A quick caveat here that I’m talking about forecasting at scale: projects that involve growing or creating a whole template type, building out content in a new topic area, etc. These forecasts are typically used for making major decisions like which projects to prioritize for the year or whether an effort merits additional headcount or agency support.

While I am a big advocate for individual page optimizations (tweaking a page title, improving a blog post to better match search intent), forecasting and making charts about exactly how much we could improve if we moved up a rank or two on individual keywords isn’t something I spend my time on. My workflow for that is just (1) notice a quick opportunity, (2) action on it, and (3) eventually report on the growth in a weekly or monthly recap. (In those cases, I’d rather do the work than waste time talking about how good it might be if I did.)

At this point in my career, I’ve made hundreds of business cases and forecasts. And when projects move forward, I take the time to check actuals vs our predictions. There are some common thresholds (like highest feasible market share) that show up over and over again, and I find they are often lower than what junior SEOs might suggest when they first begin creating business cases and approach forecasting. (If you are using CTR curves to forecast, this newsletter might be especially valuable for you.)

New Content and New Markets

When it comes to entering new markets or building out new pages (projects like tackling a new topic area on a blog, creating facets or subcategories for an e-commerce style business), the bulk of my forecasting work involves building out a good, representative body of keywords. Often, the final list includes many thousands of keywords.

Typically I approach building that keyword list as follows:

• Use site data/text to create target keywords. For an e-commerce site, this might be “Color (which I scrape from the sidebar) + Category Name” (which I scrape from the H1). For travel, I might pull city names and mash them up with common search terms (“Minneapolis day trips”). If I was Netflix, I might scrape carousel names like “RomComs with a Strong Female Lead” to decide whether these groupings deserved their own indexable landing pages.

• Use a tool like Semrush to source keyword ideas from competitors. When I take this approach, I get as specific as I possibly can:

  • I only include keywords where the competitor ranks in the top 10 to improve relevancy.

  • I limit to specific subfolders or scrape their site for categories and do a URL mashup to limit by a specific category or tag.

• Crawl someone else’s site for ideas. If my site doesn’t have what I need, I’ll crawl and scrape keywords from a competitor site. For content projects, I sometimes crawl forums or other blogs for ideas.

Once I have my keyword list, I use a rank checker to pull search volume. If my list is big enough and I don’t have access to an enterprise tool, I’ll rank check in batches, swapping out my list of keywords each day.

That work will get me to a total monthly search volume for our target market. If I’m using Semrush competitor data, I leave the search volume alone. If I am using a keyword list that I have created from scratch using site data, where each page that will be created is represented by 1 keyword (like “blue sofas”), I double my search volume estimate to account for long tail traffic.

From there, the question is how much traffic can we get? The answer is, best case scenario, you’ll get 2-5% of search volume as traffic. In a few years, if you build a best-in-class brand and dominate the market, you can get up to 8%. (For context, NerdWallet gets 8% market share in credit cards, Netflix’s traffic is 9% of its total search volume.) There are, of course, occasional exceptions to this rule where a very dominant brand absolutely owns a market and can get to 18%, but I really commonly see an 8% threshold for successful, strong-brands-who-are-good-at-SEO sites.

This is often where I see junior SEOs fall back to CTR curves and make outlandish estimates by using CTRs and assuming an average rank of 1-3. The flaw here is that nobody, not even the best brands in the world, rank in the top 3 for every one of their keywords. They rank well for some keywords, worse for others, and not at all for the rest. CTR is a nice idealized solution, but in the real world, 2-5% is common.

The answer of whether you’ll get 2% or 5% depends on how much brand authority you have overall, how much topical authority you have in this vertical, and how well you execute the nuts and bolts of the project.

I’ll often pitch a low/medium/high estimate, including what I think is likely. For brands that are well established and authoritative, that 8% is a North Star guidance that we aim to hit in a few years.

Most Site Enhancements Get You 5-15% Growth

This is simply a truth that 15 years of consulting has taught me. Whether you’re adding unique text to product pages, improving page design, restructuring your architecture, or migrating a subdomain to a subfolder - the result is going to be somewhere between 5-15% growth of unbranded traffic, applied to the pages where the change is being made. (Of course, the devil is in the details.)

