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Word count and SEO: how long should an article or page be?

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Word count is not a ranking factor in itself, but it still plays a significant role in SEO. A minimum number of words helps search engines understand your topic, helps users understand your message, and supports content quality and relevance. The right length for your content depends on search intent, topic depth, competition, and purpose. In this guide, you will learn why word count matters, when length helps or hurts, and how to decide the right length for every page you publish.

Table of contents

Key takeaways

  • Aim for over 300 words for posts and 200 words for product descriptions to enhance SEO and user experience.
  • Word count helps Google understand context and relevance, though it is not a direct ranking factor.
  • Longer content provides opportunities for the inclusion of keyphrases, synonyms, and internal links, thus supporting SEO.
  • Prioritize quality and clarity over simply hitting a word count; irrelevant filler can damage user experience.
  • Always align your content length with user intent and ensure it adds real value to readers.

What does word count mean for SEO?

Word count refers to the total number of words on a page, including headings, body text, and lists. In SEO, word count is often used as a rough indicator of the amount of information a page contains about a topic. It is not a quality signal by itself, but it strongly influences how much context, explanation, and clarity a page can provide.

Search engines aim to understand what a page is about and whether it satisfies the user’s search intent. A page with sufficient text provides both readers and search engines with the signals they need to interpret meaning, relevance, and usefulness. When word count reflects real depth and not just filler, it supports SEO. If it turns into padding, it works against you. That’s not all, though; in fact, longer articles contribute to SEO in several ways.

Longer content will naturally contain your keyphrase more often. This also gives you more opportunities to use synonyms and related keyphrases, too. Additionally, longer content enables you to utilize more headings, links, and images. These elements help support your keyphrase and enhance how well your page aligns with user intent.

Longer text can also help you rank long-tail variants of your keyphrase. That’s because you have more opportunities to address various topics in a lengthy text. What’s more, if you do some clever internal linking, you’ll drive more organic traffic to your site.

Why very short content often struggles

Pages with extremely low word counts often fail to perform well in search results. This is usually not because they are short, but because they lack sufficient context, depth, and usefulness. Very short pages often leave important questions unanswered. They also provide little supporting explanation and struggle to show expertise and build trust.

From a user perspective, thin content rarely feels complete. From a search engine perspective, it provides fewer clues about relevance and topic coverage. This combination makes it harder for very short pages to compete in most informational and commercial search results. Thin content also weakens your overall site quality signals, which can affect more than just one URL.

Minimum word count guidelines

Minimum word counts exist to help prevent thin content, not to guarantee rankings. As general thresholds:

  • Regular posts and pages typically require a minimum of 300 words
  • Product descriptions typically require a minimum of 200 words
  • Cornerstone content typically requires a minimum of 900 words

These numbers act as a quality floor. You can go above them when a topic requires more explanation, and you can sometimes go below them when the intent is extremely narrow. What matters is whether the page truly fulfills its purpose.

What does Yoast SEO check when it comes to text length?

Yoast SEO checks the length of your content as part of the SEO analysis. You can find this check in the SEO tab of the Yoast SEO meta box or in the Yoast SEO sidebar while you are editing a page. It simply calculates how many words you have added and evaluates whether that amount is likely to be sufficient to support your SEO goals. The same check is also available in the Yoast SEO for Shopify app.

Every page on your site needs to contain a certain number of words to be helpful for your site visitors and for Google. The minimum length of your text depends on the type of page. Taxonomy pages, or collections if you use Shopify, usually require less content than blog posts, while cornerstone content is often your most important content and therefore needs to contain a significant number of words.

How the Yoast SEO text length check works

This length check exists to help you avoid publishing pages that are too thin to be useful. A page with too few words often lacks context, misses important details, and struggles to demonstrate relevance or expertise. By flagging very short pages, Yoast SEO helps you improve the overall quality of your content.

an example of a green traffic light for the text length check in yoast seo
The text length check in Yoast SEO

It is essential to note that this check serves as a guideline only and does not guarantee rankings. Adding more words alone will not make a page rank. The goal is to ensure that your page contains sufficient, meaningful content to explain the topic properly, align with user intent, and enhance overall content quality.

In the table below, you can see how Yoast SEO assesses the different types of pages on your site. If a page contains fewer than the advised minimum number of words, you will see a red traffic light in the Yoast SEO analysis. When you meet or exceed the minimum word count, you will receive a green traffic light.

Word count assessment by page type

Page type Minimum advised word count
Post or page More than 300 words
Cornerstone post or page More than 900 words
Taxonomy description More than 30 words
Product description More than 200 words
Cornerstone product description More than 400 words
Product short description Between 20 and 50 words

Content depth vs content length

One of the most common SEO mistakes is confusing length with depth. Content length is the number of words you use. Content depth refers to the thoroughness with which you cover the subject.

Depth means that your content answers the main question clearly and addresses relevant subtopics. It also anticipates follow-up questions and provides enough context for users to understand what they are reading. A page can achieve strong depth with a few hundred words for simple topics, while complex subjects may require far more.

Search engines are increasingly evaluating whether a page demonstrates genuine understanding rather than superficial keyword usage. That understanding comes from depth, not from word count alone. This is also where concepts like E-E-A-T become important.

How user intent determines ideal length

User intent is the foundation of every word count decision. Once you understand why someone is searching, determining the appropriate length becomes much easier.

Informational searches usually need more explanation, context, and structure. Navigational searches often need only a few words to guide users to the right place. Transactional searches prioritize clarity, trust, and persuasion over lengthy educational content.

When length matches intent, users feel understood. If it does not, they struggle to find what they need. They can also feel overwhelmed by unnecessary information. Our guide on analyzing search intent explains how to align your content with what users actually want.

Cornerstone content and long-form pages

Cornerstone content represents the most important, comprehensive pages on your site. These articles define your expertise around core themes and often serve as hubs for related content through internal linking.

Because of their role, cornerstone articles are naturally longer and more detailed. They typically cover a broad topic comprehensively, address multiple subtopics, and provide a clear structure for both readers and search engines. While 900 words may be a starting point, many strong cornerstone pages grow far beyond that. This happens when the subject matter demands more detail.

When building cornerstone content, ensure that you also mark it correctly in your site structure and internal linking strategy. Our guide on how to create cornerstone content walks you through this step-by-step.

How to decide the right length for your page

Instead of starting with a word target, start with a set of questions. What is the main intent behind this page? What does the user need to know to feel satisfied? What do the top-ranking results already explain? What additional value can you realistically add?

Outlining your content before writing makes this process easier. It also helps you stay focused while you write. When each section has a clear purpose, the final word count becomes the natural result of good coverage rather than an arbitrary goal.

Word count for product pages

Product pages require a careful balance between information and usability. Insufficient content can erode trust and hinder visibility in search results. Too much content can distract users from taking action.

A strong product page clearly explains what the product is, what it does, who it is for, and why it is worth buying. For many products, a few hundred words of clear copy is enough. More complex or high-consideration products often require more detailed explanations. This helps remove uncertainty and build confidence.

Here, clarity matters far more than hitting any specific word target. Good product pages also benefit from solid internal linking and structured data, which are covered in our guide to site structure for SEO.

Word count for blog posts

Blog posts vary widely in length because they serve a range of purposes. Some posts aim to provide a concise answer to a specific question. Others aim to explore a topic in depth and become long-term reference material.

Shorter blog posts can perform well when they are tightly focused and match a simple query. Longer blog posts often perform well for broader or more competitive topics because they allow you to explore nuances, include examples, and cover related questions that users frequently ask.

A long blog post should never feel long. When structure and readability are handled well, even detailed articles remain easy to read. If you want to improve how readable your articles are, see our article on how to improve your readability score.

Word count for landing pages

Landing pages exist to convert, not to provide in-depth education. Their success depends on whether they clearly communicate value, build trust, and guide users toward a single, actionable outcome.

Some landing pages convert best with only a few hundred words. Others need significantly more space to overcome objections and establish credibility. The right length is determined by how much explanation your audience needs before committing.

Testing real user behavior through analytics and A/B testing is the only reliable way to determine the optimal length for landing pages.

How competition affects word count

Search results show what Google already considers competitive for a query. If the top-ranking pages are detailed and comprehensive, users likely expect that level of depth. If the top results are short and direct, that usually signals simpler intent.

Before deciding on your own content length, take time to study the pages that already rank. Look at their structure, coverage, and clarity. Your goal is not to match their word count, but to match or exceed their usefulness.

This process is closely connected to keyword research and SERP analysis. If you need a refresher, our guide on keyword research covers this topic in detail.

Why readability matters more than raw length

Length only helps when people can actually read and understand the content. Long pages fail when they are filled with dense paragraphs, unclear structure, or overly complex language.

