In this week’s Whiteboard Friday episode, Shawn walks you through four steps to overcome the challenge of gaining prioritization for your SEO projects, and how to connect your initiatives with a business’s timelines and goals.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to this week's version of Whiteboard Friday. I am your host this week, Shawn Huber. Currently my role is Director of SEO at Trellis Law, but previously I was a senior manager of SEO at T-Mobile and that's why we're here today to talk about my experiences while at T-Mobile.
That brings me to our topic of this week — How to Get Buy-in for Your SEO Projects. If you go back a few weeks, you can catch a really awesome episode of Whiteboard Friday from Kavi, that talks about the ROI of SEO. I highly recommend you watch that so that way it helps you with this next step here. All right.
In the SEO world, you know we're full of challenges. One of them is the fact that we're super dependent on other teams. I know at T-Mobile I was very dependent on my engineering partners, and so getting any project prioritized wasn't always an easy feat, especially because my goals and timelines don't align with theirs because they have other teams and leaders and departments of the org that need their services as well.
So I'm going to walk through how to gain that prioritization for your projects and how to connect our initiatives with their timelines and goals.
1. Identify motivations and goals
So the first step you want to identify their motivations and goals. Remember different teams have different needs. So you've got to figure out what matters to each of those teams. Sometimes it's as simple as just educating and letting them know that really it's not that much work for your SEO projects, and sometimes that helps.
Sometimes you don't have a complete picture. You might be missing some data points. So try to find any other ones that might be relevant to that specific audience you're trying to sell this to. Then lastly, figure out how does your data align with what they care about.
Now I was working on a project that was going to help save T-Mobile a few million dollars. But that only hit the SEO bottom line. The engineering team that I needed very heavily to push through this project, it didn't matter to them. Even though the company was saving money, at the end of the day that didn't align to his goals. So I had to figure out how can I help him help me. It turns out, obviously, they're resource strapped, and so I was able to make a deal with them and say, "Hey, you give me this little bit of time and resources, SEO won't need you anymore for this type of project."
So that helped get that project green-lighted.
2. Build a data-informed business case
Now once you have all that awesome information that you've collected, it's time to build that data-informed business case. You put all that together and make sure you customize or tailor it for each of the different audiences that you'll be presenting to. Yes, that means you're going to have to build a few decks along the way, but it's going to pay off in the end because you're making it relevant to them to help sell why they should help you.
3. Pitch and evangelize
Now that you have all those decks and everything put together, it's time to pitch and evangelize why your project needs to be prioritized over others. These are the elements that should be in that deck to help sell your project: a really awesome executive summary that says what they're going to get; what you're asking of them; why you're asking of them; the problem we have today and what it's going to look like tomorrow when your project is implemented; any test results, white papers, case studies, anything like that that you gather along the way to help prove why it's important; a very nice roadmap that talks about timelines and how long you expect this project to last; and obviously very great next steps.
You want to really focus on making sure you customize it to your audience. I know I've said it before, but it's super important, as I learned at my time at T-Mobile, that different departments have different needs. Keep it very concise because you know as it starts to bubble up and gets to senior leaders, they don't have a ton of time to go through a big deck.
Make sure you have clear next steps. Those leaders love to know what to expect each step of the way. Then include as much visualizations as possible. Make sure that you put them in brand colors and things like that because leaders love when you take that extra minute to finesse it so that it looks like you care about it and it helps them to care that you care.
4. Follow through and follow up
Then lastly, follow through and follow up. Always establish and come through on your reporting, timelines, statuses, things of that nature because that's going to help make it easier to establish the proof of value that SEO is bringing, and it fosters trust so that next time when you come knocking on the door saying, "Hey, I need your help to create this next project," or whatever, they're going to be like, "Hey, the SEO team always delivers. It makes me look good. I'll green-light whatever you want."
So in the end, our keys for ensuring program success are collaborating with all those different departments, figuring out what's valuable to them and what's important to them, and aligning it to your SEO goals and what's important to you. Thank you for watching this week's episode of Whiteboard Friday.
Search engine optimization is ever-changing as search engines are continuously evolving. A semantic SEO strategy can help you to carve out a competitive advantage. As search engines adapt to provide the best results to conversation queries, your web content should adapt too.
Once you understand the principles, you can apply semantic SEO writing to any niche. In this post, I’ll outline some of the successful strategies I’ve used across different types of sites along with some insights into the results they have achieved.
Let’s start by explaining a little more about semantic search and content before we examine some useful applications and tips.
How does semantic search work?
Semantic search provides the best results for user queries by understanding user intent and language. Through machine learning and artificial intelligence, search engines have gained a deep knowledge of the semantics (or meaning) of words and phrases, and how they link to each other. Google understands entities and topics, and groups them using The Knowledge Graph.
This is a much more sophisticated approach than the keyword matching that was used by search algorithms in their early days. Today, the semantic search engine is continuously refining its understanding of language so that it can serve the most relevant and helpful results to any given query. This requires an appreciation of the search intent, and the intent of the content being served up to the user.
What are the benefits of semantic search?
The benefits of semantic search are many.
For users:
They get a better user experience using search engines because the results they receive are of higher quality.
They can get to the information they need faster, and sometimes even answer their next question before they’ve asked it.
They can search on different devices, in different ways, and still receive qualified results.
For search engines:
They can handle the increase in conversational search queries from devices like smartphones and smart home devices (often through voice search).
They are providing a really useful service, making the general public even more likely to use their search engine, in turn giving them more data to help them learn about human language.
What is semantic content?
In linguistics, semantics refers to the study of meaning. So in this context, semantic content looks to use words, phrases, and sentences to construct a piece of writing with a certain meaning.
A piece of semantic writing aims to utilize the relationships between words, phrases, concepts, and sentences to create a really valuable resource on a certain topic. It’s paying attention to the detail in your piece of content, from sentence structure to overall page structure and everything in between.
In slightly more relatable terms, it’s writing well for humans and following linguistic rules. It’s keeping things clear, concise, and easy to read. It’s using semantically related keywords to contextualize your topics and removing unnecessary words. You don’t need complex language or convoluted text. But you do need in-depth content.
