Publisher growth tactics for election season | WEBINAR
Publisher growth tactics for election season | WEBINAR
Reading and understanding the content in this module will allow you to understand the importance of topic & keyword research, how to gain deeper insight into your audience, challenges you will face, and the pitfalls to avoid when conducting this process.
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Keyword research is the process of identifying the search terms used by your target audience to help shape your content. This process may involve free tools such as Google’s Search Console, Google Keyword Planner, or paid tools such as Ahrefs and SEMRush.
Keyword research is important because it provides you with specific search data that will help you determine:
Having this information means you’ll waste less time on low-performing content, gain more traffic and drive more revenue. Let’s explore each in more detail.
When you’re close to an industry for a long time you’ll likely have a certain way of describing things. When that’s the case, you may not realize your readers don’t do the same thing.
The keywords you target should focus on what your audience is searching for. With effective keyword research, you can focus your content on what searchers are entering into Google and optimize your content for those terms.
Keyword research will also help you uncover similar keywords/themes as well. For example, if your publication intends to cover the World Cup, then it would be useful to understand that related keywords from Google searches include “World Cup fixtures”, “World Cup start date”, and “World Cup 2022 groups.”
You can create content focused around these keywords and help direct traffic to your site.
Obviously, the more searches a keyword receives the more traffic it will drive. But there’s more to it than that. Typically, high-volume keywords are more competitive to rank for.
Everybody wants more traffic, so high-volume keywords are naturally the terms everybody wants to rank for. This means large websites with lots of authority on Google will rank for these keywords. For a smaller or relatively new site, it will be much more difficult to rank highly for such keywords.
At the opposite end of the spectrum, you want to be sure there are a reasonable number of people searching for a term before you spend the time to create content for it.
Also, keep in mind, the more focused a keyword is the more sure of the search intent you can be. Let’s take the keyword “men’s shoes” as an example. Somebody searching this term may be looking for a retail outlet, a style guide, trending fashions or any other number of things.
Ranking first for “men’s shoes” would be great, but a large portion of that search volume wouldn’t be searching for your content’s topic. It may be more valuable to rank highly for a longtail term such as “what are popular formal men’s shoes” if you’re planning to write a long-form article on trending men’s shoes for both the office and special events.
Google will surface a specific type of result depending on the search intent. Matching search intent is perhaps the most important item on this list.
A quick search of your keyword will show you what types of results Google is rewarding with high rankings. Depending on what’s in the results you may want to create a listicle, short or long-form article, video or comparison chart.
It’s important to understand what searchers want to know when they search for a term. Whichever publication can best match that intent stands a better chance of ranking higher in the results.
In cases where you find a keyword where none of the results match what you know the search intent to be, there’s an opportunity for you to fill that gap.
Similar to the previous section — with informational intent searches, users are typically trying to fill in a knowledge gap about a particular topic. They do this by using the five Ws — who, what, where, when and why — and the how.
When considering what keywords to target for your topics ask yourself how you might search for information on this topic? And what information would you want to know?
By identifying areas that are underreported or lack a comprehensive piece of content, there’s an opportunity for your publication to fill that gap. Performing keyword research effectively and reliably finding these gaps of information can lead to incredible SEO results.
This research provides answers to two very important questions of information during the content planning phase:
First, by identifying other publications that have written on a topic you have a better understanding of how competitive a topic is. If larger publications have covered all angles of a story or topic then the keyword is going to be difficult to rank for and gain traction with.
Secondly, knowing which pages are currently ranking allows you to identify opportunities to write a more engaging piece of content. If the current ranking pages are poorly written or could be improved on there is another opportunity there for your content to rank over those pages.
There are a number of challenges you, as a publisher, will face when doing your keyword research. These challenges include:
Google’s main goal is to keep users engaged with Google for as long as possible. It’s how the company makes money from its ads after all.
There are many search terms where Google is providing the answer to searches without requiring a click. According to a Semrush study, 25.6% of searches result in no further clicks. The most common reason for this is the image pack — either a horizontal row of image links on mobile or a collection of images on the right-hand side for desktop that lead to a Google Images search — that Google shows on 51% of search engine results pages (SERPs).
However, Google is increasingly showing other packs in the results that are resulting in fewer result clicks. These include videos, scores and direct answers at the top of the SERP to instantly answer search queries.
There are four types of search intent you’ll need to consider for each of your keywords. These are:
For publishers, being clear of transactional and commercial intent keywords is key. For these types of searches, the intent is for users to purchase something or at least find out more about a product or service before purchasing. Writing an informational article on a topic with transactional intent will not rank highly in Google’s results because it doesn’t match what searchers are looking for.