Strong readability stems from using short, clear sentences and maintaining a logical flow between paragraphs. It also depends on well-placed headings and simple vocabulary. Good structure makes even long content feel approachable and encourages users to keep reading.

Readability also supports accessibility and user experience. Both of these indirectly influence SEO performance. That is why readability is a core part of how Yoast SEO evaluates content quality.

Internal linking and topical coverage

Word count influences how much topical ground you can cover and how naturally you can include internal links. Internal links help search engines understand your site’s structure and enable users to discover related content.

Longer, in-depth pages naturally create more opportunities for internal links that are meaningful. This is because they touch on more aspects of a topic. Short pages often limit those opportunities. Strong internal linking enhances topical authority and improves the performance of cornerstone content.

If you want to improve your internal linking strategy, you can start with our guide to internal linking for SEO.

Common mistakes with word count

One common mistake is writing only to hit a number. This often leads to repetition and filler that reduce clarity and trust. Another mistake is publishing large amounts of thin content at scale. This can weaken the overall quality signal of a site.

Ignoring user intent is equally damaging. A very long article for a simple query can frustrate users just as much as a very short article for a complex topic. Finally, many sites overlook updating older thin pages as topics evolve and user expectations shift.

Regular content audits help prevent this problem and keep your site aligned with what users and search engines expect.

Conclusion on word count and SEO

Word count can influence how your posts and pages perform, but it should never come at the expense of quality. Writing more words only helps when those words improve clarity, structure, and usefulness. If you stretch your text just to reach a number, you risk making your content harder to read and less helpful for your visitors.

Focus on writing readable, well-structured content that genuinely answers the user’s question. Use headings to guide readers, keep paragraphs clear and concise, and make sure every section serves a clear purpose. That is what helps users engage with your content and what search engines aim to reward.

If you want to go deeper into this balance between optimization and persuasion, see our guide on SEO copywriting and writing for sales.

The post Word count and SEO: how long should an article or page be? appeared first on Yoast.

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Top Tracking Issues We Help Our Clients With

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You’re investing in ads and other marketing strategies, but have you ever stopped to think about the data you’re using to inform those investments? For many companies, the biggest blind spot is tracking. Hidden misfires are skewing channel reporting and attribution, ultimately throwing off your marketing decisions.

At NP Digital, we’ve helped hundreds of clients uncover recurring patterns of tracking failure. Today, we’re sharing the most common issues we see and exactly how you can fix them. No fluff. Just real problems, real fixes, and proven next steps.

Key Takeaways

  • Attribution: Attribution bias is mitigated by using a shared taxonomy across data sources and maintaining clean first-party data.
  • GA4: Discrepancies around revenue and event tracking with business systems are solved by integrating GA4 data with those business systems.
  • Consent Management: Consent misconfigurations can lead to legal risk and lost data when CMPs are not mapped correctly to tag categories in the tag manager.
  • Cross-device: Use customer IDs to unify fragmented cross-device journeys. 
  • Campaign Tracking: Custom setups need governance, so be sure to standardize campaign tracking structures, audit tags regularly, and align dashboards across marketing channels.

The Impact of Bad Data Tracking

Poor data tracking can be dangerous because it has the potential to distort every decision downstream. If your tags misfire, if a user doesn’t opt in and your scripts still run, or if your UTM query parameter structure breaks mid-campaign, you won’t know it until the numbers don’t add up. And by then, the damage is done.

We’ve seen firsthand how these silent issues erode marketing performance. The root causes usually fall into a few key categories:

  • Incomplete or incorrect tracking setups
  • Tracking that isn’t validated regularly
  • Misaligned naming conventions or taxonomies

And what happens when those issues go undetected?

  • Data gaps that make campaign comparisons impossible
  • Attribution errors that over-credit paid and undercount organic and vice-versa
  • Privacy violations if tags fire before consent, creating legal risk

Accurate tracking is the foundation of good marketing. And when it’s off, your strategy is too.

The Tracking Issues We See With Clients

Website tracking issues come in all shapes and sizes, but the same trends seem to emerge over the years of our experience working with clients. Across industries and platforms, we’ve found five tracking challenges that consistently disrupt clean data:

  • Broken or biased attribution
  • GA4 discrepancies.
  • Vendors restrict audience splits or don’t provide raw data
  • Algorithms self-optimize in ways that obscure true lift
  • Privacy-driven consent issues
  • Fragmented cross-platform journeys
  • Custom setups without a scalable structure

These issues don’t just mess with reporting, they impact performance and decision-making. In the next few sections, we’ll break down the causes of each issue and the solutions we provide to our clients.

Incrementality Measurement & Attribution Bias

Clients come to us with concerns about the accuracy of their reporting and questions on how they can determine what’s working/not working using their web analytics data. Once we dig into the attribution model, we realize it’s only telling half the story.  

Attribution bias occurs when platforms over-credit or under-credit paid clicks and under or over-count the earlier part of the customer journey. Skewing the data this way creates inflated ROI on paid channels, while undervaluing organic search or even direct traffic.  

It also leads to budget decisions based on faulty data. In either case, decisions made on data that consider attribution in a silo are faulty ones for most brands .Even with incrementality testing, that in theory controls for attribution bias, there can be issues. 

Savings can be attributed to fixing attribution:  

A graph showing ad spend wasted due to poor attribution.

What we recommend:

  • Use a cross-platform testing platform that lets you build holdouts and unify taxonomy across campaigns.
  • Design holdouts that abide to allowed audience splits.
  • Leverage raw ad platform data mapped to a business, meaningful taxonomy, and business-sourced total conversions data to model incrementality. 
  • When analyzing results, consider factors that might skew the measurement (e.g. self-optimizing platforms) and how that might change the decisions you make based on the results before you run the test, not after.      
  • Run ongoing incrementality tests, not one-and-done experiments.
  • Map paid and organic together when evaluating top-of-funnel performance.

Incrementality doesn’t have to be a guessing game, but you need the right framework in place to get real answers.

GA4 Data Reliability & Integration

Since the switch to GA4, we’ve seen a surge in tracking headaches. It’s not that GA4 is broken, it’s that many teams rely on it to reconcile platform data and drive reporting dashboards. But GA4 doesn’t always sync cleanly with everything else.

Here’s what we’ve seen go wrong:

  • GA4 data lags behind real-time performance, which delays optimization
  • Revenue in GA4 doesn’t match backend systems, causing reporting conflicts
  • A/B test data often doesn’t align with GA4 sessions or events
  • Key events are misconfigured or underreported due to GA4’s stricter event model

How we help clients fix this:

  • Integrate GA4 with other platforms via a Customer Data Platform (CDP) to unify user-level data
  • Create source-of-truth dashboards that include backend data, not just GA4
  • Align testing platforms with GA4 event structure to ensure clean comparisons

GA4 can be a powerful part of your analytics stack, but only if it’s connected to everything else.

Consent Management & Privacy Compliance

Marketing teams need to prioritize tracking and consent management because tracking issues can occasionally turn into legal issues. Privacy regulations like GDPR and CPRA are becoming stricter, and many businesses aren’t ready. We’ve seen major data loss and even risk exposure due to simple missteps in consent setup.

Here’s what typically goes wrong:

  • Consent Management Platforms (CMPs) fire too late or not at all
  • Tags run before consent is granted, leading to compliance risks
  • Cookie categories aren’t mapped correctly in GTM, causing incorrect cookies to fire 
  • Cookie deprecation isn’t planned for, so key audiences can disappear because steps haven’t been taken to solve for lost cookie data

These gaps could mean lost data and legal trouble.

How we help:

  • We run audits using tools like ObservePoint to check tag behavior against consent status
  • We configure CMPs (like OneTrust) to block tags until users opt in, mapped by cookie category
  • We support clients with server-side tracking and cookieless solutions to maintain data flow

You can’t afford to guess when it comes to consent. A single misfire can cost you visibility and trust.

Cross-Platform & Funnel Visibility

Even with great tracking on individual platforms, we still see clients struggle with stitching it all together. In our experience, teams often struggle to connect the dots between a user’s first ad exposure and their final conversion, especially across devices, platforms, and channels.

Common problems include:

  • No consistent customer ID across tools
  • Offline or backend actions (like CRM updates or sales calls) not tied to digital campaigns
  • Metrics that mean different things across platforms (e.g., “conversions” in Facebook vs. Google Ads)

The result is fragmented customer journey tracking and incomplete funnel visibility.

Here’s how we address it:

  • Implement first-party data strategies that collect and unify customer IDs
  • Use platforms like Segment or Tealium to connect CRM and analytics data
  • Build funnel dashboards that reflect the full customer path, not just last-click attribution

Without complete visibility, optimization becomes a matter of guesswork. Clean data across platforms turns your funnel from a black box into a roadmap.

