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6 Best Social Media Management Tools (Tried & Tested)

There are many tools that let you schedule content across different social media platforms.

But:

Not all of them are built to match your unique workflow.

Some focus on collaboration, others on planning.

That’s why I’ve handpicked the best tools and highlighted the features that go beyond basic scheduling.

Here’s an overview of the best social media management tools included in this article:

Best for Pricing
Buffer Content creators and small teams that need help generating content ideas and staying consistent Starts at $6/month per channel; limited free plan available
Planable Marketing teams that need a centralized hub to collaborate on all types of content Starts at $39/month; limited free plan available
SocialBee Businesses that want a built-in AI assistant to help plan strategy and generate content Starts at $29/month; 14-day free trial
Canva Creators and small businesses that want to design and schedule content in one place Starts at $15/month; 30-day free trial available
Hootsuite Teams that need social selling tools and CRM integration Starts at $149/month; 30-day free trial available
Sprout Social Large teams or agencies that need unified analytics, collaboration tools, and social listening Starts at $249/month; 30-day free trial available

Note: This is not the most extensive list of social media management tools. Instead, I’m sticking to what the title says and only including the very best options.


1. Buffer

Best for content creators and small teams that need help generating content ideas and staying consistent with posting

Pricing: Starts at $6 per month per channel; limited free forever plan available (for up to three channels and 10 scheduled posts per channel per month)

Buffer – Monthly Calendar

Buffer is a simple social media management tool designed to help you plan, create, and schedule content across platforms.

It has a simple layout, a Kanban-style board, AI tools to help you write posts faster, and many other features that let teams work together easily.

Here are the platforms you can manage with Buffer:

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Threads
  • TikTok
  • LinkedIn
  • YouTube
  • X/Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • Google Business Profile
  • Bluesky
  • Mastodon

Here’s what I love about Buffer:

Manage Your Content Workflow with a Built-in Kanban Board

Buffer gives you a simple, visual way to manage your entire content workflow. You don’t need a separate project management tool.

You can plan, track, and organize your social posts using a built-in Kanban-style layout. This makes it easy to track how your content moves from idea to publication.

Buffer – Built-in kanban board

You can drag and drop posts through each stage, tag them by type or campaign, and convert any idea into a live post when you’re ready to publish.

Each idea card acts like a mini workspace. You can add notes, upload images, assign tags, or even use AI to shape your post.

And when you’re ready to turn an idea into a real post, just click “Create Post”:

Buffer – Turning Idea into Post

From there, you can choose which social media platforms to post on, edit your text, and schedule it. All without leaving the ideas board:

Buffer – Choose Social Media Platform

This is a seamless workflow from idea to publishing. You don’t even need to switch tabs within the tool.

Create a Custom Link in Bio Page

Buffer’s Start Page lets you build a mini landing page to use in your social media bio.

On this page, you can add buttons to your blog, shop, podcast, or freebies — whatever you want people to check out. It’s like a custom homepage for your content.

There are templates to get you started:

Buffer – Choose a starting template

But you can also customize it with your brand colors, fonts, and layout:

Buffer – Start page – Customize template

When you publish your page, you can track views and clicks to see what your audience is interested in:

Buffer – Statistics

Whether you’re a creator, freelancer, or a small business, Start Page helps you lead your followers to the content you want them to see.

Stay Consistent with a Weekly Posting Goal

Buffer helps you build a sustainable content routine. It lets you choose a posting goal, like once, three times, or five times per week:

Buffer – Settings – Posting Goal

Once you select your frequency, Buffer will automatically recommend the best time slots and add them to your queue:

Buffer – Settings – Posting Times

The tool recommends time slots based on when your audience is active.

With this feature, you don’t have to guess when or how often to post.

Just pick a consistency level that fits your bandwidth and goals.

This is helpful if you’re overwhelmed or inconsistent. With your target already set, Buffer takes care of when to post so you can focus on what to post.

Pros & Cons

Pros Cons
Use AI assistant to draft tailored post captions for different social media platforms Analytics doesn’t support creator accounts for Instagram and LinkedIn; it’s limited to business pages
Manage comments and replies from one dashboard

2. Planable

Best for marketing teams that need a centralized hub to collaborate on all types of content

Pricing: Starts at $39 per month; free plan available (limited to 50 posts)

Planable – Workspace

Planable is a tool built for social media teams to plan, collaborate on, and schedule content together — all in one place.

It’s designed to streamline approvals, keep your calendar organized, and make team (and client) communication seamless.

Here are the platforms you can manage with Planable:

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • X/Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • TikTok
  • Google Business Profile
  • YouTube
  • Pinterest
  • Threads

And here’s what I love about Planable:

Collaborate with Your Team in Real-Time

Planable makes it easy to work with others and communicate through every step of content development.

For example, your team can leave comments directly on each social media post. This removes the need to send the post back and forth:

Planable – Commenting feature

You can even invite your team members and clients and give each one a unique set of permissions. These include view, edit, publish, approve, or analyze.

You can also make multiple approval workflows and set collaboration levels.

Let’s say you’re part of an in-house marketing team working with an external copywriter. You could create a custom workflow like this:

  • Stage 1: Content team creates the post and adds a caption
  • Stage 2: Design team steps in to finalize visuals
  • Stage 3: The client gives final approval before the post goes live

Planable – Team Roles & Approvals

Once the client approves the content, you can:

  • Automatically schedule the post to publish at the assigned time (or keep manual control if you prefer)
  • Lock the content to prevent last-minute edits or accidental changes

What’s cool is that internal team comments won’t be visible to clients.

You can also hide certain posts from clients to prevent them from seeing unfinished drafts:

Planable – Hide from clients

And if anything ever goes off track, you can see the version history. It lets you see exactly who did what and roll back to a previous version if you need to.

Manage All Your Marketing Content in One Place

Planable helps you schedule, preview, and collaborate on posts for all major platforms in one place.

You can plan your content in a calendar view to visualize what’s going live, where it’s going, and when:

Planable – Calendar view & Connected Channels

But what sets Planable apart is its ability to go beyond just social. You can also write and organize blog posts, newsletters, and other content with the same team setup.

So if your team is posting on Instagram and TikTok, writing email newsletters, and posting on the blog, you can check and edit everything in one place.

Planable keeps it all in sync, so your team stays aligned and consistent — no matter how many channels you’re managing.

Note: While you can manage blog content in Planable using the same workflows as social posts, it doesn’t integrate directly with CMS platforms. So you’ll still need to copy and paste your final draft manually.


Organize Your Content into Campaigns

In Planable, you can group your social media posts into dedicated campaigns.

This makes it easy to plan, manage, and execute content around specific themes, product launches, or events:

Planable – Campaigns

Each campaign can act as a central hub for your content. You can add posts to different social media, work with others, and see how your posts are doing, all in one place.

For example, if you’re launching a new product, you can create a “Product Launch” campaign. Inside that campaign, you can:

  • Keep internal notes (like your campaign objective, key results, and what content the campaign should include)
  • Organize all launch-related posts and visuals for future posts
  • View when each post is scheduled to go live with the calendar view
  • Check consolidated analytics across multiple platforms

Planable – Header bar

This kind of campaign structure helps your team stay focused and aligned. It also ensures every piece of content supports a bigger goal, like driving signups for an event or promoting a product launch.

Pros & Cons

Pros Cons
Craft your social media captions with AI in the Planable post editor Currently no integration with CMS platforms to post blog content on your site directly
Import visuals directly from Canva into your posts; no need to download or re-upload designs Analytics is only available for business accounts, not creator profiles
Schedule the first comment on Instagram and LinkedIn posts
Get post and account performance insights with built-in analytics

3. SocialBee

Best for businesses that want a built-in AI assistant to help plan strategy and generate content

Pricing: Starts at $29 per month; 14-day free trial

SocialBee – Create your post

SocialBee is a social media management tool that helps you manage all your content in one place. One unique thing this tool offers is a built-in AI assistant that takes tasks off your hands (more on this later).

Here are the platforms you can manage with SocialBee:

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • LinkedIn
  • X/Twitter
  • TikTok
  • YouTube
  • Pinterest
  • Google Business Profile
  • Bluesky
  • Threads

SocialBee also offers universal posting. This means you can collaborate with your team on content for a blog or newsletter for example. However, as is the case with Planable, there is currently no integration to post these directly on other platforms.

Here’s some more detail about a few of SocialBee’s best features:

Build a Content Strategy with AI Copilot

SocialBee’s AI Copilot is like having a creative assistant built into your social media tool.

It helps you build a personalized content strategy, come up with content ideas, and draft social media captions.

So, how does it work?

Let’s say you run social media for Tattly, a creative brand selling artist-designed temporary tattoos.

Copilot will ask you a set of questions about your brand, goals, and audience:

SocialBee – Social Media Copilot

Based on your input, the AI Copilot recommends the best platforms to focus on and suggests a weekly posting frequency:

SocialBee – Social Media Copilot – Posting frequency

Copilot also suggests content categories that match your business and tone:

SocialBee – Social Media Copilot – Content categories

It then generates the posting plan based on your content categories:

SocialBee – Social Media Copilot – Posting plan

And finally, it generates the posts. You can use the captions as-is or use AI suggestions as inspiration:

SocialBee – Social Media Copilot – Generated posts

Create Evergreen Content Categories

SocialBee lets you recycle posts on autopilot by marking a content category as evergreen:

SocialBee – Re-queue after posting

This means any post you add to that category will automatically be re-added to your posting queue once it goes live. You don’t need to reschedule it manually.

But why would you want to post the same content over and over?

It’s a great way to keep your content calendar full without constantly creating new content. You can use it to reshare timeless posts like tips, customer testimonials, or motivational quotes:

SocialBee – Your content categories

For example, reposting a helpful blog tip every four to six weeks keeps it fresh in your audience’s feed without feeling repetitive. Especially if you’re recycling through a variety of other content in between.

Plus, new followers may miss these posts the first time around, but still get value from them.

This keeps your content calendar active, saves you time, and ensures your best posts continue delivering value long after they’re first published.

Turn Links Into Posts

SocialBee lets you import a bunch of links and instantly generate social media posts for them:

SocialBee – Content – Import links

Just paste in your links, assign them to a content category, and SocialBee will generate a basic post using the page title and link:

SocialBee – Import links – Created post

From there, you can edit the draft to boost engagement and tailor it to your audience. Like by adding a hook or takeaway.

This is especially helpful if you run a blog or regularly share curated content. It gives you a head start on posting, so you’re not starting from scratch every time.

Get Help from a Dedicated Social Media Concierge

If you’d rather outsource some of your social media tasks to a pro, SocialBee offers concierge services.

SocialBee – ConciergeBee Store

ConciergeBee connects you with a service provider who takes care of tasks like making content or talking to your followers.

You can choose from several service packages (starting at $129/month) based on your needs.

For example, options include:

  • Weekly content creation (graphics, captions, and videos)
  • Community management (inbox and comment replies)
  • LinkedIn lead generation
  • Blog content writing
  • Ads management

SocialBee – Service packages

Compared to hiring freelancers on your own, SocialBee’s concierge service saves you time and guesswork.

You get vetted specialists, ongoing 1:1 communication, and fixed pricing. And you don’t have to go through the process of scouting talent and managing contracts.

Pros & Cons

Pros Cons
Turn articles into social media posts in seconds The mobile app is very limited at this time, sometimes not even working at all
Use AI to enhance your social media strategy
Use Canva, Unsplash, and GIPHY integrations for visuals

4. Canva

Best for content creators and small businesses that want to design and schedule content from one place

Pricing: Starts at $15 per month; 30-day free trial available

Canva – Content Planner

With its built-in Content Planner tool, Canva lets you design, write, and schedule posts across multiple platforms in one place.

If you’re already using it to create visual content, it might be enough to handle your entire content workflow. Especially if you heavily rely on graphics in your social media posts.

Here are the platforms you can manage with Canva:

  • Instagram Business Page
  • Facebook Page
  • X/Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr

While more limited than some of the other tools on this list, there are still a lot of reasons to love it as a social media management tool.