One exception to this is sites that are in poor health, with severe structural problems that are majorly impeding performance: things like content that can’t be rendered, millions of duplicate pages, JavaScript issues, etc. Of course, in those cases, where a site is severely under-performing, solving a major issue can unlock massive growth and easily improve traffic by 2X or 3X.

The other exception to this rule is start-ups in high-growth stages. In those cases, I’ll use market share as a target (what if we get to 5% or 8% of the total market search volume) instead of basing growth on current performance.

But, setting those exceptions aside for a minute, if someone came to me from a well established site and said “I think we could customize our vendor descriptions and double traffic,” I would be extremely skeptical. Can you stack projects to get to a point of doubling traffic? Sure. But rarely are there single optimization projects or site enhancements that can get you there on their own.

Here are some common pitfalls I see people run into when forecasting on-site projects:

• Your growth estimates should (usually) only be applied to unbranded traffic. You likely already rank #1 for branded searches, and there’s no room to grow.

• Your growth estimates should only be applied to pages that will be affected by the change. For example, if you add text to product pages, only product pages will lift. There are occasional projects that trigger a site wide lift, but I find those are often weighted so that some sections get a larger lift and the rest of the site gets a much smaller impact.

• You need to use RPV (Revenue per Visit) for the relevant template type. I talked a lot about traffic estimates in this post, which is how I always begin my forecasts, but, for delivery, I translate everything into revenue. The metric I like to use for revenue opportunities is RPV. For 99% of sites, the blog/content RPV is much lower than a product or category page RPV, so it’s important to apply the relevant dollar amount to the project. It’s not uncommon for a lower traffic product page enhancement to beat out a high traffic content initiative, because it nets more $$$ for the business.

I’m Doing an AMA Tomorrow

Tomorrow morning, (Thursday, 2/14/2025), I’ll be doing an AMA in the SEO Community Slack. I quit Twitter (when it was still Twitter) years ago, and I have found this Slack to be a much more peaceful means of staying up on SEO news and trends and building community. My best pitch for it is that it’s a place where there are a lot fewer SEO hustlers trying to build their personal brands and a lot more people who actually work on websites sharing ideas and asking for advice.

As always, thanks for reading and sharing. I’d love to hear if you also find these “3-8% of the total market” and “5-15% growth of existing content” rules to be true for you.

1. If You Want to Rank for That, You Gotta Have a Page for That

It’s a problem we’ve all encountered: someone wants to rank for something, but they don’t actually have a page for it on their site. It’s an easy fix. And though it’s SEO 101, I’ve found that even the most established, inspirational SEO programs still have this issue.

In many cases, “you don’t have a page for that” comes down to facets and features not being indexable. All those filtering options in the sidebar of your Category pages are really useful for customers, and making them indexable can lead to great traffic gains. The trick is choosing the right ones to turn on.

The thing you need to know about the vast majority of technical setups is that if you turn on a facet (or “filter” or “feature”) for one category, you have to turn on that facet for all categories. So if you want a page for Leather Sofas, you have to accept Leather Chairs, Leather Ottomans, Leather Dining Chairs, etc.

Your goal, once you’ve scraped your site and come up with a list of all possible “Facet + Category” permutations, then checked their search volume (to, of course, validate your idea and build a business case), is to look for high impact facets: facets with high traffic opportunity (based on search volume) that won’t spin out a million pages.

Once you’ve got your list of high impact facets, ensure your technical SEO is solid: href links from parent categories, breadcrumbs in place, rules to prevent turning on multiple facets at once, conservative thresholds for noindex tags… you get the drill. (Here are some rules I’ve used:)

The results? For a very established e-commerce site with a ton of parent/child/grandchild categories where we simply turned on “facet” pages: 25% growth to Category pages that has sustained over multiple years. Despite an influx of PLAs and merchant listings, we’ve held our ground.

Alternatively, I also did this for a small travel site I worked with. In this case we only had parent category pages (cities) and individual tours. So when we created “Place + Type” pages, essentially subcategories, we more than doubled our category page traffic. The subcategories now drive more traffic than the parent categories.