Custom Tracking & Tagging Infrastructure

Every client wants data tailored to their business, but too often, custom tracking setups become unmanageable over time. We’ve seen teams inherit messy GA4 configurations, inconsistent UTM naming conventions, and dashboards that pull data from five sources with little to no alignment.

That makes auditing a nightmare and decision-making unreliable.

Common breakdowns we’ve seen:

  • Event tracking is implemented manually, inconsistently, or without clear documentation
  • Tools like Claravine or Funnel.io are underused or misconfigured
  • Data (SEO, paid media, etc.) and backend teams all report on different numbers

How we fix it:

  • Run full tag audits to spot inconsistencies or redundancies
  • Standardize UTM frameworks and naming conventions across channels
  • Set up integrated dashboards that map channel and revenue data in one view

Clients need a more complex measurement solution to accommodate today’s users. The modern customer is more mature and selective. They’re doing more research on who you are as a brand, across channels, before they convert. Teams are doing a great job of implementing multiple channels to bring these customers into the fold, but you need to implement a unified solution to make the most of the data they provide. 

Tracking Issues in 2025 vs 2024

Tracking in 2025 looks very different from where we were just a year ago.

Last year, the biggest issues were setup-related: getting GA4 live, consistently tagging campaigns, and stitching data together across ad platforms. Clients were exploring tools and figuring out where things were breaking.

This year, the challenges have matured. Now it’s about optimizing what’s in place, shifting from basic implementation to smarter, scalable solutions.

What’s changed:

  • Tagging stability has improved, but the pressure is on to prove ROI with less data
  • Consent compliance and cookie deprecation are non-negotiable, not “nice to haves”
  • Incrementality testing and attribution refinement are top priorities
  • Teams are pushing beyond dashboards to revenue-backed insights
  • New platforms (like ArtsAI and OptiMine) are being evaluated with deeper scrutiny

The takeaway: In 2024, it was about getting things up and running. In 2025, it’s about whether your setup can scale, adapt, and stay compliant.

How You Can Start Improving Your Data Tracking Today

If you’re running into tracking issues or even suspect something’s off, don’t wait for a reporting crisis to assess the situation. You’ll save yourself time and headaches by looking into the issue now.

Here’s where we recommend starting:

  1. Run a Full Audit: Use tools like ObservePoint to validate which tags are firing, where, and under what conditions. Focus on consent compliance, event coverage, and load order.
Example of ObservePoint, a tool to help scale and automate scans for tag validation and cookie compliance: 

Source: https://www.observepoint.com/blog/how-to-import-your-onetrust-consent-categories-in-a-snap/

A graphic showing different types of digital marketing audits.

Source: https://lakeone.io/blog/digital-marketing-audit

  1. Standardize UTM and Taxonomy: Create a documented framework across your paid, organic, and internal teams. Inconsistent naming kills cross-platform clarity.
A taxonomy example chart.

Source: https://www.campaigntrackly.com/utm-link-tracking-strategy-in-6-steps/

  1. Reconcile GA4 With Backend Data: Build a dashboard that includes both GA4 and revenue data from your CRM or database. That’s your source of truth. Don’t only rely on platform-reported numbers.
GA4 and back end data.

Source: https://segment.com/product/unify/?ref=nav 

  1. Fix Consent Setup: Audit your consent management platform (CMP) setup and make sure no tags fire before consent. Use active group triggers (like in OneTrust) mapped to tag categories.
A graphic showing how consent setup works.

Source: https://wplegalpages.com/blog/consent-audit-and-logging-best-practices-tools-for-compliance/

  1. Integrate Customer IDs Across Tools: Use platforms like Segment or a customer data platform (CDP) to unify first-party data and connect journeys across devices.
How first-party data works in customer engagement.

Source: https://velaro.com/blog/what-is-first-party-data-a-definition-and-how-to-use-it

  1. Rethink Attribution: Move beyond last click. Explore incrementality testing or multi-touch attribution models that actually reflect how your audience buys.
Multi-touch attribution models.

Source: https://usermaven.com/blog/last-click-attribution

Conclusion

If your tracking setup isn’t solid, your data and every decision built on it is at risk. From attribution errors to consent gaps, we’ve seen how small misfires create major problems. But the good news is that most of these issues are fixable with the right audits and tools in place.

Whether you’re optimizing GA4, cleaning up cross-platform reporting, or getting your consent setup compliant, now’s the time to level up. Better data means better marketing, and it starts with tracking that works.

Need help getting there? Start with our conversion tracking guide or explore how technical SEO impacts your data foundation.

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How to use headings on your site

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Headings structure your content for both readers and search engines. They help users scan a page, understand its content, and quickly locate the information they need. Search engines and AI systems use headings to interpret the topic and structure of your content. By using one clear H1, supported by well-written H2 and H3 headings, you can improve readability, accessibility, and SEO simultaneously.

Table of contents

Key takeaways

  • Headings structure content and boost readability for users and search engines, enhancing SEO simultaneously.
  • Use one clear H1 for the main topic, with H2s for main sections and H3s for sub-sections, maintaining logical hierarchy.
  • Headings improve accessibility for users with assistive technology by providing clear navigation and organization.
  • Avoid common mistakes like skipping heading levels, using vague labels, or keyword stuffing to maintain clarity and trust.
  • With Yoast SEO, optimize heading structure and keyword usage to enhance content quality and search rankings.

Did you get a red or an orange traffic light for subheading distribution in Yoast SEO? Learn how to distribute them better. Or did Yoast SEO give you feedback on how you use your keyphrase in subheadings? Learn how to improve that.

What are headings?

Headings are the titles and sub-titles used to structure your content. In HTML, headings range from H1 to H6. These tags inform browsers, search engines, and assistive technologies about the organization of your content.

On a typical page, the H1 is used for the main topic. H2 headings divide the text into main sections. H3 headings divide those sections further. This hierarchy creates a logical outline of your page, similar to the table of contents of a book.

Without headings, your content becomes difficult to scan. With clear headings, readers can immediately see what your page is about and which sections are relevant to them.

Why are headings important for SEO?

Headings help search engines understand what your content is about and how different topics on the page relate to each other. They provide structure, context, and signals about the importance of different sections.

Your H1 usually tells search engines what the main topic of your page is. Your H2 and H3 headings support that topic by introducing related subtopics. When this structure is clear and logical, it becomes easier for search engines to interpret your content correctly.

Headings also support semantic SEO. Rather than focusing on one keyword, search engines now assess topical relevance and context. Well-written headings naturally contain related terms and concepts that reinforce the overall topic of the page. This approach works best when combined with thorough keyword research and in-depth content. You can read more about this in our guides to keyword research and high-quality content.

Headings also play a role in how content is interpreted by AI driven search systems. Clean structure makes it easier for these systems to extract accurate answers from your pages.

Why are headings important for readers?

Most visitors do not read every word of a page. They scan first. They look at the title, skim the subheadings, and only then decide which parts to read in detail. Headings support this natural reading behavior.

Clear headings improve readability by breaking long texts into manageable sections. They help readers understand what each part of the article is about before they start reading it. This lowers the effort required to engage with your content and keeps people on the page longer.

Readability is a key quality signal. If you want to go deeper into this topic, our readability guide explains how structure, sentence length, and headings work together to create content that is easy to read.

How to use headings correctly

Using headings correctly means following a logical hierarchy and writing them with the reader in mind. Each page should have one clear H1 that describes the main topic. This is usually your page title. Below that, use H2 headings for your main sections. If a section becomes lengthy or complex, use H3 headings to further divide it.

Do not skip heading levels. An H3 should always follow an H2, not jump directly from an H1. This keeps the structure logical for both users and machines.

Your headings should describe what the section is about. Avoid vague labels such as “Introduction” or “More information.” Instead, write headings that clearly explain what the reader will learn in that section.

How many H1 headings should you use?

In most cases, you should use one H1 per page. The H1 defines the main topic of the page and helps both users and search engines understand what the page is about at a glance.

Although modern HTML allows more than one H1, using multiple H1s often creates confusion about the primary focus of the page. For consistency and clarity, one H1 is still the best practice for most websites.

Your H1 should be written naturally and should not be stuffed with keywords. It should read like a real headline written for humans. If you need help with this, Yoast SEO can balance clarity and optimization in headlines and titles.

How to use H2 and H3 headings

H2 headings divide your article into its main sections. Each H2 should cover one important aspect of your topic. When someone scans only your H2 headings, they should still be able to understand the overall structure and purpose of your article.

H3 headings are used within an H2 section to break it down into smaller parts. They are useful when you explain steps, compare options, or cover several closely related points within one larger section.

You should not use H3 headings unless they add clarity. Headings are meant to support the reader, not to decorate the page.