Here are my favorite features:

Schedule Posts Right From the Design Dashboard

Canva makes it easy to go from designing a social media post to scheduling it for publishing. You can do it without even leaving the design screen.

Let’s say you run a small cafe and you’re launching a new seasonal breakfast menu. You design an Instagram post in Canva with a mouth-watering photo of your meals.

Once you’re happy with the design, you click “Share” > “Schedule” right from the top menu:

Canva – Schedule design

This built-in scheduling tool helps you post regularly on social media without making more work for yourself.

Instead of switching between tools, you can design, schedule, and publish all from one place.

This saves time and keeps your content calendar on track.

Fill Your Calendar with Holiday-Ready Templates

Canva’s Content Planner shows holidays, awareness days, and seasonal events from around the world:

Canva – Content planer shows holidays

You can click on any event, choose a ready-made template, make it match your brand, and schedule the post right away:

Canva – Ready made template

This is a simple and effortless way to fill your content calendar and engage your audience.

Pros & Cons

Pros Cons
Design and schedule content without switching platforms Lacks advanced collaboration tools, such as content approvals, needed for larger teams
Pre-designed visuals tied to calendar events and holidays

5. Hootsuite

Best for teams that need social selling tools and CRM integration

Pricing: Starts at $149 per month; 30-day free trial available

Hootsuite – Dashboard

Hootsuite supports everything from collaborative content planning to lead generation and social selling.

It has tools that help your team save time and work efficiently. Like CRM integrations, a smart inbox, and auto-replies for Instagram.

Here are the platforms you can manage with Hootsuite:

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • X/Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • YouTube
  • Pinterest
  • TikTok
  • WhatApp Business
  • Threads

Here are my favorite Hootsuite features:

Automate Instagram DMs with Comment Keywords

Hootsuite lets you send automated Instagram DMs to your audience:

Hootsuite – DM automation

You can use this feature to deliver lead magnets, coupon codes, or event registrations.

For example, if you’re a fitness coach offering a free meal plan, you could post a Reel with the caption:

Drop the word MEAL below and I’ll DM you my 7-day meal plan.”

When someone comments “meal,” Hootsuite instantly sends them your custom message with the link.

Here’s how it works:

You choose a keyword and write a message you want to send when someone comments that word on your post.

This method keeps your audience engaged without the hassle of replying to everyone yourself. And because the response is instant, your followers get what you promised right away. No matter when they comment.

Cool, right?

Turn Social Conversations Into Sales

Hootsuite helps you move leads from social interactions to closed deals without leaving the dashboard.

You can reply to comments and DMs, save the conversation in your CRM, and follow up to turn that lead into a customer:

Hootsuite – Turn social conversations into sales

But how’s that possible?

Hootsuite integrates with CRMs like Salesforce, HubSpot, and SugarCRM to streamline this process.

This means your social media manager and sales rep can collaborate in real time. If a follower responds to a campaign or clicks on a product post, you can turn that engagement into a lead profile.

If your business relies on social selling, this feature is a game-changer.

Pros & Cons

Pros Cons
Manage inbound messages, engagement, and scheduling in one place DM automation is limited to Instagram only
Integrate Hootsuite with your CRM and project management platform

6. Sprout Social

Best for large teams or agencies that need unified analytics, collaboration tools, and social listening in one platform

Pricing: Starts at $249 per month; 30-day free trial available

Sprout Social – Dashboard

Sprout Social is a premium social media management platform. It combines publishing, engagement, analytics, and social listening all in one place.

Here are the platforms you can manage with Sprout Social:

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • X/Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • TikTok
  • Pinterest
  • Threads
  • YouTube
  • Google Business Profile

Now let’s talk about what I love most about Sprout Social:

Respond to Every Message in One Place

Sprout’s Smart Inbox pulls direct messages (DMs), comments, and mentions across all your connected platforms.

You don’t need to bounce between tabs or apps. Instead, your entire team can view and respond to each message or comment from one space:

Sprout Social – All Messages

Your team can even tag messages, assign them to teammates, and leave internal notes to add context:

Sprout Social – Internal comments

Sprout Social also tracks your inbox activity. This lets you check how your team handles audience engagement across different platforms.

For example, you can see metrics like:

  • Number of received vs. actioned messages and action rate
  • Response rate and average time to action
  • Performance trends across time or by platform

Sprout Social – Received Messages and Actions Summary

This helps you reply faster, keep your support organized, and make sure you don’t miss any messages. Even when you’re constantly receiving messages at scale.

Track and Visualize Performance Across the Channels

Sprout Social gives you two powerful ways to analyze your results:

  • Cross-network reporting: To track performance across all your social media channels
  • Profile-specific reporting: To dive deeper into individual accounts (like your Instagram or LinkedIn)

This dual setup helps you see the big picture while still being able to zoom in on the details.

View High-Level Metrics in One Dashboard

Its profile performance report shows key stats. Such as views, clicks, engagement, and interaction rate across all your social platforms:

Sprout Social – Profile Performance

You can also track how your audience has grown over time with the Audience Growth graph:

Sprout Social – Audience Growth

This makes it easy to see whether your efforts are growing your followers.

That way, you can identify which platforms are bringing the most momentum. And which ones might need a strategy tweak.

Analyze Content with Post Performance Reports

Sprout Social also gives you post performance insights across all your connected accounts. Or you can focus on a specific platform.

You can view and compare individual post metrics. Like total engagement, reactions, and comments:

Sprout Social – Post Performance

This helps you quickly spot top-performing posts and patterns behind them. This lets you replicate what’s working — without constantly jumping between dashboards.

Listen to What Your Audience Is Saying Online

Sprout Social helps you understand what people say about your brand, industry, or competitors across social media and the web.

You can track specific keywords, hashtags, or brand mentions in real time.

For example, if you manage social media for a coffee shop, you might track the keyword “espresso.”

The conversation breakdown shows the words and phrases people use when they talk about espresso. Such as “recipes,” “easy,” and “home.”

These terms are ranked from highest to lowest engagement:

Sprout Social – Keyword tracked

You can use these words to get content ideas or write relatable captions to match what your audience is saying.

It’s a quick way to spot trends and stay relevant.

Pros & Cons

Pros Cons
All-in-one place for managing publishing, engagement, and analytics across many social media platforms Can be overwhelming for solo users or small teams due to the number of tools included in Sprout Social
Advanced analytics to track cross-platform or profile-specific performance

Ready to Choose Your Social Media Management Tool?

The right social media management tool depends on your content needs and workflow:

  • Go with Sprout Social if you’re a large team or agency that needs everything in one place, including analytics, collaboration, customer care, and social listening
  • Pick Hootsuite if your team is focused on lead generation and social selling, and you want powerful CRM integrations and sales automations
  • Choose Planable if you need advanced collaboration features and want to manage all kinds of content in one place
  • Go with Buffer if you’re solo or on a small team and want to stay consistent with posting using a simple, organized workflow
  • Try SocialBee if you want extra help either from AI or a real human handling your strategy and content
  • Stick with Canva if you’re already using it for design and want a streamlined way to schedule your posts without switching tools

Want to explore new platforms to grow on? Check out our list of new social media platforms so you can stay ahead of the curve.


The post 6 Best Social Media Management Tools (Tried & Tested) appeared first on Backlinko.

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19 Sitemap Examples for Any Type of Website (+ Best Practices)

Your sitemap is exactly what it sounds like: a map of your site’s pages.

A good sitemap organizes all your most important pages logically, and it can help Google crawl and understand your site.

Sitemap Example

Free template: Want to create your own visual sitemap like the example above? Download our free Canva template here.


Below, I’ll go through 19 example sitemaps and explain the key best practices to help you build your own.

Beyond XML, HTML, and visual sitemaps, I’ve categorized the examples below by site type. This way, you can find examples of sitemaps from websites like yours.

We’ll cover sitemaps for:

Note: If you haven’t created a sitemap yet, or you want to learn more about optimizing them, check out our dedicated sitemap guide first.


Which Type of Sitemap Do You Need? (XML vs. HTML)

Before jumping into examples, you need to know which type of sitemap is right for your website.

There are two main types: XML and HTML. Each one serves a different purpose.

Note: I’ll also provide an example of a visual sitemap below, but XML sitemaps (the kind you submit to Google Search Console) are the focus here.


XML Sitemap Examples

XML sitemaps are designed specifically for search engines, not humans.

They use a structured format that tells Google and other search engines about the pages on your site and when they were last updated. (This means they can affect your site’s SEO.)

You’ll usually find them at URLs like “yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml” or “yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml” (if you have multiple sitemaps).

XML sitemaps won’t directly improve your rankings. But they can help search engines find and then index your content.

Important: You don’t need an XML sitemap. But honestly, as long as you set it up properly, there’s no reason not to have one.


There are a few ways you can implement XML sitemaps. Below are three examples showing the most common styles you’ll come across.

HTTPStatus.io

Sitemap URL: https://httpstatus.io/sitemap.xml

The sitemap for HTTPStatus.io is fairly simple. The site offers a tool for checking the HTTP status of your URLs. But it also has some pages explaining integrations and what different status codes mean.

HTTP Status – XML Sitemap

Beyond the main tool and some knowledge base style articles, there aren’t that many pages on the site to map.

If you also have a simple site, don’t overcomplicate your sitemap.

Forbes

Sitemap URL: https://www.forbes.com/sitemap_index.xml

Forbes uses an XML sitemap index, found at forbes.com/sitemap_index.xml.

Forbes – XML Sitemap

This is an index of multiple sitemaps, like /forbes_2008_sitemap.xml and /news_sitemap.xml.

In this case, the 2005 sitemap contains URLs published in 2005:

Forbes – 2005 Sitemap

While the news sitemap contains news-themed URLs:

Forbes – News sitemap – News themed URLs

You’ll see that Forbes includes various different attributes in its sitemap. Most of these aren’t essential. Google also ignores many of them, like <changefreq> and <priority>.

But if you use the <lastmod> value and it’s “consistently and verifiably accurate,” Google may use it to understand how often to crawl your pages.

In other words: don’t use this to try and pretend you’ve significantly updated your content when you’ve just changed the date.

Backlinko

Sitemap URL: https://backlinko.com/sitemap_index.xml

We’ve used Yoast (a WordPress plugin) to create our sitemap index. That’s why it looks like a more styled page than the previous two examples.

Backlinko – XML Sitemap

If you have a WordPress site, plugins like Yoast and RankMath can create sitemaps for you.

In our case, we’ve split our sitemap up into different categories like posts, pages, tools, and hub resources.

Here’s what the /post-sitemap.xml looks like:

Backlinko – XML Sitemap – URLs

Best Practices for XML Sitemaps

Follow these best practices when creating your XML sitemap:

  • Each sitemap file should contain no more than 50,000 URLs and be smaller than 50MB (for larger sites, use multiple sitemaps and a sitemap index)
  • Don’t include duplicate content, redirected pages, or non-indexable pages in your sitemap — this can confuse search engines and waste crawl budget
  • Only adjust the “lastmod” attribute when you make significant updates to pages (and don’t use it to “fake” content freshness)
  • Configure your CMS or server to automatically update your sitemap when you make content changes

Note: Many content management systems like WordPress, Shopify, and Wix automatically update your sitemap when you add, move, or adjust pages.


HTML Sitemap Examples

HTML sitemaps, unlike XML sitemaps, are designed for your human visitors.

These are actual pages on your website that list all your content in a hierarchical structure. You’ll typically find them at URLs like “yourdomain.com/sitemap” (although it can vary depending on the site’s URL structure).

They help visitors find what they’re looking for when they can’t access what they need via your navigation menus.

However:

Your users should be able to find what they need via your navigation menus and internal links. An HTML sitemap is not a substitute for good UX design.

(But it can supplement it.)

You should consider creating an HTML sitemap if:

  • Your website has deep content hierarchies
  • You run an ecommerce store with many product categories
  • Users frequently search for specific pages on your site
  • Your website caters to less tech-savvy audiences who might need navigation help

You don’t need to choose between XML and HTML sitemaps. You can use both simultaneously.

