#which of these tags is for discovery and which are for my blog's categorization is left as an exercise for the reader

[myconetted]

pov: it's 2am and bugso is going APESHIT with a sudden, all-encompassing hunger for tissues.

he will stop at nothing. he will climb on top of you and on your nightstand and knock over anything in his path to reach that treasure chest full of delicious, bleached kleenex. he will put his little paws in the slit to drag out its precious fluffy entrails so he can rip and tear it to shreds, purring like a fucking geiger counter in between the wet smacking sounds as he tries to swallow it despite the way it's plastered to the roof of his mouth.

what do you do.

[tandytoaster]

This is me complaining about anti science bs

Pluto, our beloved dwarf planet, society does you so dirty. They protest on the street to deny you of your newfound identity, they refuse to refer to you as your new label, they simply do not care about the scientific advancements that have come since your reclassification, and they do not care about how you truly feel about it. That is, the feelings you do not have. Seeing as you are a rock.

People are stubborn, we know this. I think a lot of people get all pissy about Pluto's reclassification because it's a fairly big change in categorization, and it also challenges what was previously thought of as the truth. People don't like having their belief systems challenged or changed. A lot of people, I find, decide something early on, and that's the way they think things should be, which is an unhealthy and frustrating way to live your life. Because we're always getting new information, there's always something new to be learned. Life is change, and I usually don't like change either, I think that's natural to a lot of people, but it's something that simply has to happen and will happen no matter what. The more we study the solar system, the more information we will find and gather and put together to write new text books with the new discoveries. Information and science will always be evolving and changing based on new findings and a lot of people really don't like that kind of thing.

My mom, for example. She hates shit like this. She'll see something on the news regarding a new study or something and since it's new and unfamiliar and it challenges ones beliefs, she doesn't trust it. Which, to meet the news with a critical eye is far from a bad thing, but she is so critical that she does not seem to believe anything she cannot wrap her head around.

A lot of people are not excited to learn new things (But a lot still are too), they are eager to see their own beliefs be proven, which is often not the case, and they don't like that.

Moving forward, a lot of people don't know the true definition of our solar system and all that exists within it and how big it truly is. You commonly see people claiming that Pluto was kicked out of the solar system, but I think what is happening in the minds of people who have come to this conclusion, is that they don't realize the solar system is more than just the planets and our sun. I don't think they realize the asteroid belt is considered a part of our solar system, I doubt they're aware of the other dwarf planets, I bet they don't know what the kuiper belt is either, and I know damn well they don't know about the oort cloud. People really do latch onto the ideas and information they'd been given as basic building blocks as an introduction to the solar system and can't, or refuse to, apply more complex ideas to what they already know. And the same is true with many other topics as well, not just science.

I think it's a lot of people being stubborn, people not accept that things are subject to change, and people wanting something to fight others about.

And then there's the people who think Pluto's feelings have been hurt by the reclassification or 'being kicked out', to which 1, it does not have feelings, and 2, if we were to play this game, I honestly think Pluto would be even MORE upset at the phenomena of people denying the change. I think Pluto would say, "Hey! No one said anything about me being kicked out! They just understand me a little better now and I experience things that the rest of the planets don't so that's why I'm a little different"

A few months ago I saw a poll on here about people's opinions on whether or not they still consider Pluto a planet and it was near 50/50 and that shit broke me. ESPECIALLY going into the tags of the poll and looking at the 'viva la pluto' people and going to look at their blog descriptions and seeing how many were trans. Like, that's just crazy to me. How come you're allowed to change things about yourself and your labels, but Pluto isn't? Why are you, as a transgender youth, so bent on something staying the same as it was initially discovered? AGAIN IT'S JUST CRAZY TO ME LIKE DO YOU HEAR YOURSELF??? I think this is a great comparison to sway the opinion of the younger generations but I know it wouldn't work on most older people.

This is important and worth being agitated about from my view, because to deny the advancements of science is not only straight up incorrect but also, well you just sound like a republican. And that's a dangerous spiral to get yourself into, first it's this then what else are you going to decide isn't worth your time to listen to. It gets shoulder to shoulder with people who are anti-vaxx because they've come up with their own ideas as to how it works- it's a kind of mindset that can quickly become dangerous to not only yourself but also those around you too. A gateway to more anti-science bullshit, if you will.

In regards to semantics, when people say, "Pluto is a real planet", erasing and denying the classification of dwarf planet, I really do see a connection between that and how society has historically, and even currently, see people with dwarfism. "Pluto isn't a dwarf planet, we're not calling it that", why does the term 'dwarf' elicit such a negative reaction? Why is that such a bad thing to be categorized as? I understand this looks like a huge stretch but I really do believe that how people use their words, at times, reflects these kinds of beliefs. To play devil's advocate on myself here, you could argue the distinction is unnecessary, pluto is still a planetary body, people with dwarfism are still humans, refer to them as such. While true, I'd like to draw attention to the fact that calling a human a human and a rock a rock, are two entirely different areas of humanization seeing as one is a person with an identity and feelings, while the other is a rock with none of those. And I'd also like to point out that a person with dwarfism will have a much different lived experience than someone who does not, therefore classifying the two people the exact same with the exact same experiences and relationships and how they interact with the world and how the world interacts with them would be incorrect. Although perhaps similar, they would be two fundamentally different experiences being compared. The same can be applied to many other things that are similar yet different (like the phrase apples to oranges, both are fruit but different kinds of fruit). It's an equity thing, but after this point it's getting a bit off topic, but I hope what I'm trying to say is making sense

And like, I hate being "I'm right, they're wrong" but honest to fucking god sometimes people are just wrong like straight up incorrect, factually. If being pro-science and thinking people are wrong for blatantly ignoring change in scientific data makes me pretentious, I'll shove the stick up my ass myself

I think there's a lot of layers to the Pluto discussion that people aren't ready to peel back because, really it does seem like a stretch, but it's the kind of shit where people fall down alt-right pipelines and shit like that. On the surface it's a matter of people denying science which in itself is a huge issue but upon digging into it, I think there's a lot more room for hurt and harm and subconscious bias

I know it all seems like, "It's not that deep bro" but your subconscious mind is always at work influencing the way we talk and act whether we realize it or not and like while the Pluto discussion is moreso about the unfortunately loud portion of society that denies backed scientific studies and advancements I think it's also a good practice of opening your critical eye and especially looking inward and asking yourself, "Why am I so determined on this idea". It's the kind of mental activity my psych instructor would encourage us to do

[puyen05]

Tumblr: The Social Media Platform You're Probably Underestimating

Beyond the surface of aesthetic blogs and endless GIFs, is there something deeper going on in Tumblr? I wanted to find out if it was more than just a place to waste time. So, what did I discover? Let's dive in!

The Secret Sauce: What Makes a "Public Sphere" Tick?

So, I stumbled across this idea called a "public sphere," which serves as a foundational concept in understanding social interactions and democracy, refers to a space where private individuals come together to discuss issues of public concern, ideally leading to political and social change (Habermas, 1989). However, instead of one giant public sphere, we now have micro-publics, which are smaller, overlapping communities that engage in discourse across various social media platforms (Bruns et al., 2016, pp. 56–73).

To truly function as a public sphere, a platform must ensure equal access to information, unrestricted participation, and freedom from institutional control (Kruse et al., 2017). This raises the question: does Tumblr fit this definition better than other social media platforms?

Tumblr: My Unlikely Candidate for "Most Important Platform"?

