What tools to use for AI-based keyword research? - Firuze's Bite Size Marketing News

In this article, I’ll try to give you major takeaways from the SEO Fundamentals room in Club House on November 2, 2021.

What are the best SEO practices?
Does the order of the keywords matter?
Which tools can be used for AI-based keyword research?
What are the best practices for publishing on multiple platforms? For example, is it ok if I post my article on Linkedin, Medium, blog, Pinterest, FB and Twitter?
What are the best practices when I want to get rid of my PDFs published previously?
When I audit my pages, sometimes I find pages with similar topics and content. What shall I do?
How do you handle change management? Is it at the page level or site level?

1) What are the best SEO practices?

Understanding the search intent and creating content that will satisfy the search intent is a crucial strategy. Google Search understands the content better and better every day. Therefore, choose your target audience and then research who they are and how they think about your product. Are they on a stage of researching? Are they aware of what type of product or services they need to buy? If so, what will be the most important criteria when they are purchasing? Is it the quality, is it the price, or is it the positive reviews? If you can answer those questions, then it’s easier to create content accordingly. The next step is nurturing and bringing users from the starting point to a level where they can make a transaction for your products or services.
Researching what type of content has been ranked on the top 10 SERPs at Google. Search for different kinds of keywords and map what kind of SERPs you’ll get. It might be a knowledge graph, Product Listings, “People Also Ask”, image carousels, videos, images and maps. As a result, by mapping the types of search results, you’ll discover what kind of search intent Google finds satisfactory for its users. This is the most compelling verification by Google to drive you to create similar types of content.
Checking on how many searches have been done with the keywords that you would like to rank. This is a way to assess whether you will be able to beat the competition or not. Thus, what we are looking for is low competition keywords with enough search volume. This analysis also helps us to find keyword gaps. According to MOZ, “Competitive keyword analysis – sometimes called keyword gap analysis – is a process of identifying valuable keywords that your competitors rank highly for, which you don’t.” In other words, those are the keywords that your competitors are receiving traffic from, but your website is missing.
Get listed at the Google My Business Listings with your organization name, address and Phone number. Always use the same address style everywhere on the internet. Additionally, Google My Business Listing will show your physical address on Google maps. Embed your map visual from Google maps into your website.
Learn how to prioritize. This is a long journey, and every website has its optimal way of communicating with its audience. Therefore, no textbook solution matches the needs of every audience or problem. To start with, determine where your website is and where do you want to go. Then set up a realistic road map and strategy to reach out your objectives.
Run an audit on your existing content. List how you have been ranked with your content. If your site is not appearing on the top 25 results, check out the reasons. (Search intent, content gap, Google SERPs page, what type of content style is displayed at SERPs and how your competitors are doing. Checking out how you ranked with your content also allows you to see how you perform compared to your competitors. At this instant, you can repurpose your old content by creating videos aligned with different platforms, designing image galleries, updating your content parallel to recent developments and trends or completely getting rid of the content if it’s outdated.
While creating your content, your focus point must be on how the reader will perceive your content. Always try to give valuable and credible information. Google is getting better and better at understanding the content every day.
Write helpful content. This will lead to other websites backlink to your website.
Use Yext for reputation management. Get your citations by using BrightLocal for your local business.
When you enter a market with too much competition, the best way is to find low competition long-tail keywords to get ranked. Sometimes your client has too many expectations. Therefore, it’s a necessary practice to bring your clients to reality. Creating a report and displaying the current situation on high competition keywords will help you to explain.
Organic search is like running a marathon. Only, in the long run, you can get results from your SEO work, be patient, and focus on developing solutions for the users’ problems. Besides, your content strategy should be solid and consists of content pillars with topic clusters. Thus, try to cover everything about your topic. In some cases, it’s almost impossible to get ranked. Because the competitor has a big budget, or they are in the market for a long while. Therefore, determining the low hanging fruits and auditing what type of content your competitors have been used is a good way of dealing with this problem.
Design user-friendly and easily navigable pages. Try to run tests on your design elements and find the optimal page design with the highest conversion rates.
Build authority websites and explain what makes you unique about you solving the user’s problem. It’s essential to have a clear view of your value proposition
Create content in such a way that answers any long question at the “People Also Ask” section of the SERPs.

2) Does the order of the keywords matter?

It depends on keyword phrase to phrase. The first thing you should be doing is doing multiple searches by different keyword combinations with the same set of keywords. You’ll see what kind of results Google is bringing. Are they the same results or divergent? Are they denoting the same search intent? If the answer is yes, then using different combinations with the exact keywords does not matter. However, if the search intent is distinct for each keyword combination, then you have different SERPs.