Forbes

Sitemap URL: https://www.forbes.com/sitemap/

I showed you Forbes’ XML sitemap above, but the site also has an HTML sitemap for users.

Forbes – Sitemap

The HTML sitemap sorts Forbes’ main pages into categories like Newsletters, Leadership, and Lifestyle.

These don’t cover all of Forbes’ categories though, which you can see in their navigation menu:

Forbes – Navigation menu

So this is an example of a site likely just using their HTML sitemap to highlight specific important pages.

Lovevery

Sitemap URL: https://lovevery.com/pages/sitemap

Lovevery’s HTML sitemap sorts its products into categories like Play Kits and Course Packs. It also highlights two of their main products right at the top: The Play Gym and The Montessori Shelf.

Lovevery – HTML Sitemap

It also subdivides the Play Kits by age. This makes it easy for users to find products they need for their child.

Best Practices for HTML Sitemaps

Here are best practices to follow if you want to create an HTML sitemap:

  • Logically structure your HTML sitemap to mirror your site’s actual architecture
  • Use anchor text to describe the linked page and avoid generic labels like “click here” or “read more”
  • Use consistent indentation, typography, and spacing to show hierarchies
  • Place a link to your HTML sitemap in your site’s footer so it’s accessible from every page
  • Update your HTML sitemap when you add or remove content

Visual Sitemap Example

Visual sitemaps represent your site’s architecture graphically. They use shapes, colors, and lines to show how pages are connected.

They’re helpful during site planning and development, but you won’t submit these to Google, and your users won’t see them either.

Here’s an example of a visual sitemap for a website that sells coffee products:

Sitemap

Don’t forget: You can try our free Canva visual sitemap template to map out your own website’s pages.


Best Practices for Visual Sitemaps

Follow these tips to create a useful visual sitemap:

  • Limit your visual sitemap to core pages and pathways to avoid clutter
  • Establish a clear key for what each shape, color, and connector represents (like categories and products, or levels in the hierarchy)
  • Cluster similar pages together visually to show content relationships (and opportunities for internal links)
  • Show the intended user pathways through your site to identify potential navigation issues before they become problems
  • Share your visual sitemap with team members and clients early — it’s much easier to revise a diagram than to restructure a fully-built website

Next, I’ll go through examples of XML sitemaps for different types of websites. While HTML and visual sitemaps have their place, it’s your XML sitemap that matters most for SEO.

Blog Sitemap Examples

A well-structured blog sitemap ensures all your content remains discoverable. This includes older posts that may have fallen off your main navigation or recent posts list.

For sites that regularly publish new content, an automatically updating blog sitemap can help maintain your search engine visibility across your entire content archive.

Cup of Jo

Sitemap URL: https://cupofjo.com/sitemap_index.xml

Cup of Jo’s sitemap is generated by Yoast.

Cup of Jo – XML Sitemap

It organizes the blog’s pages into the following categories:

  • Posts (with 8 individual sitemaps covering posts going back 10+ years)
  • Pages
  • Products
  • Authors

But there are also some extra sitemaps in there that I wouldn’t recommend you include.

For example, there’s a sitemap for affiliate links…

Cup of Jo – XML Sitemap – URLs

…that just links to pages with a single image on them:

Cup of Jo – Affiliate links

(This one’s URL was /pillow/, but the image is a jacket.)

Your sitemap should contain only your important pages you want Google to index. So you should avoid including any links to pages that don’t add value for users.

NerdWallet

Sitemap URL: https://www.nerdwallet.com/blog/wp-sitemap.xml

NerdWallet has a main sitemap at /wp-sitemap.xml. It contains further sitemaps of posts, reviews, other types of posts, authors, and more.

NerdWallet – XML Sitemap – URLs

But there are also other sitemaps for specific region versions of the site:

  • /uk/sitemap.xml
  • /ca/sitemap.xml
  • /ca/p/sitemap.xml
  • /au/sitemap.xml

While NerdWallet generates its main sitemap either via a custom setup or plugin, it generates its region-specific ones with Yoast:

NerdWallet – XML Sitemap – 998 URLs

All of these sitemaps follow a simple structure, listing the URL and date it was last modified. (The Yoast ones also include the number of images on the page — a small and not super important detail.)

Considering NerdWallet has tens of thousands of pages and multiple regional versions of the site, this is an impressively straightforward example of a blog sitemap.

Best Practices for Blog Sitemaps

If you have a blog, follow these best practices for your sitemap:

  • List your blog posts in reverse chronological order (newest first) to highlight your most recent content
  • Group posts by their primary categories to create logical content clusters that search engines can understand
  • If you substantially update a post, reflect this in your sitemap’s “lastmod” parameter (WordPress plugins like Yoast often do this for you)
  • Unless your category and tag pages contain unique content, keep them out of your sitemap to avoid duplicate content issues
  • Ensure the URLs in your sitemap exactly match the canonical URLs of your published posts

Local Business Sitemap Examples

A well-structured sitemap for your local business website can help Google find and index all of your location pages and other important content. This is especially true for businesses with lots of locations or complex service offerings.

The Wild Rabbit

Sitemap URL: https://thewildrabbit.co.uk/sitemap_index.xml

The Wild Rabbit is an inn with one single location in the UK. It uses Rankmath, another popular WordPress SEO plugin, to generate its sitemaps.

The Wild Rabbit – XML Sitemap

Its sitemap index is fairly straightforward, with further sitemaps for:

  • Posts
  • Pages
  • Events
  • Menu
  • Categories

If you also have a single location with a simple website, a clean sitemap like this is a good example to follow.

Las Carettas Mexican Restaurant

Sitemap URL: https://www.lascarretasmexicanrest.com/pages-sitemap.xml

Las Carettas Mexican Restaurant’s sitemap is as simple as it gets.

Las Carretas Mexican Restaurant – XML Sitemap

The sitemap just contains all of the site’s URLs within one single sitemap file.

Pimlico Plumbers

Sitemap URL: https://www.pimlicoplumbers.com/sitemap_index.xml

Pimlico Plumbers is London’s largest independent plumbing company. But even with lots of service areas all around the city, Pimlico’s sitemap is simple and organized.

Pimlico Plumbers – XML Sitemap

The most notable sitemap here is the location-sitemap.xml file:

Pimlico Plumbers – XML Sitemap URLs

This is a useful way for Pimlico to organize all of its locations in an easy-to-find way. This potentially helps Google find and index its location pages.

Best Practices for Local Business Sitemaps

Sitemaps for local businesses don’t require too much in the way of dedicated best practices.

But you should:

  • Include your location pages if you have multiple
  • If you have lots of locations, you may want to categorize them in a separate sitemap file
  • Make sure to update any key page URLs and add a “lastmod” parameter when you do

Ecommerce Store Sitemap Examples

With potentially thousands of products, categories, and filters, ecommerce sites can end up with pretty complex sitemaps.

But with a bit of logical organization, you can ensure your sitemap helps (rather than hinders) your ecommerce site’s SEO.

Gymshark

Sitemap URL: https://www.gymshark.com/sitemap.xml

Gymshark’s sitemap is a useful example to follow for ecommerce sites.

Gymshark – XML Sitemap – Ecommerce example

Its sitemap index splits URLs across pages, collections, and products.

Here’s what the collection sitemap looks like:

Gymshark – XML Sitemap collections

And since Gymshark is a global brand, there are also sitemaps for hreflang and the Spanish-speaking US variants of the site’s pages:

Gymshark – Language variants – XML Sitemaps

Then, on Gymshark’s region-specific domains, there are separate sitemap files. Like this one for the French version of the site:

Gymshark – XML Sitemap for the French version

Ruggable

Sitemap URL: https://ruggable.com/sitemap.xml

Ruggable XML Sitemap

Ruggable offers thousands of products. But its sitemap index just consists of four simple individual sitemaps covering:

  • Products
  • Pages
  • Collections
  • Blog posts

Here’s what the extensive product sitemap looks like:

Ruggable – Extensive product sitemap

This single sitemap contains 1,000+ individual product URLs.

This creates a simple overall sitemap setup, while still being well below the limit of 50,000 URLs per sitemap.

Best Practices for Ecommerce Sitemaps

Follow these best practices for your ecommerce sitemap:

  • Every available product should have an entry in your sitemap
  • Remove or deprioritize permanently discontinued products to avoid wasting crawl budget
  • Exclude filter combinations that create duplicate content issues (like sorting options or non-essential URL parameters)
  • If you serve multiple countries or languages, include hreflang attributes to help Google understand which version to show users in specific regions
  • For stores with thousands of products, consider creating separate sitemaps for different categories and linking them with a sitemap index

Large Website Sitemap Examples

Large websites with thousands or millions of pages face unique challenges when it comes to sitemaps. Sitemaps have a URL limit of 50,000 per individual sitemap. So it’s often impossible to keep every page within just a single file.

This means sitemap indexes and automated updating are essential for larger websites.

Weather.com

Sitemap URL: https://weather.com/en-US/sitemaps/sitemap.xml

Weather.com is a HUGE site. Like 50+ million pages huge.

Google SERP – site:weather.com – Results

(This is just Google’s estimate and it’s not always that accurate. But there’s no doubt there are A LOT of pages on Weather.com.)

The site will tell you the weather pretty much anywhere on earth with its own dedicated page. So it needs a robust sitemap setup that goes beyond simple categories.

Weather XML Sitemap

In fact, it needs several sitemaps:

  • /en-US/sitemaps/sitemap.xml
  • /pt-PT/sitemaps/sitemap.xml
  • /de-DE/sitemaps/sitemap.xml
  • /fr-FR/sitemaps/sitemap.xml
  • /es-US/sitemaps/sitemap.xml
  • /es-ES/sitemaps/sitemap.xml
  • /en-IN/sitemaps/sitemap.xml
  • /en-GB/sitemaps/sitemap.xml
  • /en-CA/sitemaps/sitemap.xml

Within each of these, there are yet more sitemaps:

Weather – More sitemaps

These categorize URLs by things like:

  • Videos
  • News
  • Articles
  • Forecast types (ten-day, weekend, today etc.)

And within these, there are individual URLs:

Weather – Individual URL within sitemaps

This leads to an extensive but essentially well-organized sitemap that covers millions of potential locations.

Note: For obvious reasons, I can’t verify if Weather.com’s sitemap contains every one of its indexable URLs. For sites at this scale, what’s key is just ensuring your sitemap contains all of your most important pages.


eBay

Sitemap URL: https://www.ebay.com/lst/BROWSE-0-index.xml

The eBay marketplace is home to 2+ billion live listings.

So it’s no surprise that the site needs a massive sitemap. So massive in fact that eBay needs to compress its many sitemaps. You can tell because its sitemap URLs end in .xml.gz, with .gz referring to “gzip” (a compressed file format).

eBay – Massive XML Sitemap

You need to download these and then decompress them to view them. But when you do, you’ll find they often have 40K+ URLs in them.

I downloaded a few just out of curiosity, and I found 48K URLs in one of the “browse” sitemaps:

Sitemap with 40K+ URLs

Another had 40K URLs, so the average is likely somewhere between those numbers. On the .com domain, I found at least 1,600 individual sitemaps in total across:

  • /PRP-0-index.xml (this contains links to individual listings)
  • /VIS-0-index.xml (this contains individual listing links along with image links)
  • /NGS-0-index.xml (this contains all the store pages)
  • /BROWSE-0-index.xml (these links are for search pages — hence “browse”)

eBay – Types of sitemaps

If they all have at least 40K URLs in them (I’m not manually verifying that), we can assume there are at least 64 million URLs in eBay’s sitemap in total. But I imagine it’s more like 70-80 million.

And that’s just the .com domain. There are similar sets of sitemaps for its regional domains:

eBay – Sets of sitemaps for regional domains

So this is an example of a truly massive sitemap. And you can see eBay sorts it into just four broad sitemap indexes, each one with hundreds of individual, compressed sitemaps.

