SEO Is Not That Hard

New Search Console Integration Features

Edd Dawson Season 1 Episode 179

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What if you could streamline your SEO efforts and unlock more precise insights into your site's performance with just a few clicks? Join me, Ed Dawson, as I explore the groundbreaking features in our latest Search Console integration at Keywords People Use. Discover how the new "watch" feature, visualization tools, and similarity score can transform your SEO strategies. With the simple addition of a heart icon, prioritize the queries and pages that matter most, while the powerful visualization tools provide you with a crystal-clear view of performance trends over time. The innovative similarity score uses advanced embeddings to evaluate the relevance between queries and corresponding pages with unprecedented precision.

In the second part of our podcast episode, we dive into the transformative potential of embeddings for content relevance and optimization. Beyond mere keyword frequency, these advanced tools align page content with user intent, revealing unique opportunities for enhancing existing content. Explore how this approach shifts "Keywords People Use" from a basic keyword research tool to a comprehensive platform for ongoing content optimization and monitoring. By capitalizing on existing pages that Google already trusts, you'll create a cycle of continuous improvement and traffic growth. I'm thrilled to share these tools that have the potential to revolutionize your SEO practices. Tune in to hear how they can elevate your SEO game to new heights.

SEO Is Not That Hard is hosted by Edd Dawson and brought to you by KeywordsPeopleUse.com

You can get your free copy of my 101 Quick SEO Tips at: https://seotips.edddawson.com/101-quick-seo-tips

To get a personal no-obligation demo of how KeywordsPeopleUse could help you boost your SEO then book an appointment with me now

See Edd's personal site at edddawson.com

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"Werq" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Speaker 1:

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 the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Hello, welcome back to SEO is not that hard. It's me here, ed Dawson, hosting, as usual, and today I'm going to just cover some new features that we've put into our new Search Console integration feature that you've heard me talking about over the past couple of weeks. Now, obviously, when I did say, when we launched this, that this was the first iteration was going to be quite basic in terms of the plans we got for it, and we've been using this tool ourself to improve the visibility of our own sites, which people use itself, and you know, as we're going through and using it, we're learning where you know the things we could do better, little features that we think, oh, actually we need that ourselves. We've also been getting feedback from actual some of you people out there who've been using it as well, and we've been integrating that into the actual tool itself. These have been rolling out over the past couple of weeks.

Speaker 1:

I thought it was worth now doing a quick episode just to cover some of the the new things we've put in there and explain how they work for you. So first thing that we've put in is a watch feature. Um, so this is obviously because, as you're going through, I mean, like I say, for example, we've got I'm looking at a site here at the moment that's got, you know, just for one single page, 6735 queries. Now, obviously, when we're I'm looking at that and we're improving this page, you know we're not going to optimize for every single one of those queries. We are going to be picking and choosing the queries based on, you know, the relevance and you know sort of the traffic levels, the impression level and how you know what the current query position is. We're going to sort of look at the ones we want to improve on first.

Speaker 1:

So this watch feature allows us to just, you know, individual queries, again with individual pages as ones that we want to watch. Um, we do it at the query level. We can watch pages, so we can sort of watch these particular pages and all it means is that you know, when we've got, uh, we come to look at this, we can just say, right, I only want to look at um pages and queries that I'm watching. So it just cuts down the noise, um, just by, you know, having that filter at the top of the page. So, instead of DZ, if you want to watch a query, watch or watch a page, there's a little heart icon on every row. You just have to click the heart icon for the ones you want to watch. If you want to stop watching it, just click the heart icon against one and that watch will go off. So it's just a simple way of narrowing down and being able to quickly see the queries and pages that you're concentrating on at the moment. And yeah, that has actually saved loads of time when we're just coming along to try and say, right, let's look at those ones that we're working on and we just want to remove all the noise. So it's really really useful. Simple but useful.

Speaker 1:

The second thing we've done is some visualization around how different queries are performing for a page. Now, this is something you know in the back end, you know, once you integrate your site with keywords people use, once you sort of connect your search console data to keywords people used, we'll start automatically tracking loads of different data points. And that's that's been baked in at the start. But obviously, as I said, we were bare bones to start with and there was not a lot of ways of visualizing that. So we're now starting to add in visualizations so that you can see how performance has changed. So obviously, if you say, taken a query on a page that maybe you haven't mentioned it but you're ranking on, say, page two for it and you have now added that content or some content around that query to your page, you can now obviously easily come back and see how the performance of that page, the performance of that query on that page, has started to change over time. So we've now got like a little graph icon that's next to every query for a page and you can click that and it will show you a position over time, so where your average position on the google search results that google is reporting via search console and you can see that over time and you can see how that changes for the positive or the negative over time. So it means it's a quick, easy way of visualizing how well the changes you've made are performing. We're looking at also doing that page level so we can see individual pages, so as pages increase, the number of queries that they're ranking for over time and the number of impressions they're ranking for over time. And the number of impressions I'm ranking for over time and also kind of at a site level, so that we get it's easy for you to be able to quickly visualize and track performance over time to see how well the changes you are making are performing, because that's a real key one we're putting in at the moment as well. So we've got it down at the query level at the moment. That's the first thing.

Speaker 1:

The third and final thing I'm going to talk about today that we've added is the similarity score that we now give for every page and query combination. So for every query for a page, we'll be able to say there's a similarity score between that query and the page. Now this is based on embeddings. I did a whole podcast about what embeddings are just a few days ago, so to get the full detail on what an embedding is, go. And embeddings are used by the search engines and by chats between all the large language models as a way of comparing content.