In SEO, this is vital when writing content that you'd like to rank. Natural Language Processing (or NLP) is used by search engines to understand our content, and this process is assessing the words we’ve used, and the relationships between them.
A semantic approach to improving e-commerce SEO
So, with semantics being all about words, how does that apply to selling products? Is it purely for journalists, publishers, and blog sites? Not at all. Semantic SEO is important for all web pages on any website.
You shouldn’t assume semantic SEO isn’t for you if you run an e-commerce site. In fact, it can be really effective in an e-commerce environment. When you're writing category, product, and landing page copy, you should still think about phrase-based indexing, writing for NLP, content structure, and readability.
Review category and product page content
Make sure all your content is top-notch by making it unique, helpful, detailed, and well-structured. Research the entities that relate to your products and include them on the relevant category, subcategory, and product pages.
Provide in-depth information about your products and product ranges. Consider their benefits and key selling points. This is all helpful for the user experience as well as search engines, so keep your audience in mind and make sure your copy serves a purpose.
Working with one of my e-commerce clients, I focused on NLP terms and entities to create semantic content on over 200 categories, subcategories, product, and information pages. Going beyond basic search term research, we focused on content structure, co-occurrence, entities, synonyms, and the relationship between terms to craft high-performing content.
Here’s an example of a subcategory page that was optimised in this way:
Source: Express Doors Direct
Over a twelve-month period, the brand saw the following results:
Increased non-blog organic sessions: +495.97%
Increased organic transactions: +365.58%
Increased organic revenue: +415.30%
Examine keyword clusters and missing category pages
Using a keyword gap analysis, you can start to uncover the areas your e-commerce store isn’t ranking for in comparison with your closest competitors. You can then use this to lead your strategy for category and subcategory creation. You’re likely to find clusters of keywords on one topic that you don’t have a page to satisfy, so you can create one.
This might cover:
a different way of grouping your products (e.g. by color or style rather than by material)
a supporting guide that you’re missing
a type of product that you don’t sell but could
Examine the common themes in your keyword gap analysis and create a plan for new website pages by grouping these into keyword clusters. Collate the products for a page if necessary, and write the copy carefully, optimizing for multiple keywords in your cluster, combining concepts and ideas to contextualize your overall topic.
Source: SEMRush
I’ve seen a client’s search rankings and traffic soar when they added a key page to fulfill one of their biggest keyword gaps. Overall, the unique keywords they rank for have increased by 47.92% during 2022, and 79.4% since we started working on their new and existing content using this semantic approach:
First place rankings have also increased, by 59.43% during 2022 and staggeringly, by 627.58% since starting work with a semantic approach:
Source: Big Metrics, linked with client’s Google Search Console account
Covering multiple keyword clusters also captures more search traffic and can genuinely help customers who often shop in different ways.
Research and plan supporting content
Create content to support your website visitors' needs, centered around common product questions and guides. Rather than housing these on your blog or in a resources section, add them to the category or product pages they support.
Semantic SEO is about relationships, and that goes beyond the terms used on a single page or a single piece of content. It covers the way in which pages and topics are clustered together. If you demonstrate that you not only sell a product, but you provide a whole host of expert advice relating to that product, you will demonstrate topical authority.
Internal links
Consider the use of semantic relationships within and between your pages. You can build a really powerful resource using a series of great pages with strong connections to each other. Use a clear internal linking strategy to get this right.
A hub and spoke approach using a key category page as the center of the hub (or the pillar page) can be especially effective. A large e-commerce client we work with made almost 2% of their revenue from assisted and last click conversions through hub content in a twelve-month period. This might not sound like a large percentage, but when the overall revenue is high, an extra 2% equates to quite a sum.
Here’s a hub and spoke strategy in action, organizing help and advice on washing machines around a central washing machine category page:
Source: Appliance City
Apply schema markup or structured data
Use schema markup or structured data to help signpost your products, FAQs, and other aspects of a given page. It’s also known as semantic markup for a reason! This adds an additional level of information that helps search engines really understand your content.
For example, the below image shows product search results for UK retailers Currys and Argos displaying prices, images, and review ratings:
Source: Google SERPS
Adding structured data can help you generate rich snippets because you’re helping Google to organize your content and display it creatively. This can get you more real estate in the SERPs and therefore generate more qualified traffic.
Keep the quality high and helpful
When you've built up performance with great quality semantic content, you can still lose ground if you subsequently release a lot of unhelpful, thin, or badly written content.
In Google’s latest documentation about the helpful content update, they explicitly say:
“Any content — not just unhelpful content — on sites determined to have relatively high amounts of unhelpful content overall is less likely to perform well in Search, assuming there is other content elsewhere from the web that's better to display. For this reason, removing unhelpful content could help the rankings of your other content.” - Source:Google
This goes to show that even if you create fantastic content, it will still suffer if there aren’t enough pages of high-quality content on your website.
When you’re managing a busy e-commerce site and adding lots of new products, it’s easy to let thin, badly written, or even duplicate content slip through the net. But if you do, it can have a knock-on effect and actually harm the progress you’ve been making.
Working with e-commerce clients, I’ve seen this happen. Overall progress has taken a dip when nothing on our top-performing pages has changed. But digging into the data, I’ve often found that a large batch of products has been added to the site with low-quality, rushed descriptions. This has likely had an influence on the overall website content quality and tipped the balance in the wrong direction. If these descriptions had been carefully written for semantic SEO, taking entities, related phrases, and good structure into account, the addition of new products could have increased results across the site rather than hindered progress on key pages.
Once you start creating higher-quality content for semantic search (and your users) it’s really important to keep it up. Consistency is key. If you can, have a plan for every new page that hits the site and make sure it’s as good as it can be within the time restrictions you have.
B2B service and creative industries
Service and creative industries often have quite lengthy, text-rich pages that are ideal for optimizing with a semantic approach.
Content is key
Many B2B service websites and creative industry sites only have a small number of key pages. Unlike e-commerce sites that have hundreds — maybe thousands — of subcategories and product pages, you might have a limited number of options when it comes to your services.