2. Spend Time Where You Have Topical Authority

“Topical authority” is a term a lot of people throw around. Intuitively we know it’s a thing and have a rough sense of the areas where we have authority and where we don’t, but it’s really nice to validate it with data. Especially when you can use that data to communicate internally.

Like everything, getting data on topical authority starts with keyword research. The best way I’ve found to get these keywords involves crawling every blog post and e-commerce category page on your site and extracting the parent breadcrumb. (The parent breadcrumbs are usually a good representative set of major topic areas.)

If you’ve never used XPath extraction before, I promise it is much much much easier than it sounds. If you can crawl a site with Screaming Frog, you can extract breadcrumbs.

From there you need to pull your top keywords from Semrush or your tool of choice. Then you’re going to use the URL to mashup your data, so you end up with 3 columns: Keyword, the URL that ranks for that keyword, and the breadcrumb for that URL (that you have extracted). Pivot by that breadcrumb and voila, you have a list of top keywords for each major topic area.

Now, here’s where it gets interesting. You’re going to take the top 500 or 1,000 keywords for just one topic and load them into Semrush’s rank tracker. What you’re going to get back is a visual of who is beating you on your top keywords.

Then you’re going to clear out the data and repeat for each one of your topics. Not only will you get a very interesting list of who your competitors are in each vertical, you’ll get a really strong sense of where you have authority and where you don’t.

Areas where you’re have authority will be your fastest path to growth: the content you write about these topics will rank better and more quickly. You could create more e-commerce subcategory or collection pages here. Maybe you advise your buying team to lean in. The sky’s the limit.

Areas where you don’t have topical authority will be an uphill battle. You’ll need to do more foundational work here, maybe looking at your menu structure or creating basic resources. Sometimes the answer, if the business’ goal is to focus on one of these low-authority areas, is to educate that SEO may not be the channel to lean on in the short term.

Either way, it’s really helpful data to have in your arsenal.

3. Check Your Word Counts.

More content is generally helpful for SEO, except when it isn’t. Instead of relying on everyone’s favorite “it depends,” how about putting some data behind your answer?

Using your crawler, pull the word count for each page on your site, then create a chart of average traffic by word count. (You’ll need to manually bucket the word counts into useful ranges.)

It’ll probably look something like this, only vaguely useful, where you can see that maybe there is a relationship or optimization point, but nothing you can count on:

The trick is to do it one template at a time. Because while one section of your site might look like the chart above, you may find a section that looks like this:

That’s real data for a product page template on a site with more than 30K products. A very strong relationship.

If I see something like the example above, I’d build a reasonable business case, “What if we can get 100 more words on 10% of product pages?” and then get to work. There are a lot of examples in my deck of how to actually get more content on pages, but my two favorite examples are American Eagle’s Women’s Jeans page (look at all those useful subheadings!) and the way that Nordstrom gets an “about this brand” blurb on all of its product pages.

4. Inlinks May Be The Way

Inlinks aka internal links aka “link juice” aka internal PageRank aka link sculpting aka information architecture can be a very valuable way to spend a year.  

One time, we spent an entire year only working on information architecture for a 10+ year old site (revamping the menu, building out category structure, creating “Top Posts” and “Related Posts” widgets). That work alone led to 30% growth. And that growth got so much executive attention and investment in the SEO team that it has since 6Xed from 1 million monthly visits to 7 million.

I say this not to brag but to suggest that information architecture work can bring new life into businesses that have been stable (or stagnant) for years. In that case, many of the top resources were very old, buried deep in the site architecture, and improving the links to them (and the links from them) led to great success.

When we think of “adding Inlinks,” the main navigation is usually what we think of first, but this is often difficult to influence. In other cases, you may want to improve the links to pages that don’t belong in the top navigation. In these cases, I’ve found subnavigation menus to be extremely effective. Not only do they get links to child and grandchild categories, they also help establish topical authority and relationships.

If you have a content site, your subnav might look a little different, like a persistent table of contents that travels across articles, or related pages at the top or bottom of a post:

And if you need links to product pages, I’d encourage you to consider stacking your carousels. I find SEOs are often hesistant to suggest this, because a stack of carousels feels very “SEO-ey.” But I’ve found users (and therefore UX teams) love them. After all, if someone scrolls to the bottom of a product page instead of adding something to their cart, they want more ideas. A carousel of “More Products Like This” and “People Who Bought This Also Bought” can be very helpful.

