Speaker 1: 0:54

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform, keywordfugleusercom, 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. It's me here at Dawson hosting, as usual, and today I'm going to be talking about some new features, some new functionality that we've got on keywords people use. Now, it's not going to be all about that, because obviously I'm going to talk about some things here that you could use other ways of doing it, but we've just got a really great way of doing it and I thought people might be interested in hearing about it, and this is all about search analytics and content optimization. So what do I mean about that? Why? Two things, okay. Well, search analytics is basically taking data from your Google Search Console and displaying it in a way that is easy to understand, easy to absorb, easy to get insights out of, and that's just purely using Google Search Console data. So that's our search analytics side. The other side is content optimization. That's where we take data from your actual website and look to find you content optimization opportunities. Okay, so, with those two differences defined, let's talk about, you know, the things that I sort of want to announce today. So back in the end of 2024, end of last year, we launched the content optimizer tool for our standard and standard plan and higher plan users on keywords people use and what that content optimization tool did. What it still does is it will allow you to connect your google search console to keywords people use. We can then download a lot of data from search console and then we will also find the pages that are ranking from the search console data. We'll then go to those pages, crawl them, download the content from those pages and then look for opportunities for improving that content based on the analytics data we've got at Google Search Console. So this will be things like looking for pages where you're ranking for a query but you're not mentioning that query on page and that might give you opportunities then to update your content, sort of be add that extra, add those mentions, add those queries in a relevant context so it should be relevant context then improve your visibility for that keyword, and we've seen it work. We've seen people use this.

Speaker 1: 3:33

Now, that version that we produced back then was a our very first version, and we've seen people use this. Now, that version that we produced back then was our very first version and we made some compromises when we built it, just so we could get something built so that we could get it out to people to see how they reacted to it. One of those compromises was we couldn't go back more than 28 days for that data and we were storing lots of data locally, which was a constraint on how far back we could then show historical analytical data. And the interface, while functional, while it worked, it wasn't super speedy, wasn't? It wasn't super speedy? Um, it wasn't, um, you know as well, built for filtering down to different kind of pages, different queries um, you know, filtering out country data, that kind of thing it was. It was. You know it was just our first version. Like many products are, your first version is never going to be your best version. You're trying to get something that's that, that's functionally works, that you can test with people. We had some really great feedback from people using it and I know people on those plans are using it and our and are, you know, gaining benefits from it. So, based on the feedback from those first initial users and the things that we could see ourselves that weren't working particularly as great as we would want to, we have embarked on creating version 2.

Speaker 1: 4:48

Now, with version 2, we've got a much more intuitive interface to actually work with the data that comes from Search Console in a way that actually is much better than just Search Console's data. And also, obviously, the key thing with all these things is in Search Console Google Search Console, the free tool from Google you're limited to 1,000 rows of data. It doesn you. You know query, query, level data and page of data. It only gives you a thousand rows, doesn't give you all your data, whereas go through the api, which our tool does, we can get much more, much more rows of data things up to 50 000 rows of data, more, you know, more than enough for most sites, right?

Speaker 1: 5:28

So, going and look at it, you know some of the things we fixed are, you know the dashboard, the initial dashboard. When you go there will show you all your google search console properties and we'll pull down analytic data for them straight away. So this is free data that's come from google. So you know we'll do this for every single site and you get a nice beautiful dashboard with a graph for all of your properties and you can go back up to the full 16 months and we can show you all the click-through data, the visibility data, the click-through rate and the positioning data for all of your sites in one overall quick glance, which is really really fantastic and that's just like a by-product of, obviously, you know we've got this data for free. We can show you for free within the tool.

Speaker 1: 6:11

We don't have to charge anything for that on top of your initial, your usual plan, obviously, and then when we go, you can then dive into any one of your properties and you will see data going back um that for up to full 16 months, if you want, and you can then easily see the top queries, top pages, top countries, top devices and each one of them. You can then easily see the top queries, top pages, top countries, top devices and each one of them. You can expand out to see more, to see the full data. You can click and easily filter. So if I want to just see data from the United Kingdom, I can just click the country United Kingdom in the interface and it instantly redraws the interface and shows me only query data and page data and device data from that country. And then I can easily just go into a particular page and from that page it will then just show me the queries from that page.

Speaker 1: 7:01

And with all this, we can obviously sort by click data, impression, search, click through, rate and it will show me all the information in a graph at the top for every single one of these and we can also overlay data from what Google updates happened during that period. This is all for free. Within a standard plan and higher Light plans you get this, but limited to sites with only up to 1,000 clicks in a month. If you've got sites more than that, you need to upgrade to a standard plan to get this. But this is just like a huge amount of data we can now show you the search analytics data. Just in itself is really really, really useful.

