform where decisions happen.
That’s what makes Search Everywhere Optimization different — it evolves SEO beyond a siloed tactic into a full-funnel growth strategy.
So, you’re not just optimizing pages anymore.
You’re shaping how people find, evaluate, and trust what you offer across every stage of the journey, on every platform they turn to for answers.
Show up on high-engagement platforms where decisions start
Create content that resonates in the right format and context
Build trust through experience — design, messaging, and credibility
Turn search moments into conversions, leads, or long-term users
That’s the shift:
From rankings to relevance. From clicks to action. From Google-only to everywhere that matters.
Two Core Areas of Search Everywhere Optimization
To make Search Everywhere Optimization work, you need to understand where your audience is discovering products.
And how much control you have over those moments.
That’s where this framework comes in.
We divide the modern search experience into two key areas:
Managed experiences — where you control the content and presentation
Influenced experiences — where others shape the narrative, but your brand still shows up
This distinction helps you prioritize efforts across platforms you own… and platforms where you earn visibility.
Managed Experiences
These are touchpoints you can directly control.
Your website is still your most important owned asset. But you also manage your social media profiles, product listings, app store pages, and more.
This is where things gets tactical. You’re shaping the journey with:
Engaging content
Clear messaging
Cohesive visuals
Optimized flows and CTAs
On your website, you can go even deeper — refining structure, page speed, copy, and trust signals.
The goal? Deliver a fast, credible, and conversion-ready experience every time someone finds you through search.
Earned and Influenced Experiences
Now, let’s talk about where you don’t control the narrative.
These are the moments shaped by others: customers, creators, communities, algorithms.
Earned and influenced experiences are touchpoints you don’t directly control.
But they still shape how people perceive and trust your brand.
This includes:
Customer reviews
Reddit threads
YouTube mentions
Third-party comparisons
AI-generated responses in tools like ChatGPT
You can’t control these spaces… but you can influence them.
Search Everywhere Optimization is about increasing your visibility, credibility, and perceived value in places you don’t own.
That might mean:
Engaging in relevant conversations
Encouraging customer reviews
Partnering with trusted voices
Publishing helpful content that others cite
Truly Beauty does this well. Their TikTok is a managed asset. The brand controls the content, caption, and messaging.
This isn’t about control. It’s more about visibility, relevance, and credibility in places people already go to decide.
Luckily, you can help shape perception through helpful content, real engagement, and clear value.
You can pay influencers to review and interact with your product, publish high-quality guest posts. So, you don’t have full control over them, but you can light the fire.
For example, Truly Beauty has a strong presence across owned and earned/influenced platforms.
This includes the brand’s official TikTok account, an owned experience.
The brand controls the content, caption, and messaging.
But when someone searches for Truly on TikTok and sees unsponsored reviews? That’s an influenced experience.
Both matter. Because both shape how people perceive your brand.
Search Everywhere Optimization ensures you show up in both worlds (managed and influenced) so you’re part of the journey no matter where it happens.
How Search Everywhere Optimization Builds on Traditional SEO
Traditional SEO has mostly focused on one thing — ranking on search engines like Google.
That still matters.
But it’s no longer enough.
Search Everywhere Optimization expands your SEO strategy beyond Google to include every platform where people search, compare, and decide.
So instead of optimizing just for rankings…
You’re optimizing the entire discovery journey.
This shift doesn’t replace SEO. It levels it up.
Here’s how they work together:
Traditional
SEO
Search Everywhere Optimization
Primary Goal
Drive qualified traffic from Google and other search engines
Help people find, evaluate, and take action across platforms
Tactics
Focus on content, keywords, backlinks, and technical fixes
Tailor messaging and format to each platform and stage of the journey
Performance Metrics
Metrics include rankings, impressions, CTR, and conversions
Metrics include engagement, watch time, scroll depth, reviews, and cross-platform performance
Think of it this way:
Traditional SEO gets you found on Google
Search Everywhere Optimization gets you chosen — everywhere
When you combine both, you create a strategy that moves with your audience.
Across platforms. Across formats. Across every step of their journey.
Step 1: Define Your Search Personas
Creating search personas lets you outline what your ideal audience wants and needs, and what drives their decisions.
This helps you design content and experiences based on real search behavior, rather than assumptions.
Pro tip: Already have marketing personas? Add a “Search Behavior” section to show how your audience searches, discovers, and evaluates solutions online.
Start with Real People
Before you can build your personas, you need real-world insights.