Common mistakes when using headings

A common mistake is using headings only for visual styling. Headings are not just larger or bolder text. They define the structure of your content in the HTML. Choosing a heading level solely based on its appearance can compromise the semantic structure of your page.

Another frequent issue is skipping heading levels, such as jumping directly from H2 to H4. This disrupts the logical structure of the page and creates issues for screen readers and search engines.

Repeating the same heading text in multiple places is also a problem. Each heading should be unique so that users and search engines can clearly distinguish between sections.

Keyword stuffing is another mistake. Headings should sound natural. If they read like a list of search terms, they reduce trust and harm readability. Clear, descriptive language always works better.

Headings and accessibility

Headings are essential for accessibility. Screen readers utilize headings to assist users in navigating a page efficiently. With a proper heading structure, visually impaired users can easily navigate from section to section and understand how the content is organized without needing to listen to the entire page.

A clear and logical heading hierarchy improves usability for everyone, not just for users of assistive technology. It is also strongly aligned with how search engines assess page quality.

If accessibility is part of your broader optimization work, it should be considered alongside internal linking and overall site structure. Don’t forget that, in many cases, what’s good for accessibility is also good for SEO!

Read more: Writing accessible content: 4 checks you can do with Yoast SEO and the block editor »

Headings in WordPress and Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO uses headings as part of both its SEO analysis and its readability analysis. One of the checks it performs is on your subheading distribution, which looks at how evenly your text is divided into sections with headings. If large blocks of text appear without any subheadings, Yoast will flag this and suggest you add subheadings to improve the readability of that part.

Effective subheading distribution means readers regularly encounter clear signposts that help them navigate the page without feeling overwhelmed by long, uninterrupted paragraphs. See the video below to find out more about the subheading distribution check and the keyphrase in subheadings check in Yoast SEO:

How to get a green traffic light for your subheading distribution

What do you do if you get an orange or red traffic light in the Yoast SEO plugin for your subheading distribution? First of all, and this is quite obvious, don’t forget to use subheadings. You should try to create a subheading for every separate topic in your text. This could be for every paragraph or a couple discussing the same topic. 

We suggest that you include a heading above every long paragraph or group of paragraphs that form a thematic unit. The text following a subheading should be 250-350 words.

An example heading structure

Let’s say that we have a blog post about ballet shoes. We’ve chosen “ballet shoes” as our focus keyword and written an article about why we like ballet shoes. Without headings, there’s a risk that we might end up writing a long, rambling piece that is hard to understand. But if we structure things logically using headings, we make it easier to read and help focus our writing.

Here’s what the structure of that post might look like:

  • H1: Ballet shoes are awesome
    • H2: Why we think ballet shoes are awesome
      • H3: They don’t just come in pink!
      • H3: You can use them for more than just dancing
      • H3: They might be less expensive than you think
    • H2: Where should you buy your ballet shoes?
      • H3: The ten best ballet equipment websites
      • H3: Our favorite local dancing shops

See how we’ve created a logical structure, using H2 tags to plan sections and H3 tags to cover specific topics? We’ve done the same thing in the post you’re reading right now!

This is an excellent example of how your headings should be structured in a medium-length article. You should use fewer (or more general, high-level) headings for a shorter article. If you want to go into more detail, nothing stops you from using H4 tags to create even ‘lower-level’ sections.

Adding headings

Knowing how to structure is all well and good, but how do you add headings? The best way to explain this is in two of the most popular CMSs: WordPress and Shopify!

Note: The instructions below will walk you through how to add in-text subheadings. Don’t forget to add a post title at the top of the page, too! In Yoast SEO Premium, you’ll get a reminder to do so if the ‘Title’ field is empty. In addition, if you use Yoast SEO Premium, you get various other AI features, like Yoast AI Optimize, that help you do the hard work.

How to add a heading in WordPress

If you’re using WordPress, there are a couple of ways to do this:

Via the editor
The easiest way to add headings is through the editor. If you use the block editor, click the + button and select ‘Heading’. Then, you can select which heading (H2, H3, etc.) you want to add.

adding a heading in the block editor using the blocks menu
Selecting a heading type in the block editor of WordPress

If you’re still using the classic editor in WordPress, it’s easy, too. Ensure you’re on the visual tab of the editor and select ‘Heading 2’ or another heading from the dropdown menu.

adding headers in the classic editor using the headings drop down menu
Change the heading type from the dropdown menu in the classic editor

Using HTML
It’s also possible to add headings using HTML. In the classic editor, you will need to make sure you’re on the text tab (or directly in the code) and use heading tags <h1>, <h2>, <h3>, etc., to specify each type of heading. End each heading with a closing tag like </h1>. Like this:

adding headers in html in the classic editor
Be sure to select the Text tab in the classic editor in WordPress

You can switch between the visual editor or edit as HTML in the block editor. Click on the three vertical dots in the block toolbar to do that. Then, select the Edit as HTML option. Like this:

editing html in the block editor
You can also edit a post as HTML in the block editor

How to add a heading in Shopify

Adding headings in Shopify is similar to that in WordPress’s classic editor. If you’re in the content editor, you can select a piece of text and select the appropriate heading from the dropdown in the formatting menu item:

adding a header in shopify's nlog editor using the drop down menu
Select the text and choose a heading in Shopify

If you prefer to work in HTML, you can select the code sign in the upper right corner of the editor and create headings in HTML as described in the instructions for WordPress above.

editing the text in html in shopify using the icon on the top-right hand side
Click the code sign to switch to HTML in the Shopify editor

Using your keyphrase in the subheadings 

Headings allow you to prominently use your focus keyword (or its synonyms) to clarify what the page is about. By adding your focus keyphrase to your subheadings, you stress its importance. Moreover, if you’re trying to rank for keywords, you must write about them. You’ll probably have difficulty ranking if none of your paragraphs address the main topic.

Still, just like keyphrases, it’s important not to overdo it. Add your keyphrase where it makes sense and leave it out where it doesn’t.

Yoast SEO can help you with the keyphrase in headings assessment 

After you insert your keyphrase in Yoast SEO, the keyphrase in subheadings assessment checks whether you’ve used it sufficiently. In Yoast SEO, you’ll get a green traffic light if you use the keywords in 30 to 75% of your subheadings. Please note that we’ll only review your H2 and H3 subheadings. If you have Yoast SEO Premium or if you’re using the Yoast SEO for Shopify app, you can even check your use of synonyms.

green bullet showing a positive outcome for the subheadings assessment
A green traffic light for the keyphrase in subheadings assessment in Yoast SEO

How to add your keyphrase in your subheadings

Whether you add your keyphrase to a subheading depends on the paragraph(s) it’s connected to. Every paragraph in your text should tell the reader something about the topic. In addition, your subheadings are nothing more than a very short outline of what you will say in one or more paragraphs. Therefore, adding your keyphrase to one or more subheadings should always be possible. If you’re still struggling to achieve this, ask yourself a couple of questions about the structure of your article.

  1. Does my text discuss the topic described in the keyphrase? If not, should I pick other keywords?
  2. Do my current subheadings accurately describe what I discuss below?
  3. What paragraphs are most closely connected to the topic and the keyphrase?
  4. What questions do these paragraphs answer concerning the topic and the keyphrase?

Most of the time, you’ll find that answering these questions helps you add the keywords to one or more of your subheadings. If you can’t, you should probably reconsider question number one. If that doesn’t solve your problems, consider educating yourself on copywriting and text structure, to get a clearer view of how a good piece is structured. Your keyphrase should be central to the topic. Therefore, you should be able to add the keywords to several subheadings.

Headings in themes

Most themes will use headings as part of their HTML code, but some don’t follow best practices. Almost all themes will automatically use the name of your article in an H1 tag. This is helpful because you don’t need to repeat the post name inside your content.

Unfortunately, some themes use tags incorrectly, in an illogical order (e.g., an H4, then an H2) or use tags messily in sidebars, headers, and footers. This can cause accessibility problems, as the order of your headings may not make sense. Users, search engines, and assistive technologies typically examine the entire page, not just your content area.

If you have a custom theme, you may be able to resolve this issue by adjusting your HTML code. You may need to contact the developers if you’re using an off-the-shelf theme. Either way, you should verify that your headings are consistent across each template type on your website.

Check your blog’s headings

Using headings well is helpful for your users. It increases the chances of people reading your article, improves accessibility, and might even contribute to SEO. So add them to your copy, but make sure you use them correctly!

The document overview is a handy button located in the upper left corner of the WordPress block editor’s content editing screen. This shows an outline of the page you’re editing. If you’ve structured your content well, it should look like this!

If you’re using Shopify or the Classic Editor in WordPress, you can test your published article via the W3 Validator.

the outline menu in the block editor shows the hierarchy of the headings
Check the heading hierarchy in the WordPress outline feature

Final thoughts

Headings are one of the simplest and most powerful tools you have for improving both readability and SEO. They guide your readers through your content and help search engines understand what each part of your page is about.