That's when it hit me: Could Tumblr actually be a modern-day public sphere? Tumblr is a platform for building online communities. It's a microblogging and social networking site where people post and share content with others who have similar interests.

Reasons Why Tumblr Might Be Secretly Awesome

Versatile Microblogging Platform: Tumblr blends microblogging, social networking, and multimedia sharing. It allows you to share your ideas, express creativity, and connect with others through short updates, images, and artistic expression. It's also ideal for those who like to keep things to the point.

Hashtags = Community & Discovery: Tumblr pioneered hashtag-powered community building. Tags categorize material and help users locate posts relating to particular subjects, themes, or fandoms. Tumblr will even suggest relevant tags as you type.

Re-blogging & Content Curation: Users can easily re-blog posts from other users, letting their followers know about blog postings from other users. This develops a cooperative and linked society where information flows quickly, encouraging interaction.

Multimedia Integration: Tumblr prioritizes multimedia, making it great for creatives. Users may easily contribute photos, videos, audio snippets, and even animated GIFs within their postings.

Customization & Themes: Tumblr offers customization tools to personalize blogs and establish a distinctive online identity. Users may select from various themes and layouts to customize their blog's appearance. It allows for direct interaction with your audience through comments and messaging.

Is the Feminist Revolution Happening on Tumblr?

Tumblr has an amazing and extremely progressive environment compared to most social media platforms. It's often used for community-building and identity exploration, especially for LGBT groups. In recent years, Tumblr has become a platform for highly involved feminist dialogue because like-minded users follow and reblog posts regarding feminist issues and content.

Tumblr's feminist community spans intersections of race, nationality, class, gender, sexuality. It is a space for the practical application of post-structuralist writing, where the singular concept of the ‘woman’ is deconstructed and rejected.

My Final Words

Then, is Tumblr just a place for cute animal pics and fandoms, or is it something more? I'm starting to think it has the potential to be a real digital public sphere, fostering connection, creativity, and conversations that actually matter. It offers a unique digital experience that intersects microblogging, social networking, and multimedia sharing. What do you think?

References

Bruns, A., Enli, G., Skogerbo, E., Larsson, A. O., & Christensen, C. (2016). The Routledge companion to social media and politics (pp. 56–73). Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.

Habermas, J. (1989). The structural transformation of the public sphere : an inquiry into a category of bourgeois society. Massachusetts Institute Of Technology.

Kruse, L. M., Norris, D. R., & Flinchum, J. R. (2017). Social Media as a Public Sphere? Politics on Social Media. The Sociological Quarterly, 59(1), 62–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/00380253.2017.1383143

[prototypeviktor]

complaint box vol. 1, or "i suppose you all hate whimsy"

in making this blog in part to cordon off my complaining, i now have the opportunity to complain more broadly rather than messaging a friend or two with "this is unfortunate" or similar. whether or not this is an improvement that will result in more mental well-being rather than less is up for debate.

anyways, the average Arcane Poster on social media (not to be confused with the average Arcane Fan, who may or may not also be an Arcane Poster; Posters are outspoken while Fans may be content to just enjoy the work) has at least something of a dislike for whimsy, kitsch, or otherwise actually having fun in the space. this is displayed prominently in my experience when Posters talk about the design differences between league and arcane.

in particular, today i will be complaining about (and broadening out into wider complaints from there) an instagram reel that was thrust upon me in my latest excursion into the instagram tags/discovery page to try to find neat fanart of jinx, whose arcane outfits i do quite like. i will not be linking the reel, because i have made a promise to myself to not copy down links of things that make me mad, because then i will click the link at some point and feel bad again. anyways, it was a reel of the WR caitlyn and jayce animation (which i also quite like) and the original poster had written over top of it that they'd wished caitlyn had gotten her top hat in arcane as they like it as a design piece. anyways, i will now give you a moment to guess what the comments were like. please click the read more at your convenience.

my brief observations of the comments revealed the following categorical trends:

people saying the hat was stupid/ugly/etc. and arcane was good for removing it.

subcategory of 1: people saying her league outfit is a "porn parody" of herself, which i think is a reasonable comment for release caitlyn's duds (although in the spirit of whimsy, i do have a fondness for it) but is actively incoherent for WR/LoL's current look.*

people saying that her hat was totally there, in a cameo and/or in the strange peaked-top cap she wears in S1 for three seconds and in a few scattered pieces of promotional material. this is missing the point of the post.**

people more broadly calling arcane a "glow-up" for all characters.

people calling LoL/WR jayce's outfit or general appearance bad/ugly.

people somehow discussing the LoL vi tutu/ruffle detailing, which was mentioned approximately nowhere in the post.***

*need i remind the gentle reader that her enforcer outfit, or whatever it is, in S1 is bare-legged? and if they are talking about her S1 purple outfit, that has more cleavage than WR/LoL ASU if we're using "showing skin" for "porn parody" criteria. if they're discussing S2, i again really do not see how WR/LoL ASU is more sexualizing than anything from there. perhaps all of these people googled Caitlyn League Of Legends and google "helpfully" returned her first model, but that does not explain commenting on a reel that visually showcases WR's outfit that it's a "porn parody".

** as a hat goes, i think the arcane hat is a bad and goofy-in-the-wrong-ways one. it is tall and has no meaningful brim so it looks bad in silhouette, and the overall design doesn't quite fit in with the rest of the enforcer outfit design language at large imo. caitlyn also being 6ft or so makes the hat especially poor, as i imagine the reason it was used so infrequently is because retaining between-character height constancy in any form while one character is 6ft with a hat that's taller than their head is going to make every single shot look bad. we already know height constancy was played around with in order to achieve some shots, anyways.

i am not going to go check the show again, as i like myself, but i believe very few enforcers are shown wearing the hat in the first place, and that out of the named enforcers caitlyn is the only one wearing an outfit with a skirt and no pants/leggings... ever. maybe some background enforcer was in S1. either way, this gives the in-universe impression that caitlyn's enforcer outfit is not standard-issue for women (standard-issue would be non-ideal, as it would imply some form of gender-based outfit expectations in a world that overton keeps saying has none of that (untrue statement, another post another time), but at least would give logical explanation for why caitlyn is wearing it) and she chose it herself. this does not really make sense for something that someone of low-ish rank would be allowed to do, at least in my opinion.

***the tutu also remains in vi's enforcer outfit in S2, so i think broad and non-nuanced praise re: "fortiche glow-ups" should be tempered somewhat. it exists as a vague signifier and/or in-joke in the same way caitlyn's hat is cameo'd or singed was reveck-baited in S1 and confirmed, due to fan speculation according to the artbook, to be reveck in S2. it's not meaningful, really. jangle the keys for the league players and do nothing more.

all in the span of a few scrolls of the comments. the poor original poster was left to say variations of "i just liked the hat and wish she'd worn it, not that it was a cameo" repeatedly and maybe luck into one or two commenters who agreed that they too liked the hat.

this finally brings me to my initial point after much subnotes and winding about (which will presumably be a hallmark of these complaint boxes, if they continue), which is:

so do Arcane Posters just hate whimsy and having fun? (overgeneralization for comedic effect.) these reactions feel like a step-to-the-left (pun intended?) version of a subtype of Superhero Comic Book Movie Poster: the guy who thinks Supes' comics trunks are stupid, and that whatever part-costume part-CGI outfit design the DCU (or god forbid, Arrowverse) puts out is actually the best thing ever because you can see the Realistic Textures and It's Very Serious. which is a valid opinion, since design preferences are an individual thing, but also fundamentally misses something that i personally think is important about superhero comics^... that it's fun and fantastical, actually, and that sometimes people enjoy fun and fantastical and "not realistic" designs.

