Check out this Patagonia ad:

(Image source: @dailyadcoffee)

Copywriter Jon Morrow defines power words as “persuasive, descriptive words that trigger a positive or negative emotional response. They can make us feel scared, encouraged, aroused, angry, greedy, safe, or curious.”

If you “sprinkle in a few, … you can transform dull, lifeless words into persuasive words that compel readers to take action.”

What’s remarkable about this ad from Patagonia isn’t that it uses power words. All great copywriting does.

The remarkable thing about it is that those power words tap into different emotions depending on the order you read them in.

Reading from top down, they cause anger and fear: screwed, it’s too late, we don’t trust anyone, we don’t have a choice.

From the bottom up, the emphasis changes entirely, to hope and encouragement: choice, livable, imagine, healthy future.

Brilliant.

The poem is followed by that kicker of a tagline: “Buy Less, Demand More.” That’s shocking from a retailer—and extremely affecting.

The takeaway? Appeal to your readers’ emotions. We tend to think of decision making as being connected to the rational part of our brain, but the opposite is true. Decision making is emotional.

Feelings dictate decisions. Emotional responses are why we share things that go viral, why we donate to causes, and why we buy what we buy (or don’t buy what we don’t need, in the case of Patagonia).

Refer back to Morrow’s list as you write your copy. Consider how your writing instills fear, encouragement, arousal, anger, greed, safety, or curiosity. If, instead of triggering a high-arousal emotion, it makes you feel merely content, a little bit sad, or just kind of bored, it’s time for a rewrite.

That Patagonia ad is one in a collection of the strongest copywriting examples we’ve come across. You can check out the full article here.

Referral programs have three phases of maturity. Understanding yours will help you maximize your referrals ROI.

• Phase 1: Test—when your referral program is starting out
• Phase 2: Prove—when you’re optimizing it
• Phase 3: Scale—when you’re growing and streamlining it

Phase 1: Test. The point of this phase is to test your referral program incentive as quickly and cheaply as possible. Iteration is the action, profitability is the goal.

Here’s what this phase might look like:

• Find your top 10-20% most engaged customers. Run a pilot with them by sending them individualized emails describing your referral program.
• Fulfill the incentives manually. Engage with new prospects 1:1 and learn from them.
• Refine your messaging, incentive, and process over time.

Spend time on this phase. Early-stage referral programs are not yet “set it and forget it.” Just like any other marketing channel, they must be actively monitored and improved before you start scaling up.

Test, then invest.

Phase 2: Prove. Once you find an incentive that converts and messaging that resonates, start removing friction from the process.

• Optimize the experience to make it as few clicks as possible (for the customer first, then the prospect, then your internal team). Start using low-cost automations for repetitive tasks.
• Continue to refine your messaging and learn from your new customers.

Phase 3: Scale. When your referral program is predictably generating prospects—and the economics still make sense—it’s time to invest in referral program software, like Rewardful, GrowSurf, or Referral Rock.

Create feedback loops so your referrers know their efforts are paying off. Even if their sharing doesn't yield a referral, seeing that their friend clicked and viewed is still encouraging (and might spur another referral).

Keep an eye on your economics to make sure customer acquisition cost (CAC) is comparable to your other acquisition channels. Monitor the quality of your prospects to keep out any fraudulent gaming of the program.

How much should you charge, and how should you charge (e.g., subscription, usage-based, flat rate)?

When establishing your business model and answering those questions, be sure to factor in friction.

Your product’s friction should align with your model’s friction. A low-friction product should have a low-friction business model. A high-friction product should typically have a higher-friction business model.

• A low-friction product is easy to use to accomplish a product’s job-to-be-done. It’s easy to get started in and stick with. Examples: TikTok, Gmail. Those have low model friction, too—they’re free. Free trials, freemium, or just plain free often align with simple products.
• A high-friction product has a more complex onboarding and use process. Experiencing full product value and forming a product habit take longer. Examples: Salesforce, Palantir. They have high model friction, too, such as higher pricing, add-ons, and variable pricing.

When product and model friction don’t align, there’s a risk that your product’s value won’t get realized, your unit economics (CAC and ARPU) won’t work, and growth potential will be stymied.