Speaker 1: 7:36

And the incredible thing with all this on the search analytics is we don't actually, you know, ever have to download and store any of your data. We don't store it locally, it's not on our servers, it only displays to you, only you see it. We displays to you. Only you see it, we have no idea what's in there, um, so you know your, your privacy is really um, completely assured with that one um and yeah, it's incredibly fast, you know, um compared to the previous version and this is just so fast and we're really, really pleased with it.

Speaker 1: 8:02

Now, the thing that's obviously we've got we built this not initially to provide anyone with search analytics. It's just that we realized that we were building this interface to work with the content optimizer that if we just remove the content optimizer part from it, we could provide for free. Now, with all these sites, you can add the content optimizer on top of it, okay, and you can enable it for any one of your sites. Now you get a number of free slots depending on your plan. If you're a standard plan, you get one free slot, a pro plan gets three free slots and an unlimited plan gets five free slots. You can buy additional slots. If you're on a standard plan and you want a free slot but you want to add another site on, you can pay just an extra $10 a month and you can add an extra one on. So you don't have to upgrade to a pro plan if you want to get one or two more, but there'll come a certain point where it might be cheaper to have a pro plan than doing it. But anyway, that's how that works.

Speaker 1: 8:57

But what this content optimizer does is it then allows us to do as the original content optimizer we launched last year does, which is go and crawl your content and then compare crawled content with the queries that you're ranking for you've got visibility for, and find that mention data, check whether you're mentioning those, those queries on on page, check the cosine similarity and even better now, the old version did this. We didn't really publicize it very much, but what we also have is the ability to see content changes. So we store a history of all the content changes of every page on your site. So this means that you can make a content change to a page and then you can come back and monitor how those changes have affected your rankings over time. We'll display it in the graph every time there's been a content change. You can see where the content change has been made and if you click on that, that date that the content change was made will actually show you the before and after versions of the content, so you can actually see which content has changed. So you can therefore go make some content change on your site, then leave it for a while for google to index it and then see how that affects your visibility and rankings and you can then track whether your rankings are going up or improving, going down or staying flat. You can see what effects been made from that and it means that if you say you change some content, it doesn't work out great for you. You can actually go back and see what content changes you made so you can revert them back to the original if you want to do. It's all there stored for you and that's a really, really powerful feature to be able to track your changes of content every time and what that does to visibility and ranking. So we're really really, really, really pleased with that.

Speaker 1: 10:33

Now, if you want to try this out, obviously if you're on a light plan already you can see this for every site already. You can go to your search analytics. You cannot add content optimizer on the light plan. You have to be standard planner above. So if you're on Lite plan you want to do the content optimizer, you will have to upgrade, but it's not going to be a huge amount extra per month for you to do that and the additional functionality is so powerful it's really worth that just cost of upgrade. But you can use the search analytics on Lite up to site for any site, up to 1,000 clicks a month On the standard plan. Yeah, it's all there, standard above. So standard, pro and unlimited. It's all there for you, all ready to go. You can try this out.

Speaker 1: 11:11

Many of you who are using the original content optimizer that's still there, the original version. We've kept it up so that if you're used to using that. But I do suggest you know, go and try the new search analytics and the Content Optimizer within it, because you'll be blown away with how much easier it is to use, faster to use and goes back much further within your data. If you are not a QSP Produce customer and you're interested in trying this, if you go to com slash content dash optimization dash tool and I'll put that link in the show notes there is a free trial button there. You'll just scroll down, look at the page um and click the start free trial button, you can get a seven day free trial of our standard plan um, which means you can try this out for no cost. It will ask you for a credit card detail when you sign up in stripe, but if you cancel within the first seven days, you'll never be charged anything. You're not charged anything when you give the credit credit, does it's only if you keep the account for over seven days. You'll then get charged. So you can try it risk-free.

Speaker 1: 12:12

And, yeah, it's, we're really amazed with it. We'd love to hear any feedback. Please do get into any feedback on it. There's loads more we want to do with it. I'm sure it'll be improved over time, um, but we're really really keen to see here, see and hear people's feedback in the first instance, so we can see where we go next. So, yeah, I hope you found that interesting, even if you're not interested in these actual tools.

Speaker 1: 12:33

I've talked about Google Search Console before. It is such a fantastic resource of information that Google give you. But the big problem is 1,000 rows and it gives you 1,000 rows of data, and if you've got a site of any size, you're going to want to be able to get access to those additional data, and a tool like ours can give you that additional data at a very low cost. So, yeah, really really do suggest you try it. So yeah, that's all I'm going to say today. So until next time, 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.

Speaker 1: 13:08

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.

Speaker 1: 13:30

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 keywords people usecom, where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people are asking online. Post 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 and continually refine your content. Targeted, personalized advice to 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.