Best Practices for Large Site Sitemaps

Follow these best practices for large sitemaps:

  • Use a sitemap index file to organize multiple child sitemaps, keeping each under the 50,000 URL and 50MB size limits
  • Configure your system to automatically generate and update sitemaps when content changes, as manual management becomes impossible at scale
  • Only include canonical versions of pages
  • Consider compressing your sitemaps to save bandwidth if you have lots of large sitemap files

SaaS Sitemap Examples

A well-structured SaaS sitemap encourages Google to index your most important pages.

SaaS websites are often complex, and so sitemap indexes are usually the go-to for this kind of website.

ClickUp

Sitemap URL: https://clickup.com/sitemap.xml

ClickUp’s sitemap is clean and simple — even though the SaaS site has tens of thousands of pages and 10+ regional versions.

ClickUp XML Sitemap – Clean & simple

ClickUp’s main sitemap index splits into:

  • /sitemap-landing.xml: Landing pages
  • /blog/sitemap.xml: Blog posts
  • /sitemap-next.xml: Various types of pages, including feature pages, events, and resources
  • /sitemap-programmatic.xml: Pages ClickUp has generated programmatically

Then there are a bunch of sitemaps for templates, more programmatic pages, and region-specific blog posts.

Like this one for Spanish speakers in Spain:

ClickUp Sitemap – Blog for Spanish speakers in Spain

It’s worth noting that many of these sitemaps exist on a cdn.web.clickup.com subdomain. (The individual URLs within the sitemap aren’t on this subdomain.)

This might provide a small performance boost in terms of how fast Google can crawl the sitemaps, along with a bit of server load reduction. But I don’t imagine it would be a game changer for most sites.

It’s also not something you absolutely need to do for large sitemaps. But it could still be worth considering.

Further reading: Page Speed and SEO


Docusign

Sitemap URL: https://www.docusign.com/sitemap.xml

Docusign’s sitemap index contains individual sitemaps for things like blog posts and PDFs.

Docusign – XML Sitemap

But what makes it an interesting sitemap example is the way it implements hreflang for its language and regional variants.

For example, here’s the /en-gb/ sitemap for English speakers in the UK:

Docusign – EN for GB Blog Sitemap

But this actually highlights one of the reasons many site owners stick with just one form of hreflang implementation (often putting it in each individual page’s code). When you have lots of URLs and different language versions of them, it can be tough to keep them updated.

(Even Google warns that this can become an issue.)

Including hreflang attributes in multiple locations (like the page’s source code and in your sitemap) means you have two sets of alternate URLs to manage.

Let’s look at the first example in the screenshot above (/docusign-iris-agreement-ai). We see the sitemap tells search engines there are five variants of the URL:

  • en-au
  • en-ca
  • en-gb
  • en-sg
  • en-us

But the page’s source code (see below) suggests there is also a variant for Spanish speakers in Mexico (es-mx):

Docusign – Page source code

And in fact it doesn’t explicitly include en-us. Instead it opts for just en for the English/US version (/blog/docusign-iris-agreement-ai).

Perhaps the sitemap or page code just hadn’t updated yet (other pages don’t all show the same issue).

But if you have widespread cases like this, it could lead to Google having trouble knowing which versions of your site to serve to users. Or it might ignore your hreflang tags altogether.

Best Practices for SaaS Sitemaps

If you run a SaaS site, do the following to optimize your sitemap:

  • Prioritize feature and landing pages that target your primary conversion keywords
  • Include your knowledge base and technical documentation
  • Organize pages based on where they fit in the customer journey, from awareness to consideration to decision
  • Exclude pages like dashboards that are behind a login
  • Remove tracking parameters and unnecessary URL variations to prevent duplicate content issues
  • Consider implementing hreflang if you target a global audience — but make sure you don’t create any conflicts

Corporate Sitemap Examples

A well-designed corporate sitemap makes it easier for Google to index high-value pages. These could include pages about investor relations and press releases, along with leadership profiles.

TSMC

Sitemap URL: https://www.tsmc.com/english/sitemap.xml

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, or TSMC, is Taiwan’s largest company. It’s also one of the world’s most important manufacturers of computer chip components.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company – XML Sitemap

So it’s no surprise that it has sitemaps covering important pages like:

  • Annual reports
  • Business contacts
  • Policies
  • Declarations

TSMC uses Drupal to create its sitemap. This automatically adds change frequency and priority values, but Google ignores these.

Deloitte

Sitemap URL: https://www.deloitte.com/sitemap_index.xml

Deloitte is another major firm with a huge global presence. Its sitemap index primarily contains sitemaps for all of its regional variants.

Deloitte – XML Sitemaps – For regional variants

Like this German variant:

Deloitte – XML Sitemaps – German variant

These sitemaps contain everything from staff profiles to services and events.

Best Practices for Corporate Sitemaps

If you’re creating a sitemap for a corporate or business website, follow these best practices:

  • Include important quarterly reports, annual statements, and shareholder information pages to make them more discoverable for search engines like Google
  • Prioritize press releases, media kits, and company news to support your PR efforts and media visibility
  • If you have a large global presence, consider using different sitemaps for each regional variation
  • Don’t include any internal portals or pages that are behind a login

How to Find Issues with Your Sitemap

Putting together a sitemap is fairly straightforward. But it’s still easy to make mistakes (as some of the examples above show).

To make sure your sitemap is valid, use a sitemap validator, like this one:

XML Sitemaps – Validate XML Sitemap

But just because your sitemap is valid doesn’t mean it’s error-free.

To check for the most common sitemap issues, use a tool like Semrush’s Site Audit.

Just enter your domain, run the audit, and head to the “Issues” tab. Then type “sitemap” into the search bar:

Site Audit – Backlinko – Issues – Sitemap

The tool will highlight issues like:

  • Sitemap formatting errors
  • Incorrect pages in your sitemap (like pages with redirects, non-canonical URLs, or URLs with errors)
  • Sitemap files that are too big
  • Missing sitemaps
  • Sitemaps missing in your robots.txt file
  • Unsecure URLs in your sitemap
  • Orphaned pages in your sitemap

Note: Use Semrush Site Audit to find issues with your sitemap by using this link to access a 14-day trial on a Semrush Pro subscription.


The post 19 Sitemap Examples for Any Type of Website (+ Best Practices) appeared first on Backlinko.

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15 years of Yoast: 15 SEO tips for 2025 and beyond

We’re celebrating 15 years of Yoast, and we can’t celebrate without offering some SEO insights. So, here are 15 SEO essentials to focus on in this year and beyond. Whether you are a beginner or an SEO expert, these tips will help you focus on what’s important right now.

In collaboration with our Principal SEO, Alex Moss

1. Embrace AI-powered SEO tools

Artificial intelligence is making every part of SEO faster and more efficient, from keyword research to real-time performance tracking. Tools like Semrush and Ahrefs help you plan content quickly and uncover opportunities you might have missed. These platforms use data in new ways to help you improve your strategy based on live trends and competitor changes. Use tools like ChatGPT or Gemini for research, inspiration, coding, and data analysis.

Thanks to AI tools, you can automate time-consuming tasks like technical audits, site crawls, and content analysis. The time you win by doing that helps your team focus on the bigger picture, from setting the strategy, building authority, and creating content that connects with audiences and brings something new to the world.

Yoast SEO’s AI features offer guidance to help your content succeed.

Did you know?

Yoast is 15 years old!

We’re celebrating 15 years of Yoast this year and have all kinds of nice stuff planned. Of course, we’re also offering a deal on our SEO products. Use coupon code yoast15_gift4you at the checkout for a 15% discount!

Shop our products

2. Optimize for zero-click searches

In 2025, Google shows more quick answers than ever. You’ll see AI overviews, featured snippets, knowledge panels, People Also Ask boxes, and more. To be featured in those places, your content has to be high-quality and unique, above all, unique – regurgitating what’s already out there won’t cut it. But, it also has to be easy to read and scan. Don’t forget to use lists, highlighted snippets, and concise definitions at the top of your articles.

Keyword research helps you to find the questions your audience is asking. Write clear answers to those questions, making them as concise as possible. Use tools like AlsoAsked to find opportunities to rank even when a user doesn’t click through to your site.

3. Invest in video content

Video dominates search results and offers a good way to diversify traffic sources. The growth of a platform like TikTok shows that many people prefer consuming video content. Create videos that answer questions, demonstrate your products, or explain complex topics. Optimize the videos to make them easy to find, and don’t forget to add a transcript and timestamps to help with indexing and user experience. 

Depending on your video strategy, hosting them on YouTube and embedding them on your site can boost engagement and dwell time. YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, and building a solid presence there can reach a massive audience.

4. Improve e-commerce SEO

SEO for your products is not just about rankings, but also about conversion. Your product titles and descriptions should naturally include your most important keywords while also sounding persuasive. Don’t forget your category pages! Proper optimization helps customers find what they need. At the same time, you are building a strong internal linking structure. 

Structured data is essential for e-commerce stores because it can trigger rich results, highlighting reviews, pricing, and stock status. When done well, these show up nicely in Google, boosting your visibility. Rich snippets make your SERP listings more trustworthy and clickable. Do everything you can to get more traffic and, eventually, more sales. Our Yoast SEO for Shopify app can help your business succeed.

5. Prioritize local SEO

If your business is locally oriented, local SEO should be at the top of your strategy.  Keep your Google Business profile updated with opening hours, services, and nice photos. Post regularly about special offers, events, or published blog posts to show you are active and encourage engagement. 

Build citations in trusted local directories and get high-quality local backlinks. You should publish high-quality, localized content or case studies from regional customers. This signals that you are active in a geographic area, which could help local search visibility — Yoast Local SEO helps you do this.

6. Improve user experience (UX)

UX and SEO are deeply connected; we all know that. If people can’t use your site, they won’t stick around. Focus on a clean layout with plenty of whitespace and add clear call-to-actions for the user to click on. Make your site load quickly and test it regularly on mobile devices. 

Heatmaps, scroll maps, and user recordings made with tools like Hotjar can show where people get stuck on your site. Friction could occur with long loading times, confusing menus, missing CTAs, or other similar issues. Solving these can help reduce bounce rates, increase engagement and conversion.

7. Participate in SEO communities

Joining SEO communities isn’t just about asking for help when facing issues; it’s about much more. Platforms like LinkedIn, X, Reddit, Facebook groups, or SEO forums sometimes offer insights and advice you can’t get anywhere else. Sharing wins, failures, and experiments helps you stay connected to the SEO community and lets you build a name for yourself.

These platforms often surface research, news about Google core updates and warnings about issues some time before becoming common knowledge. News might be shared just early enough for you to take advantage of it before your competitor does. Building relationships can help you get business opportunities, collaborations, or friendships. 

8. Optimize for AI discovery

AI tools and chatbots are trained on information from the web, so it’s important to understand how your content is surfaced by large language models (LLMs). These systems, like ChatGPT and Google Gemini, reshape how users uncover information. The results are often served without a way to click to your site. If your brand is not visible in these generated answers, you could be missing out in a growing share of visibility. 

Research your topics and content to see how the system responds to your queries and if your content appears in the answers. Audit your content to see if you structured it so LLMs can understand it. Use clear language, be factual, build your topical authority, and use easy-to-understand layouts. Most of all, be sure that the crawlers of the AI services can reach your site without issues. 

9. Focus on content pruning

Sometimes, ranking higher isn’t about adding more content to your site; it’s often about cleaning up what you have. Content pruning means removing, merging, or updating poorly performing content. Ancient blog posts that no longer get any traffic, outdated product pages, and thin articles with no value may impact your site’s overall performance. 

Start with a content audit using Semrush, Screaming Frog, or Ahrefs. Find pages with limited traffic, few backlinks, and poor engagement. You can update these posts if you have enough insights to add. If they’re no longer relevant, merge them into a single, more authoritative page. If nothing works, delete and redirect. Keep your site lean and focused to improve the overall quality and authority, which also helps you fix keyword cannibalization.  

10. Implement structured data markup

Part of SEO is making your site easy for crawlers and search engines to understand. Structured data markup is one of the best ways to tell Google what your pages are about. With the correct schema items, you can highlight things like product prices, event dates, business locations, recipes, and more. 