Use one clear H1 to define your topic. Use H2s to structure your main ideas. Use H3s where they genuinely improve clarity. Write your headings for people first and let optimization support that goal.

Read more: WordPress SEO: the definitive guide to higher rankings for your WordPress site

The post How to use headings on your site appeared first on Yoast.

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Web Design and Development San Diego

Introducing weekly and monthly views in Search Console

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Today, we are excited to introduce a new feature in the Search Console Performance report: weekly and monthly views.
This new functionality allows you to adjust the time aggregation of any of the performance charts,
helping you smooth out daily changes and focus on the overall trend of traffic to your website.

Read more at Read More

Google launches Data Manager API

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GPT-4 or Google Cloud’s API library- What should you choose for SEO task automation

Google is rolling out a new Data Manager API that lets you plug first-party data into Google’s AI-powered ad tools with less friction. The goal: stronger measurement, smarter targeting, and better performance without the hassle of managing multiple systems.

Why we care. The Data Manager API helps you get more value from the data you already have by sending reliable first-party data into Google’s AI. This improves your targeting, measurement, and bidding. It also replaces several separate APIs with one easy connection, cutting down on engineering work and getting insights back into your campaigns faster.

About the Data Manager API. It will replace several separate Google platform APIs with one centralized integration point for advertisers, agencies, and developers. It builds on Google’s existing codeless Data Manager tool, which tens of thousands of advertisers already use to activate their first-party data.

You can use it to:

  • Upload and refresh audience lists.
  • Send offline conversions to improve measurement.
  • Improve bidding performance by giving Google AI richer signals.

Partnership push. To speed adoption, Google is launching with integrations from AdSwerve, Customerlabs, Data Hash, Fifty Five, Hightouch, Jellyfish, Lytics, Tealium, Treasure Data, Zapier, and others.

Available today. The API is available starting today across Google Ads, Google Analytics and Display & Video 360, with more product integrations on the way.

Google’s announcement. Data Manager API helps advertisers improve measurement and get better results from Google AI

Read more at Read More

Mentions, citations, and clicks: Your 2026 content strategy

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Mentions, citations, and clicks- Your 2026 content strategy

Generative systems like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity are quietly taking over the early parts of discovery – the “what should I know?” stage that once sent millions of people to your website. 

Visibility now isn’t just about who ranks. It’s about who gets referenced inside the models that guide those decisions.

The metrics we’ve lived by – impressions, sessions, CTR – still matter, but they no longer tell the full story. 

Mentions, citations, and structured visibility signals are becoming the new levers of trust and the path to revenue.

This article pulls together data from Siege Media’s two-year content performance study, Grow and Convert’s conversion findings, Seer Interactive’s AI Overview research, and what we’re seeing firsthand inside generative platforms. 

Together, they offer a clearer view of where visibility, engagement, and buying intent are actually moving as AI takes over more of the user journey – and has its eye on even more.

Content type popularity and engagement trends

In a robust study, the folks at Siege Media analyzed two years of performance across various industry blogs, covering more than 7.2 million sessions. It’s an impressive dataset, and kudos to them for sharing it publicly.

A disclaimer worth noting: the data focuses on blog content, so these trends may not map directly to other formats such as videos, documentation, or landing pages.

With that in mind, here’s a run-through of what they surfaced.

TL;DR of the Siege Media study

Pricing and cost content saw the strongest growth over the past two years, while top-of-funnel guides and “how-to” posts declined sharply.

They suggest that pricing pages gained ground at the expense of TOFU content. I interpret this differently. 

Pricing content didn’t simply replace TOFU because the relationship isn’t zero-sum. 

As user patterns evolve, buyers increasingly start with generative research, then move to high-intent queries like pricing or comparisons as they get closer to a decision.

That distinction – correlation vs. causation – matters a lot in understanding what’s really changing.

The data shows major growth in pricing pages, calculators, and comparison content. 

Meanwhile, guides and tutorials – the backbone of legacy SEO – took a sharp hit. 

Keep that drop in mind. We’ll circle back to it later.

Interestingly, every major content category saw an increase in engagement. That makes sense. 

As users complete more of their research inside generative engines, they reach your site later in the journey or for additional details, when they’re already motivated and ready to act.

If you’re a data-driven SEO, this might sound like a green light to focus exclusively on bottom-of-funnel content. 

Why bother with top-of-funnel “traffic” that doesn’t convert? 

Leave that for the suckers chasing GEO visibility metrics for vanity, right?

But of course, this is SEO, so I have to say it …

Did you expect me to say, “It depends?”

Here’s a question instead: when that high-intent user typed the query that surfaced a case study, pricing page, or comparison page, where did they first learn the brand existed?

Dig deeper: AI agents in SEO: What you need to know

Don’t forget the TOFU!

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but you’ll have to keep making TOFU content. 

You might need to make even more of it.

Let’s think about legacy SEO.

If we look back – waaaaay back – to 2023 and a study from Grow and Convert, we see that while there is far more TOFU traffic…

…it converts far worse.

Note: They only looked at one client, so take it with a grain of salt. However, the direction still aligns with other studies and our instincts.

This pattern also shows up across channels like PPC, which is why TOFU keywords are generally cheaper than BOFU.

The conversion rate is higher at the bottom of the funnel.

Now we’re seeing this shift carry over to generative engines, except that generative engines cover the TOFU journey almost entirely. 

Rather than clicking through a series of low-conversion content pieces as they move through the funnel, users stay inside the generative experience through TOFU and often MOFU, then click through or shift to another channel (search or direct) only when it’s time to convert.

For example, when I asked ChatGPT to help me plan a trip to the Outer Banks:

After a dozen back-and-forths planning a trip and deciding what to eat, I wanted to find out where to stay.

That journey took me through many steps and gave me multiple chances to encounter different brands and filtering or refinement options. 

I eventually landed on my BOFU prompt, “Some specific companies would be great.” 

From there, I might click the links or search for the company names on Google.

What matters about this journey – apart from the fact that my final query would be practically useless as insight in something like Search Console – is that throughout the TOFU and MOFU stages, I was seeing citations and encountering brands I would rely on later. 

Once I switched into conversion mode, I wanted help making decisions. That’s where I’m likely to click through to a few companies to find a rental.

So, when we read statistics like Pew’s finding that AI Overviews reduce CTR by upwards of 50%, and then consider what happens when AI Mode hits the browser, it’s easy to worry about where your traffic goes. Add to that ChatGPT’s 700 million weekly active users (and growing):

And according to their research on how users engage with it:

We can see a clear TOFU hit and very little BOFU usage.

So, on top of the ~50% hit you may be taking from AI Overviews, 700+ million people are going to ChatGPT and other generative platforms for their top-of-funnel needs. 

I did exactly that above with my trip planning to the OBX.

Dig deeper: 5 B2B content types AI search engines love

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But wait!

The good news is that while that vacation rental company or blue widget manufacturer might not see me on their site when I’m figuring out what to do – or what a blue widget even is – I’m still going to take the same number of holidays and buy the same number of products I would have without AI Overviews or ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, etc.

Unless you’re a publisher or make money off impressions, you’ll still have the same amount of money to be made. 

It just might take fewer website visits to do it.

More about TOFU

Traffic at the bottom of the funnel is holding steady for now (more on that below), but the top of the funnel is being replaced quickly by generative conversations rather than visits. 

The question is whether being included in those conversations affects your CTR further down the funnel.

The folks at Seer Interactive found that organic clicks rose from 0.6% to 1.08% when a site was cited in AI Overviews. 

And while the traffic was far lower, ChatGPT had a conversion rate of 16% compared with Google organic’s 1.8%.

If we look at the conversion rate for organic traffic at the bottom of the funnel – which we saw above – it was 4.78%. 

Users who engage with generative engines clearly get further into their decision-making than users who reach BOFU queries through organic search. 

But why?

While I can’t be certain, I agree with Seer’s conclusion that AI-driven users are pre-sold during the TOFU stage. 

They’ve already encountered your brand and trust the system to interpret their needs. When it’s time to convert, they’re almost ready with their credit card.

Why bottom-funnel stability won’t last much longer

Above, I noted that “traffic at the bottom of the funnel is holding steady for now.”

It’s only fair to warn you that through 2026 and 2027, we’ll likely see this erode. 

The same number of people will still travel and still buy blue widgets. 

They just won’t book or buy them themselves. And at best, attribution will be even worse than it is today.

I spoke at SMX Advanced last spring about the rise of AI agents. 

I won’t get into all the gory details here, but the Cliff Notes are this:

Agents are AI systems with some autonomy that complete tasks humans otherwise would. 

They’re rising quickly – it’s the dominant topic for those of us working in AI – and that growth isn’t slowing anytime soon. You need to be ready.