Informational intent keywords will typically start with the five W’s — who, where, when, what, and why — and how. Just be sure to check that the search results are not dominated by video tutorials or another information pack.
For keywords that return video results, the standard webpage results will be pushed even further down the page lowering the click-through rate (CTR) in the process.
For many publishers, time to publish is a critical component of driving traffic to your website. This is especially the case in news-related topics, where publishing quickly becomes essential to having your content seen at all.
While keyword research is essential for optimizing and focusing your content, taking too long with the process can be detrimental to your results. To limit the impact of keyword research on your time to publish, have a well-documented workflow laid out and understand how important it is to be first for that particular topic.
There are several tools that can make keyword research easier. Using these tools to implement the strategies we discuss will help your content drive traffic to your site.
Google Search Console (GSC) is a free service Google provides that allows you to monitor your website’s results in Google searches.
GSC provides you with a lot of data including how many organic clicks, impressions, CTRs, results positioning, backlinks, etc your site has.
For keyword research, you can also see which search queries your website is being found for. If you’re being found for queries you haven’t optimized for yet you may want to produce a new piece of content to better satisfy that search term.
You can also see which position your pages are ranking in. This makes it easy to identify low-ranking pages that need to be better optimized. They may be low-quality pages that need to be rewritten or may not be matching the search intent.
Ahrefs is one of the premier SEO tools available. Ahrefs has several features to help with SEO and one area it can help most is with keyword research.
Start with a few seed keywords for your topic or niche. If you don’t know any you can find these in a couple of ways using Ahrefs:
Once you have a few seed keywords for your topic or niche enter these into Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer. The tool will return thousands of relevant and related keywords to the main keyword. You can then use the tool to analyze various keyword metrics including search volume, keyword difficulty, traffic potential and more.
Once you have a large list of keywords you can then develop a content strategy around those keywords. Group the keywords according to the parent topic and search intent to form the basis of a content strategy.
You’ll see better performance from your content with a good internal linking and site layout strategy. An effective strategy to adopt the content flywheel strategy.
Using the content flywheel, you’ll internally link your content to enhance search performance and conversions. Content is grouped into informational, promotional and tactical content. So what does that mean?
From your main page, link to your pillar pages. Pillar pages are your main informational posts on a particular topic. The keyword your pillar page is optimized for should receive at least 1,000 monthly searches — less than 1,000 monthly searches and there likely won’t be enough supporting content to surround the pillar page.
Your pillar pages should then be linked to several supporting pages, which contain content optimized for related and supporting keywords to the pillar. These supporting pages, also know as clusters, help show Google your website is an authority on the topic and gives Google context as to what the pillar page is about.
Marketing or promotional pages are then linked together in another group, which links out to tactical content. Tactical content could be case studies or other content intended for your readers to make the desired conversion — such as subscribing to your publication.
Structuring your content in this way maximizes its effectiveness with Google, by giving it context and a structured layout for its crawlers to understand. The better Google can understand your content, the more likely that content is to rank higher.
Having looked at the tools and strategies you can use to drive traffic to your site, let’s turn our attention to the processes you should follow to make this happen.
Analyzing keywords is a relatively straightforward process — if you know what you’re looking for. There are three key metrics you should consider when analyzing keywords:
The first step in analyzing any keyword is identifying the number of monthly searches the keyword has. Keywords with a higher search volume have a higher potential for organic traffic.
The other thing to keep in mind with search volume is the trend for that keyword. Is the keyword trending upward and becoming popular? Or is the opposite true? With a tool such as Ahrefs, you can see the volume trend and how the monthly search volume has changed over time.
When using SEO tools you’ll often find two keywords with a similar search volume. But if you take the top-ranking page for both those keywords and look at the organic traffic of those pages you’ll likely see a stark difference in results.
The difference in traffic is because pages will rank for more than one keyword. Google understands that there’s no difference in what somebody is looking for when querying “World Cup 2022 start date” and “Start date for 2022 World Cup”.
Tools such as Ahrefs’ Keywords Explorer give an estimated traffic potential for a keyword by showing what organic traffic the top page for a given keyword is currently receiving.
Each of the popular SEO tools will give an estimated keyword difficulty score. These are based on a proprietary formula that takes into account things such as:
Only Google knows the exact nature of its algorithm, so these tools present guidelines for how difficult a term may be to rank for. There are varying strategies for how you approach keyword difficulty. Typically newer websites will attempt to rank for easier topics first and work their way up from there.