Plugins like Yoast SEO make this process much easier. Start with your most important pages and products, select the proper schema, and fill in the details needed. Once you have the basics done, you can expand it to more complex structured data if needed.

11. Keep focusing on mobile

If you’ve been living under a rock, you might have missed that today’s world is all about mobile. We’ve been spending more and more hours glued to our mobile phones. So, having a perfect mobile site is no longer an option. Make sure that it adapts to all screen sizes, that the buttons work, and that no nasty pop-ups overlay the screen. 

Test your site often in various browsers on Apple and Android devices. See if it offers a great user experience. If not, fix it. Fixing even small accessibility issues or loading performance can greatly impact user satisfaction.

12. Create helpful, people-first content

Google is no longer just rewarding keyword-optimized pages, but genuinely helpful, people-first content. Your articles should satisfy user intent by providing clear, trustworthy and actionable information. Instead of writing the same things everyone has already done, create unique content that informs, solves problems, and adds value for your readers. 

When thinking about your content, ask yourself the questions that Google recommends: “After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they’ve learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?” and “Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and depth of knowledge?” If your content doesn’t do any of these things, you might need to rethink it. Focus on things you know well, avoid clickbait and write for your readers, not search engines. 

13. Optimize for Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals gives you a sense of your site’s health, especially with speed, responsiveness, and visual stability. They measure three main things: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), which looks at loading performance. The second is Interaction to Next Paint (INP), which shows how quickly your site responds to user actions. The third one is Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS), which checks for unexpected layout shifts when your page loads. Google uses these metrics to determine whether your site gives a good user experience. 

You can monitor your Core Web Vitals in Google PageSpeed Insights, Search Console, or Lighthouse. Improvements you can often make include optimizing images, using faster hosting, reducing reliance on JavaScript, and setting proper dimensions for media. Test your site often to see if your improvements improve the user experience. 

14. Diversify content formats

Not everyone wants to read a 2000-word blog post. Some people enjoy graphics, videos, or podcasts. You can quickly repurpose your content in various formats, instead of starting over every time. 

Doing so makes your site more interesting for readers and search engines alike. Adding helpful videos to articles or offering downloadable checklists or research reports makes your content more appealing.

15. Always stay updated

In SEO, change is a constant. There are algorithm updates, new AI features emerge, and best practices change. It’s a lot, so staying up to date with the news is essential. Follow reliable sources like Search Engine Land, Search Engine Roundtable, the Yoast SEO newsletter, or our monthly SEO update to get the needed insights.

Plan some time every week to read up on SEO news. Join the conversation whenever you feel like it. Use the new insights to improve your strategies. Sticking to last year’s strategy will not cut it if your competitors are faster to adapt!

15 SEO tips for 15 years of Yoast

Here’s to 15 years of Yoast and 15 more years of helping the world rank better. Whether you’re launching your first site or revamping your SEO strategy for the AI age, it doesn’t matter — we’ll help you succeed.

Which SEO tip do you swear by in 2025? Please share it with us on our social media platforms (X, LinkedIn, Reddit, Instagram), or in the comments below.

The post 15 years of Yoast: 15 SEO tips for 2025 and beyond appeared first on Yoast.

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Keyword and content cannibalization: how to identify and fix it

If you optimize your articles for similar terms, your rankings might suffer from keyword or content cannibalization: you’ll be ‘devouring’ your chances to rank in Google! Especially when your site is growing, your content could start competing with itself. Here, we’ll explain why keyword and content cannibalism can harm SEO, how to recognize it, and what to do about it.

What is keyword cannibalization?

Keyword cannibalization happens when multiple pages on your website target the same or very similar keywords. This often occurs unintentionally, especially as your site grows and more content accumulates. Pages that are too similar in focus might confuse search engines, which may struggle to decide which to rank higher. As a result, your pages compete with one another, and all of them can rank lower.

For example, if you publish two posts — one optimized for “does readability rank” and another for “readability ranking factor” — Google may see them competing for the same query. Instead of one strong result, both might hover around lower positions, weakening your site’s overall performance.

What is content cannibalization?

Content cannibalization is closely related but centers on the issue of multiple articles covering the same topic, regardless of whether they’re optimized for the same keyword. It’s a broader issue that affects thematic overlap more than exact keyword matching.

Where keyword cannibalization focuses on duplicating keywords, content cannibalization involves too many pages delivering overlapping value. This undermines user experience, spreads authority thin, and can make your content performance uneven.

Is cannibalization harmful?

Both keyword and content cannibalization can hurt SEO.

  • Lower rankings: Google often limits the number of results from a domain per query. When several of your pages try to rank for the same keyword, they could all underperform. This is especially true when neither page is clearly better in content depth, backlinks, or relevance.
  • Diluted backlinks: Instead of one strong page getting all the backlinks, multiple weaker ones split the attention. If many pages discuss a similar topic, other sites may link to each inconsistently. As a result, no one page accumulates strong authority. This fragmentation makes it harder for your content to rank competitively.
  • Confused crawlers: Search engines can’t always easily figure out which page they should prioritize. As a result, this could lead to inconsistent rankings. These days, Google is better at understanding topical relationships and can often see their differences. If content overlap is too high and intent is unclear, prioritization issues can still arise, especially on sites with thin or low-quality pages.
  • Reduced Click-Through Rate (CTR): Spreading clicks across several similar listings may lower the collective performance. If multiple similar titles from your domain show in results, users may split clicks between them. Worse, one strong CTA title might appear further down the page than a weaker or outdated one. This can impact user engagement and CTR for both pages, especially if they fall further down the SERPs.

In short, cannibalization limits your content’s potential by weakening each page’s authority and clarity.

How to identify cannibalization issues

As your site grows, you’ll have more and more content. Some of these articles are going to be about a similar topic. Even when you’ve always categorized it well, your content might compete with itself. You’re suffering from keyword or content cannibalization. Finding and fixing keyword cannibalization issues should be part of your content maintenance work to prevent all this.

Identifying keyword cannibalization

Start with a site search. Use site:yourdomain.com “keyword” in Google to surface all pages relevant to a particular term. If you see two or more of your URLs targeting the same term, they may be in conflict.

Next, use tools like Google Search Console. Look under the Performance tab. Filter by query to view keywords that bring in impressions and clicks, then see which pages receive traffic from those terms. Then, use SEO tools such as Ahrefs or Semrush to track keyword rankings and expose overlapping URLs targeting the same terms.

Look especially for pages that rank beyond the top five positions for the same term. When two of your URLs rank closely together outside the top spots, it’s often a sign that neither is performing optimally.

A Google site search with a domain and keyword showing post keyword cannibalization results
A simple site search with your domain and keyword will show all the pages ranking for that term

Identifying content cannibalization

Content cannibalization is subtler. You might not see overlapping keywords, but you may notice thematic overlap.

Review URL structures and tags to catch duplicates

Start by scanning your site’s URLs and content categories to catch pages covering the same topic in different formats. Look for similar slugs, repeated folder structures, or articles under the same tag or category. This quick check often reveals duplicate coverage, especially on larger sites or those with multiple writers.

Use keyword/topic mapping tools

Trace what each page is targeting. Create a list of your key pages and their target keywords or main topics. This helps you spot when multiple pages aim for the same term or cover the same subject. It doesn’t matter whether you use a tool or a spreadsheet, but keyword mapping helps explain the purpose of content. It also helps avoid overlap and ensures that all pages on your site have a place in your strategy.

Use the page filter

In Google Search Console, use the Page filter to see how each URL performs. The data gives insights into impressions, clicks, and average position. Look for pages that are getting traffic from similar queries. Multiple pages appearing for the same or closely related terms could signal content cannibalization. You can also use the Query filter to search by keyword and review which pages compete for it.

How to fix cannibalization issues

You should know your content, its performance, and where overlaps exist. Fixing keyword or content cannibalization means auditing, evaluating, and restructuring your pages. It doesn’t mean you should delete content blindly. Every page on your site should have a purpose and support your site’s overall SEO strategy. Below are practical ways to resolve both types of cannibalization.

Fixing keyword cannibalization

In many cases, solving keyword cannibalization means deleting and merging content. We will run you through some of that maintenance work as we did it at Yoast to show you how to do this. In particular, we’ll show you some thinking around a cluster of keywords related to keyword research.

Step 1: Audit your content

The first step is finding all the content on the keyword research topic. Most of that was simple: we have a keyword research tag, and most of the content was nicely tagged. This was also confronting, as we had many posts about the topic.

We searched for site:yoast.com "keyword research" and Google showed all the posts and pages on the site that mentioned the topic. We had dozens of articles devoted to keyword research or large sections mentioning it. Dozens or so mentioned it in passing and linked to other articles.

We started auditing the content for this particular group of keywords to improve our rankings around the cluster of keywords related to keyword research. So we needed to analyze which pages were ranking and which weren’t. This content maintenance turned out to be badly needed. It was surely time to find and fix possible cannibalization issues!

Step 2: Analyze the content performance

Go to Google Search Console and find the Performance section. In that section, click the filter bar. Click Query and type “keyword research” into the box like this:

A Google Search Console keyword query filter helping you find which articles rank for terms
Google Search Console helps you find which articles rank for certain terms

This makes Google Search Console match all queries containing keyword and research. This gives you two very important pieces of data. A list of the keywords your site has been shown in the search results for, and the clicks and click-through rate (CTR) for those keywords. A list of the pages that were receiving all that traffic, and how much traffic each of those pages received.

Start with the total number of clicks the content received for all those queries, then look at the individual pages. Something was clear: just a few posts were getting most of the traffic. But we knew we had loads of articles covering this topic. It was time to clean up. Of course, we didn’t want to throw away any posts that were getting traffic not included in this bucket of traffic, so we had to check each post individually. 

We removed the Query filter and used another option: the Page filter. This allows you to filter by a group of URLs or a specific URL. On larger sites, you might be able to filter by groups of URLs. In this case, we looked at the data for each post individually, which is best if you truly want to find and fix keyword cannibalization on your website.

Step 3: Decide on the next steps

After reviewing each post in this content maintenance process, we decided whether to keep it or delete it. If we deleted a post (which we did for most of them), we decided which post we should redirect it to.

For each of those posts, we evaluated whether they had sections to merge into another article. Some posts had paragraphs or sections that could be merged into another post. When merging posts entails more work (and time) than adding one paragraph or a few sentences, we recommend working in a new draft by cloning one of the original posts with Yoast Duplicate Post plugin. This way, you can work on your merged post without making live changes to one of your original posts.

Step 4: Take action

We had a list of action items: content to add to specific articles, after which each piece of content could be deleted from the articles it came from. Using Yoast SEO Premium, it’s easy to 301 redirect a post or page when you delete it, so that process was fairly painless.

With that, we’d removed the excess articles about the topic and retained only the most important ones. We still had a list of articles that mentioned the topic and linked to one of the other. We reviewed them and ensured each was linked to one or more of the remaining articles in the appropriate section.

Another example of fixing cannibalization by merging

Another example: We once had three separate articles covering how to do an SEO audit, split into parts 1, 2, and 3. Each post focused on a different section of the audit process, but none of them ranked well or brought in meaningful traffic. On their own, the articles felt incomplete, and splitting the topic likely made it harder for users (and search engines) to find everything they needed in one place. We decided to take a step back.

After reviewing performance data and gathering insights on what users were actually searching for, we merged the three posts into a single, more useful SEO audit guide. We rewrote outdated sections, expanded key points, added a practical checklist, included tool recommendations, and tightened up the structure. Since updating and combining the content, that article now ranks for more keywords than the separate posts ever did, draws more consistent traffic, and performs better overall. It’s a good example of how merging overlapping content, when done thoughtfully, can give users more value and improve SEO at the same time.

This shows three old seo audit articles that were merged in a much better, more comprehensive guide
Merging three simple posts into one big, much-improved SEO audit guide helped boost performance

Yoast Duplicate Post is a great free plugin

Ever wanted to quickly make a copy of a post in WordPress to work on some changes without the risk of ruining the published post?

You need Yoast Duplicate Post!

Fixing content cannibalization

Even if keywords differ slightly, topics may still overlap, and there are things you can do to improve that.