A few concepts to familiarize yourself with, if you want to understand what’s coming, are:

  • AP2 (Agent Payments Protocol): A standard that allows agents to securely execute payments on your behalf. Think of it as a digital letter of credit that ensures the agent can only buy the specific “blue widget” you approved within the price limit you set. Before you say, “But I’d never send a machine to do a human’s job,” let me tell you, you will. And if you somehow prove me wrong individually out of spite, your customers will.
  • Gemini Computer Use Model API: A model with reasoning and image understanding that can navigate and engage with user interfaces like websites. While many agentic systems access data via APIs, this model (OpenAI has one too, as do others) lets the agent interact with visual interfaces to access information it normally couldn’t – navigating filters, logins, and more if given the power.
  • MCP (Model Context Protocol): An emerging standard acting as a universal USB port for AI apps. It lets agents safely connect to your internal data (like checking your calendar or reading your emails) to make purchasing decisions with full context and to work interactively with other agents. Hat tip to Ahrefs for building an awesome MCP server.

Dig deeper: How Model Context Protocol is shaping the future of AI and search marketing

Why do these protocols matter to a content strategist?

Because once AP2 and Computer Use hit critical mass, the click – that sacred metric we’ve optimized for two decades – changes function. 

It stops being a navigation step for a human exploring a website and becomes a transactional step for a machine executing a task.

If an agent uses Computer Use to navigate your pricing page and AP2 to pay for the subscription, the human user never sees your bottom-of-the-funnel content. 

So in that world, who – or rather, what – are you optimizing for?

This brings us back to the Siege Media data. 

Right now, pricing pages and calculators are winning because humans are using AI to research (TOFU and MOFU) and then manually visiting sites to convert (BOFU). 

But as agents take over execution, that manual visit disappears. The “traffic” to your pricing page may be bots verifying costs, not humans persuaded by your copy.

The 2026 strategy

This reality pushes value back up the funnel. 

If the agent handles the purchase, the human decision – the “moment of truth” – happens entirely inside the chat interface or agentic system during the research phase.

In this world, you don’t win by having the flashiest pricing page. 

You win by being the brand the LLM recommends when the user asks, “Who should I trust?”

Your strategy for 2026 requires a two-pronged approach:

  • For the agent (the execution): Ensure your BOFU content is technically flawless. Use clean schema, accessible APIs, and clear data structures so that when an agent arrives via MCP or Computer Use to execute a transaction, it encounters no friction.
  • For the human (the selection): Double down on TOFU. Focus on mentions and citations. You need to be the entity referenced in the generative answer so that users – and agents – trust you.

As we move toward 2026 and then 2027 (it’ll be here sooner than you think), the “click” will become a commodity more often handled by machines. 

The mention, however, remains the domain of human trust. And in my opinion, that’s where your next battle for visibility will be fought.

Time to start – or hopefully keep – making the TOFU.

Read more at Read More

How to evaluate your SEO tools in 2026 – and avoid budget traps

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How to evaluate your SEO tools in 2026 – and avoid budget traps

Evaluating SEO tools has never been more complicated. 

Costs keep rising, and promises for new AI features are everywhere.

This combination is hardly convincing when you need leadership to approve a new tool or expand the budget for an existing one. 

Your boss still expects SEO to show business impact – not how many keywords or prompts you can track, how fast you can optimize content, or what your visibility score is. 

That is exactly where most tools still fail miserably.

The landscape adds even more friction. 

Features are bundled into confusing packages and add-on models, and the number of solutions has grown sharply in the last 12 months. 

Teams can spend weeks or even months comparing platforms only to discover they still cannot demonstrate clear ROI or the tools are simply out of budget.

If this sounds familiar, keep reading.

This article outlines a practical framework for evaluating your SEO tool stack in 2026, focusing on:

  • Must-have features.
  • A faster way to compare multiple tools.
  • How to approach vendor conversations.

The new realities of SEO tooling in 2026

Before evaluating vendors, it helps to understand the forces reshaping the SEO tooling landscape – and why many platforms are struggling to keep pace.

Leadership wants MQLs, not rankings

Both traditional and modern SEO tools still center on keyword and prompt tracking and visibility metrics. These are useful, but they are not enough to justify the rising prices.

In 2026, teams need a way to connect searches to traffic and then to MQLs and revenue. 

Almost no tool provides that link, which makes securing larger budgets nearly impossible. 

(I say “almost” because I have not tested every platform, so the unicorn may exist somewhere.)

AI agents raise expectations

With AI platforms like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity – along with the ability to build custom GPTs, Gems, and Agents – teams can automate a wide range of tasks. 

That includes everything from simple content rewriting and keyword clustering to more complex competitor analysis and multi-step workflows.

Because of this, SEO tools now need to explain why they are better than a well-trained AI agent. 

Many can’t. This means that during evaluation, you inevitably end up asking a simple question: do you spend the time training your own agent, or do you buy a ready-made one?

Small teams need automation that truly saves time

If you want real impact, your automation shouldn’t be cosmetic. 

You can’t rely on generic checklists or basic AI recommendations, yet many tools still provide exactly that – fast checklists with no context.

Without context, automation becomes noise. It generates generic insights that are not tailored to your company, product, or market, and those insights will not save time or drive results.

Teams need automation that removes repetitive work and delivers better insights while genuinely giving time back.

Dig deeper: 11 of the best free tools every SEO should know about

A note on technical SEO tools

Technical SEO tools remain the most stable part of the SEO stack. 

The vendor landscape has not shifted dramatically, and most major platforms are innovating at a similar pace. 

Because of this, they do not require the same level of reevaluation as newer AI-driven categories.

That said, budgeting for them may still become challenging. 

Leadership often assumes AI can solve every problem, but we know that without strong technical performance, SEO, content, and AI efforts can easily fail.

I will also make one bold prediction – we should be prepared to expect the unexpected in this category. 

These platforms can crawl almost any site at scale and extract structured information, which could make them some of the most important and powerful tools in the stack.

Many already pull data from GA and GSC, and integrating with CRM or other data platforms may be only a matter of time. 

I see that as a likely 2026 development.

What must-have features actually look like in 2026

To evaluate tools effectively, it helps to focus on the capabilities that drive real impact. These are the ones worth prioritizing in 2026.

Advanced data analysis and blended data capabilities

Data analysis will play a much bigger role. 

Tools that let you blend data from GA, GSC, Salesforce, and similar sources will move you closer to the Holy Grail of SEO – understanding whether a prompt or search eventually leads to an MQL or a closed-won deal. 

This will never be a perfect science, but even a solid guesstimation is more useful than another visibility chart.

Integration maturity is becoming a competitive differentiator. 

Disconnected data remains the biggest barrier between SEO work and business attribution.

SERP intelligence for keywords and prompts

Traditional SERP intelligence remains essential. You still need:

  • Topic research and insights for top-ranking pages.
  • Competitor analysis.
  • Content gap insights.
  • Technical issues and ways to fix them.

You also need AI SERP intelligence, which analyzes:

  • How AI tools answer specific prompts.
  • What sources do they cite.
  • If your brand appears, and if your competitors are also mentioned.

In an ideal world, these two groups should appear side by side and provide you with a 360-degree view of your performance.

Automation with real-time savings

Prioritize tools that:

  • Cluster automatically.
  • Detect anomalies.
  • Provide prioritized recommendations for improvements.
  • Turn data into easy-to-understand insights.

These are just some of the examples of practical AI that can really guide you and save you time.

Strong multilingual support

This applies to SEO experts who work with websites in languages other than English. 

Many tools are still heavily English-centric. Before choosing a tool, make sure the databases, SERP tracking, and AI insights work across languages, not just English.

Transparent pricing and clear feature lists

Hidden pricing, confusing bundles, and multiple add-ons make evaluation frustrating. 

Tools should communicate clearly:

  • Which features they have.
  • All related limitations.
  • Whether a feature is part of the standard plan or an add-on.
  • When something from the standard plan moves to an add-on. 

Many vendors change these things quietly, which makes calculating the investment you need difficult and hard to justify. 

Dig deeper: How to choose the best AI visibility tool

Plus, some features that might be overhyped

AI writing

If you can’t input detailed information about your brand, product, and persona, the content you produce will be the same as everyone else’s. 

Many tools already offer this and can make your content sound as if it were written by one of your writers. 

So the question is whether you need a specialized tool or if a custom GPT can do the job.

Prompt tracking 

It’s positioned as the new rank tracking, but it is like looking at one pixel of your monitor. 

It gives you only a tiny clue of the whole picture. 

AI answers change based on personalization and small differences in prompts, and the variations are endless.

Still, this tactic is helpful in:

  • Providing directional signals.
  • Helping you benchmark brand presence.
  • Highlighting recurring themes AI platforms use.
  • Allowing competitive analysis within a controlled sample.