3)Which tools can be used for AI-based keyword research?

There are a few tools in the market like SurferSEO.com or Marketmuse.com. These tools can be helpful to analyze the top 10 results when there is no context. They can highlight SEO strategies, keyword density (help you not to overstuff with the exact keywords)

If there is a context, try to use SEMRush, Moz or Ahrefs. These tools are very good in guiding you to find the keyword gap.

4) What are the best practices for publishing on multiple platforms? For example, is it ok if I post my article on Linkedin, Medium, blog, Pinterest, FB and Twitter?

Another question is, what if I have a Press Release picked up by different media outlets and got published in a couple of them? Does Google punish me?

The answer is no. Google decides on which link to show in SERPs. Some the best practices to follow:

Try to rewrite and make a few changes on each platform that you’re submitting.

Schedule different days to publish on various platforms. The first-day post on your blog, then wait until it’s indexed by Google (you can quickly check out your indexing status by using Google Search Console). After your page gets indexed, submit it to Medium and the other day publish it on Linkedin.

If you want to refrain from Canonical issues:

Suppose it’s a “Top 10 tips………..” article. You can make a Medium Post with “Top 6 Tips…..” content, and a Linkedin Post by “Top 4 Tips….” content.

Finally, you publish the whole post at your website with the title “Top 10 Tips….”

When posting your content, it’ll be an excellent strategy to be mindful about what type of content you have created (which search intent you are matching). Any content that will match the customer journey at the top of the funnel will fit in Medium type of content (the customer is at the information gathering and research stage). Any content for the bottom of the funnel stage should be used on your website to generate leads and sales.

5) What are the best practices when I want to get rid of my PDFs published previously?

If you don’t want that page to be seen anymore, you can use 410 and permanently delete that page.

If the content has value before it is trash, then you can use a 301 Redirect. This way, you can pass the authority or link juice of the page to the redirected one.

6) When I audit my pages, sometimes I find pages with similar topics and content. What shall I do?

Before deleting anyone of them, check out which page is doing better by using Google Search Console or Google Analytics and which page has higher conversions. Delete the page which is relatively poorly performing and redirect that page to the high performing one. Always try to get rid of old content that’s not performing well. Because Google has a crawl budget for each website, and it’s not infinite. Therefore, to use your crawling budget efficiently, get rid of the old ones to receive enough crawling for the up-to-date pages.

7) How do you handle change management? Is it at the page level or site level?

You can create a few garbage pages for what you want to test—monitor which one of the pages are doing better. And then apply the same process on your client’s page, which will bring the best results.

You can organize “change files”, write a journal (log book) or take notes (Don’t forget to use the dates and time interval of your test).

Try to document any change you have made.

Be mindful about items you are changing and consider the client’s expectations.

Benchmark Comparison is important. Benchmark comparison helps you see where you are today and how you are doing against your competitors in terms of SEO. This analysis allows you to set SEO goals, track your performance over time and be aware of your competitors’ efforts. To visualize benchmark analysis, you can use DataStudio by Google (which is a Free Tool)

Some of the data points that you are analyzing for comparison are

Keywords: What are your keywords and your competitors’ keywords? What keywords are receiving more traffic? Is there a way for your keywords to perform better than the competitors’? Can you create long-tail keywords from the high performing keywords of your competitors? How many of your keywords are ranked at the first SERP, and how many keywords of your competitors are ranked at the top 10?
Run a technical analysis to check out the site speed of your site and your competitors’ site? Are you doing better, or are there any differences in terms of technical SEO (Site Speed, SSL/HTTPS, Mobile-friendliness)
What are the content opportunities for your website? How are your competitors’ menu, category pages, sitemap, product pages and blog designed? Besides, you also need to discover how deep their content pages are? Can you find any content opportunities? Content ideas that you have not created yet but generated by your competitors and performing well.
How about your competitors UX with a lower bounce rate and high conversion? Can you make your site’s UX better them theirs? How is your call to action, contact page and address details?
How many backlinks have been received by your competitors? Is there any chance that you can receive the same high authority and relevant backlinks for your content too?
How many pages of your site has been indexed by Google, and How many pages from your competitors?
How are your competitors positioned themselves in social media? To which social media channels they are posting? How much their content has been shared on social media? What type of content and topics has been shared the most in social media?
What traffic sources you have been receiving the most traffic in comparison to your competitors? What is the reason behind that? (Is it an advertisement, app, page or widget?)

If you have any questions for your website I will be more than happy to offer you a 30-minute FREE Consultation for your business.

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