Create a cornerstone/pillar or landing page

Create a main page — a cornerstone article — that covers the broad topic in depth, then link to more specific articles that explore subtopics. This helps define a content hierarchy, improves internal linking, and signals which page should rank for the core topic to search engines. Supporting content can still rank independently, but will pass relevance and authority back to the pillar.

Consolidate underperforming content

If you have several pages covering similar ideas, but none are ranking well, combine them into one stronger, more complete resource. Prioritize the page with the most traffic or links, and bring valuable sections from the others. This helps reduce redundancy, improve content quality, and give search engines a clear page to index for that topic.

Use 301 redirects

Redirects are an important tool for your cannibalization actions. After deleting content, remember to use 301 redirects to send visitors from the old URLs to the updated one. Of course, you can also send them to the most relevant page as an alternative. This keeps existing rankings, backlinks, and traffic from the original pages intact. Plus, it also helps to avoid broken links or indexing issues. 

Preventive measures

Another way to avoid future keyword or content cannibalization issues is to prevent them, of course. 

Audit your content regularly

Analyze the content for your most important topics regularly. Look for overlapping pages, outdated posts, or content that doesn’t fit your keyword strategy. Regular audits will help you find issues early, which can help keep your site focused and maintain search visibility.

Assign a unique target keyword to each page

Before creating new content, please ensure no existing page targets the same keyword. Giving each page a clear, unique focus prevents internal competition and helps search engines understand which page to rank for a given query.

Write with a clear content brief

Start every piece with a brief that outlines the target keyword, search intent, key points to cover, and how it supports your existing content. Such a strategy helps your articles stay focused and avoids topic overlap. In addition, it ensures that the new content you add is truly unique to your site.

Keep a keyword and topic map

Maintain a simple record of which topics and keywords are already covered on your site. This makes it easier to spot gaps, avoid duplication, and plan new content that fits your overall strategy. A keyword map also helps when updating or pruning existing pages.

Also, if you’re running an e-commerce site with many similar product pages, make sure category pages are well-optimized and that your products clearly support them through internal linking.

Common mistakes in addressing cannibalization

Cannibalization happens, and many site owners have tried to address it in one way or another. Of course, there are right and wrong ways to do this.

Deleting pages without checking their value

Don’t delete content because you think it no longer serves a goal. Before you do that, look at traffic data, backlinks, and search performance before taking drastic measures. For instance, a page may look outdated, while in reality, it still drives traffic or has solid external links. Simply deleting it could lead to unwanted ranking losses.

Relying on canonical tags without checking content

Adding a canonical tag isn’t always the right fix. If two pages are too similar, merging or redirecting them may be better. Canonicals help when content overlap is minimal and both pages still serve a purpose, not as a quick workaround for duplication without analysis.

Merging pages that target different search intent

Just because two pages cover a similar topic doesn’t mean they should be combined. If each one is aimed at a very specific audience or answers a different question, merging them could hurt relevance and rankings. Always consider the intent behind each page before deciding to consolidate.

Overlooking internal linking opportunities

Internal links help search engines understand which pages are most important. If you skip this step, you may weaken page authority and miss chances to guide crawlers — and users — to your key content. Linking related pages strategically can reduce confusion and support stronger rankings.

Final thoughts on keyword and content cannibalization

A growing website means a growing risk of content overlapping. This could be a risk to the visibility of all that content. To prevent this, perform regular content audits and carefully plan and structure your content. 

Whether you’re fixing overlapping blog posts or aligning product pages under a clear hierarchy, regularly addressing cannibalization helps search engines — and users — find the most relevant, valuable pages on your site.

The post Keyword and content cannibalization: how to identify and fix it appeared first on Yoast.

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Video Previews come to Google Business Profile verification

Google has rolled out a new feature for Google Business Profile verifications. When you verify using video verification, you can now preview that video before you submit the video for review.

Google is calling this “Video Previews.”

Video Previews. Video Previews give you the option to review the video you are about to submit to the Google Business Profile team. This will allow you to ensure that video includes all the necessary elements before you submit it to Google.

Here is what it looks like:

What Google said. Google’s Lisa Landsman wrote on LinkedIn, “Now, you can review your recordings before submitting, ensuring clarity and accuracy – saving you valuable time and reducing the need for resubmissions.”

Why we care. All too often, a business will submit a verification requirement but leave out some important detail. With video previews, you can now preview the video before you submit it, to give you one more chance to ensure that the video you are submitting meets all the requirments you need to verify your business in Google Business Profiles.

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New data: Google AI Overviews are hurting click-through rates

Two new studies agree: Google’s AI Overviews steal clicks from organic search results.

While Google told us that AI Overviews citations result in higher-quality clicks, the introduction of AI Overviews correlates with a measurable decline in organic visibility and clicks, particularly for top-ranking, non-branded keywords. That’s according to two new data studies from SEO tool provider Ahrefs and performance agency Amsive.

By the numbers. Here’s how AI Overviews have decreased click-through rate (CTR) for traditional organic listings, according to the two studies:

  • Ahrefs: A 34.5% drop in position 1 CTR when AI Overviews were present, based on an analysis of 300,000 keywords.
  • Amsive: An average 15.49% CTR drop, with much larger losses in specific cases (e.g., -37.04% when combined with featured snippets), based on an analysis of 700,000 keywords.

Non-branded keywords. AI Overviews are much more likely to trigger on non-branded queries, and these terms showed the largest CTR drops:

  • Amsive: -19.98% CTR decline on non-branded keywords.
  • Ahrefs: Focused exclusively on informational intent (99.2% overlap with AI Overviews).

Lower rankings = bigger CTR hits. Google’s AI Overviews push organic results further down, minimizing visibility even for solidly ranking pages.

  • There was a -27.04% CTR drop for keywords not in the Top 3 positions, according to Amsive:

AI Overviews benefit branded queries. Branded keywords are less likely to trigger AI Overviews (only 4.79%) – but when they do, they get a +18.68% CTR boost. This is possibly due to greater user intent and brand familiarity, according to Amsive.

Why we care. These two studies (as well as data from Seer Interactive, which we covered in Google organic and paid CTRs hit new lows: Report) call into question Google’s claim that AI Overviews get more clicks than traditional listings. Google’s claim may or may not be true, but these studies show that overall clicks have gone down – and many websites ranking well in Classic Search aren’t included in AI Overviews.

About the data:

  • Ahrefs: Used Ahrefs + Google Search Console (GSC) data to analyze CTR changes before (March 2024) and after (March 2025) the U.S. rollout of AI Overviews.
  • Amsive: Pulled data from 700,000 keywords across 10 websites and 5 industries to isolate patterns by keyword type, industry, and SERP feature overlap.

The studies. You can read them here:

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Google Search to redirect its country level TLDs to Google.com

Google will begin redirecting its country code top-level domain names (ccTLD) versions of its Google domain to Google.com. That means if you frequent google.fr (in France), google.ng (in Nigeria) and so on, you will be redirected to Google.com.

Why the change. Google said, “Over the years, our ability to provide a local experience has improved. In 2017, we began providing the same experience with local results for everyone using Search, whether they were using google.com or their country’s ccTLD.” “Because of this improvement, country-level domains are no longer necessary,” Google added.

Google said, “we’ll begin redirecting traffic from these ccTLDs to google.com to streamline people’s experience on Search.”

The impact. For the most part, most searchers should not notice any difference. When you are redirected, there is a chance you may have to login to Google again and also reconfigure some of your search settings.

But overall, there won’t be any significant changes. Google wrote, “It’s important to note that while this update will change what people see in their browser address bar, it won’t affect the way Search works, nor will it change how we handle obligations under national laws.”

Timing. This change will begin today but “will be rolled out gradually over the coming months,” the company said.

Why we care. You may notice slightly different referral traffic from Google Search, related to this change.

This may also impact your signed in experience with Google.com in the short term.

But outside of that, there should be no other large changes with these ccTLD changes for Google Search.

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AI agents in SEO: What you need to know

AI agents in SEO: What you need to know

You’ve probably been hearing a lot about AI agents lately – whether in your workplace conversations or scrolling through your social feeds (hopefully both). 

While there’s no shortage of articles discussing their general benefits, there’s surprisingly little coverage on what they mean specifically for SEO – where their impact is not just significant, but amplified.

Before we dive into the two key reasons AI agents are so important for SEOs to understand (and yes, you’re probably already using them – even if you don’t realize it), let’s first get clear on what AI agents actually are.

What are AI agents?

At their core, AI agents are autonomous systems equipped with access to external tools, data, functions, and more. 

They operate with a clear understanding of an end goal and are provided with the resources needed to achieve it.

In some cases, they’re also given instructions on how to use those tools. In others, they’re left to figure it out on their own.

Rather than diving into a chart or technical diagram of a sample agenting system, I think a simpler – and surprisingly accurate – illustration can be found in one of nature’s most complex yet overlooked lifeforms: the humble ant.

Ant colony and AI agents

Imagine an ant colony: the queen, much like a master AI algorithm, sets the overarching goal. The worker ants – each equipped with their own specialized tools – are the individual agents tasked with specific functions.

Consider the parallels:

  • Queen = Agent operator: Directs and adjusts the overall strategy.
  • Worker ants = Sub-agents: Each has a specialized tool or function, whether it’s gathering data, analyzing content, or communicating findings.
  • Colony efficiency = System optimization: As ants work together, the system optimizes resources and information flow, mirroring how AI agents coordinate to achieve complex tasks.

The queen communicates the goal to each “tool,” which each ant then tries to accomplish. 

They return with their requested resource, communicate and assess their status, share information to accomplish their macro goal faster and report back. 

An overall status is reported to the queen, who communicates adjusted commands to her tools.

This is not all that different from an AI agent, other than being generally more sophisticated (though not as impressive to us, as it only sustains a species and doesn’t automatically make a stock trade 56 nanoseconds faster after catching a new trend and applying the sentiment as positive).

I’ll poorly parallel this to AI agents below.

But before I do that, let me answer why one of my assertions above is true. 

Why the impact of AI agents in SEO is multiplied many times over most other professions

I can’t think of an industry that won’t be touched by agents, at least indirectly. 

  • Lawyers will use agents to look up and summarize judgments and analyze loopholes used for their clients.
  • Software engineers will use them to assist in developing code and systems, referencing their internal docs, repos, and external knowledge.
  • Bakers will receive their ingredients through shippers coordinated using agents.
  • SEOs will use them as tools to do their jobs faster and better – as I’ll illustrate below.
A cartoon ant holding a microphone

On top of that, we also need to learn and adapt to marketing into agentic systems.

Generative engine optimization (GEO) entered the scene not that long ago. 

But what it is evolving into is something different — something far more powerful. 

Something that takes us past optimizing for an algorithm, even one driven by an LLM like AI Overviews or ChatGPT, and into optimizing for agents, their functions, and their tools.

We’re seeing this evolution in its toddler years right now, and if you’re on the ground floor, that’s a great place to be. 

While there are exceptions, for the most part, generative engines are performing a lot like search engines in their presentation of solutions.

  • The user enters a query.
  • The user receives a reply.
  • That reply might have a few links in it.

Sure, the system might check on the web for additional references outside of its current knowledge base, but nothing revolutionary. 

Again, it functions a lot like traditional search with a better user experience. 

I expect the next steps in this evolution will be gradual, as tools like Google and ChatGPT add new capabilities – such as the recently announced feature where an AI-driven system can call a store to gather additional information for you.

However, new pieces will gradually fall into place until we reach a point where providing your agent with insights into your goals or needs will trigger actions in ways we likely can’t fully understand yet.

Here’s a simple example.

You give the Google agent (for example) your goal, want, or need. 