^a genre whose production history/choices, at least when it comes to the big two, has a significant amount of overlap with how LoL and Arcane work, in my opinion... perhaps for another post.

if i am a martian manhunter fan, for example (i am somewhat, although i've not read as much as i would like), i probably like or am at least neutral on his goofy shirtless-crossed-suspenders + blue briefs + matching calf boots. (don't worry mr. j'onzz. i saw your Chanel boots.) because that is part of his character design for decades, and because while it may be "goofy" and "not realistic" it's at least a fun, vibrant design that also is relatively simple. i (personally) do not very much like live action j'onns because they are afraid of committing to being faithful to that design, and overcomplicate it and dull it down in a way that i don't think needs to be the case. now, returning to league...

league designs are fantastical and, historically, not very realistic. they operate on rule of cool principles a lot, but that's okay because league historically was kind of goofy. i will not go so far as to absolve caitlyn's or vi's original outfit of sexism allegations, because to be a female league champion is to be sex appealed, but they were also fun designs for a game with minimal lore at the time and a relatively goofy tone. as for jinx, who as far as i know was primarily designed by katie de sousa, one can argue the bullet bikini and short-shorts are sex appeal, but i personally wouldn't attribute them to that. 2013 was a magical time in which a woman being flat-chested was actually a diverse body type, at least at riot internally. i do not think jinx was intended to be a sex appeal champion, at least by de sousa.

as a side note, perhaps the reason i like arcane jinx's outfit the best is that it's still somewhat rule of cool whimsical. does she need that "X" button-style detailing on her top? no. is it fun? yes. do her pants need to be striped? no. is it fun and something i originally read as^^ a homage to early piltover's predilection for pinstripes (see vi leggings and more)? yes.

^^the artbook blows this nice thought up by saying they're a hangover from a version where jinx... went off to bilgewater at the end of S1A1 and... became a pirate...? some things are best left on the cutting room floor.

anyways, it was a goofy setting and that let people do fun stuff. even LoL-verse VGU/ASUs historically kept more impractical-but-pretty-cool aspects in designs, in my opinion, at least until as of late. (skarner.) do i particularly like some of those VGUs or ASUs? no i think a lot of them took dedicated mains out back and slapped them around quite a bit. can i still say that i think that VGU swain, for example, is an interesting character design even if i have mixed feelings on him? yes. the coat's a cool piece. would swain in the arcaneverse be made to have a cloak-chain or cape instead to match that silhouette, because otherwise logic and rationality states his coat would fall off his shoulders? probably.

with arcane, it's all so... practical and down-to-earth, mostly. which works for the tone, i suppose. but now it's leeching back into league. caitlyn's blue, because the warriors cinematic and/or fortiche and co. thought purple was too out there probably. bright, saturated colors exist only for fractured jinx or whatever we're calling her outfit there. arcane chitinbug viktor is greys and dull golds. jayce doesn't even get to wear red, really. caitlyn's wearing purple for two brief outfits. vi's

"i heard you liked gold metallic detailing so i put some in your gold metallic detailing so you can gold metallic detail while you detail" is the hextech and piltover at large motto, which would be nice if the formula then wasn't "neutrals, jewel tones, and/or white and black" for the most part. cyan blue hair's too bright, make it more mid-blue. pink hair's too bright, make it more red. so many uniforms with only brief touches of character personalization, and that's in subtypes of gear worn (all the piltover war/combat uniforms i guess) rather than anything broader.

and all of this is fine for a realistic tone, or what have you, but is it an improvement? not really, at least to me. because for something to be an improvement on something else, those two things have to be playing the same game with the same rules. league designs are made to be fantastical and unique and visible from a top-down perspective. arcane designs are made to fit the setting (and elaborate on it visually, presumably - what materials are used where, small characterization trinkets, etc.) and have different silhouette criteria because it's a show not a video game.

it's apples and oranges. it's not "wrong" or "stupid" to like the league designs, because they are intended to fulfill a different purpose and were concepted by different people at a different time. in counterpoint, it's not "wrong" or "stupid" to like the arcane outfits, because they serve a different purpose. the issue occurs when Arcane Posters act as though there is some aspect of superiority in liking the more gritty-realism of the two, because of... pick your choice of rationale given by the Arcane Posters you've seen. i know that you have seen many rationales, if you are reading this and have gotten this far.

caitlyn's hat is iconic in the same way that her and others' weaponries are. in the same way viktor's pauldron and third arm are. it is not an unreasonable assumption that an adaptation would put caitlyn in her top hat or hats in general, considering that out of her 14 non-arcane non-prestige skins 9 have hats and a further 4 have some sort of headpiece (pulsefire has an updo, but no specific hairpiece so i don't count it).

just like how it is not unreasonable to assume viktor the machine herald would be machine-based, for what it's worth.

the point of all of this, in all its overblown and thinking-too-much sincerity, is that if one more Arcane Poster tells me or someone i know or some poor Arcane Fan Who Came From League that LoL designs are bad/stupid/ugly/goofy/etc. i will probably feel steam whistle out of my ears. i think perhaps people can express their disappointment in something minor and trivial, like not getting to see caitlyn in her cool hat, without getting a hundred or more comments on how they're wrong for thinking that.

why is it on the Arcane Poster's back to go some variation of "nuh-uh, that version's bad" in direct response? what compels the Poster to do that? i may seem hypocritical here as i have just complained about this phenomena for an extended period of time, but i also do not make a habit of going into the comments section of someone who is genuinely enjoying arcane to say "nuh-uh, that version's bad". even if i have thoughts about enjoying a show in which, for example, a character's mental health is depicted with all the sensitivity of a sledgehammer and the primary endgame canon pairing has an act of on-screen partner violence that is not meaningfully resolved or addressed. because it's not my circus, and it's not my monkeys!

going back to comics: at least in comics you can go find and read the comics that have your character designs and narrative tones of choice, if you're not into the latest live-action or other adaptation. might cost you a bit and there is something to be said about obscure issues being hard to find, but they are physically out there in the world. if you're a league fan and you don't know the wiki exists, for whatever reason, you're just out of luck for even looking at old versions of characters or their scant previous lores. but this is a topic for another time, i believe.

anyways, maybe if they put caitlyn in a top hat and leaned less "realistic" we wouldn't have gotten a show whose message is "maybe we can heal the political divide [in america, see linke's comments] by uniting against an outside force and using the underclass as canon fodder". food for thought!

[convoswithk80]

Benefits of Using Tumblr to Showcase Your Tech Projects and Learning.

If you stumbled across my page you are probably wondering why I migrated my website to Tumblr. The last time I used Tumblr as my main form of social media was in high school (circa 2013). During this time I was the most creative I'd ever been in my life - photographing my life, reposting quotes that led me to reading books, and so forth. Maybe it's the nostalgia factor, maybe it's my Leo tendencies to want to stand out (I apologize for the reference to horoscopes, I promise I only use them for comedic purposes), or maybe it's because I'm tired of paying for a platform that no longer inspires me. Using Tumblr to showcase my projects or learning has its own set of advantages, and were heavily considered before deciding to migrate. Whether it's better than a traditional website depends on your specific goals and preferences. Here are some benefits of using Tumblr

Ease of Use:

Tumblr is known for its user-friendly interface. It's easy to set up and customize your blog without the need for advanced technical skills.

You can quickly create and publish content, making it a convenient platform for sharing updates on your projects or learning journey.