Go straight to the source by asking existing customers questions like:
How they found you
What made them trust you
What they needed before taking action
Tools like Typeform let you create and distribute surveys.
Start with their ready-to-use consumer behavior templates to make the process fast and easy.
Loop in Sales and Support
No one knows buyer questions better than your frontline team.
Ask them:
What keywords or phrases do people use when they reach out?
Which platforms drive user discovery?
What’s unclear or confusing before people convert?
This input gives you practical insights you can’t get from keyword tools alone.
Layer in Data
Tools like Semrush’s Traffic & Market Toolkit let you analyze your target market’s demographics.
Here’s how it works:
Enter your domain and up to four competitors’ domains.
Click “Analyze.”
View the “Audience” report to get a breakdown of unique visitors to each domain by age and sex.
Then, scroll to the “Geo Distribution” report to see an overview of visits and unique visitors by country.
Next, click “Audience Overlap” to learn about your audience’s online habits.
Including their most-visited domains. This gives you insights into their preferences, pain points, and needs.
Once you’ve gathered your data, organize everything into a clean visual persona.
Or just use a doc or spreadsheet — whatever helps you capture the key insights clearly.
By the end, you should know:
What your audience is trying to solve when they search
What blocks or gaps slow them down
What type of content or format resonates most
These insights give you a clear picture of who your searchers are and what matters to them.
Note: You can create multiple personas if your product serves more than one audience. For example, a beginner and a power user won’t search the same way or want the same content.
Step 2: Map the Full Search Journey
Map how each search persona moves from discovery to decision across platforms, questions, and content types.
We want to start by breaking the journey into three simple stages.
Quick note:
I’m showing these stages as a linear progression for simplicity. Real search journeys usually aren’t straightforward.
Users frequently jump between platforms and stages, circling back and moving forward unpredictably. This framework simply helps organize our understanding of the core phases searchers experience.
Discover: This is when someone first realizes a need or problem and starts looking for ideas, inspiration, or possible solutions
Compare: At this stage, they evaluate their options, which involves comparing features, reading reviews, or checking alternatives to decide what fits best
Act: This is when they’re ready to take action. Including making a purchase, signing up, booking a service, or taking the next step.
Expand this journey into more stages and variations as needed.
Like awareness, consideration, evaluation, or post-purchase.
For simplicity, we’ll stick with three core stages.
Then, for each stage, identify:
What they search for
Where they go to find answers
What content format they expect
Let’s say we’re mapping the search journey of a shopper discovering Truly Beauty.
A user might first come across this brand when searching for “best after shave oil” on TikTok.
From there, they Google “after shave oil” and see Truly in the top results.
Next, they visit the brand’s site to view product details, images, and pricing.
After that, they head to YouTube.
They search “truly after shave oil review” to find reviews from real people.
Finally, they visit Amazon, search for the product, and check reviews again before placing their order.
This is a simplified version of your audience’s actual journey.
In reality, searchers might visit more platforms during the discovery and compare stages — spanning days or even weeks.
This is why it helps to map the complete journey.
Like this:
Have more than one persona or product category? Create a separate map for each.
Many platforms offer free customer journey map templates, such as Canva and Miro.
Step 3: Identify Gaps and Prioritize Touchpoints
Here’s where you’ll identify what your brand is missing across the search journey and what to fix first.
Using your journey map from Step 2, go through each stage and ask:
Are we visible everywhere our audience searches?
Does our content actually help them move forward?
Let me walk you through an example.
I conducted a quick manual audit for Truly Beauty across multiple platforms.
On TikTok and Instagram, they consistently appear for branded searches like “Truly Beauty.”
And product-specific searches like “vanilla baby body oil.”
Next, I examined user-generated forums to see if people discuss the brand organically.
On Reddit, I found some positive threads where users recommend Truly products.
And some negative threads, too.
Overall, Truly Beauty could have a stronger presence in earned and influenced spaces.
We’re excited to announce that Yoast AI Optimize is now also available when using the Classic Editor in WordPress!
You’ve finished your copy, great! But those pesky Yoast SEO Analysis lights aren’t all green and you have to make manual changes. That’s where Yoast AI Optimize comes in. With Yoast SEO Premium, you can now get AI-powered suggestions right inside your Classic Editor to help fine-tune your content.
What is Yoast AI Optimize?