Let’s say you need new shoes for a wedding. The agent can then:

  • Check your calendar for the wedding date.
  • Check the weather in that city on that date, or likely weather based on the time of year if specifics are unavailable.
  • Ask what you’ll be wearing.
  • Knowing your size, general style, and preferred brands and stores – source options that will arrive in time for the wedding.
  • Source and store a local backup, in case something goes wrong with the delivery or fit, to have that information ready in case it detects a problem.
  • Ask if you would like to see the options:
    • If yes, send them to a display of your choosing.
    • If not, move on to the next step.
  • Once the shoe is selected, complete the order.
  • Check what other common items might be needed for weddings, based on your status at it (guest, best person, bride or groom, etc.), and optionally send an email list of these to you if it doesn’t have evidence these are completed.

Imagining this world, I have a couple of questions for you:

  • How do you attribute that to Google?
  • Was it their crawler that surfaced the information to them? What kind of optimization does that take with LLMs?
  • Was it a product feed through Google Merchant Center?
  • Did they use an operator to navigate your site to get to it? Is there optimization you need to apply to filters to simplify that?
  • If you sell umbrellas, how do you ensure you’re part of those emailed suggestions from earlier in the event that it’s going to rain.
  • Oh, and how do you even get attribution for that?

This simple example highlights the immense complexity of what lies ahead. 

New technologies will emerge that companies and teams will need to adopt and optimize. 

Additionally, with the development of new protocols like Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), adding your store’s feed to a marketplace – or even creating your own tools for other agents to use – will become much easier. 

This opens the door to greater distribution, though it may come with challenges like difficult attribution and untested effectiveness. 

The question is: 

  • Do you really want to wait and see if your competitors dive in first, or will you seize the opportunity now?

While I can’t predict the exact shape of the marketing world in the next two weeks, let alone a year from now, I can confidently say that we’ve already entered the agentic era. 

The rate of adoption and development in this space is unlike anything I’ve seen in over two decades of online marketing.

It’s even more disruptive than the changes brought on Google’s Panda and Penguin updates.

A red ant plus small pandas and penguins

Dig deeper: From search to AI agents – The future of digital experiences

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SEOs and GEOs use agentic AI, too

And on the other side of the coin, we also have SEOs using their own agentic systems.

As an example, I’ll share an agenting system I created to help generate article outlines for authors at Weights & Biases. 

What started as a simple replacement for a script I had previously written for the same task has since evolved. 

I’ll also highlight a few upcoming expansions to better illustrate the potential of AI agents.

This agentic system begins by asking the user for five things:

  • The primary phrase they are hoping to rank for with an article.
  • Any secondary terms.
  • The type of article they were writing.
  • The title (if they have one in mind).
  • The author.

It uses this information to inform the other agents within the system what to do and what data to access.

I’ve created several agents and data sources for the agent to access. 

The main ones (including a few still being finished after some testing) are:

A search agent

This agent has access to Google search and removes social platforms, which tend to block our web scrapers.

An analysis agent

This agent does a few things:

  • Extracts the entities from the pages using Google’s Natural Language API.
  • Summarizes content.
  • Extracts questions from the content.

I’ll likely separate these into their own agents as I expand the capabilities, but combining them works well in the current iteration.

A data store of examples

For each author, I created a folder with 10 markdown files that include:

  • The inputs they provided (primary phrase, secondary terms, title, etc.).
  • The outlines generated by the system.
  • The final outlines I handed off after manual editing.
  • The first paragraphs from the published articles, based on my criteria for how section intros should read.

This collection trains the agentic system to understand each author’s preferred structure and tone. It also helps suggest first paragraphs that align with their writing style.

I log all of this – inputs, extracted entities, questions, and outlines – to W&B Weave to monitor performance and guide improvements.

An outline agent

This agent takes in the information from the user, the search results, entities, questions, and summaries and generates an article outline.

Coming soon

Some agents I’m adding in presently are:

  • A keyword agent that will have access to the Google Ads API to get additional keyword ideas and search volumes.
  • A social listening agent that will monitor social channels for trending topics and auto-generate and outline when one crosses a threshold of likely importance.
  • A Slack/email agent: When an article outline is generated automatically, the agentic system will inform me – including a list of notable people talking about the topic and a summary.
  • A competitor agent that will check to see if known competitors are ranking for the content and send them to me with the outline.

I’m sure there’s more to come. (I considered waiting until everything was finished before writing this, but new ideas keep popping up, and this article would never get written.)

You should (and can) build agents too

I’m not alone in developing agents, and while some SEO tools claim to be agentic, I haven’t found any worth paying for yet. 

The real benefit of building agents is that they help me understand the environment I’m marketing in. 

If you want to try developing one, I’ve used obot.ai, which is simple and great for creating basic, useful agents for various tasks.

Big thanks to Marc Sirkin, CEO of Third Door Media, for introducing me to it. 

At the very least, it’ll give you a feel for how agents work, which is a big advantage over competitors who don’t understand what’s happening behind the scenes.

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4 Best SEO Reporting Tools (Free & Paid Options)

SEO reporting transforms raw data into actionable decisions. It shows clients and teams exactly what’s working — and what isn’t.

But here’s the painful truth:

You can waste hours each month collecting data from various platforms. Like copying numbers from Google Analytics, Search Console, and rank trackers into spreadsheets.

Then struggling to make it look presentable.

Oh, and this is for one website. If you’re managing many projects, reporting can get VERY tedious (and costly).

That’s why I’ve handpicked a list of four dedicated SEO reporting tools that:

  • Save time by automatically collating data from your favorite SEO and analytics platforms
  • Help you build client-ready reports without starting from scratch every time
  • Let you track and visualize SEO performance in a way that actually makes sense for you

Here’s a quick rundown of our favorite SEO reporting tools:

Best for Pricing
Google Looker Studio Creating reports from 1,000+ sources like Google Sheets, Search Console, and other APIs Free; Pro plan costs $9/month with a 30-day free trial
Semrush SEO professionals who want an all-in-one solution to track, analyze, and report performance Starts at $139.95/month; Backlinko-exclusive 14-day free trial available
AgencyAnalytics Freelancers and SEO agencies who want to share real-time dashboards with clients Starts at $79/month; 14-day free trial available
DashThis Creating customizable SEO dashboards and helping clients understand what the data means with in-line notes Starts at $49/month; 15-day free trial available

1. Google Looker Studio

Best for creating reports from various sources like Google Sheets, Search Console, and APIs

Pricing: Free; Pro plan costs $9 per month with a 30-day free trial.

Google Looker Studio is a free tool that helps you create SEO dashboards that are visually appealing and customizable.

Looker Studio – Homepage

Here’s what I love about Looker Studio:

Connect All Your Data Sources in One Dashboard

One of the biggest advantages of Google Looker Studio is how seamlessly it connects with 1,000+ data sources.

This lets you pull all your SEO, PPC, and marketing data into one clean, interactive dashboard.

Here’s how it works:

Connect your Looker Studio account to Google’s native platforms, including:

  • Google Search Console to pull in keyword rankings, impressions, clicks, and click-through rate (CTR)
  • YouTube Analytics if you’re reporting on YouTube SEO
  • BigQuery, Google Sheets, Google Cloud Storage if you’re managing large datasets
  • Google Ads if you want to compare paid and organic performance metrics in one place

Looker Studio – Connect datasources

These connectors are free to use and only need a few clicks to set up.

Beyond Google’s platforms, Looker Studio also integrates with 1,100+ third-party data sources via partner connectors.

For example, you can connect your Looker Studio to:

  • Semrush: Import keyword rankings, domain analytics, and backlink data
  • Shopify: Combine ecommerce sales data with SEO performance insights to see how organic traffic impacts your revenue
  • Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok Ads: Combine all your social media ad metrics with SEO results in one report

Looker Studio – Partner connectors

Note: You can connect Semrush to Looker Studio for free. Many other third-party connectors need a separate paid subscription.


Report Fast with Templates or Build Custom SEO Dashboards

Looker Studio gives you the flexibility to choose how you want to set up your SEO reports. Whether that’s in a streamlined or more hands-on way.

Here’s how:

If you want a quick start, you can use pre-built templates from the gallery.

Looker Studio – Templates

For example, you could choose a Google Search Console performance template.

It visualizes impressions, clicks, CTR, and average position:

Looker Studio – Template – Google Search Console

With this template, you simply need to connect your Search Console account, and you’re good to go.

But if you need something more tailored, you can easily build custom dashboards from scratch in three simple steps:

  1. Choose exactly which metrics to show
  2. Pull in multiple data sources (Google Analytics, Semrush, Shopify, etc.)
  3. Design the layout to fit your team’s or client’s needs

Looker Studio – Report from scratch

Tip: If you’re showing these reports to clients, you can also fully customize your SEO dashboards to reflect your (or their) brand. Do this by adding logos, brand colors, and any visual elements specific to your projects.


Pros & Cons

Pros Cons
Visualizes data with interactive charts, scorecards, and tables It’s primarily a visualization tool that relies entirely on other data sources for its reports
Refreshes data in real-time — you can set up the report and forget about it
Option to embed interactive reports on your website

2. Semrush

Best for SEO professionals who want an all-in-one solution to track, analyze, and report SEO performance in one place

Pricing: Starts at $139.95 per month; Backlinko-exclusive 14-day free trial available

Semrush’s My Reports lets you build customizable SEO reports. It’s designed to help you merge data from across Semrush’s various tools and present it in an easy-to-understand format.

Semrush – My Reports – Overview

Here’s what I love about My Reports:

Combine Multiple Semrush Tools in One Report

Semrush’s My Reports tool lets you pull data from across the platform’s entire SEO toolkit and present it in a single, cohesive report.

You can include insights from tools like:

  • Position Tracking to highlight keyword performance
  • Site Audit to showcase technical SEO health
  • Backlink Audit for link profiles

Semrush – My Reports – Widgets

This feature is perfect if you want to avoid bouncing between separate dashboards. Or manually merging data sources.

With everything in one place, it’s also easier to spot patterns and draw connections. Like how ranking improvements might correlate with new backlinks. Or how technical issues could be holding your keyword performance back.

Create SEO Reports from 20+ Marketing Data Sources

You can go beyond just Semrush data by connecting 20+ other marketing data sources to further enhance your reports.

These include Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Business Profile, and more.

Semrush – My Reports – Integrations

For example, you can pull keyword rankings and backlink data from Semrush. Then combine it with Google Search Console data to highlight clicks and impressions.

All in one report:

Semrush – My Reports – Backlinko – Semrush & GSC

This makes it easier to present a holistic view of your SEO performance. And show not only where you rank but also how those rankings translate into actual search traffic.

Save Time with Ready-Made Templates

If you’re short on time and don’t want to build your SEO reports from scratch, Semrush has you covered with ready-made templates:

Semrush – My Reports – Ready-to-use-templates

These templates help you quickly generate reports for common SEO tasks.

For example, you can select:

  • Monthly SEO Reports: Use these to update clients about your SEO performance
  • Site Audit: This gives you a quick overview of your domain’s technical health
  • Backlink Audit: This lets you analyze your website’s backlink profile and spot new link opportunities

You can use your selected template as is:

Semrush – My Reports – PDF

Or you can customize it further with the drag-and-drop tools.

Quickly Build SEO Reports with Drag-and-Drop Widgets

Semrush’s drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to build your own custom reports or build on templates.

Just drag the data widgets you need from the left panel and drop them wherever you need them.

Let AI Summarize Your Report

One of the standout features of My Reports is the built-in AI Summary tool.

Once you’ve built your SEO report, you can click “Add AI Summary,” and Semrush will automatically generate a clear, concise overview of the key takeaways:

Semrush – My Reports – Backlinko – AI Summary

You can also choose whether you want the AI to generate a brief or detailed summary, depending on your audience:

Semrush – My Reports – AI Summary in details

Note: A free Semrush lets you create one report for free. Or you can use this link to access a 14-day trial on a Semrush Pro subscription.


Pros & Cons

Pros Cons
Easily schedule recurring reports and receive them via email You can’t edit the AI-generated summary
White label reports with your logo and branding
Share reports as a PDF or via dashboard link

3. AgencyAnalytics

Best for freelancers and SEO agencies to share real-time reporting dashboards with clients

Pricing: Starts at $79 per month; 14-day free trial available

AgencyAnalytics is a reporting platform built specifically for agencies managing SEO and digital marketing clients.