Community Interaction:

Tumblr is a social media platform, and it allows for easy interaction with a community of users. You can gain followers, receive feedback, and engage with other users who share similar interests. I hope to reach an audience that perhaps has no clue what conversation design is. Linkedin, Medium, and other tech-focused platforms can seem intimidating.

The reblogging feature enables your content to be shared across the platform, potentially reaching a broader audience.

Visual Emphasis:

Tumblr is particularly visual-centric. If your projects involve a lot of visual elements such as images, graphics, or multimedia, Tumblr can be an excellent platform for showcasing them effectively.

The platform supports various media types, including photos, videos, and GIFs. This makes my job a little easier in that I don't have to rely solely on free image websites like Unsplash (sorry, ILY Unsplash).

Tagging and Discovery:

Tumblr uses a tagging system that helps organize and categorize content. This can improve the discoverability of your projects, especially if users search for relevant tags.

Tags make it easier for users interested in specific topics to find and follow your content.

Mobile-Friendly:

Tumblr is optimized for mobile use, making it accessible to users on various devices. This can be advantageous if you want your projects to be easily viewable on smartphones and tablets.

Cost-Effective:

Tumblr is a free platform, which can be beneficial if you're looking for a cost-effective way to showcase your work. You don't need to invest in hosting or domain fees.

Experimentation and Informality:

Tumblr has a more casual and informal atmosphere compared to traditional websites. This can be advantageous if you want to experiment with different styles of content or convey a more personal touch to your audience.

While Tumblr offers these advantages, it's essential to consider the specific needs and goals of your project or learning showcase. Traditional websites may provide more control over branding, customization, and the overall structure of your online presence. Ultimately, the choice between Tumblr and a website depends on factors such as your audience, content type, and the level of control and professionalism you desire.

[millennialmoderator]

How to Get More Customers through Multi-Touch Attribution

It's no surprise that today, companies need to be marketing on all digital fronts..

Originally published on millennialmoderator.com

Social media, Google ads, affiliate placements, and more all play into the funnel that your business uses to gather leads and turn sales. The notion of variety in where people spend their time online is subject to scrutiny. Some sources believe that businesses should only focus on the platforms where their demographic is most active. In contrast, others believe that marketing efforts should be widespread in the case of attracting outliers.

Regardless if you have a product or service, the digital front has an abundance of channels to locate potential customers, but what's often lacking in the marketers' wheelhouse of expertise is a comprehensive understanding of how the varying channels all feed into the sales funnel. Where do leads come from? Which channels convert and which ones don't? Is it possible to track conversions from radio to website? This is the question that Multi-Touch Attribution seeks to answer, and it's one of the best ways for small businesses to grasp the reigns of their marketing strategy.

According to LeadsRX, a leader in the digital marketing space, Multi-Touch Attribution is the collection of touch-points across all marketing channels, which are then captured as conversions in the funnel, then mapped to each individual customer journey to provide unrivaled and impartial attribution results. In my own interpretation: MTA collects all conversions from all platforms that a company engages from a marketing perspective and designs unique journeys for each of those converting users. These custom "journeys" are designed to expand from the experience they've had so far (someone on Twitter will have a very different experience than someone from Google Ads or Facebook, for example.)

Not only is Multi-Touch Attribution a great way to design unique funnels for a variety of users, but it's effectively a mindset that collectively exhausts all opportunities for marketing narrative across all of a businesses' channels. Take a company's blog posts, for example- pieces of writing designed to share updates or notable topics related to their business, with an underlying assumption that readers will further explore their business and possibly become customers or clients. SEO draws the readers to the blog post (a different topic entirely). After reading said article, that target audience now has an imprint of understanding about what your business stands for.

From there, their next immediate action needs to be closely monitored by the marketing team. Do they choose to click on the "buy now" option, or do they navigate to a different page? Despite a companies' identified customer base, there will always be outliers trickling in through marketing channels, new people who may or may not become your customers but whose behavior can be very insightful to a marketing team's data. Ask yourself this question to better understand multi-touch attribution: wheredo you currently advertise your business/service, and how does that channel's target market vary from another channel? What's the difference in user behavior from an ad on YouTube versus Facebook?

Understanding these differences can be fruitful for a marketing team, but the trouble with such a comprehensive evaluation has always been the same- how do we track it all?

How are multi-touch points evaluated?

Social media posts, radio advertisements, phone/SMS ads, all of these help discover potential new customers, but the process for capturing and measuring these conversions is spotty at best. After all, how are you supposed to track an advertisement for your service on the radio that led to conversion when there are no physical clicks? To answer this question, companies like LeadsRx have designed comprehensive tracking systems that all funnel into a central database, from which marketing teams can extract meaning. By using universal tracking pixels, they can delineate which type of traffic is visiting your site- its source, time spent, and much more.

This information is vital to marketing teams, as it can fuel smarter assumptions in future campaigns. The great thing about Multi-Touch Attribution is that it can be applied to campaigns for new or existing customers. Leveraging a marketing team with experience in MTA and universal pixels is likely the easiest way to get started with this strategy.

Where can customer touch points be planted?

Depending on how your sales funnel is structured, various channels could benefit from a touchpoint (invitation for conversion). There are, of course, obvious placements such as social media platforms (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, LinkedIn, etc.), but some of the less traditional ones that could yield promising conversion results include:

Radio

SMS messages

TV

Mobile (in-app)

Offline (events, meetings, etc.)

From a marketing mindset perspective, these are all channels that could lead to conversions and should be fully explored. Harnessing the power of Multi-Touch Attribution means gathering data from all of these channels and making informed decisions on how to best proceed with future campaigns. Multiple platforms should be explored with intent for any new business that is desperately seeking a product market fit or customer discovery to get customers. For companies with current customers, expanding to new channels (and effectively tracking their ROIs through MTAs) is a valuable way to increase business.

The age-old debate of how businesses can find new customers is, in my opinion, based on an underlying, incorrect assumption of what customers are. The best places to discover new customers is wherever the topic of your industry is being discussed. Digital environments make this increasingly simple by categorizing everything into topic keywords- the struggle for marketers is to evaluate if the virtual room they've entered has anyone alive or has been deserted for years (the downside of evergreen content strategy, I suppose).

As an overview, begin by evaluating your target audience's needs, exploring search results that relate to that specific need, and strategically placing yourself in the customers' stream of discovery through SEO, backlinks, tags, etc. The website, social media post, or paid advertisement you create to achieve this interception is one example of a touch point. As such, it should be evaluated for effectiveness, along with all other touch points in your campaign. To learn more about how Multi-Touch Attribution works, check out this Attribution Playbook from LeadsRx, which will help break down the process of setting up and evaluating all of your advertisement conversions.

Conclusion

Getting customers is an uphill battle in a vast arena, so it pays to distribute your efforts, but you can't expect quality results if you don't properly evaluate your efforts. Multi-Touch Attribution can help you do just that.

If you enjoyed this Mod, you might like to read more about these tips for video marketing in 2021! Please share this Mod using the social links below. Any questions or comments? Let us know on Twitter!

Originally published on millennialmoderator.com

[kaiasky]

I think other people have said most of it, but I wonder if thinking of tags as a thing that the original poster decides and then it's done is a missed opportunity. I'd suggest promoting user-curation as the way to handle this.