Large keyword databases

They still matter for directional research, but are not a true competitive differentiator. 

Most modern tools have enough coverage to guide your strategy. 

The value now stems from the practical insights derived from the data.

How to compare 10 tools without wasting your time

Understanding features is only half the equation. 

The real challenge is knowing how to evaluate specialized tools and all-in-one platforms without losing your sanity or blocking your team for weeks. 

After going through this process for the tenth time, I’ve found an approach that works for me.

Step 1: Start with the pricing page

I always begin my evaluation on the pricing page. 

With one page, you can get a clear sense of: 

  • All features.
  • Limitations.
  • Which ones fall under add-ons.
  • The general structure of the pricing tiers. 

Even if you need a demo to get the exact price, the framework should still be relatively transparent.

Step 2: Test using your normal weekly work

No checklist will show you more than trying your regular BAU tasks with a couple of tools in parallel. 

This reveals:

  • How long each task takes.
  • What insights appear or disappear.
  • What feels smoother or more clunky.

How difficult the setup is – including whether the learning curve is huge. 

I work in a small team, and a tool that takes many hours just to set up likely will not make my final list.

Not all evaluations can rely on BAU tasks. 

For example, when we researched tools for prompt and AI visibility tracking, we tested more than ten platforms. 

This capability did not exist in our stack, and at first, we had no idea what to check. 

In those cases, you need to define a small set of test scenarios from scratch and compare how each tool performs. 

Continue refining your scenarios, because each new evaluation will teach you something new.

Dig deeper: Want to improve rankings and traffic? Stop blindly following SEO tool recommendations

Step 3: Always get a free trial

Demos are polished. Reality often is not. 

If there is no option for a free trial, either walk away or, if the tool is not too expensive, pay for a month.

Get the newsletter search marketers rely on.

See terms.

Step 4: Involve only the people who will actually use the tool

Always ask yourself who truly needs to be involved in the evaluation. 

For example, we are currently assessing a platform used not only by the SEO team but also by two other teams. 

We asked those teams for a brief summary of their requirements, but until we have a shortlist, there is no reason to involve them further or slow the process. 

And if your company has a heavy procurement or security review, involving too many people too early will slow everything down even more.

At the same time, involve the whole SEO team, because each person will see different strengths and weaknesses and everyone will rely on the tool.

Step 5: Evaluate results, not features

Many features sound like magic wands. 

In reality, the magic often works only sometimes, or it works but is very expensive. To understand what you truly need, always ask yourself:

  • Did the tool save time?
  • Did it surface insights that my current stack does not?
  • Could a custom GPT do this instead?
  • Does the price make sense for my team, and can I prove its ROI?

These questions turn the decision into a business conversation rather than a feature debate and help you prepare your “sales” pitch for your boss.

Step 6: Evaluate support quality, not just product features

Support has become one of the most overlooked parts of tool evaluation. 

Many platforms rely heavily on AI chat and automated replies, which can be extremely frustrating when you are dealing with a time-sensitive issue or have to explain your problem multiple times.

Support quality can significantly affect your team’s efficiency, especially in small teams with limited resources. 

When evaluating tools, check:

  • How easy it is to reach a human.
  • What response times look like.
  • Whether the vendor offers onboarding or ongoing guidance. 

A great product with weak support can quickly become a bottleneck.

Once you have a shortlist, the quality of your vendor conversations will determine how quickly you can move forward. 

And this may be the hardest part – especially for the introverted SEO leads, myself included.

How to navigate vendor conversations

I’m practical, and I don’t like wasting anyone’s time. I have plenty of tasks waiting, so fluff conversations aren’t helpful. 

That’s why I start every vendor call by setting clear goals, limitations, a timeline, and next steps. 

Over time, I’ve learned that conversations run much more smoothly when I follow a few simple principles.

Be prepared for meetings

If you are evaluating a tool, come prepared to the demo. 

Ideally, you should have access to a free trial, tested the platform, and created a list of practical questions. 

Showing up unprepared is not a good sign, and that applies to both sides.

For example, I am always impressed when a vendor joins the conversation having already researched who we are, what we do, and who our competitors are. 

If you have spoken with the vendor before, directly ask what has changed since your last discussion.

Ask for competitor comparisons

When comparing a few tools, I always ask each vendor for a direct comparison. 

These comparisons will be biased, but collecting them from all sides can reveal insights I had not considered and give me ideas for specific things to test. 

Often, there is no reason to reinvent the wheel.

Ask how annual contracts influence pricing

Annual contracts reduce administrative work and give vendors room to negotiate, which can lead to better pricing. 

Many tools include this information on their pricing pages, and we have all seen it. 

Ask about any other nuances that might affect the final price – such as additional user seats or add-ons.

Don’t start from scratch with vendors you know

Often, the most effective approach is simply to say:

“This is our budget. This is what we need. Can you support this?”

This works especially well with vendors you have used before because both sides already know each other.

What to consider from a business perspective

Even if you select a tool, that does not mean you will receive the budget for it.

Proving ROI is especially difficult with SEO tools. But there are a few things you can do to increase your chances of getting a yes.

Present at least three alternatives in every request

This shows you have done your homework, not just picked the first thing you found. Present your leadership with:

  • The criteria you used in your evaluation.
  • Pros and cons of each tool.
  • The business case and why the capability is needed.
  • What happens if you do not buy the tool.

Providing this view builds trust in your ability to make decisions.

Avoid overselling

Tools improve efficiency, but they cannot guarantee outcomes – especially in SEO, GEO, or whatever you call it. 

Spend time explaining how quickly things are changing and how many factors are outside your control. Managing expectations will strengthen your team’s credibility.

But even with thorough evaluation and negotiation, we still face the same issue: the SEO tooling market has not caught up with what companies now expect. 

Let’s hope the future brings something closer to the clarity we see in Google Ads.

Dig deeper: How to master the enterprise SEO procurement process

The future of the SEO tool stack

The next generation of SEO tools must move beyond vanity metrics. 

Trained AI agents and custom GPTs can already automate much of the work.

In a landscape where companies want to reduce employee and operational costs, you need concrete business numbers to justify high tool prices. 

The platforms that can connect searches, traffic, and revenue will become the new premium category in SEO technology.

For now, most SEO teams will continue to hear “no” when requesting budgets because that connection does not yet exist. 

And the moment a tool finally solves this attribution problem, it will redefine the entire SEO technology market.

Read more at Read More

AI tools for PPC, AI search, and social campaigns: What’s worth using now

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AI tools for PPC, AI search, and social campaigns: What’s worth using now

In 2026 and well beyond, a core part of the performance marketer’s charter is learning to leverage AI to drive growth and efficiency. 

Anyone who isn’t actively evaluating new AI tools to improve or streamline their PPC work is doing their brand or clients a disservice.

The challenge is that keeping up with these tools has become almost a full-time job, which is why my agency has made AI a priority in our structured knowledge-sharing. 

As a team, we’ve honed in on favorites across creative, campaign management, and AI search measurement. 

This article breaks down key options in each category, with brief reviews and a callout of my current pick.

One overarching recommendation before we dive in: be cautious about signing long-term contracts for AI tools or platforms. 

At the pace things are moving, the tool that catches your eye in December could be an afterthought by April.

AI creative tools for paid social campaigns

There’s no shortage of tools that can generate creative assets, and each comes with benefits as well as the risks of producing AI slop. 

Regardless of the tool you choose, it must be thoroughly vetted and supported by a strong human-in-the-loop process to ensure quality, accuracy, and brand alignment.

Here’s a quick breakdown of the tools we’ve tested:

  • AdCreative.ai: Auto-generates images, video creatives, ad copy, and headlines in multiple sizes, with data-backed scoring for outputs.
  • Creatify: Particularly strong on video ads with multi-format support.
  • WASK: Combines AI creative generation with campaign optimization and competitor analysis.
  • Revid AI: Well-suited for story formats.
  • ChatGPT: Free and widely familiar, giving marketers an edge in effective prompting.

Our current tool of choice is AdCreative.ai. It’s easy to use and especially helpful for quickly brainstorming creative angles and variations to test. 

Like its competitors, it offers meaningful advantages, including:

  • Speed and scale that allow you to generate dozens or hundreds of variants in minutes to keep creative fresh and reduce ad fatigue.
  • Less reliance on external designers or editors for routine or templated outputs.
  • Rapid creative experimentation across images, copy, and layouts to find winning combinations faster.
  • Data-driven insights, such as creative scores or performance predictions, when available.

The usual caveats apply across all creative tools:

  • Build guardrails to avoid off-brand outputs by maintaining a strong voice guide, providing exemplar content, enforcing style rules and banned words, and ensuring human review at every step.
  • Watch for accuracy issues or hallucinations and include verification in your process, especially for technical claims, data, or legal copy. 