• Low product friction and high model friction: Not competitive. You’ll lose out to competitors who make it easier to pay or offer a more affordable solution. Because of the pricing barriers to entry, you’ll limit the number of users who experience your product’s job-to-be-done—and limit growth. Hypothetical example: if Instagram were to start charging a monthly fee.
• High product friction and low model friction: If you have a highly complex product, it probably can’t be learned during a free trial or freemium use. Users wouldn’t get the maximum value from your product. If you were to offer onboarding services to help free trialers get the most out of your product, your CAC would go up and could become unsustainable.

Because of the importance of aligning product and model friction, successful low-ARPU products tend to be low-friction (like social media apps), and successful high-ARPU products tend to be high-friction (like enterprise B2B SaaS).

Good creative is the biggest driver of ad success in a post-iOS 14 world.

Your ads need to resonate with your audience. No amount of sophisticated targeting or optimization tweaks will save your campaigns—that's what makes creative testing so crucial.

Here’s a look at Thesis’ creative testing methodology. Consider using it to find learnings faster and protect your core campaigns from creative flops.

Step 1. Use a simplified account structure. Three campaigns, 3-4 ad sets per campaign, with 3-6 live ads in each. The campaigns:

• Campaign 1: Creative testing. Isolate creative testing into a separate campaign to ensure live tests won't impact your core campaign performance. This also allows you to force spend to drive faster learnings and curb creative fatigue.
• Campaign 2: Prospecting. Move winners from your creative testing campaign into a separate prospecting campaign. This campaign contains only your best-performing ads.
• Campaign 3: Retargeting. Again, move winners from your testing campaign into a separate retargeting campaign. You can test the prospecting creative as is, only changing the specific offer or discount for your retargeting promotions.

Step 1a. Allocate ~20% of your budget to creative testing. Use your CPA target and this formula to calculate (approximate) starting daily spend:

• First, calculate your weekly budget by multiplying your target CPA by 50 (minimum weekly conversion threshold needed to exit the learning phase).
• Then, divide your calculated weekly budget by 7 to arrive at your daily budget.
• Here's a hypothetical example using a $35 CPA:
• $35 x 50 = $1750
• $1750 / 7 day = $250 daily budget

Step 2. Set up a creative test. Use broad targeting—it's the most scalable (and often the cheapest). Each creative concept gets its own separate ad set containing up to six variants.

Only test elements of the ad unit itself (e.g., ad formats, new images or videos, thumbnails, copy, or CTAs). Here's an example of a net-new video test:

• Create a new ad set for your video test.
• Choose one element to test. If the video is untested, start by testing different hooks or altering the first three seconds of footage.
• Launch test.

Step 3. Run creative tests for at least three days, then make a call. After about three days of running a new test, you'll typically run into one of the following scenarios:

• Results are excellent: CPA is lower than average. At least 1-2 variants show signs of traction. Start scaling spend by ~20% every three days directly in the creative testing campaign. If you have the budget, you can increase spend by 50%-100% to drive learnings even faster.
• Duplicate the winning ad into your core prospecting and retargeting campaigns.
• Results are average: Only a few purchases are generated, falling within 10%-20% of your CPA targets. Start optimizing at the ad level and turn off worst performers to give other ads more spend.
• If an ad reaches 2X your average CPA without a purchase, turn it off.
• If no winners are found in the test after 5-7 days, turn off the ad set.
• Results are bad: CPAs are high (2X normal or greater) across the board, engagement rate is poor, and there are little to no purchases generated from the new creative test.
• Follow the same optimization process from the previous bullet point.

Don’t turn off any ad set that's performing well during your creative tests. Keep it running in your testing campaign as long as results remain strong.

If you have an ecommerce site, best practice is to keep your menu (navbar) as simple as possible.

That’s not to say that every ecommerce brand should remove its informational pages—e.g., blog, About Us, FAQ—from their menu. For some, those links will help conversion, not hinder it.

A general rule of thumb for you to consider:

• If your brand has a relatively low average order value and you’re not selling a complex, ultra-specialized, or mission-driven product, move your informational pages and blog out of your menu and into your footer.
• For higher-priced, sophisticated, or story-oriented products, content marketing and info pages could increase conversion. These can factor into the consideration, intent, and evaluation stages of a buyer’s journey. Your navbar might be a good place for them.