5. Content is Where Underdogs Can Win

If you are reading this and thinking “Wow, this sounds great. I could do this great work if only I, too, had engineering resources available, but my site is held together with duct tape and a dream” – I hear you. I’ve been there.

Five Six years ago (where has all the time gone?) at MozCon , I talked about how we need to think about intent beyond this idea of informational, transactional, navigational. Google knows when users want answers or lists or processes. It’s looking for informational content in a specific format. You have to get that format right to rank.

Now, in 2024, I find that revising content to match intent is still an extremely valuable use of time. Maybe you have a size chart in a picture, but Google wants it in a table. Maybe Google wants a specific answer, but you only give that answer vaguely in paragraph 8 of your article. When you have an article ranking at the bottom of page 1, intent is usually the thing holding it back from ranking higher.

Spending just an hour or two getting the intent right can often double traffic. Do this for your top 10, 50, 100 articles, and you can get significant growth and hit your goals.

 The key is thinking about intent more deeply than “informational” or even “answer/list/process.” Sometimes the intent is a calculator and a size chart. Sometimes it’s embedded YouTube videos. Sometimes it’s custom Canva images with explainers or ideas.

If I can leave you with anything, let it be this:

A keyword tool is going to tell you that something has “informational” intent. That isn’t enough. You need to look to the SERPs to figure out what Google wants, what format it’s looking for. From there, if you can meet that and layer on something original (an interesting piece of a data, a helpful visual, a fact that only someone with experience would know) – I guarantee you’ll have exceptional results.

Thank you for reading this newsletter. Thank you for supporting me and Justin all these years at Briggsby (it’s officially over 10 years old!) I am grateful for the opportunity to travel and take the stage at brightonSEO and for your continued readership. Here’s one more link to my deck, I would love if you shared it or this post with someone who would appreciate it. I wish you the best, happiest, safest, most joy-filled holiday season.

Now, that kind of search intent is table stakes. You have to nail your format if you want to even be in the ballpark of page one. And, so, the question is, what’s next?

Search Intent in 2024

Search intent is still what can get you into the top 3, but you have to get way more specific than “list format” or “action steps.” Look at the results for ski size chart.

Both articles that rank here have a calculator to get your own custom size and a size chart table. 

This is where experienced (human!) editors become extremely important. AI doesn’t yet understand intent (and I’ve tried a lot of different models.) If you ask ChatGPT what you need to outrank these two articles, it suggests “detailed guidance” and “structured data.”

You can have all the detailed guidance in the world, but you won’t get to #1 here without a calculator and a size chart table.

Or, look at Eras Tour outfit ideas. You can’t rank without custom Canva-style images of curated outfit ideas. 

That custom image is why all these tiny brands outrank a more authoritative domain like Refinery 29.

One more for you in the e-comm space. Here’s women’s barrel jeans: 

The intent is individual product listings. If you aren’t optimizing your product feeds and trying to win on price, shipping, or reviews, you aren’t going to get seen.

Part 2: Consensus & Differentiation

There is a caveat. Search intent isn’t quite enough. You also need consensus & differentiation.

There’s a strong argument that all the articles Google chooses to rank look the same and give the same answers. This is by design. Google has really leaned into consensus in the last few years.  See what it says in its guidelines for human quality raters:

This is especially true for sites in the financial and health space, but I see it happening across the board, even with topics as simple as how to pack a backpack.

So when everything gives the same answer, how does Google decide gets to rank number 1? This is where “originality” comes into play.

Google looks for “unique, original content that is not available on other websites.” Sites like NerdWallet are really good at this, packing its articles with helpful facts. 

If I ask whether I can use a credit card to buy a money order, NerdWallet also gives me popular places to get a money order:

“Most retailers, banks and credit unions don’t let you purchase money orders with a credit card. Popular places to get a money order — including the U.S. Postal Service, Walmart, Western Union and 7-Eleven — accept only cash or debit cards for money order purchases.”

Or let’s look at e-comm:

There are a million articles about the best stability running shoes for overpronation, but Runner’s World offers a gif of what overpronation actually looks like:

“Originality” or differentiation can be as simple as a really helpful sentence or a quick video shot on your iPhone. And it’s often what can get you from #3 to #1. 