Yoast AI Optimize brings smart, targeted SEO support into your writing flow. It gives AI-powered suggestions for specific assessments in the Yoast SEO analysis, such as length, structure, and keyphrase distribution. You’ll see exactly where improvements can be made and get quick, editable suggestions to help you fix them. You can quickly apply or dismiss them; the final decision always remains yours.
Benefits:
Get real-time AI suggestions that help improve SEO and readability
Edit suggestions to match your style and tone of voice
Apply or dismiss suggestions easily without breaking your writing flow
Use it in both the Classic and Block editors with Yoast SEO Premium
Supports optimization for:
Keyphrase in introduction
Keyphrase distribution
Keyphrase density
Sentence length
Paragraph length
Whether you’re using the Classic Editor or sticking with the Block Editor, Yoast AI Optimize helps you improve your SEO score faster, without losing the personal touch.
If you’re curious to know how we built this feature, check out our developer blog post with all the behind the scenes.
Ready to optimize smarter? Update to Yoast SEO Premium to try AI Optimize in the Classic Editor today!
http://dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/dubado-logo-1.png00http://dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/dubado-logo-1.png2025-06-02 14:32:452025-06-02 14:32:45Yoast AI Optimize is now available for Classic Editor
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
See what’s driving the highest engagement for these brands. Then (if it’s relevant to your own brand), see if you can come up with related ideas with your own spin on it.
Once you’ve identified some trending themes, you have to decide which trends are worth following.
Evaluate your ideas against these parameters to see how well the trend aligns with your brand:
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?
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.
You don’t have to scramble to collect data from multiple platforms.
Social Analytics gathers organic and paid data from Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram.
Here’s a preview of the Overview tab on Social Analytics. It gives you a glimpse of each channel’s key metrics, like followers, reach, profile views, post engagement, and more.
To get started with Social Analytics, you need to connect your social media profiles to Social Poster.
This will automatically link your accounts and collate all performance data.
Social Analytics creates unique dashboards for every platform.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Now that so many people use AI tools to create content, the questions about the credibility of those tools keep popping up. Can you really make AI-generated content and still meet Google’s E-E-A-T standards? Of course, the answer is yes, but there’s a limit to what you should let these tools do. Incorporating human insights in AI content can help uphold these standards.
AI helps you move faster and do more, but it can’t replace humans (yet). Do you want readers to trust your content and have it seen as a reliable source in traditional and AI-driven search? Then, you need to have people involved in every stage of the content production process.
In this article, we’ll discuss how to combine AI content with human editing to maintain experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. But we’ll also discuss what happens if you don’t do that.
AI 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.
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.
http://dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/dubado-logo-1.png00http://dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/dubado-logo-1.png2025-05-30 12:33:562025-05-30 12:33:56Integrating human insight with AI-generated content: How to maintain E-E-A-T
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.
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.
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
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
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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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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“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.
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.
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.
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.
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…”
Do they include the current year?
People want the latest updates. Add the year to your title to show 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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
Readers (usually) read from left to right, so the keywords will stand out to them
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.
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.
5. Match the Title to the Content
Simple, but important.
Your title has to accurately reflect what’s on the page.
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:
vs.
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.
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.
Click on the issue to see the list of affected pages.
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 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.
Use the filter dropdown or look at the “Issues” column to find 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.
The Keyword-Colon Formula
Formula: [Content Topic]: [Actionable promise]
Why it works: Directly addresses the topic and hooks the reader with an actionable promise.
The Keyword-Question Formula
Formula: [Keyword Question]? [Promise]
Rationale: Answers the reader’s question head-on and draws them in with a clear benefit.
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.
http://dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/dubado-logo-1.png00http://dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/dubado-logo-1.png2025-05-14 15:55:292025-05-14 15:55:29Title Tags: How to Write Them (+ Steal Our Formulas)
While there is no guarantee that any particular site will be added to Google’s index, sites that follow the Search Essentials guidelines are more likely to appear in Google’s search results.
How to Identify Keyword Stuffing on Your Site
Not sure if your content crosses the line from optimized to overkill?
Here’s how to spot keyword stuffing before Google and your readers do.
Manual Calculation
Old-school, but it works:
Count how many times your target keyword appears in your content
Divide by your total word count
Multiply by 100 to get the percentage
Side note: AI tools can help you calculate keyword density, but their results may not be entirely accurate. I tested ChatGPT against a manual calculation and found it was off by 28%. After prompting it to recheck its work, ChatGPT was able to provide the correct answer. But this process actually took longer than just calculating it myself.
So, how do you know if your percentage is “good” or “bad”?