This is where your informational content can play a pivotal role in the success of your site. Through the addition of informative and FAQ content, we increased an e-commerce website’s informational search queries by 75%. But even so, they only account for 12% of their total keyword rankings.
In contrast, for a service site that I work on, informational queries make up 76% of their total keyword rankings. These information pages help to make semantic connections by providing further context around the subjects a service provider specializes in. Without these supporting pages, they wouldn’t be able to display their depth of knowledge or expertise on a topic.
Source: Sistrix
Information pages also help to bring your target audience in at the top of the funnel. Perhaps they’re just starting out in an industry and looking for answers. If you are present in the search results and provide a helpful resource, your brand will be associated with their learning. When they try to think of an expert to help them with a problem later down the line, you’ll stand a good chance of being the one that springs to mind and winning their business.
Structure your content well
As service and creative sites are often quite wordy, it’s vital to use structure to your advantage. This helps out search engines and users alike.
Use clear headings and subheadings to signpost different areas and group common themes within an article or page. Bullet points and bold text can help certain aspects stand out. Proximity within the text can indicate the strength of relationships between phrases and entities.
On the Boom Online website, we structure our content with clear formatting to make text-heavy service pages easier to read:
Source: Boom Online
This is helpful for both search engines and users because relevant information can be located quickly and efficiently.
Don’t forget to use synonyms and close variants
When reviewing service sites, I often find that they stick with one way of saying something for consistency. Perhaps they do it just because that’s how they refer to a certain thing internally. But when you’re optimizing for semantic search, it’s much more beneficial to consider the variety of different ways you can refer to something and use them appropriately.
Let’s look at a digital marketing example: PPC can also be called pay-per-click, sponsored search, keyword auction, paid search, or search advertising. If you stay with just one of these options, you’re likely to be missing out on opportunities for traffic and chances to add context to the meaning of your page.
Here’s a good example of some content about “meet the team” pages. Because synonyms and close variants have been included, it ranks for similar terms like team bios, our team page, team profiles, and many more:
Source: Search Console
So, research these varied options for your page and use them in a suitable way. Don’t just add them for the sake of it, but add any that make sense. You’ll probably find your page is much more readable due to the variety of language you’ve used, and it will perform better in search too.
Keep your eye on the detail
If you’re using statistics to back up a point or referring to prices or facts, review these regularly. Update your pages to show the most recent stats and research and review pricing changes. Search engines don’t like out-of-date or incorrect information, and they can identify it because they understand the meaning and context they are displayed in.
Creating semantic content in the home & DIY sector
If you’re working in the home and DIY sector, you might be selling high-ticket items or services that require a little extra persuasion to close the sale. The average consumer might not have all the DIY knowledge they need to tackle their project, and is likely to be searching for additional information before they make a purchase.
You can address these sales barriers by creating semantic content that not only helps users but also drives search traffic and increases your chances of becoming a topical authority.
On-page FAQs
One useful application to consider is adding on-page FAQs that tackle some of the queries consumers might have before they purchase. Not only is this helpful for UX, but it’s also powerful for semantic SEO.
The answers to FAQs enrich your category pages, allowing you to add related entities and complete phrases to support phrase-based indexing.
Keep answers short and succinct, use schema markup, and link to more detailed articles where required.
Source: Climadoor
Implementing this across a DIY client’s site has resulted in a 44% increase in keyword rankings with informational intent since January 2022, from 2.5k informational keywords ranking in Jan 2022 to 3.6k in October 2022.
Keywords by intent Oct 2022:Keywords by intent Oct 2022:
Detailed guides
Working with a lot of home improvement and DIY clients, there’s plenty of scope in this sector for creating detailed how-to and informational guides. This type of content offers an abundance of helpful information to potential customers, and it helps you to rank too.
How-to and other informational guides can bring a wealth of relevant organic traffic, capture featured snippets, and demonstrate your expertise in a topic area. They can also help to drive your target customers through your sales funnel, getting them closer to the buying phase.
If you’re creating this type of content, take the time to make it really detailed, rich, and useful. Add unique images, video content, expert opinions, and more. Think about what it takes to really bring the topic to life, making it an interesting and helpful read. If competitors are doing the same thing, try to set your resource apart as the best by including some media or original insight that they have missed.
Source: Express Doors Direct
Don’t forget to execute a hub and spoke strategy. This can be really powerful if you position key category pages as hub centers, and create spokes to support them. I’ve talked more about this in the e-commerce section.
The technology sector
Selling a very technical product or service presents its own challenges for semantic SEO. Website copy is often written by subject matter experts to maintain accuracy, but this doesn’t always produce the best search results.
Create content that search users want
This is SEO 101, right? But it isn’t always that obvious. Sometimes technical providers can get carried away with explaining the intricacies of what their product or service can do, without thinking about how a user would search for that information.
To succeed with semantic SEO, go back to your keyword research. Re-focus on the relevant search queries, and then match their intent with suitable content. This might mean reworking some existing content to support the relevant keywords or the creation of new content.
For example, the below content fulfills a multitude of search queries about a specific technology in a simple format.
Source: GeoSLAM
Follow the longtail
When I’ve been working in technical niches, search queries are often very specific and have low to zero search volume in many of the common tools. But longtail keywords can still be really valuable if they are relevant to your users.
Don’t be afraid to create great content to satisfy “zero volume” phrases. Group these phrases together to create a detailed resource and as always, research the related entities and phrases to strengthen your content. Group a series of these very specific articles together for even more semantic SEO power. The search traffic you receive might not be huge, but it will be extremely relevant and qualified.
This recently published article based on a series of longtail, very low-volume queries has generated 18.3K impressions and 816 clicks in the last four months:
Source: Search Console
Reduce jargon and improve readability
Technical sites can often use a lot of industry jargon and long, winding sentences. Whilst technical subjects do tend to have higher reading difficulty scores, they shouldn’t be impossible to comprehend.
Very long and complex sentences make it difficult for Google to understand the links between words, reducing its confidence in the meaning of that sentence. It’s important to be precise, concise and clear no matter what the subject.