This Work Doesn’t Scale

Right now in the SEO social media sphere, I’m seeing a lot of folks touting the benefits of AI-generated content and scale.

But in my day-to-day, the brands I work with, and the ones I see actually winning traffic, start their writing process as follows:

1. Get a topic (totally fine to use tools to scale this part)

2. Perform a search for that topic in Google

3. Look at the SERP and open the top 5 results

4. Figure out what Google has determined the primary search intent to be. Get really, really, really specific. 

5. Figure out how you can meet that intent (consensus) and then do even better than the best post out there (originality).

6. Write the content brief. Start creating.

Search intent is still the key to winning at SEO, you just have to take it about 5 levels deeper than you used to.

Up Next for Me

I’m really excited to share that I’ll be at Brighton SEO in San Diego in November. As that’s about the time everyone will be working on their roadmaps for next year, I’ll be sharing SEO Projects that Worked (& How we Found Them).  Expect case studies and data deep dives. I really hope to see you there!

This newsletter is intermittent (I only write when I have something I feel is worth sharing), but you can expect a recap of my Brighton deck after the event. As this is the only real social media I do, I would greatly appreciate you sharing this newsletter or forwarding it to anyone who you think might find it interesting. 

My consulting slate is full at the moment, but if you’d like to get added to my wait list, please reach out.

It’s slow season for SEO. Many sites are in a code freeze, lots of folks are traveling, and there isn’t a lot of on-site work getting done. I like to use this time to step back, dig deep into what’s working and what isn’t (for both us and competitors), develop business cases, then set the roadmap for 2024. 

Here are a few workflows and projects I tend to revisit this time of year. And if you’re the one who is busy and traveling for the holidays, these are great ones to hand off to your agencies:

Get Rid of Dead Pages

If your site is older than 5 years, then it’s likely that you have a lot of pages that aren’t getting any traffic. They’re usually one of two types:

1. Out of stock products

2. Old blog articles written “for social media” that have long since fizzled 

At this point, I’ve done this project a handful of times, and the results are always wild. Typically, it gets 15%+ growth to the affected folder structure or template after redirecting the dead pages. (When I forecast for project planning, I keep the estimate closer to 5% to be conservative.)

The process is pretty straightforward:

• Find old pages (site crawl, log files, analytics from a few years ago, etc.)

• Look for pages that have received 0 visits (or <5 visits) from ANY CHANNEL (you want to make sure you don’t accidentally delete something that’s important to social, email, etc.) in the past year.

• Review and setup redirect mapping for the “dead” pages. 

For out of stock products, I’ll typically point them at the most relevant category page. (Or brand page, depending on the site and circumstance.) 

For articles, I’ll do a manual review to see if there are any sections, images, tables, or assets worth preserving and repurposing. I’ll usually spend a little more time on these redirects and point them to the next-most-relevant article if I can, or a blog category page if there isn’t an article that makes sense.

Simple work, fast results.

It’s one of the best ROI projects I’ve found. A few days crawling and churning through a spreadsheet, then fast results.

Note: During this work you’ll likely identify a few articles that are old but performing really well. These are great candidates for refreshes or giving them more internal links (featured posts, highlighted in a nav or footer, etc.)

Slog through Google Search Console

I am a firm believer that the strongest content programs spend a good chunk of their time iterating and revising on existing articles. The best tool for this is Google Search Console. 

1. Filter the pages, so you’re looking only at your blog or content section

2. Choose the “Pages” view

3. Click into each and every article to view its actual search terms

My article evaluation looks something like this:

• Open the article on my site. What intent does it fulfill? Do I think it’s a good post?

• For every search term where we don’t rank #1, I google it and see what is ranking. Do we match the intent? Could we do something to make our article better than what’s ranking in the top 3? (This often includes pivoting the format, adding some visual assets, building out the content, adjusting the title or intro, etc.) 

• If it doesn’t make sense to pivot the existing article to rank better, the search term gets added to a list of new articles to create. I note the intent (how to, short or long form, visual, etc.), and provide some basic guidance that will eventually go into a content brief for the new article. I also log the article where I found the term, so I can remember to add a link to the new one from it. 