Examples: Allbirds has a page about sustainability in its navbar. That's a core value that many shoppers will connect with and support. Judy puts FAQs in its navbar, since the decision to buy a disaster prep kit brings a lot of questions with it. On the other hand, the navbars for Nomatic and Clevertify focus on their relatively straightforward products (backpacks and baby clothes).

This boils down to a simple question to ask about any page: Will it help prospects convert or distract them from converting?

When it’s done right, cold email is one of the highest ROI activities for growing your business. In fact, good cold emails get response rates between 2% and 10%—and even better ones get rates above 40%.

Here's the framework we use to write emails of the latter caliber:

• Opening line: Your first sentence must grab attention. Since it also appears as your email’s preview text in the inbox, your goal is to intrigue readers enough to open your email. We recommend personalizing this line so it doesn’t read like the other poorly written cold emails people get in their inboxes.
  
• Context: Why you’re reaching out. For instance, because you noticed that the recipient is using a particular tool and might have a certain pain point. The more specific, the better. This is also a good place for a quick intro.
  
• Value proposition: How you offer value. Don’t be salesy. Focus on describing your product’s benefits rather than its specific features. If true, highlight the fact that your product genuinely solves a problem for your recipient better than an alternative they’re already using.
  
• Wrap-up: One clear call to action. If this is your first email, ask for someone’s interest instead of their time. “Think we might be a good fit?" works better than “Let’s book a call” since replying “yes” is lower friction than immediately booking a call with a stranger.

Note that it’s not enough to just write one email in hopes of reaching your target audience. Write multiple—test different opening lines, value props, etc. Create different versions to experiment with.

For inspiration, take a look at this cold email that uses this exact formula:

Read more about sending better cold emails here.

In a survey of ~600 SaaS companies, nearly half (45%) had usage-based pricing in 2021— that’s up from 27% in 2018.

What is usage-based pricing? It’s charging for customers’ use of or transactions with your product. The more they use it, the more they pay.

Examples:

• SendGrid users pay for emails/month.
• HubSpot users pay for marketing contacts.
• Wistia users pay for videos or podcast episodes.

Usage-based pricing is generally considered the SaaS gold standard. When you align your pricing with product value, users stick around. They came to your product because of the value it offers, and they’ll stay if they’re paying for what they’re getting out of it.

If usage-based pricing is right for your business, the first step is to figure out what you’d charge for—what your value metric should be (like “marketing contacts” for HubSpot). Here’s an abbreviated version of a framework for that process:

1. Define your job-to-be-done: what it is your customers “hire” your product/service to do. Example for a language-learning app: “self-paced language learning.”
2. Convert your JTBD into proxies. Examples for the language-learning app: courses taken, live classes scheduled, test score improvement.
3. Answer these questions for each proxy: Does it align with customers’ needs? Is it scalable? Is it clear? Does it make sense as a way to acquire and retain customers? Do price and value scale proportionately?
4. If any of your proxies have all “yes” responses to the above questions, include them in a customer survey. Use max-differential sets to find the right feature for your value metric. These force respondents to pick the most and least important item from a list, helping to identify what your audience truly values (and they’re available in survey platforms like SurveyKing).

We get much more in-depth with this framework in our Growth Program’s pricing module, where we also help you determine whether usage-based pricing is right for your startup. But these four steps provide an overview of the customer-first approach you should take with usage-based pricing.

Product seeding is the act of sending your product to influencers so they'll promote it to their audiences—organically. Some call it gifting.

Most brands approach seeding by immediately pushing contracts or content obligations on influencers.

We advise taking a more hands-off approach instead. That is, identify relevant influencers that align with your brand. Send out your product and make it clear there are no strings attached. Then see which influencers create content about your product without being asked. Use a tool like Archive or MightyScout to track influencer stories and posts that mention your brand.

Product seeding has three major benefits:

1. It has a higher potential ROI than traditional influencer marketing, which often requires a large upfront investment. Though product seeding means giving away your product for free, organic exposure from just one influencer can quickly offset this cost.
   