For this complex sentence, there are a lot of dependency “hops” between words:
Google sees the most salient entities as “products” and “front”.
But I am talking about reaching an audience using advertising. So when we simplify the language as below:
You can instantly see the dependency “hops” reduce. And the overall result is a sentence that retains meaning, while the most salient entities “audience” and “advertising” have a much higher salience score showing they are understood as more important or central to the text:
Re-focus your content for clarity and readability. It’s absolutely possible to do this for technical subjects. Don’t try to baffle your readers with science or technology. Making things clear and succinct will help search engines and users alike process your language and extract the meaning.
If specific industry terms are necessary, define them where possible. A great definition will reinforce your expertise, and could also pick up other relevant queries and featured snippets.
Working on all of the above with a technical client across their blog content has yielded a 43.42% increase in organic traffic landing on blog pages, and a 24.92% increase in goal completions so far in 2022:
General tips for semantic SEO
No matter what type of website you work on, you can apply semantic principles to make your content perform better. Here are some general tips for semantic SEO success:
Use it as a competitive advantage
Don’t assume that you can’t rank well enough for competitive terms without a strong link profile. Links are only one part of the picture. If you are an expert in a field and can create great content on the topic, it’s certainly worth considering. Plan the content carefully, provide high-quality, unique insights and give it a shot. You might be surprised by the results.
I have helped clients to outrank really well-known brands with strong backlink profiles for competitive search terms by using a semantic approach. It required plenty of time and effort to research the topic, related phrases, and entities. Equal care and attention have gone into writing the copy and optimizing it at a later date, but allowing for attention to detail has really been worthwhile.
Don’t forget your link-building strategy
If you create quality content using semantic search it can rank well. High-ranking content can attract some valuable backlinks. A client of ours picked up one from the New York Times in this manner.
Don’t forget to include your semantic content in your link-building plans. Share it with others, and use social media and email marketing to get it noticed. If you’ve done a really great job for semantic search, you’ve probably nailed your content for users too. And this is the kind of content that other publications would choose to share or link to, which will only add to its success.
Always stay relevant to your topics and relationships
The way to build things up with this approach is by gaining ground in your topic area. Broader topics will have little use, so it’s best to stick to what you know.
Carry out a content audit to see what’s working for your website. Use this to define your areas of strength and relevance. When you have a clear focus, thoroughly research your topic area, and stick to it. Make sure irrelevant content doesn't creep in - you must stick to your strategy.
I worked with a client who used to add broader blog content for interest and color, assuming that people didn’t want to know about their product area as much because it didn’t seem exciting. But after a content audit uncovered that their successful content was all very closely related to their product area, we refined their strategy in early 2022.
Now, most of their blog content is very tightly related to their products, and each new post ranks well and brings in qualified traffic. The site as a whole is seeing the benefit, and the visibility for blog content has been steadily increasing:
Source: Sistrix
Give it time
Don't try to optimize too early. Give your pieces at least three months before reviewing performance. Some really well-written pieces can rank in weeks. Others can take months. If you start to change them before you’ve really seen what they can do, you risk harming their performance.
Lots of the content myself and my team have worked on in the first half of 2022 has seen some really positive gains after the May 2022 Google Core Update, so you might even need to wait for algorithm updates to really know what’s paying off.
Here’s an example of a specific content piece that was published in January, and saw virtually no visibility for just over three months. Things started to take hold and really ramp up after the May core update (marker B) with no significant changes made to the content.
Source: Sistrix
Keep optimizing
Whilst you shouldn’t start optimizing too soon after releasing a piece of content, the landscape keeps changing. You should always keep optimizing and improving your content once you’ve given it some time to get established.
This new, key sales page was added to a client’s site in December 2020. It took hold quite quickly, so was further optimized in March 2021, and visibility increased massively from then on.
Source: Sistrix
The content quality was reviewed again when things began to dip in December 2021, which brought about recovery.
Create an optimization plan so you don't forget to come back to key pages. Review important pages again if you see a dip in traffic, or if things change after a core update.
Balance quality with quantity
Whilst you need to keep a close eye on the quality of each page you publish, it’s more effective to focus on quality over perfection. Ten articles that are well optimized with a semantic SEO approach will be more powerful than one article that contains all the entities possible. This is because the relationships between pages are important too, and as mentioned earlier, a larger proportion of higher quality, helpful content on your site is beneficial to the whole site.
Whatever your niche, you can take a semantic approach
You can use semantic SEO to get results in any niche. Whilst the things you focus on will be different for each, the general principles always apply. Take time over your writing, consider the words you use and the relationships between them. Create clear, structured writing, and make sure you review and optimize as the search landscape changes. Enjoy creating content that’s topically relevant and you’ll see the results!
In June 2022, the Moz team released The Professional's Guide to SEO — a resource to help level-up anyone comfortable with the basics of SEO, who have some experience practicing it professionally, and who crave the challenge and reward of moving from intermediacy toward mastery.
And now, we're excited to announce a series of bonus chapters for different SEO niches, that will be added to the core guide over the next few months!
Managing the on- and off-page optimization tasks for a large business's website (or websites) is only part of the battle for enterprise-level SEOs. In order for your SEO tactics to be successful, you also need to consider the bigger operational and interdepartmental workflows and priorities that will come into play. With all that in mind, this chapter will help you:
Break silos and create a culture of SEO
Scale your SEO efforts
Use SEO to bolster your brand
Develop meaningful content at the enterprise level
Improve your link acquisition strategies
Who should read this chapter?
If you're an in-house or agency SEO that works for or with large businesses (think Fortune 1000), or large websites with thousands of pages (like travel and listings sites) this chapter is for you!
Ready to learn?
Level-up your enterprise SEO with this bonus chapter to the Professional’s Guide to SEO! Use the tips in this chapter as a guideline when you need to scale up your efforts, and be sure to check out the rest of the guide for more expert SEO advice.