These types of edits often driver faster, more impactful growth than writing new articles from scratch. For example, last year, we added a simple HTML table and a one sentence summary to a top article, and, this year, it’s getting 125% more traffic. Do that for your 10 or 15 strongest articles, and you’ve got solid growth. (And a great set of keywords for new articles where you’re very likely to rank well and rank quickly.)

Slice & Segment Your Product Pages

This assumes you already have a solid reporting view in place for your product pages. If you don’t, here’s the type of chart I like to have for every major template type on a site:

Even if I only report out traffic on a monthly basis, with aggregate numbers and highlights/lowlights, having this type of view I check in on weekly allows me to identify changes (both problems and growth) as they happen and provides good seasonal context.

The Deep Dives

Once good on-going reporting is set up, you can do a one-off deeper analysis to look at product page performance. Here are some of the relationships I’d compare:

• Traffic by inlinks

• Traffic by words of content on the page

• Traffic by review count

• Traffic by depth

• Traffic by brand

• Traffic by category

If you have a premium crawling tool like Botify, it will have some of these answers at the ready. If not, you can extract most of them by using xpath extraction in Screaming Frog. (This will get you the review count, the brand, the category from the breadcrumb, etc.) Then you can create pivot tables to summarize your data.

The Projects to Queue Up

Some of the projects that have derived from this research in years past have included building out more robust product descriptions, incentivizing reviews, building related products widgets, and changing the global navigation. The data from the research feeds nicely into business cases, too.

Brush Up Your Analytics Knowledge

The last analytics course I took was circa 2011, when becoming Google Analytics certified was a thing. In the decade that followed, I’ve been in the weeds of Adobe Analytics and GA and have been very confident and effective building dashboards and doing advanced data analyses.

That being said, the rollout of GA4 had a lot of hiccups for the teams I’ve worked with, and I’ve found myself facing questions about why and how things are working. Serendipitously, I won a copy of KickPoint’s Analytics for Agencies course (via #SEOForLunch), and it’s been immensely helpful. I’ve only had time for part of the lessons so far, but they’ve already provided enough value to make the course worse it. (It was free to me, but the price is $1K.)

So if you have budget and time this winter, consider brushing up. If you are a video course person, you’ll love it. If you are not a video course person, you’ll be relieved (like I was) to find there’s a lovely transcript that plays along with each video so you can read, and Dana is great and easy to listen to.

(This is not sponsored in the slightest, it’s just the only digital marketing course I’ve found to be worth my time in the last 5 years, so I wanted to pass along my experience.)

About this Newsletter

My name is Stephanie Briggs, you may have seen me present at MozCon a few years ago. These days, I’m largely quiet on social media but you can find me in the SEO Slack.

I consult at Briggsby, primarily with e-commerce clients that also have content programs.

I’m very thankful for your readership. If this was forwarded from a friend, please consider subscribing. I only publish about once per quarter, so I won’t flood your inbox. If you’re already a subscriber, you can support me by forwarding this along to a colleague or sharing it on social media.

As always, send me an email or leave a comment on Substack to let me know if you have questions or thoughts. I really appreciate the feedback.

I hope you and your loved ones have happy, cozy holidays.

With autumn approaching, it’s time to focus on lucrative SEO initiatives that can drive growth in time for the holiday season. 

And one of the most valuable things you can do is work to close the gap between how people search and the limitations of your existing site taxonomies. Specifically with category pages. 

Here are 3 frameworks I use to develop those projects. These are initiatives that have worked again and again in sites as small as 100 pages and as large as 1B pages. 

Note 1: When I’m talking here about “Category pages,” I mean that in the broadest sense — this applies to all PLPs (product listing pages).  Categories, brands, special collections, etc. 

Note 2: There are a lot of screenshots in this one, so if you’re viewing it as an email, make sure to have photos turned on.

1. Flatten the Architecture

Category structures are typically designed to help buying & merchandising teams find a logical home for every product a company sells. 

However, what can often happen for SEO is that the most valuable categories end up 4 or 5 levels deep. 

“Basketball shoes” may be hidden under Footwear > Men’s Footwear > Sneakers > Basketball Shoes. 