2. It identifies influencers who genuinely love your product—creating the perfect foundation for an effective, long-term, and mutually beneficial relationship. Example: After the Rowing Blazers team got word that Pete Davidson was wearing their apparel, they reached out for a collab—and got a very enthusiastic response.
   
3. You can easily repurpose this user-generated content for other channels, like ads. This is where serious growth comes in. You can get loads of high-quality, influencer-generated content, for free, from genuine product adopters. Taylor Lagace scaled Animal House Fitness from 0 to $1M in 4 months by using this seeding and ad approach.

We’d recommend seeding micro-influencers (those with under 50k followers). Big-time influencers who create for a living expect to get paid for their work upfront, whereas smaller influencers might appreciate the free product. For more insights on influencers, check out our creator marketing playbook.

There are two main signals Google’s algorithm looks at to rank your pages:

• The types of sites linking to you: What are they? And how big, relevant, and authoritative are they? These are backlinks.
• Your internal link structure: How are you linking pages together? Does your link structure enable productive link flow?

Most marketers over-fixate on backlinks, when they should be paying more attention to internal link structure.

Think of your website as an electrical circuit:

• Backlinks supply energy to the circuit in the form of electrical current (link flow).
• Each page functions as a component of the circuit board.
• Unless each component is calibrated and strung together just right, electrical current won't flow, and the circuit won't function.

To get the most benefit from backlinks, link up your pages in a way that distributes link flow productively throughout your website.

Here are two ways to do it:

• Distribute link flow to high–search value pages. Every internal link you create sends a signal to Google that you think that page is important.
• Your “About us” page may be valuable to you and your site visitors, but if that page has no search value, you’re sending Google the wrong message by linking to it internally.
• As a rule of thumb, remove these links where possible, especially if they’re repeated often. Then prioritize creating links to key pages that are better optimized for search. Think: valuable blog posts and pages that are designed to convert.
• Avoid linking to weak or duplicate content.
• Duplicate content tells search engines that your site has poor content quality. Linking to these pages only adds insult to injury. Apart from your header and footer, make sure your pages share less than ~50% of the same words.
• Pages that are considered “weak” in Google’s eyes typically have low word counts and little information. Think: all the short, half-hearted blog posts of the internet—abundant in quantity, but never quality. To make your link flow more productive, avoid linking to these pages (better yet, avoid having them altogether).

After The Hustle published an article about Hint Water, the flavored water company saw their CPC drop from ~$5 to < 10¢. Their cost to acquire customers dropped from $80 to $25.

(Source: Nik Sharma during our Growth Summit. That’s an unlisted video, just for DC readers.)

We view PR as an “unscalable channel.” It can help you get traction, but growth won’t compound as you put more resources behind it.

But that doesn’t mean a single media hit can’t cause growth to skyrocket. Think of it as performance PR: using media to earn revenue.

Here are three ways to increase your chances of getting viral PR:

1. Run social media ads to your target demographic within a specific location: where editors who cover your industry are. Then reach out to those editors. People view the things they’re familiar with as better. Editors are more likely to respond since they’ll already be familiar with your company because of your ads.
2. Pretty much all major media companies are on affiliate platforms. To increase your chances of media traction, join one of those platforms (like Impact, Skimlinks, or ShareASale)—especially if you’re DTC. A higher affiliate percentage usually ups the likelihood of a mention.
3. As Bell Curve’s growth strategist Stephanie Jiang puts it, “Media drives media.” Put ad spend behind existing media mentions. They have third-party validation, which carries more weight than a company talking about itself.

Loyalty programs can feel like a nice-to-have, so plenty of brands brush them off.

But building an email-based loyalty program for your best customers could have an incredibly high ROI—trade a few hours of work for a steady stream of revenue.

Here’s an example.

Rejoiner, an email marketing platform for ecommerce brands, built a quick loyalty program for their client Peak Design.

The results are incredible. The program has generated $46.8k in added revenue over the last 90 days—with an 11.6% click-through rate. And it took just six total work hours to build.

Here’s how they pulled it off (and our take so you can replicate the strategy).

Step 1: Rejoiner created two loyalty offers based on Peak’s purchase history:

• Customers who’ve spent over $500 get $20 off their next purchase of $100+.
• Those who’ve spent $1,000 get $40 off their next purchase of $200+.