Estimating the opportunities within your various SEO efforts is an important component of your analytics, not only to help determine where to focus your energy, but also to prove the potential value of your work to others. Building on the recent post about Aira’s new keyword estimation worksheet, in today’s episode, Robin walks you through a good strategy for this all-important estimative work.
Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!
Video Transcription
Good evening, good afternoon, and good morning wherever you happen to be in the world. My name is Robin Lord. I work for a digital marketing agency called Aira here in the UK. I'm going to be talking to you about estimating opportunities with different searches. Now, it's really important that we're able to estimate opportunity because it gives us a way to talk about how valuable our projects are to other people and it helps us to figure out where we should be focusing our energies.
So being able to know how much opportunity we might get in different places is pretty crucial. So we're going to start with the most basic way of approaching that, and then we're going to work our way up to a slightly more complex, slightly more nuanced approach.
Number of keywords you're targeting
But to begin with, the kinds of things that we have, when we start to estimate opportunity with different searches, are usually the number of keywords that we want to target, for example here's one "setting up a business," and the search volume that we have for those keywords.
So here in this case, "setting up a business" we think is searched about 6,500 times a month. So 6,500 times a month someone is searching for "setting up a business." Now, we're not going to assume that every single one of those is going to come straight to our website. We're not assuming that we could get 6,500 clicks straight to our website. We get an idea that probably most people are going to click position one, but some people are going to click position two, and some people are going to click position three and position four, and so on and so on.
So even if we were in the best possible position, we can't be everywhere. So we can't just assume we're going to get that 6,500 clicks through to our website.
Click-through rate curve
The way that we start to handle that is by using something called a click-through rate curve, which, if you haven't encountered it before, looks roughly like this. You can probably see why it's called a click-through rate curve.
Here we've got the curve. We've got all of our positions, 1 through 10 here at the bottom, and the side is how likely we think someone is to click through to our site. So the easiest way to kind of visualize it is in a graph. But what we usually have is in a table so that we can use something like a VLOOKUP. If we are saying position one, then we know that our click-through rate for that is probably going to be about 35%.
So we use that to estimate what we could get out of this search for position one. Likewise, if we're looking at like position eight, we might say our click-through rate for that is more like 5%. So if we're in position eight, that's kind of what we assume we're going to be able to get out of it. We use that in a formula kind of like this one. So we say the search volume, so how many how many times something is being searched here at the top, multiplied by the click-through rate is how many clicks we expect to get.
So in this case, 6,500 is our search volume. Thirty-five percent for position one gets us about 2,300 clicks a month or 27,000 clicks a year. You can see here I've hidden up here you can kind of mark it here at this line just to visualize it for you.
That's kind of what we're doing here. We're assuming position one will get us this kind of click-through rate, and that would result in about 27,000 clicks a year for this search term.
Factor in current rankings
Now, we could stop there, and some people would stop there, in terms of, okay, well, I'm going to assume I can get position one for every keyword and I'm just going to multiply it out to make sure that I'm not making wild predictions about how much traffic I might be able to get.
But that's the way I'm going to leave it. That can give you a slightly more accurate estimate, but it's not factoring in times when we might already be ranking a bit for a keyword. So say, for example, we are already ranking position eight for this specific search. Now we can see here, position eight is already getting some clicks.
So if we if we move up to position one, sure, we're going to get more than we're currently getting, but we're not going to get 27,000 clicks more than we're currently getting. We're going to get a bit more than we're currently getting. But we need to factor that in because there could be other searches, for example, that have smaller search volume, but we're not ranking at all. So the opportunity for us is bigger, because really what we want to focus on is how much more could we get than we're currently getting at the moment.
The math
So how could we handle that? Well, fortunately, the math around that is actually fairly simple. It's exactly the same sum as we've done here.
We just need to look at position eight, figure out what our click-through rate is for position eight, and then do that same sum to figure out how much we could get. Now in this case, 5% gives us 325 clicks a month, about 4,000 clicks a year.
So we're getting 4,000 clicks a year at the moment. We could get 27,000 clicks a year. So we just subtract what we're currently getting, and we say, okay, we've got an opportunity here of about 23,000 clicks a year. So that's starting to get us a bit more of a nuanced idea of what our opportunity is in different places, because we're not going to keep pouring energy into something we're currently doing kind of well for, and we can start to focus on the areas where there's kind of untapped growth there.
How about we push things a little bit further still? So we've got this understanding of of how much we could get if we got to position one. Say for this search position one is a government website, and position two is Amazon, and position three is Google. Now, Google, once it has a government website, once it decides a government website is quite relevant, doesn't really like to replace that because they tend to be very trustworthy and they tend to have pretty good information.
Also, it doesn't really like to replace Amazon by and large because Amazon tends to be a great result for a whole bunch of different things. Particularly it doesn't like to replace itself. So if we're starting to think about what we could get for this keyword and we're assuming we could get position one is 35% click-through rate, we might look at some of these results and think, well, actually I don't think I can get up here.
I think we should probably be looking a little bit further down. So maybe we look at something like position fifth or fourth. Say position four is a page about how to start a business. Position five is Wikipedia. Position six is someone offering to sell a service, so that you can buy a business setup.
Seven is 50% off a business setup. So again, offering to sell, but they've got that cheeky 50% discount that you can benefit from. So if we look at all of this, we might start to think, okay, well, I don't think I can reach position one, probably not position two, probably not position three. Actually, I think I probably don't want to assume I can replace Wikipedia here either in position five.
So the best position that I'm looking at here is actually position four. So I should go back to some of my click-through rate estimates. I should estimate based on position four, rather than position one, and then use that to get an idea of the total opportunity we could get for this keyword.
How to do this
Now, you could be wondering how you might do this. Actually, there's a bunch of tools that will give you the full top 20 export for a whole list of keywords. The first time I did this, I used the STAT top 20 export, and I just exported everything and I dumped it into a Google Sheet. So I ended up with all of my keywords and all of the top 20 results row after row after row after row on my sheet.
Then I used a formula, a pretty simple formula to just find any websites that we thought we wouldn't be able to beat. I used that to mark those rows any time we thought we wouldn't be able to beat, and then I just deleted those rows. So I ended up with each of my keywords I only had the ranking positions that we thought we were actually able to achieve.