Keep in mind that the ideal keyword density doesn’t exist.
As Leigh McKenzie, Backlinko’s head of SEO, says:
You can’t fake relevance by jamming your target phrase into every heading. A natural, readable flow matters more. As a general rule, if your keyword density creeps above 2–3%, it’s worth taking a second look.
Use keywords intentionally. But write like you’re talking to real people, not search engines. That’s what both the algorithm and AI actually reward.
Manual Assessment
One of the most effective ways to identify keyword-heavy content is to read it aloud.
If something feels stiff, repetitive, or robotic, your readers will feel it, too.
Ask yourself:
Would I write this way if SEO wasn’t a factor?
Does this content feel valuable and informative?
Would real people enjoy reading this?
If the answer to any of these questions is “no,” it’s time to revise.
WordPress Plugins
Using WordPress?
Plugins like Yoast SEO and Rank Math can help flag potential keyword stuffing.
These tools provide readability scores and keyword density calculations.
But keep in mind that these tools may miss subtle issues.
And typically won’t flag anything until it’s really obvious.
So, it’s best to use them as a guide rather than a final verdict.
On Page SEO Checker
Want a smarter, more in-depth look at keyword usage on your pages?
Our natural language understanding models look at a search in context, like the relationship that words and letters within the query have to each other. Our systems start by deciphering or trying to understand your entire search query first. From there, we generate the best replacements for the misspelled words in the query based on our overall understanding of what you’re looking for. For example, we can tell from the other words in the query “average home coast” that you’re probably looking for information on “average home cost.
Same goes for grammatically incorrect or just plain awkward keyword phrasing like:
“Running shoes cheap”
“How to train dog fast”
Yes, people search like this:
But you shouldn’t mirror that phrasing word-for-word.
Or you risk lowering the readability and trustworthiness of your content.
6. Spread Out Keyword Usage
Don’t use a bunch of keywords in a single paragraph or section.
Distribute them naturally throughout your content, from the introduction to the conclusion.
This creates a more cohesive piece that flows naturally while still signaling relevance to search engines.
If you don’t have any manual actions, you’ll see this message:
If you have a manual action, you’ll see a report with the number of issues detected.
And a description of each one.
Like unnatural links, cloaking, thin content, and — you guessed it — keyword stuffing.
If you received a penalty, you’ll need to address the issues and submit a reconsideration request.
Fix the Issues
Once you’ve identified the problem pages, it’s time for cleanup.
But this isn’t just about fixing one page. It’s about showing Google you’ve changed your approach.
Here’s what to focus on:
Rewrite keyword-stuffed content: Focus on clarity, depth, and user intent. Cut repetition and use natural phrasing and keyword variations.
Remove hidden keywords: If you used any black hat tactics, such as white text on white backgrounds, keyword-stuffed alt tags, or hidden links, remove them from your site
Upgrade the content: Check that each page meets search intent, thoroughly covers the topic, has meaningful information gain, and includes E-E-A-T signals. Like high-quality sources, author expertise, and expert insights.
Audit your site: For best results, consider following the above steps for every page on your site (if possible) — not just the ones Google flagged. This may improve your chances of getting the penalty removed.
Request a Review
Once your content is cleaned up, go back to Search Console and follow these steps:
Open the “Manual Actions” section and click “Request Review.”
Next, you’ll be asked to check a box confirming you fixed all of the issues.
You’ll also need to explain what you fixed and how you did it.
Don’t copy and paste generic language. Be honest, transparent, and direct in your answer.
Explain the following:
What caused the issue
The exact steps you took to fix it
The outcome of your efforts
Expect to wait anywhere from a few days to a few weeks for a response.
You’ll get an email with Google’s decision when the review is complete.
If your first request is denied, you can try again.
Stop Stuffing. Start Optimizing.
Google doesn’t count keywords anymore.
Why should you?
Ranking in 2025 isn’t about gaming the algorithm — it’s about creating content that actually helps people.
So, leave the keyword stuffing to 2005 and focus on what modern readers and search engines want:
Helpful, trustworthy content.
Ready to write content that reads and ranks well?
Check out our SEO best practices guide. It’s packed with proven strategies for writing high-performing content without sacrificing quality or user experience.
http://dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/dubado-logo-1.png00http://dubadosolutions.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/dubado-logo-1.png2025-05-12 16:07:492025-05-12 16:07:49What is Keyword Stuffing? How to Avoid Doing SEO Like It’s 2005