“Gowns” can fall under Apparel > Women’s Clothing > Dresses > Gowns. 

It can look something like this:

The work to improve depth leads to traffic growth.

Here’s how I typically get started:

Gathering Data

To gather data here, I’ll build my case in one of these two ways:

Traffic vs. Inlinks (or Site Depth, depending on what’s available)

• Crawl and extract crawl depth or inlinks (botify is wonderful for this).

• Mash this up with annual traffic.

• Pivot to get annual traffic by inlink count (or site depth) - build a chart like the one above.

• Do a manual review of your spreadsheet to identify high performing URLs with few inlinks (or deep site depth) that could benefit from additional visibility.

Search Demand Approach:

• I’ll crawl and extract either a heading or page title to get the primary keyword for each URL. 

• Then using STAT or SEMrush, get search volume. 

• Next, I’ll mash this data up with crawl data and traffic to identify high potential URLs deep in the architecture. 

Projects 

At its simplest, this work gives you a short list of 5-20 URLs to highlight on the homepage or in the primary navigation. 

With more resources and scale, you can use this data to develop useful features such as related categories, subnavigations, and hub pages that get users to the most valuable content more quickly. If your engineering resources are limited, even adding some text links within bottom of page content can get you there. 

One of my favorite examples is Viator’s beautiful, dynamic subnavigation that varies by destination:

But it can be as simple as Target’s “Featured Categories” on its homepage:

2. Update Category Names

This project is admittedly a slog, but it’s a worthwhile slog. You need to identify pages where category names don’t match user language. 

To do this, you appoint a brave soul to spend a full day in Google Search Console, flipping through impressions and URL data to find mismatches. Please buy them a nice coffee or tea. 

Then have them build a spreadsheet of URLs and title changes. In the best case, you can change an entire category name so it impacts headings, breadcrumbs, and titles. But usually a basic html title change gets you most of the way there. 

Here’s traffic over time to a page where the only major change was the title:

3. Create New Pages

The third type of opportunity you’ll find is new pages. These are categories with products you already carry but don’t yet have a good landing experience. 

The most beautiful example of this is Abercrombie who identified demand for “wedding guest dresses.” Realistically, they could have just repurposed a gowns page. Instead, they created “Best Dressed Guest” and a landing experience that includes gowns, cocktail dresses, jumpsuits and accessories (but of course has the HTML title of “Women’s Wedding Guest Dresses & Outfits”).

For an emerging e-commerce program, this might mean creating subcategories for PLPs that have more than 10 or 20 products.

For established e-commerce programs, we frequently do this work at scale, using gap analysis and internal search data to develop lists of thousands of keywords, which are then qualified and pruned. From there, we create PLPs and use related links, menu features, and sitemaps to fuel discovery.

Here’s an example of a related search feature on Shutterstock:

You can also do it visually, a la Walmart:

And here’s what growth from this type of work can look like (the first screenshot is from a huge domain, the second is from a much smaller one):

Another approach sites often take is turning on facet links (“black” dresses, “waterproof” boots). If you go this route, the trick is having enough controls in place to exclude low-value facets.

And that’s what I’ve got for you on this installment of my Briggsby SEO newsletter: growing your category pages by improving site depth, updating titles, and building out your landing pages. I hope it was useful!

About this Newsletter

My name is Stephanie Briggs, you may have seen me present at MozCon a few years ago. These days, I’m largely quiet on social media but you can find me in the SEO and Women in Tech SEO slacks. 

I consult at Briggsby, primarily with e-commerce clients that have content programs.

Justin, the other half of Briggsby, took an in-house role earlier this year leading the SEO team at Paramount+. He's still an owner of Briggsby, but he isn't consulting. I (Stephanie) am still here, working a limited number of consulting hours. I'm at capacity, but you can reach out if you'd like to join our client waitlist.

Because I’ve taken a long break from social, the algorithms aren’t friendly to me. I’d be incredibly grateful if you would share this newsletter with someone who may find it valuable. 

You can expect quarterly dispatches, maybe a little more often if I have something useful to say.  They’ll remain free forever.

I would LOVE to hear what you think of this and whether or not you found it helpful. Please email me your thoughts or leave a comment in substack.

Happy almost Fall!