So in this case, four, six, seven, and eight, which we are currently. Then I just found the highest position that we could get in that list for each keyword, and I used that with my click-through rate curve to try and estimate how much traffic we might be able to get. So this all really boiled down to like IF formulas and VLOOKUPs. So it's very accessible for anyone who wants to get involved in this kind of thing.
Get fancy with it
Now, we could leave it there. That would give us a pretty solid understanding of where we might be able to get, and it's far more nuanced than the picture that we might get at first blush. If you want to get a bit more fancy with it, there's other information that you could pull in to your analysis.
So say, for example, you're able to pull in the titles of all of the pages that are currently ranking. Say in position four, it's how to start a business, and position six, it's buy a business setup, and position seven, it's 50% off a business setup. Again, if we look at these, we could use some fairly simple formulas, even just in Google Sheets, to try to categorize these into different intents. So "how to" is fairly clearly an informational search, an informational result rather. So we're not trying to categorize the search.
We're trying to categorize the individual results. "Buy" is a fairly clear purchase search, and "50% off" again suggests that it's trying to sell us something. So if we start to look at these results, we can filter them down even more if we want to. So say, for example, we're working on a site and we know it has to be a product page. If we're going to target this term, we have to use a product page.
Well, we could do that same filtering process, except this time we're marking anything where the title is something like how to or top tips or instructions how to, or anything that seems like a blog post, and we remove them as well. So we say, actually, we couldn't get this either. This is the highest we could get with this product page.
If we do that across all of our keywords, we know that we have to use product pages. We're saying, okay, for this, we're position six. Well, say position six actually has a pretty low click-through rate. If we're looking at position six for this keyword, we're already at position eight. So maybe the opportunity that we've got for this keyword is actually pretty small, and we decide that we want to focus on other things.
So that's another quick way to filter all of our different opportunities by just removing the kind of results that we wouldn't want to compete with. Alternatively, if we don't already have an idea that it's got to be a product page, we could go through all of our searches and say we know that it's going to be position four is the best place that we could get.
We can use that same category, we can use that same categorization formula to say, well, position four looks like it's informational. So as we're identifying our opportunities, we can quite quickly say when we go to do a content brief for this, for example, this needs to be a blog post. It shouldn't be an update to a product page.
What's the goal?
Now, the aim for any of this isn't to make people's decisions for them. We're never going to just send this sheet, for example, off to someone and not have an SEO professional look at it. But it means that instead of spending lots of time having to reverse engineer, having to think really hard about all these different things and pull information into one place, we have a starting point for people to go from.
So when we have someone who's an expert at SEO looking at this, they've got all of the information in front of them to begin with. That's actually the approach that we tend to take in general in Aira. So when we do this kind of work, we actually tend to use a Python script, and that script pulls in all of the top 20 results. It also categorizes those search results, the individual results rather than the search term itself, based on whether they seem informational or transactional.
It finds that opportunity. It finds that highest place that we can currently get and subtracts where we're ranking at the moment. That means that we end up with a sheet where we can order things quite nicely based on highest opportunity to lowest opportunity and categorize them based on what kind of results they are.
We also pull in some other things like authority, which is one thing that you could also use to filter down your results if you're starting to dig into this. We also use the search results to see how similar different searches are as a way of clustering them. So those are some other things that you can dig into once you get familiar with these kinds of concepts and really start to accelerate. Now, you don't have to go that far.
You could do any step along this route and get a little closer to a nuanced understanding of what this search result can get you, and that's going to be a really positive advancement because the more that we can bring in this nuance, the more quickly we're able to identify these different things. All of these are decisions that you're going to be making anyway. You're already a smart SEO professional.
You're already going to know all this information. It's about speeding up your path to that answer. Anyway, thanks very much for listening to me. I really enjoyed chatting this through with you. I hope you've enjoyed it as well, and I'll look forward to hearing your thoughts. Thanks a lot.
Link research is an essential pillar of an SEO strategy, but competitive link research can help you get a leg up. It’s vital for websites to not only know about their own link profile, but to also have an effective strategy in place to stay relevant against competitors.
Hopefully at this point, you know who your competitors are, and hey, that’s half the battle. If you still aren’t sure, check out our Competitive Research tool in Moz Pro. This tool can help you find out exactly who your competitors are, the keywords they rank for and what their top performing content is.
If you would like to understand our Competitive Research tool more, and learn how it can be used to your advantage, feel free to book a Moz Pro Kick Off Call with a member of Moz’s Onboarding Team below.
So, why do we want to conduct "competitive link research"?
Learning how others are performing can help guide your own linking strategy, and you may discover tactics that you haven’t considered before.
There may be opportunities and gaps in your competitor’s link profile, which you can identify and slot yourself into.
You will know what types of content perform well, and from there can make your content 10x better than your competitors!
Your analysis will help you understand more about the audience you are trying to speak to.
A comprehensive backlink strategy can aid you in ranking higher on the SERP.
If you're seeking guidance on how to build an SEO competitive analysis framework, check out Moz Academy's SEO Competitive Analysis Certification. This coursework covers everything you need to know to confidently implement an effective strategy, and you'll earn your Moz Certification, which you can display on your LinkedIn profile!
In the following videos, the Moz team will show you workflows and other tips and tricks within the Moz Pro tool set that will help you with your competitive link research analysis.
Link Gap Analysis: Link Intersect
Link gap analysis is a popular tactic amongst SEOs. It involves comparing your own link profile to that of your competitors, and finding the gaps that exist. They could be getting backlinks from several websites that you aren’t receiving any from — this could be a golden opportunity — another way to compete with your top competitors.
In this video, Emilie will show you how to use Moz Pro’s Link Intersect tool to find out this information.
Discover Linking Domains with SERP Analysis
In the Moz Pro Keyword Research tool, there is a functionality where you can search a keyword, and the top ranking pages for that keyword will show. But, there is so much more to this function.
In this video, Varad will show you those ranking pages, as well as the domains that are linking to that particular page. Get ready to soar from there!