Right now, my experience following tags is… kinda poor, and it's not because talking-in-tags messes with that that, it's because tags are by their nature inconsistent. For instance, I follow #valorant. But mostly what I'm interested in is cool gameplay highlights and fanart. A lot of what I see is AO3 fanfic, and obviously huge props to those writers, but it's not what I care about. But valorant highlights aren't going to all be tagged 'valorant gameplay', and plenty of artists are going to tag their art 'valorant gameplay' (and yelling at people for tagging wrongly is Not a behavior we need to encourage).

So I don't think clarity & more distinction between talking in tags and tagging fixes the fundamental problem, which is that tags are great for some things (personal blog categorization if the search feature worked, community trends like 'tag your art #kaia-art-challenge-2023 so people can see it!', content warnings) but not great at discovery.

Youtube has playlists, where you let a user or set of users collect videos of a theme. So when I want to find a lot of something, especially something without a clear pattern for titles, I look for a playlist.

Tumblr theoretically has the tools for this--a shared sideblog with a queue that reblogs posts found by the owners or sent in through submissions. And in fact, some of the best blogs I follow are single-purpose collections of 'good posts', for some definition of good, eg @/heritageposts. But running such a sideblog is often involved to set up and maintain. It leads to mod-drama, and following these blogs often means following more asks-about-the-blog than actual content.

I wonder if streamlining that process as a new type of sideblog called a 'collection', and then foregrounding collections in searches/algorithmic feed content would be better than tags. This gives a sort of hybrid model, where users decide what posts are good for a certain interest, and the algorithm's decision is which collections align with a user's interests.

A collection can't make its own posts (and maybe can't even add tags), and default runs on a queue. When creating a collection I think you ask users for 2-5 tags/search terms that best describe the collection, and use those for discovery.

The submit-to-collection and approve-submitted-post should be as streamlined as possible, and duplicate submissions should be ignored.

I think when promoting this, you'd want to emphasize that:

this is useful for fandoms and communities! Encourage people to work together to start collections for their ships/fandoms/favorite memes

collections are collaborative but impersonal. You might moderate a collection, but it's not a personal blog, it's for everybody. And likewise, if you don't moderate a collection, you can also be an important part in growing it by sending good submissions.

we're counting on you, tumblr. 'hey, a lot of people say you need the algorithm to be successful in 2023. we don't think so. help us prove them wrong.'

collections are yet another way for tumblr to do emergent behavior. Like the letterboxd playlist "Movies where a character is involved in an incident which briefly impairs their hearing and leads to us hearing 'EEEEEEEEEEEEE' for a few seconds to symbolize this".

Some issues that immediately come to mind, plus my first thoughts of solutions:

I followed a collection, it was well-curated, and then the user running it stopped posting! -- I think it'd be nice if abandoned collections could be 'picked up', but I think that's probably more of an issue than it fixes. But finding a new similar collection shouldn't be that hard,

I followed a collection, it was well-curated, and then the user started posting things I don't like on it! -- deliberately mistagged things are already an issue. Report collections that post inappropriate content, or unfollow if they just have bad taste.

I'm a collection-curator, and people send things that aren't related at all! -- two options on the approve-submission form, [reject] and [reject + ignore user].

I'm an artist and I want people to see my posts, now I have to submit it to a bunch of different collections to get seen?? -- maybe a field in post/reblog form that also lets you submit to collections. But secondly, rely on your followers! In the same way artists currently say 'reblogs > likes', I think 'if you know a collection that'd love my art, send it in!! <3' is totally reasonable.

I'm running a collection and it's hard and unrewarding! -- thank-you-for-your-hard-work crabs? let people leave messages of thanks? not sure

the problem of commentary in the tags

"talking in the tags" is a very tumblr-unique emergent usage of tags, and that's very cool. i love emergent behavior, tumblr's full of it. ("emergent" in the sense that folks are using features in ways that weren't intended, but aren't disallowed either.)

but "talking the tags" hurts tumblr's ability to use tags for its original intended function: sorting and organizing and surfacing content based on tags. tumblr really needs to get better at organizing and sorting based on tags, but it's really difficult to do with so much "noise" in the tags. with millions upon millions of posts and reblogs to organize and sift through, the number of tags that are actually "commentary" becomes pretty daunting, even for a complex algorithm to sort through.

and yeah, it's not really noise -- i get that people (myself included) use the tags field as a way of "whispering to followers", since traditionally the tags would only be seen by people viewing a post/reblog directly, like in their dashboard, not in the notes view. that's no longer true, of course -- we now have the option to see "comments and tags" by default in the new notes view.

with all of that in mind, how could we improve posting/reblogging on tumblr in such a way that would make folks use the tag field for tags and not "whispers"? do we need a new field in the post form for "whisper content" that doesn't show up anywhere but for followers? do we need a visibility setting for posts, so you can make it so only your followers will see the post in their dashboards, and on your blog, and not anyone in the notes view? how do we preserve all of this awesome unique behavior without stopping the viral spread of content through reblogs? 🤔

[schoolofartsgent]

A fire inside music Success Story You'll Never Believe

A person this sort of millennial who knocked my socks off was this young Lady named Anushka, a teenager in her early twenties. Her white t-shirt with "MILLENNIAL" in significant, black, bold letters just caught our swift focus and we could not quit serious about her Exceptional Talent Presentation, listed here at Nirmiti Academy. The Do-it-yourself (Do It Oneself) Craft was her exclusive talent. She represented a younger face on the millennials. Furthermore, it had been her presentation that spoke a lot more of her for a millennial. She was a real go-getter when it arrived to existing her special expertise in a novel way. We could see her beaming with pleasure and contentment to showcase her one of a kind expertise to Other individuals. She was so enthusiastic that she was talking a mile a minute. She experienced so much to state about it and he or she could go on and on and maintain us glued to her presentation. The millennials like Anushka and lots of others are inspired to work on things which desire them. At the same time, I could also see her being struggling to smile and existing herself Fortunately. Gone are definitely the moments for that millennials wherever they sense existing and revel in their surroundings. They are really the generation who come to feel the frequent need to have for Digital consideration which leads them to overshare their life and times on social media marketing or go inward in deep conscience to find them selves. This leaves them unconnected Using the Bodily earth close to them.

Millennials certainly are a extremely praised and self-assured era. These are a really optimistic generation. They may have a better need to have to acquire daily life ordeals instead of to build up substance wealth, Despite the fact that they are doing like to amass things which should help them to appreciate These experiences. Millennials are the most educated technology. As the selling price tag of education has become so significant and continuing to climb each year, Millennials have grown to be really savvy with regards to their instructional possibilities. Unlike prior generations who noticed instruction as being a ritual and an investment decision inside their foreseeable future, millennials perspective education and learning as an cost, Until it's going to empower them as a way to be a greater unique. They be expecting instruction to help you them prepare for The brand new opportunities and difficulties of this age, instead of encouraging them by providing truth-dependent information and facts/awareness. The millennials want to be challenged by thinking of the future And just how they can add to creating a improved Culture and setting. They don't truly feel the necessity to turn out to be "textbook wise / e book worms".

They understand that points may be simply observed on-line by means of their own personal independent action. They can be the generation that features and prosper on knowledge at finger "click". In a very globe of open access to know-how, it would make little sense to count on the classroom as a Discussion board for that transfer of information.

As a substitute, The scholars A great deal choose to learn with the tales and encounters of Other individuals. These shared stories and ordeals help them to enhance their own personal working experience by Studying from your good results and issues of Other individuals. This allows them keep away from creating a similar errors as their influencers. Hence, they like to take a position additional of their time and money on these kinds of applications which enable them to create a variety of strategies that they might incorporate into their ideas and conclusion-producing system, thereby building a new ability set.