Speaker 1:

So this is a way for the tool to understand the overall meaning and context of both a web page and a potential search query. So once we've got these understandings, we can then compare the two and give a similarity score. So this score tells us how closely the content on a page aligns with what a user might be looking for. So in practical terms, so if someone's searching for, say, best budget travel tips for europe and you have a page about affordable ways to explore europe, our tool will check how closely your contents in matches this query. So the higher the similarity score, the better match it's likely to be. And the scores go between zero and one. So I mean it's almost impossible to get a score of one. So basically, the higher the number between zero and one, the more closely matched your content is to a query. So this helps you see where your content's hitting the mark or where you know it might need adjustments to attract the right search traffic. And this is very different to all the other content optimization tools you might have ever heard of.

Speaker 1:

So things like Surfer SEO, which will do things like they'll crawl the top 10 results and they'll average the number of words on a page and how many headings they've got and how many H4s, h3s and things like that, and they'll try and say they've got and how many h4s, h3s and things like that, and that they'll try and say you've got to improve based against the competition, in ways like that, which you know is useful to a point, but it's not really the way that google works and the other large language models work and ai works. It doesn't. They don't work on that kind of thing. They work on this embedding model, where they they are looking at scoring content based on these relevancy models and then comparing the relevancy of queries to and the relevancy of the content on the page. You know, because that's just the way they work now, that that is the evolution of the search engine model, so so using this embedding way is taking a step further, because we actually understand the meaning behind your content and a user's potential search query. So this is moving beyond just copying what's on page one of Google and focusing on actual relevance in a more human, intuitive way, instead of just saying here's what ranks, so match it.

Speaker 1:

Our integration using embeddings is to assess how closely your page content aligns with what a user might be looking for, and this way it goes beyond content structure or specific keyword frequency to really judge if your content's a genuinely a good match for the query's intent. So in a practical sense, it's like finding someone who really gets your question and offers the best answer, even if it looks very different from what's already out there. And you know this is a superior approach because it helps you identify unique opportunities where your content could satisfy a search in ways that existing content doesn't, rather than just mimicking the status quo. You know, if you go back to concepts like information gain, you're never going to get information gains by being the average of the top 10 results already. You've got to add something new, and the only way to score that information gain is using things like embedding. So that's why we've now got this in there the similarity score and you know this is early days on this you know we will be improving this and hopefully being able to do so much more. Now we've got this embeddings worked in there and as you change the content on the page you know we will we recrawl it. We update those embeddings so you can and you can force a recrawl. So if you've made some changes to content. You can then, um, you know, hit refresh on the tool on the page. We'll go back, we'll get the new content and then we'll recalculate that similarity score, uh, with those embeddings, to see if we think it's improved, how you're going to improve your relevance for that query, which is a really key thing. So, yeah, this is something really really unique. I've not seen anyone else doing this and we think this is going to be a big thing going forward. So there's going to be a lot around this space. So keep an eye on this, and I don't know about you, but I find this really exciting.

Speaker 1:

As I said I think you've mentioned in previous podcasts you know, our aim and my aim for keywords people use is not just to be a keyword research tool. We're not just a keyword research tool. Keyword research is part of what it does and that's how we started, because we couldn't do everything at once. The overall vision here is to have something that takes you from beginning to end and then you can repeat a cycle of of improving your content. So we help you find keywords, but then in second, after you've built your content, we then help you optimize that content and then we monitor that content and then we help you optimize it again and again and again, because the easiest way to get more traffic is optimizing existing content.

Speaker 1:

New content yep, it's great. But obviously once Google trusts the page, trusts the content on the page. To expand that page, to tweak that page, to improve that page is some of the easiest ways of bringing on new traffic and new audience, as compared to just creating new content all the time. This is where a lot of people go wrong. They just create tons and tons and tons of new content, whereas a lot of the gain can be made in improving existing content, and having a tool like this is kind of like the howdy-go-rell that I wish I'd had 20 years ago to help scientifically, mathematically, help you work out how to improve that content, where to improve that content?

Speaker 1:

By using data. We've got that data now from Google Search Console. We've got that content by crawling the pages on your site and matching the content of your pages to the queries that you're receiving and seeing where you're. You can then improve on that content to make it more relevant to those careers that you're starting to rank for but not generating traffic for, and this flywheel effect is what we're trying to build on. So, yeah, we're getting closer and closer all the time. We're we're improving all the time and you know this is. You know there's so much more that we're going to do, we want to do and, yeah, it's looking good and it's fantastic.

Speaker 1:

Um, so many people have already been using it. If you do want to use it, you know what to do. You know where it is keywords people use. So, okay, I'm sorry this if this episode's been a bit all about keywords people use, but this is really important stuff. This is. This is stuff that you know we've. You know I've been wanting to get built for so many years, um, because I know it can help so many people and it's already helping us with our sites. It's already helping other people. You know the early adopters on it and you know it's something that helps anybody. It's worth. You know this is something so much value in this. It's unbelievable and I'm so excited. So, anyway, until next time.

Speaker 1:

Thanks for listening. I hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you next time. Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools at Keywords People Use that you can book a free, no obligation, one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up Once again. That's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon. Thanks for being a listener. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps.

Speaker 1:

Seo is Not that Hard is brought to you by keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organize the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at keywordspeopleusecom to get an instant hit of more SEO tips. Then find the link to download a free copy of my 101 quick SEO tips in the show notes of today's episode. If If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at channel5 on Twitter. You can email me at podcast at keywords people usecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.

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