Hello and welcome to SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello, welcome back to SEO's Not that Hard. It's me, ed Dawson, here, as usual, hosting, and today it's part 21 of our S-A-Z SaaS to SEO.

Now, the eagle-eared amongst you may have noticed that the last episode I introduced is part 21. That's because somewhere along the line between episodes 17 and 19, I'd missed 17. Now I didn't miss the content, I just jumped straight from 17 to 18 sorry, to 19, when I was um working out what number I was on. I've gone back and edited the actual page titles, but I've not. Sorry, podcast titles, but I've not gone back to edit the audio in them all because it's just too much faff to make such a small change. But this actually is part 21 and, yeah, let's get on with it.

So, starting with SAS or S-A-A-S software as a service, sas are services, usually web-based, that you can subscribe to, and they provide a service such as calendar management or keyword research, like keywords people use does image editing. Almost any kind of software can now be found as a sas, and the benefit of a sas over traditional locally installed software is that it's constantly updated. So repeat the you know the developers of sas are working on them all the time, improving them. You don't have to install or update any new versions as they're released and you can use it on any device you have access to, and initial setup costs are also lower than outright software purchase. So if you see people talking about sass or software as a service, that's what it is. So keywords people use is one, canva is one, calendly you know there's a huge bunch of sass platforms out there now that people use.

Next up, we've got Schema. Schema is structured data that is designed to be machine-readable and is used by Google to understand various types of content, such as product data, authors, all sorts. There's a huge number of different schema that you can use on your webpages if they are relevant to the content of your page, and if you go to schemaorg, there's all the types of schema available there and what you need to get them implemented and if you're using things like wordpress, there are schema plugins that can help you set up the right schema for your pages that you're using. Really, really useful. It helps google and your pages and can help with rankings quite a lot. Next we've got scraping, also known as web scraping. Now this is the process of using software to download and retrieve data from other websites at scale, so it keeps people usually use software to download pages from google and scrape people so ask data or to complete data, ranking data and all sorts of other information from the search engine result pages. Google themselves download and scrape data so they can build their index and search result pages. It's just the whole process of, at scale, automating downloading information and web pages and then interrogating that data. Scrapers often use proxy services when scraping to evade detection, like we have to with keywords people use because Google doesn't like being scraped, so we have to use proxy services to help us get around that so that Google doesn't see all the traffic coming from one particular source when we're doing that interrogation.

Next we've got search features. So search features are all the possible elements that can make up a Google search results page in addition to the basic search results. Now, google are frequently launching, trialing and discontinuing search features over time, but some examples of search features that you probably know about are people also ask related searches, featured snippets, local map pack, top stories and videos. You know anything that you see around there. They're all the search features. Next, we've got Search Generative Experience, or SGE. So Search Generative Experience SGE is a search feature introduced in 2023 by Google that provides answers to users' queries by using generative AI instead of directing them to third-party websites.

Now, there's been a lot of controversy over experience. Now there's been a lot of controversy over experience, especially around giving very stupid answers or suggesting people do slightly dangerous things like eating rocks, and it's actually been dialed back quite a lot and is now only appearing for a small number of searches. It seems like Google is trying to just keep on the AI bandwagon as much to keep, probably, investors happy, shareholders happy, without really considering whether it actually does provide the best experience for actual users, and the fact that they went really hard on it to start with and have now dialed it back quite a long way suggests to me that users aren't finding it as useful as Google themselves are saying that they are Now. It's not to say that we won't see more AI in the future in Google search results, but I think it's very early days and the search generative experience we've seen so far are quite poor. But we'll see. We'll watch this space.

Next we have search intent, sometimes abbreviated to just intent, and this covers what a user's trying to actually achieve when they're doing any kind of search, and search intent tends to get grouped into four different types of intent. So we have navigational intent. That is where people are searching just for a specific website or page or place. So it might be if they're searching for, say, amazon, they're looking for probably looking for the amazon website. If they search for amazon customer services, they're looking for the amazon customer services web page on the amazon website. Next we have then um informational intent, where people are looking to research a subject or just information with no commercial intention. So it might be someone who's looking at a historical event, say they're researching World War I. They're not looking to make any purchases, they're just looking for information about that topic. That's an informational intent.

Then we have commercial intent. That's where someone who's actually started on a buying path towards something maybe they're interested in, say, buying a lawnmower and they're looking at different types. So they want a petrol lawnmower or a electric corded or electric cordless lawnmower, looking for a robot lawnmower. They're looking for options on lawnmowers with a commercial, a purchasing intent in mind, but they haven't narrowed down a product. That's commercial intent. Then you get transactional intent, which is where people know what they want to buy and then they're just looking at where to buy it. You know where the best deal is, like that kind of thing. So these are all the different types of intents and they have different types of content that are relevant to go with them. So you need to think about the intent that someone has for a question or a keyword when deciding what kind of content to produce for it.

Next, we've got search volume, also known as keyword volume. So this is an estimate on how much search traffic there is for a particular keyword. Now, obviously, all keywords have an exact, definite amount of search volume every month, but only Google and the search engines know it. They don't tend to share that data in exact terms. There are services out there that will estimate this and they'll base it on certain metrics that they do have access to, but it's always going to be an estimate. This is why I've always if you listen to the podcast long enough you'll know that I'm not a massive fan of chasing search volume. It is important to think about. There's obviously different topics have greater search volume than others and if you are looking into making commercial decisions, thinking about search volume can have a purpose. But when it comes to actually chasing individual keywords purely based on volume, it doesn't mean that you're going to necessarily cover a topic in depth and cover it well and get that kind of topical authority that most people are looking for. So I tend not to see it as a real key metric compared to how some other people do.

Next, we've got semantic keywords and semantic SEO that kind of go together. So we'll talk about semantic SEO first, and this is really the concept of semantic SEO is to create content that's not just keyword phrase specific, but which also covers a topic with natural language and topical relevance. So the shift to the concept of semantic SEO came with the 2013 hummingbird Google update that allowed Google to now consider the context of related words on a page. So this means that Google can work with synonyms rather than relying on exact keyword matches when choosing which pages to rank for a query. So this is why you'll sometimes find Google surfacing pages that don't contain the exact phrase you're requesting, but which are really good synonyms for that phrase and might provide better results than if they just did it on a pure keyword matching. So this brings us to semantic keywords, which are those words and phrases that are related to each other by common concepts. So, for example, chillies and India are semantically related to curry, because chillies are a key ingredient of curry and India is the country people most associate with curry as a food. So when creating content, it's useful to try and find and include semantically related keywords, as it will help you increase the relevance to the target, target topic of your page. So the whole semantic SEO idea is thinking about topics on a semantic level, just not on the keyword level.

Okay, and finally, today we've got SEO, which is in here for completeness purposes. We know that SEO stands for search engineization as a Process or Search Engine Optimizer as a Role. So SEO is a process, but it's also a role, and obviously at the aim of SEO, as we all know and all want to know, is to increase the visibility of websites and pages in Google search engine result pages and other search engines, but really we all know that Google's the main game in town when it comes to search traffic, at least in most countries, especially on the western side of the world. So yeah, seo, there we go. So that's everything for today.

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