Dig deeper: How to get smarter with AI in PPC

AI campaign management and workflow tools for performance campaigns

There are plenty of workflow automation tools on the market, including long-standing options, like Zapier, Workato, and Microsoft Power Automate. 

Our preferred choice, though, is n8n. Its agentic workflows and built-in connections across ad platforms, CRMs, and reporting tools have been invaluable in automating redundant tasks.

Here are my agency’s primary use cases for n8n:

  • Lead management: Automatically enrich new leads from HubSpot or Salesforce with n8n’s Clearbit automation, then route them to the right rep or nurture sequence.
  • UTM cleanup: When a form fill or ad conversion comes in, automatically normalize UTM parameters before pushing them to your CRM. Some systems, like HubSpot, store values in fields such as “first URL seen” that aren’t parsed into UTM fields, so UTMs remain associated with the user but aren’t stored properly and require reconciliation.
  • Data reporting: Pull metrics from APIs, structure the data, and use AI to summarize insights. Reports can then be shared via Slack and email, or dropped into collaborative tools like Google Docs.

As with any tool, n8n comes with caveats to keep in mind:

  • It requires some technical ability because it’s low-code, not no-code. You often need to understand APIs, JSON, and authentication, such as OAuth or API keys. Even basic automations may involve light logic or expressions. Integrations with less mainstream tools can require scripting.
  • You need a deliberate setup to maintain security. There’s no built-in role-based access control in all configurations unless you use n8n Cloud Enterprise. Misconfigured webhooks can expose data if not handled properly.
  • Its ad platform integrations aren’t as broad as those of some competitors. For example, it doesn’t include LinkedIn Ads, Reddit Ads, or TikTok Ads. These can be added via direct API calls, but that takes more manual work.

Dig deeper: Top AI tools and tactics you should be using in PPC

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AI search visibility measurement tools

Most SEOs already have preferred platforms for measurement and insights – Semrush, Moz, SE Ranking, and others. 

While many now offer reports on brand visibility in AI search results from ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and similar tools, these features are add-ons to products built for traditional SEO.

To track how our brands show up in AI search results, we use Profound. 

While other purpose-built tools exist, we’ve found that it offers differentiated persona-level and competitor-level analysis and ties its reporting to strategic levers like content and PR or sentiment, making it clear how to act on the data.

These platforms can provide near real-time insights such as:

  • Performance benchmarks that show AI visibility against competitors to highlight strengths and weaknesses.
  • Content and messaging intel, including the language AI uses to describe brands and their solutions, which can inform thought leadership and messaging refinement.
  • Signals that show whether your efforts are improving the consistency and favorability of brand mentions in AI answers.
  • Trends illustrating how generative AI is reshaping search results and user behavior.
  • Insights beyond linear keyword rankings that reveal the narratives AI models generate about your company, competitors, and industry.
  • Gaps and opportunities to address to influence how your brand appears in AI answers.

No matter which tool you choose, the key is to adopt one quickly. 

The more data you gather on rapidly evolving AI search trends, the more agile you can be in adjusting your strategy to capture the growing share of users turning to AI tools during their purchase journey.

Dig deeper: Scaling PPC with AI automation: Scripts, data, and custom tools

What remains true as the AI toolset keeps shifting

I like to think most of my content for this publication ages well, but I’m not expecting this one to follow suit. 

Anyone reading it a few months after it runs will likely see it as more of a time capsule than a set of current recommendations – and that’s fine.

What does feel evergreen is the need to:

  • Monitor the AI landscape.
  • Aggressively test new tools and features.
  • Build or maintain a strong knowledge-sharing function across your team. 

We’re well past head-in-the-sand territory with AI in performance marketing, yet there’s still room for differentiation among teams that move quickly, test strategically, and pivot together as needed.

Dig deeper: AI agents in PPC: What to know and build today

Read more at Read More

Think different: The Positionless Marketing manifesto by Optimove

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In 1997, Apple launched a campaign that became cultural gospel. “Think Different” celebrated the rebels, the misfits, the troublemakers. The ones who saw things differently. The ones who changed the world. 

Apple understood something fundamental: the constraints that limited imagination weren’t real. They were inherited. Accepted. Assumed. And the people who broke through weren’t smarter or more talented. They simply refused to believe the constraints applied to them. 

Twenty-eight years later, marketing faces its own Think Different moment. 

The constraints are gone. Technology has removed them. AI can generate infinite variants. Data platforms deliver real-time insights. Orchestration tools coordinate across every channel instantly. The infrastructure that once required armies of specialists, weeks of coordination and endless approvals now exists in platforms accessible to any marketer willing to learn them. 

Yet most marketers still operate as if the box exists. 

They wait for the data team to run the analysis. They wait for creative to deliver the assets. They wait for engineering to build the integration. They operate within constraints that technology has already eliminated, not because they must, but because assembly-line marketing taught them that’s how it worked. 

Creative waits for data. Campaigns wait for creative. Launch waits for engineering. Move from station to station. Hand off to the next department. That was the assembly line. That was the box. 

And that box is gone. But the habits remain.  

Here’s to the marketers who refuse to wait for approval

The ones who see a customer signal at 3 p.m. and launch a personalized journey by 4 p.m., not because they asked permission but because the customer needed it now. 

The ones who don’t send briefs to three different teams. They access the data, generate the creative and orchestrate the campaign themselves. Not because they’re trying to eliminate specialists, but because waiting days for what they can deliver in hours wastes the moment. 

The ones who run experiments constantly, not occasionally. Who test 10 variants instead of two. Who measure lift instead of clicks. Who know that perfect insight arrives through iteration, not through analysis paralysis. 

Here’s to the ones who see campaigns where others see dependencies 

They don’t see a handoff to the analytics team. They see customer data they can access instantly to understand behavior, predict intent and target precisely. 

They don’t see a creative approval process. They see AI tools that generate channel-ready assets in minutes, allowing them to personalize at scale rather than compromise for efficiency. 

They don’t see an engineering backlog. They see orchestration platforms that automate journeys, test variations and optimize outcomes without a single ticket. 

They’re not reckless. They’re not cowboys  

They’re simply operating at the speed technology now enables, constrained only by strategy and judgment rather than structure and process.  

This is what Positionless Marketing means: Wielding Data Power, Creative Power and Optimization Power simultaneously. Not because you’ve eliminated everyone else, but because technology eliminated the dependencies that once made those handoffs necessary. 

And here’s what most people miss: This isn’t just about speed. It’s about potential 

When marketers were constrained by assembly-line marketing infrastructure, their job was to manage the line. Write the brief. Coordinate the teams. Navigate the approvals. Wait for each station to finish its work. The marketer’s skill was project management. Their value was orchestrating others. 

Now? Your job in marketing has changed entirely 

Your job is no longer to manage process. Your job is to enable potential. To help every person on your team (and yourself) realize what they’re capable of when the constraints disappear. To show them that the data they’ve been waiting for is accessible now. That the creative they’ve been briefing can be generated instantly. That the campaigns they’ve been coordinating can be orchestrated autonomously.  

Teach people to think outside the box by showing them there is no longer a box 

The data analyst who only ran reports can now build predictive models and operationalize them in real time. The campaign manager who only coordinated handoffs can now design, test and optimize end-to-end journeys independently. The creative strategist who only wrote briefs can now generate and deploy assets across every channel. 

This is the revolution: not that technology does the work, but that technology removes the barriers that prevented people from doing work they were always capable of. 

The misfits and rebels of 1997 saw possibilities where others saw limitations. They refused to accept that things had to be done the way they’d always been done. 

The Positionless Marketers of today are doing the same thing 

They’re refusing to wait when customers need action now. They’re refusing to accept that insight takes weeks when platforms deliver it in seconds. They’re refusing to operate within constraints that technology has already eliminated. 

They’re thinking differently. Not because they’re trying to be difficult. But because the old way of thinking no longer matches the new reality of what’s possible. 

In 1997, Apple told us: “The people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”  

In 2025, the people crazy enough to think they can deliver personalized experiences at scale, launch campaigns in hours instead of weeks, and operate without dependencies are the ones who will. 

The constraints are gone. 

The assembly-line marketing box can no longer exist. 

Read more at Read More

Google Search Console performance reports adds weekly and monthly views

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Screenshot of Google Search Console

Google added weekly and monthly views to Search Console performance reports. These options give you clearer, longer-term insights instead of relying only on the 24-hour view.

What it looks like. Here are a few photos I took during the announcement at the Google Search Central event in Zurich this morning:

Why we care. This small update gives SEOs, publishers, and site owners access to more detailed data. It can help you pinpoint why your performance shifted in a specific month, week, or day.

Read more at Read More