Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform, keywordfupoleasercom, where we help you discover the questions people ask online and learn how to optimize your content for traffic and authority. I've been in SEO and online marketing for over 20 years and I'm here to share the wealth of knowledge, hints and tips I've amassed over that time. Hello and welcome back to SEO is not that hard. I'm your host, as usual, ed Dawson, and today I'm going to talk about how I'm optimizing content on my own sites using keywords people use. Obviously, full disclosure keywords people use is my tool. It's a tool that my team has developed based on the philosophies and ways of working that I've always used during seo over the past sort of 20 odd years, and we're trying to automate and create a system that people can use and you know, some bits of you might only use you have to use it all but we've just done some really cool stuff. You've, if you listen to podcasts, you've heard we talk about it a lot, and that's our content optimization tool, which now plugs you in into qsgp use, into your google search console data, meaning that we can then download data about your site, download the content of your site, crawl the pages and then look at where you have content opportunities for queries that okay, as people are using your way, getting impressions for, but you're not ranking high enough to get any actual clicks. Or where you know you might be getting a few clicks, but you know a little bit of work you could be. You could soon be getting a lot more clicks. Now, as we do this, we're using ourselves as guinea pigs. Okay, we're not just writing a tool in isolation. You're actually using our own sites, like I have a number number of sites.

As I say, I've been an affiliate. If you know enough about me, if you've listened to me, I've been an affiliate for well over 20 years, run many affiliate sites, sold some affiliate sites, and I still do have a number of affiliate sites, and these are all content sites. Okay, this is the kind of site I've always built in the past, which is a content site monetized by affiliate marketing, and obviously you know these sites really important to me that a they're useful. We're not trying to do cookie cutter type content. We're not trying to do tips and hints, tricks. You know hacks to do this.

This is I've always built sites for the long term and I've been using the new um integration where we've dragged in that google search console data for for a number of my sites and the one in particular I've been using the new integration where we've dragged in that Google Search Console data for a number of my sites, and the one in particular I've been looking at is one that I've been running for about eight years and it's in the mobile phone sector. I don't mind sharing your sector information because you know it's well known that mobile phones, like broadband and lots of other telecoms and people's utilities, is a very lucrative areas for affiliates and there's plenty of people working in that space already. I'm not going to share the actual domain name because you know I don't want other people in those areas looking at exactly what we're doing and the kind of things we're doing, because you know if they want to find out who we are, they can do the work themselves, okay, so, and I'm also not going to share exactly the keywords we've been working on because, again, I don't want to be doing people's work for them. Okay, they can come and find them if they want to, but, um, the page that I've looked to optimize, the one I'm going to talk about now is one that is a very solid landing page on the site. It's been there for several years now at least three years and it is driven a solid kind of 1500 visitors per week to this site. So it's one that drives good volume, has good impression levels.

So when I went to our content optimization tool and connected in this site um to the google search console so we could draw down that data, it was one of the one of the one of the wasn't the best performing page on site in terms of traffic and impressions. It's probably around about hey to 20th best performing page, but it was one which looked like there was an opportunity because it was getting a lot more impressions than it was getting clicks. So the ratio of impressions to clicks was quite high. So I thought, right, let's dive into this now. In our content optimization tool you can look at just the queries or you can look at pages and the queries that those pages are ranking for. So now I went into the pages section of the site and looked up this particular page and then what this information list gave me was then all the queries that this page is ranking for over the time period of the data that we've pulled down and it'll tell me whether that query that we're ranking for is being mentioned on the page and, if it's being mentioned on the page, how many times you mentioned it on the page.

It will then tell me the similarity between the query and the content of that page, because the tool itself downloads a copy of the content from the page and then turns it into an embedding. That'll be using that machine learning to give us a vector, a numerical vector that represents the content on the page. We do the same thing with a query. We turn it into a vector, into an embedding, and then to a vector that shows us, gives us that mathematical score for that query content. And then we can compare the two using cosine similarity. This is an angle difference between the two and the. We can compare the two using Kerson similarity. That uses an angle difference between the two, and the closer in similarity they are, the more relevant the content of the page is to that query. So we can use that. So a similarity score close to one means this query is really quite similar to the content on the page and they're very closely related.

Also, look at the impression data. Obviously I'm going to be keener to put my efforts into optimizing those queries which you've got a higher impression, high number of impressions, because you get more bang for your buck when you get it to work and also look at the position, the page position, that this, this query, is currently at. Is it one that's that's close to ranking well? You know the difference between one that's ranking position 84 to one that's close to ranking well. The difference between one that's ranking position 84 to one that's ranking 12.3, say, for example, is I'm going to look at the one which ranks 12.3 on average more closely than I am the one that's on position 84, because I've only got to move it. And then I'm going to look at the clicks and the click-through rate and this is where probably the ones that are less important. It's really to me, the most important thing is the impressions and the page position and then the similarity and whether we've got any mentions.

And what I did was I went through and picked out at the top this page had. I think I'm just looking at it now. It's got 1,499 queries it's ranked for, it's shown impressions for in the past 28 days, and I'm looking through and looking for those ones which are ranking with a high number of impressions. So, for example, I've got a query here where it's got zero mentions on page. We've got 1,200 impressions and 184 clicks. Yeah, that's right, 184 clicks. So this is one where I'm thinking, actually, if I now go and edit the content on this page and add that query in, there's a fair chance that I'm going to raise the ranking of that slightly, just slightly enough that it will pop me up slightly higher in the search rankings.