Use Page Optimization to Find Content Suggestions
Moz’s Page Optimization tool is primarily used to see what improvements may need to be made to a page, as well as keyword placement on a page. When you dive a bit deeper into this particular tool, you’ll find that Moz offers content suggestions to you, including URLs that are ranking for the keyword you first queried. Identifying these top ranking URLs is a great way to see what kind of content you should also be creating.
In this video, Rachel will show you what you can do with this new found information and how it can help your link research.
Find Backlinks to Competitor’s Broken Pages
Analyzing the backlinks on a competitor’s broken page is another tactic that SEOs are using, that you may not have been aware of. There are hidden opportunities within these broken pages that are just waiting to be discovered.
In this video, Arian will show you exactly how you can find those broken pages within Moz Pro’s Link Research tool.
Discovered & Lost Backlinks
Another gem within the Moz Pro Link Research tools is the ‘Discovered & Lost’ section. This section will show you all of the new backlinks that Moz has found linking to your competitor in the last 60 days, as well as backlinks that have been lost. This can be insightful information when working on your own backlink building.
In this video, Eoin shows you how you can use this functionality to up your Link Research game.
If you’d like to continue learning about Competitive Research, check out our previous Daily SEO Fix on Competitive Keyword Research for some great insights into a competitive keyword research strategy.
Other additional resources for learning continuation:
Whether speaking to senior management or just trying to figure out what direction our SEO strategy should take next, as SEOs we often find ourselves asking the same question: “but what could I get from this?”
Particularly when we’re prioritizing work across different keywords, it can be hard to know:
What rank we can expect to achieve (rather than just assuming position 1 for everything).
What we could get from that ranking in terms of traffic/conversions.
What that means in terms of additional traffic or revenue
It can really trip us up if any of our predictions are based on wild rankings we could never achieve, or if we accidentally include traffic we’re already getting anyway!
So, what’s the solution to solve all of that, and ensure we focus on getting the biggest bang for our buck? Introducing Aira’s Keyword Opportunity Estimation Tool.
What is Aira’s Keyword Opportunity Estimation Tool?
Built in Google Sheets, the focus of the tool is to:
Identify the highest probable ranking position for different keywords.
Estimate what that could achieve in terms of traffic, conversions, and revenue, etc.
Highlight the best opportunities so you can prioritize your efforts. This is done by subtracting current estimated traffic, conversions, and revenue from the estimations if you were to rank in the highest possible position.
The sheet takes a top-20 report from a rank tracking tool and:
Allows you to enter a list of domains you determine you are unable to outrank.
Removes any ranking positions for domains you’ve listed as those you are unable to outrank.
Allows you to toggle on/off a list of commonly hard-to-beat domains so you can quickly cut down the list.
Removes instances where you might be trying to compete with competitors on their own branded terms.
Automatically picks out where you’re ranking currently to see how much more traffic/conversions you might be able to get on a given keyword.
Here’s an example output:
Let’s dive into an example
Imagine you’re doing SEO for a new flight site. Let’s call it BrainAir.
You know that you can probably rank for quite a few “flights” terms, unless there’s a comparison site like expedia.com already ranking. So, you add expedia.com as a domain to remove and now the sheet will find the best possible ranking you could get for each keyword except for positions where Expedia is already appearing.
In the example below, skyscanner.net and expedia.co.uk are both listed as domains to remove. In this case, position 2 is the highest potential ranking position, as this sheet only removes the specific ranking positions for the domains listed. This means you can still get a better position if that is available.
When doing keyword analysis, you may also realize there are some terms in your list like “Easyjet iceland flights”. If you don’t think you could beat Easyjet for “Easyjet iceland flights”, you can tick a box and the sheet automatically ignores any time Easyjet is ranking for a search that includes the word “Easyjet”.
Why use this tool?
This sheet can be used to see:
How much more traffic you could get from an SEO project in general.
How much more traffic you could get from specific keywords.
Where you should prioritize your efforts first.
While no estimate is going to be bang on the money, many other approaches will likely wildly overestimate how much traffic you could get in total, as they usually assume a highest position of 1, which is not always attainable.
On top of that, other approaches tend to not look at current traffic estimates, so don’t factor in additional traffic, instead just focusing on total traffic. This leads to situations where you’re focusing primarily on keywords with the highest search volume, as opposed to focusing on the keywords capable of driving the highest amount of potential traffic to the site.
This can help with developing SEO strategies, such as:
Prioritizing new page creation/re-optimization based on potential traffic opportunity. For example, if this sheet highlights an opportunity to drive a significant level of additional traffic for specific keywords, you may decide to prioritize building out new landing pages, or re-optimizing your existing content to target those keywords more effectively.
Prioritizing technical fixes based on potential opportunity. For example, if a tool such as Little Warden highlights technical issues , then this sheet can help you see the highest potential rank for specific keywords, should those issues be fixed.
Seeing which competitors are having the biggest impact on ranking positions for specific keywords/keyword groups. For example, if you see that the same domain consistently appears as one you need to replace in the rankings, then it will be worth investing time looking at their strategies and approaches.
Import your top 20 report into the tab named [Input] Top 20 Ranking Report, pasting into cell A1. You should delete/override the existing dummy data. The top 20 ranking report can come from any rank tracking tool, for example STAT, Rank Ranger, Accuranker, Data For SEO, etc.
At this stage, the order of the columns does not matter.
Stage 2: Selecting which columns to include
Navigate to [Input] Column Selection.
Here you need to use the dropdowns to select which columns relate to:
The keyword column
The search volume column
The rank column
The URL column
The table on the right-hand side will automatically update as these different dropdowns are updated with the first six rows.
Please check if the data aligns with the correct columns (or the rest of the outputs are going to look really odd).
Stage 3: Defining which domains you’re unable to compete with
Navigate to [Input] Domain Selection.
The first step is to enter your domain. The example in this case is booking.com
Next, add the domains you feel you’re unable to compete with. These can either contain the protocol or subdomain, or not.