Our take: Don’t overthink your loyalty segments and offer. Consider targeting the top ~10% of your customers by spend—no need to get too methodical here. Provide an offer that’s materially valuable and test it. You can optimize the offer and segments later.

Step 2: Rejoiner created an email that combines personalized copy with CRO best practices (like the big red button). It feels personal but gets straight to the point.

Clean, simple, effective. The result: 8% of recipients make a purchase.

Our take: Customers know that the emails they receive from brands are automated. When you’re writing your email, show there’s a human behind the copy. The Peak Design email feels like it’s coming from a friend. And use “I” instead of “we”—“I” feels more emotionally involved, and studies show that it leads to more purchases.

Step 3: Rejoiner used a unique discount code. A generic discount code like “VIP_10_OFF” would quickly kill the magic the personalization created.

Plenty of apps make it easy to generate randomized discount codes (here’s one for Shopify brands). And most of these apps integrate with email marketing platforms, so you can send each subscriber a unique code.

Bottom line: A simple, thoughtful email loyalty program can be an engine for incremental revenue.

Most companies that pursue SEO default to using keyword difficulty and search traffic to determine which keywords to target. They simply prioritize keywords that aren’t too competitive to rank for and regularly receive moderate to high search traffic.

But Ahrefs adds another layer to their research. Besides search traffic and difficulty, the Ahrefs team also uses an internal metric they call “Business Score.”

Business Score is a subjective rating measured on a scale from 0 to 3 and based on each keyword or potential topic’s relation to Ahrefs’ product.

• 0: The keyword can’t be tied to Ahrefs’ product.
• 1: Ahrefs provides only a partial solution.
• 2: Ahrefs provides a solution, but other tools solve the problem just as well.
• 3: Ahrefs’ product is an irreplaceable solution for the keyword.

For instance, a topic like “backlink analysis” ranks 3 while “email outreach" ranks 1—Ahrefs can help with finding companies to reach out to but it isn’t an all-encompassing solution for email outreach.

Ahrefs prioritizes keywords with a higher Business Score, using this metric to understand each keyword’s business value. Since they don’t make a compelling case for users to invest in Ahrefs, topics with a low Business Score are low-priority.

If you’re pursuing SEO, consider including Business Score in your keyword research. This metric will save you from creating content about topics that are relatively easy to rank for but don’t drive people into your product.

Every piece of copy is unique.

Yet no matter the situation, the same mistakes seem to show up over and over again.

At least that's what Neville Medhora, founder of Copywriting Course, observed after answering over 20k questions from his students.

Here are 8 of the most common copy mistakes, with solutions to quickly solve them:

Mistake #1: Putting too many CTAs on a page or email

• Why it's bad: Including too many CTAs causes each of them to compete against one another (e.g., Join, Click, Buy, Read More). This dilutes your message and leads to decision fatigue—both of which hurt conversion. And especially in email, once a reader clicks a link, they're unlikely to come back and click anything else.
• Quick fix and result: Pick one CTA and write your copy for that specific action. Your messaging and conversion should be stronger.

Mistake #2: Using too many buzzwords or jargon

• Why it's bad: Buzzwords are vague and confusing. Jargon is usually too specific for most audiences, which is also confusing. Neither one clearly tells the reader about your product or how it benefits them. This makes it a chore to read and hurts conversion.
• Quick fix and result: Replace buzzwords and jargon with direct, simple language that a 5th grader could understand. You'll help readers value your offer.

Mistake #3: Busy pages with bad layouts

• Why it's bad: Crowded pages are bad UX. They're tough to read and distract from the copy—the most important part.
• Quick fix and result: Make the simplest possible page layout and use negative space to your advantage. That means simple words, distraction-free layouts that emphasize those words, and short, concise explanations to get the message across. People will be more likely to read your copy and take action.

Mistake #4: New writers trying to copy content from major blogs

• Why it's bad: Major blogs tend to write about the same broad and stale topics over and over again. Articles like, "how to start a business" or "complete guide to losing weight." This usually makes for mediocre content that isn't very useful.
• Quick fix and result: Instead of writing for the masses about the same broad topics that have been covered ad nauseam, write about the specific problems your product aims to solve. Your content will resonate more if you include personal stories from experience, anecdotes, and interviews. This gives your content personality, a memorable human element.