We cannot ignore The truth that millennials are also a generation of uncertainties and fluctuations. They can be the technology who likes to help keep switching their devices. They grew up with technology the place everything was at their fingertips. It gets frustrating for them to not get what they need once they want it. Most of the factors are already handed to them on the silver spoon. This helps make them experience entitled to acquire what they need with out putting in much effort and hard work.

Though They may be the major workforce of the companies today, they don't believe in lifelong employment. Lifelong commitment is a fairy tale for the millennials. They usually leap from on career to a different mainly because they are constantly seeking some thing new and greater. These substantial anticipations become their downfall and helps make them fewer fiscally steady than their mothers and fathers.

Millennials are in this article to stay! They are really younger, dazzling and energetic and they're the long run. They are fantastic assets which the earth have to harness and use. They're the generation that is certainly revolutionizing the world. They are the budding leaders of tomorrow. They undertake technologies and stimulus in the same breadth. This technology is additionally a collaborative and social era that includes a target knowledge and creating their information by means of numerous sorts of medium to find the solutions. It's with the educator like us to supply an arena for engagement and discovery and also be considered a material professional and mentor. It can be for Understanding System suppliers like Nirmiti Academy to present an explorative and experiential experience and bring out their real potential in everyday life and at work. It Is that this transformational journey that we at Nirmiti Academy sit up for every single day to master, unlearn and relearn Using these youthful and magical era - the Millennials!

With all the advancement of innovation, it's got gotten crucial that you persistently discover, unlearn, and relearn to extinguish the thirst of grave obstacle. In contrast to customary time, the action of bookkeepers is not constrained to keeping up thick registers. With robotization, the thought of manual bookkeeping has become an outsider phrase and now, an unlimited piece of bookkeeping do the job could be handled bookkeeping programming, by way of example, QuickBooks programming.

With this blog, We are going to mention a percentage of the significant specialised capability and skills to change into a professional Accountant now and constantly:

Basic Wondering

Source: magnapubs.com

At the point whenever we look at the bookkeeping contacting, we should always take into consideration fundamental capabilities, such as, getting the vital information on the bookkeeping calling. In any scenario, presently the problem has been modified and people are alluding applicants with the ability to burrow additional to have a gander whatsoever viewpoints with the quantities and the information just as recognizing styles and examples to learn the Tale inside. Be that as it might, this potential cannot be grown medium-time period. This is a sort of fragile aptitudes that you can study above a timespan, via successfully on the lookout for knowledge Using the do the job. In contrast to accomplishing things which ring a bell, attempt to consider creative and out in the container arrangements. Look into, assess, and Imagine once you practical experience a difficulty to concoct by far the most achievable and modern preparations.

Get hold of Technological Skills

Supply: Domain.me

As indicated by Entrepreneur.com, cloud bookkeeping will likely be introduced in over ninety% corporations. Mechanization has gotten inalienably essential to help while in the company. With innovation, one example is, the cloud, it really is at this time very simple to appreciate the unpredictable info also to get to them from anyplace on the planet with barely any snaps. The cloud has become the most recent sample for the bookkeeping company.

With cloud facilitating it happens to be A great deal less complicated for that companies to work cooperatively without the need of trading off the security issue. Moreover, dealing with the cloud give nonstop accessibility of the information from any remote corner of the globe. Appropriately, the fascination to get a bookkeeper having specialized abilities will be the best selection above the group.

Information on Govt Laws

Supply: Financial Categorical

Thanks to differed new and reconsidered pointers, The work of bookkeepers has On top of that altered. From the year 2020, knowing the stray parts of these progressions will get principal for bookkeepers. As indicated by experts during the bookkeeping organization, new govt guidelines and compliances will likely be consistently actualized to advance straightforwardness in business enterprise. In this manner It will probably be A lot more simple to the bookkeepers to have the knowledge on new and existing govt guidelines and guidelines. Thus, it is suggested to makeover your latest mastery time allowing, and to improve a vital chosen position around others.

Relational Skills

Source: Jarvee

You must have the choice to liaise with diverse divisions, traders and The purchasers. For this, bookkeepers are anticipated to possess strong relational skills, such as, customer the executives, arrangement aptitudes, compassion, and so forth.

Presently, the activity on the bookkeepers are usually not limited to the calculating, it contains customary gatherings with industry experts, consumers, and associates to fit their preferences. On this manner, having every one of such talents will contain while in the do the job efficiency and accomplishment of the bookkeeper. As an example, it is prescribed never to make the most of inside abbreviations or specialised language although responding to inquiries of The purchasers. Acquiring great relational aptitudes will construct sound connections and to carry purchasers and to draw in new clients. This is a big aptitude to have.

Data Analytics

Supply: excellent details aggregate

Smarts would be the people who can fathom the information, even so a lot more astute are those who could make it being used. To analyze the knowledge and to think of a plausible arrangement, it is significant for that bookkeepers to learn the intricate facts of the information. Having Each one of those aptitudes will make you mindful with the current fascination from the consumers and consumers. Greedy the innovation and embellishment of our arrangement of qualities According to the need of some time will probably enable.

[we-johnnygonzalez-blog]

Evolving Keyword Research to Match Your Buyer's Journey

Posted by matthew_jkay

Keyword research has been around as long as the SEO industry has. Search engines built a system that revolves around users entering a term or query into a text entry field, hitting return, and receiving a list of relevant results. As the online search market expanded, one clear leader emerged — Google — and with it they brought AdWords (now Google Ads), an advertising platform that allowed organizations to appear on search results pages for keywords that organically they might not.

Within Google Ads came a tool that enabled businesses to look at how many searches there were per month for almost any query. Google Keyword Planner became the de facto tool for keyword research in the industry, and with good reason: it was Google’s data. Not only that, Google gave us the ability to gather further insights due to other metrics Keyword Planner provided: competition and suggested bid. Whilst these keywords were Google Ads-oriented metrics, they gave the SEO industry an indication of how competitive a keyword was.

The reason is obvious. If a keyword or phrase has higher competition (i.e. more advertisers bidding to appear for that term) it’s likely to be more competitive from an organic perspective. Similarly, a term that has a higher suggested bid means it’s more likely to be a competitive term. SEOs dined on this data for years, but when the industry started digging a bit more into the data, we soon realized that while useful, it was not always wholly accurate. Moz, SEMrush, and other tools all started to develop alternative volume and competitive metrics using Clickstream data to give marketers more insights.

Now industry professionals have several software tools and data outlets to conduct their keyword research. These software companies will only improve in the accuracy of their data outputs. Google’s data is unlikely to significantly change; their goal is to sell ad space, not make life easy for SEOs. In fact, they've made life harder by using volume ranges for Google Ads accounts with low activity. SEO tools have investors and customers to appease and must continually improve their products to reduce churn and grow their customer base. This makes things rosy for content-led SEO, right?

Well, not really.

The problem with historical keyword research is twofold:

1. SEOs spend too much time thinking about the decision stage of the buyer’s journey (more on that later).

2. SEOs spend too much time thinking about keywords, rather than categories or topics.

The industry, to its credit, is doing a lot to tackle issue number two. “Topics over keywords” is something that is not new as I’ll briefly come to later. Frameworks for topic-based SEO have started to appear over the last few years. This is a step in the right direction. Organizing site content into categories, adding appropriate internal linking, and understanding that one piece of content can rank for several variations of a phrase is becoming far more commonplace.

What is less well known (but starting to gain traction) is point one. But in order to understand this further, we should dive into what the buyer’s journey actually is.