But you shouldn’t put off content for higher-difficulty keywords forever. Ranking highly for these terms will take several backlinks and the sooner you have your content out — the sooner you can get started on your link-building campaign.
Analyzing keywords is a balancing act of several metrics. Ideally, you would love to find high search volume, high traffic potential and low difficulty keywords. Unfortunately, that’ll never happen.
Instead, you’ll need to target specific keywords based on the above factors. Finding the right balance of traffic and difficulty is the key to analyzing keywords.
The next step in keyword research after analyzing is deciding which keywords you want to target. This involves a couple of steps.
The first step is to begin grouping keywords into posts or articles. Take, for example, the following three keywords:
If you enter those terms into Google you’ll see there is a lot of overlap in the results between chocolate chip cookie and chocolate chip cookie recipe. There is virtually no overlap between the results for those terms and the sugar-free option though.
This tells us that Google sees chocolate chip cookie and chocolate chip cookie recipe as virtually the same term with the same search intent. These terms should be grouped together in a single post or article.
This also tells you that Google does not see any overlap with sugar-free chocolate chip cookies. Instead, that should be covered in its own piece of content.
As we discussed earlier, matching search intent is a critical piece to being rewarded with a high ranking on Google.
As a publisher, you aren’t likely going to target transactional-based keywords that have a buying intent behind them. A quick search on Google — and some common sense from your keyword list — will tell you which keywords you may want to avoid creating information-based content for. If the results on Google are dominated by product pages — you aren’t going to rank an information-based article for the same term.
For a deeper dive into how to conduct keyword and topic research, please review our dedicated module on the subject.
We’ve covered the critical items, but there are some nice-to-haves that can streamline the keyword research process.
Keywords Everywhere is a Chrome or Firefox extension with free and paid — credit-based — plans.
The extension adds a new sidebar to the Google search results with related keywords, keyword difficulty and what people also search for. It also adds some statistics beside each search result. The paid portion of the plan also includes monthly search volume data.
Another useful feature of the extension is the addition it makes to Google Trends. It adds search volume, CPC and difficulty statistics to related queries, which can be extremely useful for publishers zeroing in on trending topics.
SurferSEO has several features, but its main product is for optimizing content for SEO and planning a content strategy. However, SurferSEO also has a free Chrome extension to use as well.
The extension adds estimated monthly traffic, word count, backlinks and related keywords to the Google search results. The results can then be exported to a CSV file for manipulation in a spreadsheet.
SEOtesting is a website that tracks several metrics for your content including positioning, traffic and grouping your content based on things like author or topic.
Perhaps the most useful tool SEO Testing has for publishers is its striking distance keywords report. This report shows the keywords you are ranking that fall just outside of the first SERP. Results 1 to 10 are shown on the first page of Google. As soon as your content slips to rank 11 and the second page of Google the click-through rate (CTR) will drop dramatically.
Knowing what content you have that ranks for position 11 and above, you can make small changes to increase the probability of you content being pushed up a few spots. This, in turn, can help increase traffic.
There are some common issues that arise for publishers performing keyword research, which if avoided would make the process significantly more effective.
Publishers must check the Google SERPs for the content format Google is rewarding for a specific keyword. Creating content that doesn’t match what Google wants to see for that keyword will not yield the results you want.
Google is smart enough to know that in many cases a singular or plural version of a keyword has the same search intent. But again, it’s key to check the SERP results to see what you should be optimizing for.
In some cases, there will be a slight difference in search intent behind the singular and plural versions of a word. Publishers should be sure to optimize for the correct version to match the intent of the search.
For example, search Google for “seo agency” and you will see localized results with individual SEO agencies. But, if you search for “seo agencies” you will see top agency listicles such as top 30 SEO agencies.
By optimizing for the same keyword across multiple pieces of content, you run the risk of cannibalizing some of your pages. Doing this confuses Google on what page they should be showing users and can reduce your rankings for both pages as a result.
For newer publications, some keywords are simply out of reach. By only focusing on highly competitive search terms, you will be competing with industry giants. Longtail keywords are typically much easier to rank for and to start building momentum for your site.
Keyword research is the first step in any successful SEO strategy. Without an effective keyword strategy, you are simply guessing what content might work for your site.
Let’s review action items from this module:
With the knowledge you’ve gained in this module, you now have the ability to focus your content with keywords that will grow your organic traffic. Take the time to implement your keyword strategy workflow, and make sure it doesn’t slow your publishing velocity either.
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