And this is what I did. I I went through, found a whole bunch and I want to say a whole bunch. I think I concentrated on about five or six, uh, so not going nuts and I went to the page and added to the bottom of this page an faq section, because I just felt I could get these queries into an faq section on this page probably more easily than I couldn't any other place on the page, and I added in a this FAQ section, not a huge amount of content, probably. Let's have a look. I can tell you exactly if I can look at the actual page. Yeah, I put a very small FAQ section with just two, two questions in it and then the answer and probably about 50, 60 words in total amongst all those which just made sure that I got those five, six keywords that I was looking to boost into those. Then I left it.

I did actually go to Google Search Console and request an exit to the page. It probably would have indexed it and crawled it within the same day anyway, because it's a reasonably high traffic site when the pages are probably being checked out multiple times a day by Google. Anyway for this one and left it. And it did not take long for me to come back because obviously with our Search Console tool, our integration, we recrawl the data every day, pick, we go up the latest data from google every day from the search consult and we also will recrawl pages on a daily basis. You can force a recall as well if you want to immediately do a recrawl so you can see checks that you've got those keywords and those queries mentioned in your new content.

And we saw the queries starting to rank slightly higher, slightly higher and slightly higher. Within less than two weeks we'd gone from ranking for these queries on page two to ranking on page one. And we did look at the traffic at the time and I think across those five keywords five, six keywords. We saw at least a doubling in the traffic just on those keywords. But the interesting thing was that this page, where previously I'd been ranking number two for a very good head term which was probably driving a good section of the traffic let's have a look. I can look at the head term actually in the console, actually in the console. Yeah, so driving around about 15% of the clicks for this head term, and it's normally ranking position two, position three. All of a sudden there we're ranking number one.

So just because I improved this content further down the page and had picked up these sort of slightly longer tail queries around that topic area, it actually pushed the head term up as well and it starts to drag more countments up. And this goes back to what I've always said, that if you answer the longer tail stuff, it will start to boost your short head terms in time as well. And this page obviously is one that's quite established and it really took very little to to boost it across those those five, six ones I was trying to do, but it also lifted it across a whole load of others as well. And within less than a month I mean literally within two weeks or so of this content. Going on, we'd upped the number of clicks this page was getting analytics, from what I said around about 1,500 to 700 odd a month sorry, a week to now being 1,900 to 200 per week. You know, this is a good sort of 15% to 20% boost in traffic because we'd gone in, had looked at the queries where we were almost ranking well, but we weren't mentioning them, added that little bit of extra content, let Google do its stuff, let it recrawl it, and then, just you know, exactly, within just a couple of weeks, we boosted our traffic on this page by, you know, a good 10 to 15% plus and that turns into revenue.

I can see from our sales figures that traffic that comes from this page that we send off to mobile suppliers is turning into more sales. We're getting more sales from this page. We've given ourselves that boost, so it's already paying for itself. Okay, I get to use this tool for free because we built it, but if I was a customer and I was paying $39 a month, whatever, for this one site, then I would easily be repaying that now. So that value is there, and even the fact that you know that I have paid for all this because we spent a lot of money and I'm developing this tool.

It's pleasing for me to see that this is providing a return on investment onto one of my sites already and we're going to go through, we're going to do more pages on this site and other sites and having this ability to look at the content of the page, look at the stats of where traffic's coming from, merging the two together and being able to make those decisions on what's the most effective content to change, what's the most effective course to target, and I say, take very little amount of content to actually move the needle on a lot of these. And yeah, this is just an example of it in action. So I just wanted to share how you know we're really pumped in-house that this is working. You know, because that's always a key thing we want to be able to prove to ourselves that anything we recommend actually works okay, and to have this here doing this and working for us and we're using our keywords people use as well and across a whole bunch of sites. I just wanted to share this and say it's really worth trying.

If you haven't tried it, if you've got a standard account on keywords people use and you haven't tried it, do try it. If you haven't got a standard account and you want to try it, you've probably heard an advert at the start of this podcast where I'm saying if you want to try this and we can give you a seven-day free trial, we can demo you how to hook your site up and I can run you through a whole bunch of ways in which you can find the content that needs optimizing. And if it doesn't provide that value, we have our money-back guarantee, happy to give anyone the money-back who tries this and thinks it doesn't work. So just wanted to share how it's I mean just one single example for us and how it's boosted our traffic on that one page across five keywords that we've concentrated on, how it's affected that whole page positively and yeah, so people can hear about it. So, yeah, that's it for today, really, and, as usual, until next time. Remember, keep optimizing, stay curious and remember SEO is not that hard when you understand the basics. Thanks for listening. It means a lot to me.

This is where I get to remind you where you can connect with me and my SEO tools and services. You can find links to all the links I mentioned here in the show notes. Just remember, with all these places where I use my name, the Ed is spelled with two Ds. You can find me on LinkedIn and Blue Sky Just search for Ed Dawson on both. You can record a voice question to get answered on the podcast the link is in the show notes.

You can try our SEO intelligence platform, keywords People Use at keywordspeopleusecom, where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people are asking online. Poster those questions and keywords into related groups so you know what content you need to build topical authority and finally, connect your google search console account for your sites so we can crawl and understand your actual content, find what keywords you rank for and then help you optimize continually. Refine your content, targeted, personalize advice, keep your traffic growing. If you're interested in learning more about me personally or looking for dedicated consulting advice, then visit wwweddawsoncom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is Not that Hard.