What is the buyer’s journey?

The buyer’s or customer’s journey is not new. If you open marketing text books from years gone by, get a college degree in marketing, or even just go on general marketing blogs you’ll see it crop up. There are lots of variations of this journey, but they all say a similar thing. No matter what product or service is bought, everyone goes through this journey. This could be online or offline — the main difference is that depending on the product, person, or situation, the amount of time this journey takes will vary — but every buyer goes through it. But what is it, exactly? For the purpose of this article, we’ll focus on three stages: awareness, consideration, & decision.

Awareness

The awareness stage of the buyer’s journey is similar to problem discovery, where a potential customer realizes that they have a problem (or an opportunity) but they may not have figured out exactly what that is yet.

Search terms at this stage are often question-based — users are researching around a particular area.

Consideration

The consideration stage is where a potential consumer has defined what their problem or opportunity is and has begun to look for potential solutions to help solve the issue they face.

Decision

The decision stage is where most organizations focus their attention. Normally consumers are ready to buy at this stage and are often doing product or vendor comparisons, looking at reviews, and searching for pricing information.

To illustrate this process, let’s take two examples: buying an ice cream and buying a holiday.

Being low-value, the former is not a particularly considered purchase, but this journey still takes place. The latter is more considered. It can often take several weeks or months for a consumer to decide on what destination they want to visit, let alone a hotel or excursions. But how does this affect keyword research, and the content which we as marketers should provide?

At each stage, a buyer will have a different thought process. It’s key to note that not every buyer of the same product will have the same thought process but you can see how we can start to formulate a process.

The Buyer’s Journey - Holiday Purchase

The above table illustrates the sort of queries or terms that consumers might use at different stages of their journey. The problem is that most organizations focus all of their efforts on the decision end of the spectrum. This is entirely the right approach to take at the start because you’re targeting consumers who are interested in your product or service then and there. However, in an increasingly competitive online space you should try and find ways to diversify and bring people into your marketing funnel (which in most cases is your website) at different stages.

I agree with the argument that creating content for people earlier in the journey will likely mean lower conversion rates from visitor to customer, but my counter to this would be that you're also potentially missing out on people who will become customers. Further possibilities to at least get these people into your funnel include offering content downloads (gated content) to capture user’s information, or remarketing activity via Facebook, Google Ads, or other retargeting platforms.

Moving from keywords to topics

I’m not going to bang this drum too loudly. I think many in of the SEO community have signed up to the approach that topics are more important than keywords. There are quite a few resources on this listed online, but what forced it home for me was Cyrus Shepard’s Moz article in 2014. Much, if not all, of that post still holds true today.

What I will cover is an adoption of HubSpot’s Topic Cluster model. For those unaccustomed to their model, HubSpot’s approach formalizes and labels what many search marketers have been doing for a while now. The basic premise is instead of having your site fragmented with lots of content across multiple sections, all hyperlinking to each other, you create one really in-depth content piece that covers a topic area broadly (and covers shorter-tail keywords with high search volume), and then supplement this page with content targeting the long-tail, such as blog posts, FAQs, or opinion pieces. HubSpot calls this "pillar" and "cluster" content respectively.

Source: Matt Barby / HubSpot

The process then involves taking these cluster pages and linking back to the pillar page using keyword-rich anchor text. There’s nothing particularly new about this approach aside from formalizing it a bit more. Instead of having your site’s content structured in such a way that it's fragmented and interlinking between lots of different pages and topics, you keep the internal linking within its topic, or content cluster. This video explains this methodology further. While we accept this model may not fit every situation, and nor is it completely perfect, it’s a great way of understanding how search engines are now interpreting content.

At Aira, we’ve taken this approach and tried to evolve it a bit further, tying these topics into the stages of the buyer’s journey while utilizing several data points to make sure our outputs are based off as much data as we can get our hands on. Furthermore, because pillar pages tend to target shorter-tail keywords with high search volume, they're often either awareness- or consideration-stage content, and thus not applicable for decision stage. We term our key decision pages “target pages,” as this should be a primary focus of any activity we conduct.

We’ll also look at the semantic relativity of the keywords reviewed, so that we have a “parent” keyword that we’re targeting a page to rank for, and then children of that keyword or phrase that the page may also rank for, due to its similarity to the parent. Every keyword is categorized according to its stage in the buyer’s journey and whether it's appropriate for a pillar, target, or cluster page. We also add two further classifications to our keywords: track & monitor and ignore. Definitions for these five keyword types are listed below:

Pillar page

A pillar page covers all aspects of a topic on a single page, with room for more in-depth reporting in more detailed cluster blog posts that hyperlink back to the pillar page. A keyword tagged with pillar page will be the primary topic and the focus of a page on the website. Pillar pages should be awareness- or consideration-stage content.

A great pillar page example I often refer to is HubSpot’s Facebook marketing guide or Mosi-guard’s insect bites guide (disclaimer: probably don’t click through if you don’t like close-up shots of insects!).

Cluster page

A cluster topic page for the pillar focuses on providing more detail for a specific long-tail keyword related to the main topic. This type of page is normally associated with a blog article but could be another type of content, like an FAQ page.

Good examples within the Facebook marketing topic listed above are HubSpot’s posts:

How Do Facebook Stories Stack Up to Snapchat?

How to Use Facebook Live: The Ultimate Guide

For Mosi-guard, they’re not utilizing internal links within the copy of the other blogs, but the "older posts" section at the bottom of the blog is referencing this guide:

The malaria map and your guide to traveling safe

Target page

Normally a keyword or phrase linked to a product or service page, e.g. nike trainers or seo services. Target pages are decision-stage content pieces.

HubSpot’s target content is their social media software page, with one of Mosi-guard’s target pages being their natural spray product.

Track & monitor

A keyword or phrase that is not the main focus of a page, but could still rank due to its similarity to the target page keyword. A good example of this might be seo services as the target page keyword, but this page could also rank for seo agency, seo company, etc.

Ignore

A keyword or phrase that has been reviewed but is not recommended to be optimized for, possibly due to a lack of search volume, it’s too competitive, it won’t be profitable, etc.

Once the keyword research is complete, we then map our keywords to existing website pages. This gives us a list of mapped keywords and a list of unmapped keywords, which in turn creates a content gap analysis that often leads to a content plan that could last for three, six, or twelve-plus months.

Putting it into practice

I’m a firm believer in giving an example of how this would work in practice, so I’m going to walk through one with screenshots. I’ll also provide a template of our keyword research document for you to take away.

1. Harvesting keywords

The first step in the process is similar, if not identical, to every other keyword research project. You start off with a batch of keywords from the client or other stakeholders that the site wants to rank for. Most of the industry call this a seed keyword list. That keyword list is normally a minimum of 15–20 keywords, but can often be more if you’re dealing with an e-commerce website with multiple product lines.

This list is often based off nothing more than opinion: “What do we think our potential customers will search for?” It’s a good starting point, but you need the rest of the process to follow on to make sure you’re optimizing based off data, not opinion.

2. Expanding the list

Once you’ve got that keyword list, it’s time to start utilizing some of the tools you have at your disposal. There are lots, of course! We tend to use a combination of Moz Keyword Explorer, Answer the Public, Keywords Everywhere, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Ads, ranking tools, and SEMrush.