Mistake #5: Subheadings that don't guide the reader through an article

• Why it's bad: Most people skim through content to get the gist from subheadings. Bland subheadings make your content hard to scan, and many readers will just bounce.
• Quick fix and result: Tell the story of your content using descriptive subheadings. Your content will be more engaging, and more readers will stick around to read the full article. And readers who just want to skim will still get value from the subheadings alone.

Mistake #6: Writing "How To" content without giving practical actions

• Why it's bad: When your content fails to give readers practical actions to take, it doesn't actually help the reader. It's also forgettable—if there's no action to take, the reader probably won't remember your advice.
• Quick fix and result: Include at least one actionable takeaway in every section of your article. This makes for better content, happier readers, and actionable content is much more likely to get shared.

Mistake #7: Awkward cold emails with bad intros

• Why it's bad: Gimmicky, insincere email intros are guaranteed to turn the reader off immediately. They probably won't read past the intro, and they definitely won't convert. They may even dislike you and delete your email.
• Quick fix and result: Write the email as if you're speaking to a friend. Be direct and concise, don't pitch them upfront, and state a simple, obvious reason for why you're emailing them in the first place (e.g., "I saw that we're in the same Slack group and wanted to reach out"). Have a legitimate reason for reaching out. You'll build better relationships and more conversions that way.
• Note: We cover how to write a cold email in detail here.

Mistake #8: Overthinking email style and format

• Why it's bad: When you only write one draft, you don’t have anything to test, you get stuck on design instead of conversions, and you put yourself under a lot of pressure to get it right on the first try.
• Quick fix and result: When testing different formats, write three versions: one short, one medium, and one long. That way, you'll move quicker because there’s less pressure and more creative freedom, and you’ll have extra versions to test. In the long run, this will help you land on a style and format that resonates most with your audience.

Check out Neville's full post which has helpful visual examples.

All eyes are on TikTok as the next big opportunity in paid social.

TikTok is unsaturated—competition is low and traffic is affordable. And its userbase is snowballing across audiences worldwide.

But is now the right time for you to test TikTok ads as a new ad channel? Before you launch into testing, consider these questions:

1. Can you commit the budget to test TikTok ads properly? Every new channel has a cost of entry, and you have to spend to learn. We recommend setting aside 10% - 30% of your ad budget to test this channel properly. It’ll likely take 6-10 weeks to test and validate TikTok as a paid acquisition channel.
2. Does TikTok align with your product? TikTok ads perform well for DTC ecom brands and mobile apps. DTC ecom brands selling visual products with broad appeal, short sales cycles, and AOVs between $25 - $100 tend to get the most out of TikTok. Similarly, mobile apps and games work well since free app installs are low-friction. TikTok ads can work for many other types of products, but consider how your product aligns with the channel before testing.
3. Do you have the capacity to focus on TikTok as a separate channel in your ad mix? TikTok is an entirely different beast than Facebook. To give TikTok ads a fair shot, you'll need to invest resources into producing a high volume of channel-specific creatives that you can test diligently. Whether you make them yourself or partner with content creators, having a high volume of creatives ready to go is essential.
4. Have you seen success with Snapchat ads, IG Reels, or IG Stories? If you've had success with any of these channels and want to diversify, TikTok is a logical next step. TikTok can have cheaper CPAs, cheaper CPMs, and higher quality traffic than Snapchat or Instagram. You can try repurposing Snapchat/IG assets because these types of ads are typically vertical UGC videos, precisely the kind of content that performs best on TikTok. And if you have the original video content, even better. You can cut new ads, making full use of TikTok's audiovisual publishing tools to achieve the right aesthetic.

If you answered 'yes' to all four questions, TikTok ads might be worth testing now.

If not, and you're still interested in experimenting with TikTok, consider experimenting with an organic TikTok strategy before you dive into ads.

Hiring for SEO positions is a notoriously difficult and time-consuming process.

Unless you're an SEO expert yourself, you likely lack the domain knowledge needed to properly vet candidates and entrust them to deliver results. And SEO is an investment—results often take 6-12 months. That requires massive trust in who you hire.