AgencyAnalytics – Demo project

It lets you create customizable SEO reports by pulling data from 80+ tools, including:

  • Google Search Console
  • Google Analytics
  • Semrush
  • Moz
  • Bing Webmaster Tools

Here’s what I like most about Agency Analytics:

Choose From Four Report Starting Points

AgencyAnalytics gives you four ways to start building a report:

  • Blank report: Start fresh and create a fully customized SEO report
  • Smart report: Auto-generate a report with your connected integrations (like Semrush, Shopify, Google Search Console, and Salesforce)
  • Template: Use a pre-made reporting template
  • Clone existing report: Copy any report you’ve already created

AgencyAnalytics – Four Report Starting Point

If you manage multiple clients or create recurring SEO reports, cloning an existing report is a HUGE time-saver.

You can duplicate the layout, data sources, and widgets from any previous report. This way, you don’t have to start from scratch every time.

And if speed is your priority, the Smart Report option gives you a great baseline. It pulls in data from your connected tools automatically.

But if you’re building something new or one-off, starting with a blank report or a premade template still gives you all the flexibility you need.

Track Your Client’s SEO Goals

AgencyAnalytics lets you set and track specific SEO goals for each client. You can then keep track of the progress in your reports.

Whether it’s hitting a target number of organic sessions, ranking for priority keywords, or increasing revenue, you can define it as a goal.

Simply choose the metric you want to track and set your conditions.

Let’s say your goal is exceeding 100k sessions per month:

AgencyAnalytics – Create a goal

You just drag and drop that goal into your report to track it alongside your SEO performance:

And just like that, you can track your goal right next to your current performance.

Have Full Control of How Your Reports Look

AgencyAnalytics also lets you adjust the size and placement of each widget to fit your reporting style.

You can resize and rearrange your charts, tables, and graphs to fit your preferred style and showcase what’s most important to your audience.

This level of granularity lets you fully customize your SEO reports to make them visually appealing and easy to understand.

Give Clients Real-Time Access to SEO Dashboards

AgencyAnalytics also lets you create custom logins for your clients. This gives them real-time access to their SEO dashboards any time they need.

You can also adjust permissions for each user individually to control exactly what each client sees:

AgencyAnalytics – New user – Customized access

This gives clients a transparent view of their performance. And it cuts down on back-and-forth reporting requests.

Pros & Cons

Pros Cons
Set and track specific SEO goals for clients A bit of a learning curve
Schedule reports and track delivery history
Give clients real-time dashboard access with custom permissions

4. DashThis

Best for creating customizable SEO dashboards and helping clients understand what the data means

Pricing: Starts at $49 per month; 15-day free trial available

DashThis lets you create SEO reports fast, or fully customize them when you need more control.

DashThis – Creating Dashboard

In other words: it’s suitable for those that want a streamlined solution OR a highly tunable one.

You can also pull data from 30+ tools. These include the usuals like Google Analytics, Search Console, and Semrush. But also the likes of Google Ads, CallRail, and YouTube.

Here’s what I love about DashThis:

Build an SEO Report Your Way

DashThis gives you multiple widget types to build exactly the kind of SEO report you want.

Whether you’d like to craft a report quickly or need full control, DashThis gives you this flexibility:

DashThis – SEO Report – Custom Widgets

For example:

You can drop in preset widgets that auto-populate common SEO key performance indicators (KPIs):

DashThis – SEO Report – Preset Widgets

But if you need something specific, you can use custom widgets to pick your graph type, tweak the settings, and fully control how your data looks:

DashThis – SEO Report – Tweak the settings

You can also use static widgets to add context or structure to your report.

For example, you can:

  • Add a custom header
  • Write comments
  • Upload a CSV to add more data to your report
  • Manually enter numbers

DashThis – SEO Report – Static Widgets

You can also use widget bundles to quickly add a group of related widgets at once.

For example, you can add a bundle of five related widgets that give you an overview of your image or organic search performance:

DashThis – SEO Report – Widget Bundle

This makes it easy to quickly set up important reports.

Leave Notes in Your SEO Dashboards

DashThis lets you add notes right inside your dashboards. This way, you can explain what’s happening without sending a separate email to your client:

DashThis – Notes in SEO dashboards

You can use notes to:

  • Call out key wins
  • Clarify sudden traffic drops
  • Guide your client through the data

Comments live right next to your charts. So clients can see your notes in context as they review their performance:

DashThis – Comments next to your charts

Add Formatted Insights

At the end of your report, you can drop in a rich text comment block.

Here, you can write your own notes, style the text, add images, and even structure sections with bullet points:

DashThis Report – Formatting options

It’s perfect for:

  • Summarizing key takeaways
  • Highlighting recommendations
  • Making your report easier for clients to act on

Group Dashboards to Stay Organized

If you manage lots of SEO dashboards, you can organize them into groups. These work like folders for easier navigation.

For example, you could create a group for each client (e.g., “Client A — Monthly Reports”).

Or you could create them for different report types. Like “Local SEO” and “Ecommerce SEO.”

DashThis – Group Dashboards

Pros & Cons

Pros Cons
In-line notes and comment blocks to add insights and context for clients Somewhat outdated overall design
White-label your reports
Plenty of flexibility

Ready to Choose Your SEO Reporting Tool?

The best SEO reporting tool for you really comes down to how much flexibility you need, and how quickly you want to get things done.

If you’re comfortable with a bit of setup, Looker Studio gives you endless customization.

But if you prioritize speed and being able to work with just one tool for many key SEO tasks, Semrush’s My Reports is the better option.

Note: A free Semrush lets you create one report for free. Or you can use this link to access a 14-day trial on a Semrush Pro subscription.


The post 4 Best SEO Reporting Tools <br> (Free & Paid Options) appeared first on Backlinko.

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Google vision match vs. traditional search: Early insights on AI shopping tool

Vision match vs. traditional search: Early insights on Google’s AI shopping tool

With Google’s introduction of its vision match feature, users can now describe a product they’re looking for, and AI will generate suggestions similar to that item. 

The real kicker is that the product generated likely doesn’t exist. 

The AI will create something that you want, show you the product, and then try to match the AI product with items from the real world.

Google Shopping - Vision match

It sounds like a streamlined, user-friendly shopping experience that could revolutionize online shopping yet again. 

  • But does it actually enhance our shopping journey? 
  • Are these AI-generated results truly more effective than the product results we get from traditional Google search? 
  • What does this mean for advertisers? 

To find out, I tested the feature myself, comparing vision match results with standard search results for a few product categories. 

What I found may give you a new perspective on the role AI plays in online shopping.

Test 1: Vision match ‘suggested query’

To start, I choose one of vision match’s “suggested queries.”

  • Search query: “holographic platform boots with metallic highlights”

Vision match results

Vision match - holographic platform boots with metallic highlights

Sponsored shopping results

Sponsored shopping results - holographic platform boots with metallic highlights

Free listing results

Free listing results - holographic platform boots with metallic highlights

Interestingly, my AI-generated image results are more accurate than the “shop similar-looking product” results. 

While the product recommendations included some metallic holographic platform boots, they also included a mix of non-metallic boots and even a prom dress. 

So, what’s the point of the AI-generated images if they’re not actually helping me find the product I want but instead creating a fake version of it? 

Wouldn’t it be more sensible to expand the “Shop Similar” section beyond six products and give us more real options? 

What also stands out to me is the selection of retailers. 

I’ve never heard of most of these retailers. Some results come from resale platforms like eBay and Poshmark. 

And then there’s the cost difference. The average price of the AI-generated product recommendations? 

A whopping $230, with some listings going as high as $954. 

Meanwhile, the average price from a regular search? Just $75.

Looking at my shopping results, every product in the first carousel (and beyond) is a pair of holographic platform boots with metallic highlights and nothing else. 

Now, I’m not planning on attending a disco party anytime soon, but if I were, I’d know where to go: Google Search.

Contender  Grade
Vision match D+
Traditional search A

Next, I tried a broader query, hoping for more accurate results. 

Test 2: Non-specified search (statement piece)

  • Search query: “mens red button down shirt”

Vision match results

Vision match - mens red button down shirt

Sponsored shopping results

Sponsored shopping - mens red button down shirt

Free listing results

Free listing - mens red button down shirt

The first AI-generated image and product suggestions did show a red button-down shirt (though some may argue it’s an orange-red.) 

From there, I got a mix of red button-downs, some with patterns and textures. 

Overall, it wasn’t bad, but the price range was still all over the place.

I still find myself drawn to the traditional search results. 

When I search for “men’s red button-down shirt,” I get exactly what I asked for. 

No guesswork, no unnecessary variations. 

Plus, I’m given valuable details upfront, like:

  • Discount percentages.
  • Customer ratings.
  • Product attribute callouts (“comfortable,” “easy to clean”). 

These elements make the listings far more compelling and trustworthy, which incentives my click – unlike the AI-generated results, which feel more like a best guess than a true recommendation.

Contender  Grade
Vision match C
Traditional search A

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Test 3: Brand search

You’d expect that searching for a specific brand name would surface products primarily from that brand’s official website, right?

Not quite.

I ran this search multiple times just to be sure I wasn’t imagining things – and still, less than 3% of the results actually came from Nike’s own site.

  • Search query: “Nike sneakers”

Vision match results

Vision match - Nike sneakers

Sponsored shopping results

Sponsored shopping - Nike sneakers

Free listing results

Free listing - Nike sneakers

Even worse, I was given additional irrelevant results – New Balance sneakers, socks, leggings, and blue polka dot blankets – definitely not Nike sneakers.

Sponsored shopping is a different story.

Since other major retailers carry Nike products, it makes sense to see them appear alongside Nike. 

However, when looking at the free listings, all my results come from nike.com. 

So, what does this mean for brands? 

If Nike, one of the world’s largest retailers, is hardly featured in the vision match results, what does this mean for smaller brands? 

Will they struggle even more to get visibility in vision match and possibly other future AI-generated product recommendations?

Contender  Grade
Vision match D-
Traditional search A+

Test 4: A trending search

For my final test, I wanted to see how AI would handle a fashion trend rather than a standard clothing item. 

Trends come and go quickly, creating a high demand for a short period of time, unlike staple pieces like a “men’s red button-down shirt,” which remain relevant year after year. 

This felt like an important test, given how fast fashion moves and how crucial it is for shopping tools to keep up with ever-changing styles.

  • Search query: “barrel jeans”

Vision match results

Vision match - barrel jeans

Sponsored shopping results

Sponsored shopping - barrel jeans

Free listing results

Free listing - barrel jeans

If you haven’t heard of the “barrel jean” trend, don’t worry; you’re not missing much in the vision match results because they’re completely wrong. 

I only included three screenshots, but after scrolling through everything, I didn’t spot a single pair of actual barrel jeans. 

Instead, I got jeans in every color and pattern imaginable, along with some random dress slacks.

Meanwhile, a simple Google Search gave me exactly what I was looking for: a variety of barrel jeans from well-known retailers available in different price ranges and washes. 

It’s pretty clear that when it comes to keeping up with fashion trends, AI might be trending, but vision match still isn’t fashion-forward.

Contender  Grade
Vision match F
Traditional search A+

The final verdict

In my experience, while vision match offers an interesting new way to search for products, it still has a long way to go in terms of accuracy and relevance. 

In each test, it struggled to provide precise matches for the products I was looking for, often offering unrelated items or a confusing mix of options. 

On the other hand, traditional search results from Google gave me exactly what I wanted: clear product options, price ranges, and relevant details that helped me make an informed decision. 

Let’s take a look at the final results of our test:

Contender  Grade
Vision match D
Traditional search A

I understand that these results are subjective, but anyone with search intent would agree that a D average is generous in this case. 

So, what does this mean for advertisers? 

As AI-generated results grow, advertisers must continue to adapt their strategies to ensure their products are accurately represented. 

However, with limited control over what’s featured in vision match, this will be very difficult. 

Given that the current vision match results seem subpar, users will likely still prefer the traditional search results, which continue to provide more accurate and relevant options. 

While vision match has potential, its current limitations likely won’t sway many users away from the search results for now.

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