You can find your competing domains by using a tool such as Moz’s Free Domain SEO Analysis Tool. Alternatively you can go to [Output 4] Current Traffic/ SOV Per Domain, which displays all of the domains ordered by total estimated traffic and share of voice.
We would recommend revising this list once you have seen the results, to include any additional domains you hadn’t previously included.
On the right side of the page, you can choose to include pre-defined domains in the list. This includes standard, hard-to-beat domains such as Google and Amazon, or social media domains such as Facebook and Twitter.
Finally, you can decide whether you want to exclude domains that contain target keywords in the domain name. For example, if you don’t think you could beat Easyjet for “Easyjet flights”, tick this box and the sheet automatically ignores any time Easyjet is ranking for a search that includes the word “Easyjet”.
Stage 4: Entering CTR, conversion rates, and average order values
Navigate to [Input] CTR, Conv Rate and AOV.
This section is designed for you to enter an estimated CTR for each position, average conversion rate, and average order value (AOV).
You can access the CTR position data yourself by using Google Search Console. It would make sense to focus on non-branded keywords, as branded keywords would skew these figures.
Advanced Web Ranking also provides an average CTR for each position for different industries based on a sample of sites. This can be found by navigating to the categories tab on this page.
Note: If you leave this column blank, traffic estimates will use the Average Non Branded CTR from Advanced Web Rankings.
The Conversion rate and AOV data can be found using Google Analytics, though it’s worth noting that these figures will vary depending on the type of page. For example, a blog is likely to have a much lower conversion rate than a product page, so it’s worth bearing that in mind during your analysis.
Stage 5: Output 1 — Keyword Breakdown
Navigate to [Output 1] Keyword Breakdown.
Here you can see the top 20 report with just the four columns that were previously selected: Keyword, Search Volume, Rank, and Ranking URL.
There are a number of additional columns:
Domain: The domain of the ranking URL.
Can our site outrank this domain?: This column tells you whether you “Can Compete” or “Cannot Compete” with each of the domains for their ranking position, depending on whether they are included in the domain list in [Input] Domain Selection.
Is it our domain?: This signifies whether it is the domain you have inputted in the [Input] Domain Selection tab.
Highest Potential Ranking Position for your site?: This column shows whether the column is the highest potential ranking position for that keyword.
Domain Name Mentioned in the Keyword?: This column tells you whether the domain name is mentioned in the keyword.
Stage 6: Output 2 — Keyword Highest Rank
Navigate to [Output 2] Keyword Highest Rank.
Here you can see a summary for each keyword showing you the highest potential rank, estimated traffic, and conversions/revenue, as well as which domain/URL you could conceivably outrank.
There is also data related to your current rankings and potential increase in traffic, conversions, and revenue should you reach the highest potential ranking position.
These figures are based on your previous inputs, so go back and check what you have entered if you feel that any of the figures are noticeably different to what you would expect.
Stage 7: Output 3 — Keyword Highest Rank
Navigate to [Output 3] Keyword Opportunities.
This output provides the top-level summary focusing on the keyword, search volume, and which domain/URL you could seek to replace. The metrics in this output are focused on potential additional traffic, conversions, and revenue.
These figures are calculated by working out estimated current traffic, conversions and revenue based on current rank, search volume, conversion rate, and average order value and subtracting this from these figures should the domain rank in the highest potential position.
Stage 8: Output 4 — Predicted Traffic/SOV Per Domain
Navigate to [Output 4] Predicted Traffic/SOV Per Domain.
This output provides an overview of the total estimated traffic per domain from the top 20 report, which allows you to see which domains are driving the highest amount of traffic across your keywords.
There is also a Share of Voice column, which pulls in the share of voice for each of these domains. The calculation is total traffic per domain/total traffic across all domains.
On the right side of the page, your own domain's current estimated traffic will be pulled through, alongside Share of Voice.
You can then enter competitor domains into the boxes below, which will provide total estimated traffic and share of voice with a comparison to your own domain.
How does this Google Sheet work?
This tool is designed to allow you to import a top 20 rankings report for your priority keywords, select which domains you feel you aren’t able to outrank within your niche, and optionally enter in CTR figures by position, average conversion rate, and Average Order Value (AOV), if you have access to this data.
Then, in the [Output 3] Keyword Opportunities tab you'll get a list of the best potential rankings you could get for each keyword, ordered by total additional traffic and revenue you could get from on top of what you are currently getting.
In order to make all this magic happen there is a fair amount of Google Sheets spice happening in the background, so if you’re a Google Sheets enthusiast, you may enjoy taking a look under the hood to see how we’ve pulled it together.
The main formula used is the QUERY function in order to pull specific data from one sheet to another, which automatically updates based on the user's selection on the [Input] Column Selection tab. This logic is used in all the main outputs.
The domain selection uses REGEX in order to combine together a list of different domains which are used in the different outputs to determine whether a site can rank for a specific domain or not.
Whenever working with rows, we use ARRAYFORMULAs in order to ensure that the formulas are applied to the whole column.
In the example below, we are using the regex above in order to determine whether a domain can or cannot compete for different ranking positions.
The estimated traffic, conversions, and revenue positions take the inputs from the [Input] CTR, Conv Rate and AOV tab.In the example below, we are working out the estimated traffic by multiplying the highest potential rank (in column C), looking up the CTR for that position and then multiplying it by the Search Volume (in column B). The same logic applies to the conversions and revenue figures.
Working out the difference in potential vs. current position is done by subtracting the estimated traffic from the current estimated traffic. There is some additional logic in there to catch whether the current traffic is higher than the potential traffic (as we obviously wouldn’t want the potential rank to be lower than the current rank).
These are the fundamentals, but if you are interested further, do make a copy, unhide the hidden cells, and have a good look under the hood.
Final thoughts
Within SEO, it’s critical to focus on impact when delivering results.
When you have a list of keywords, it’s often tricky to know where you could potentially rank, what levels of traffic you can earn, and how this relates to conversions and revenue. Aira’s Keyword Opportunity Estimation Tool tries to answer these questions.
Please reach out on Twitter to let us know how you get on with it!