So, if you're thinking about hiring an SEO operator and don't have the time to brush up on technicals or source a trusted referral, use these sample interview questions to help expedite the interview process and find a qualified candidate:

• How do you check whether a URL is indexed by Google? Every operator should know the site: command. This displays all indexed pages in the SERPs.
• How do you block a URL from being indexed? This question is meant to see if they actually know the purpose of a no-index tag and don't confuse it with blocking a page in robots.txt. The former tells Google not to index a page while keeping it in the sitemap. The latter keeps pages out of Google's index completely.
• What are the most important SEO ranking factors, in your opinion? No definitive answer here. Listen to their perspective and see if they can explain how multiple ranking factors contribute to overall rankings. A good candidate will:
• Back up their answers with data and relevant experiences.
• Have on-the-job examples to share.
• Avoid absolute statements and not be afraid to say "it depends" (SEO is nuanced and case-specific).
• What SEO myths have you had enough of? Only an experienced SEO should be able to answer this question. Ask them to elaborate on their favorite SEO myths and how they navigate them in their work. Their answer should provide insight into their learnings and strategy—the development of their process.
• What are some quick technical SEO wins? No right answer here, but you want to see if they can differentiate between and prioritize low-impact, high-impact, low-effort, and high-effort optimizations.
• For example, compressing images and deleting thin content are low-effort, high-impact actions. Optimizing meta descriptions on blog posts is a high-effort, low-impact one.
• A site that's been online for 9 months is getting zero traffic. Why? There are a million reasons why an established site might not be getting traffic. They should be able to offer several possible scenarios—with solutions—that illustrate why that is. This question is meant to explore their ability to problem-solve, think critically, and be creative—all requisite SEO skills.
• How do you perform a technical SEO audit? Like the last question, there are many ways to skin a cat. The point of this one is to check if they have a process in place for auditing a website. Some follow-up questions:
• What tools do they use and how do they use them?
• What are the first things they look for in an audit, and why?
• How have they resolved particular issues and what were the results?

Bonus: Ask the candidate to explain their SEO strategy in a way a child could easily understand. This is harder than it sounds, but if they can get the point across without all the jargon and technical mumbo jumbo, that's a good sign they know their stuff.

Check out the article for the full list of questions.

Consumers now have a sixth sense for inauthenticity. We can tell when a brand is jumping on a bandwagon just because it’s the trendy thing to do, or when they’re saying all the right things but not following through with all the right actions.

How can you overcome consumer distrust? Two possibilities are to talk about your competitors and share bad reviews.

It sounds illogical. But by talking about competitors and bad reviews, you'll:

• Create a warmer brand perception. Transparency and authenticity increase brand trust.
• Surprise seen-it-all-before consumers. Most brands talk about themselves (and only in a positive light). Acknowledging competitors and addressing bad reviews is novel.
• Overcome key objections, like they’re not as good as x competitor or any concerns that often come up in negative reviews. Praising competitors might increase perceptions of competence, and addressing bad reviews is a direct way to dispel whatever objections are discussed in them.

Talk about your competitors. In a series of Facebook ads for a fictional car wash company, an ad that praised a competitor got a 5.4% click-through rate (“Precision Car Wash congratulates LikeNew Car Wash. Our fiercest competitor and the Industry Best 2020 Award recipient!”).

Compare that to a 3.3% CTR for a self-promotional ad (“Precision Car Wash is proud to receive the Industry Best 2020 Award”) and 1.8% for an ad with a third-party endorsement (“The Industry Best 2020 Award committee is proud to announce Precision Car Wash as this year’s Best 2020 Award recipient”).

Praising a competitor seems risky and unlikely. When a brand does it successfully, they come across as genuine. And sincerity is skepticism’s biggest foe.

Share bad reviews. Peloton did this earlier this year with ads featuring negative comments like “overpriced coat rack”—followed by praise from those same people a few years later.

If you share bad reviews, balance them with positives like Peloton did. Prove that either 1) the criticism is no longer valid or 2) it was never justified to begin with.

Don’t overdo either of these tactics, or it could start to backfire. Always keep copy fresh and authentic.