The idea of this list is to start thinking about keywords that the organization may not have considered before. Your expanded list will include obvious synonyms from your list. Take the example below:

Seed Keywords

Expanded Keywords

ski chalet

ski chalet

ski chalet rental

ski chalet hire

ski chalet [location name]

etc

There are other examples that should be considered. A client I worked with in the past once gave a seed keyword of “biomass boilers.” But after keyword research was conducted, a more colloquial term for “biomass boilers” in the UK is “wood burners.” This is an important distinction and should be picked up as early in the process as possible. Keyword research tools are not infallible, so if budget and resource allows, you may wish to consult current and potential customers about which terms they might use to find the products or services being offered.

3. Filtering out irrelevant keywords

Once you’ve expanded the seed keyword list, it’s time to start filtering out irrelevant keywords. This is pretty labor-intensive and involves sorting through rows of data. We tend to use Moz’s Keyword Explorer, filter by relevancy, and work our way down. As we go, we’ll add keywords to lists within the platform and start to try and sort things by topic. Topics are fairly subjective, and often you’ll get overlap between them. We’ll group similar keywords and phrases together in a topic based off the semantic relativity of those phrases. For example:

Topic

Keywords

ski chalet

ski chalet

ski chalet rental

ski chalet hire

ski chalet [location name]

catered chalet

catered chalet

luxury catered chalet

catered chalet rental

catered chalet hire

catered chalet [location name]

ski accommodation

ski accommodation

cheap ski accommodation

budget ski accommodation

ski accomodation [location name]

Many of the above keywords are decision-based keywords — particularly those with rental or hire in them. They're showing buying intent. We’ll then try to put ourselves in the mind of the buyer and come up with keywords towards the start of the buyer’s journey.

Topic

Keywords

Buyer’s stage

ski resorts

ski resorts

best ski resorts

ski resorts europe

ski resorts usa

ski resorts canada

top ski resorts

cheap ski resorts

luxury ski resorts

Consideration

skiing

skiing

skiing guide

skiing beginner’s guide

Consideration

family holidays

family holidays

family winter holidays

family trips

Awareness

This helps us cater to customers that might not be in the frame of mind to purchase just yet — they're just doing research. It means we cast the net wider. Conversion rates for these keywords are unlikely to be high (at least, for purchases or enquiries) but if utilized as part of a wider marketing strategy, we should look to capture some form of information, primarily an email address, so we can send people relevant information via email or remarketing ads later down the line.

4. Pulling in data

Once you’ve expanded the seed keywords out, Keyword Explorer’s handy list function enables your to break things down into separate topics. You can then export that data into a CSV and start combining it with other data sources. If you have SEMrush API access, Dave Sottimano’s API Library is a great time saver; otherwise, you may want to consider uploading the keywords into the Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension and manually exporting the data and combining everything together. You should then have a spreadsheet that looks something like this:

You could then add in additional data sources. There’s no reason you couldn’t combine the above with volumes and competition metrics from other SEO tools. Consider including existing keyword ranking information or Google Ads data in this process. Keywords that convert well on PPC should do the same organically and should therefore be considered. Wil Reynolds talks about this particular tactic a lot.

5. Aligning phrases to the buyer’s journey

The next stage of the process is to start categorizing the keywords into the stage of the buyer’s journey. Something we’ve found at Aira is that keywords don’t always fit into a predefined stage. Someone looking for “marketing services” could be doing research about what marketing services are, but they could also be looking for a provider. You may get keywords that could be either awareness/consideration or consideration/decision. Use your judgement, and remember this is subjective. Once complete, you should end up with some data that looks similar to this:

This categorization is important, as it starts to frame what type of content is most appropriate for that keyword or phrase.

The next stage of this process is to start noticing patterns in keyphrases and where they get mapped to in the buyer’s journey. Often you’ll see keywords like “price” or ”cost” at the decision stage and phrases like “how to” at the awareness stage. Once you start identifying these patterns, possibly using a variation of Tom Casano’s keyword clustering approach, you can then try to find a way to automate so that when these terms appear in your keyword column, the intent automatically gets updated.

Once completed, we can then start to define each of our keywords and give them a type:

Pillar page

Cluster page

Target page

Track & monitor

Ignore

We use this document to start thinking about what type of content is most effective for that piece given the search volume available, how competitive that term is, how profitable the keyword could be, and what stage the buyer might be at. We’re trying to find that sweet spot between having enough search volume, ensuring we can actually rank for that keyphrase (there’s no point in a small e-commerce startup trying to rank for “buy nike trainers”), and how important/profitable that phrase could be for the business. The below Venn diagram illustrates this nicely:

We also reorder the keywords so keywords that are semantically similar are bucketed together into parent and child keywords. This helps to inform our on-page recommendations:

From the example above, you can see "digital marketing agency" as the main keyword, but “digital marketing services” & “digital marketing agency uk” sit underneath.

We also use conditional formatting to help identify keyword page types:

And then sheets to separate topics out:

Once this is complete, we have a data-rich spreadsheet of keywords that we then work with clients on to make sure we’ve not missed anything. The document can get pretty big, particularly when you’re dealing with e-commerce websites that have thousands of products.

5. Keyword mapping and content gap analysis

We then map these keywords to existing content to ensure that the site hasn’t already written about the subject in the past. We often use Google Search Console data to do this so we understand how any existing content is being interpreted by the search engines. By doing this we’re creating our own content gap analysis. An example output can be seen below:

The above process takes our keyword research and then applies the usual on-page concepts (such as optimizing meta titles, URLs, descriptions, headings, etc) to existing pages. We’re also ensuring that we’re mapping our user intent and type of page (pillar, cluster, target, etc), which helps us decide what sort of content the piece should be (such as a blog post, webinar, e-book, etc). This process helps us understand what keywords and phrases the site is not already being found for, or is not targeted to.

Free template

I promised a template Google Sheet earlier in this blog post and you can find that here.

Do you have any questions on this process? Ways to improve it? Feel free to post in the comments below or ping me over on Twitter!

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don't have time to hunt down but want to read!

[simplemlmsponsoring]

New Post has been published on http://simplemlmsponsoring.com/attraction-marketing-formula/seo/evolving-keyword-research-to-match-your-buyerrsquos-journey/

Evolving Keyword Research to Match Your Buyer’s Journey

Posted by matthew_jkay

Keyword research has been around as long as the SEO industry has. Search engines built a system that revolves around users entering a term or query into a text entry field, hitting return, and receiving a list of relevant results. As the online search market expanded, one clear leader emerged — Google — and with it they brought AdWords (now Google Ads), an advertising platform that allowed organizations to appear on search results pages for keywords that organically they might not.

Within Google Ads came a tool that enabled businesses to look at how many searches there were per month for almost any query. Google Keyword Planner became the de facto tool for keyword research in the industry, and with good reason: it was Google’s data. Not only that, Google gave us the ability to gather further insights due to other metrics Keyword Planner provided: competition and suggested bid. Whilst these keywords were Google Ads-oriented metrics, they gave the SEO industry an indication of how competitive a keyword was.

The reason is obvious. If a keyword or phrase has higher competition (i.e. more advertisers bidding to appear for that term) it’s likely to be more competitive from an organic perspective. Similarly, a term that has a higher suggested bid means it’s more likely to be a competitive term. SEOs dined on this data for years, but when the industry started digging a bit more into the data, we soon realized that while useful, it was not always wholly accurate. Moz, SEMrush, and other tools all started to develop alternative volume and competitive metrics using Clickstream data to give marketers more insights.

Now industry professionals have several software tools and data outlets to conduct their keyword research. These software companies will only improve in the accuracy of their data outputs. Google’s data is unlikely to significantly change; their goal is to sell ad space, not make life easy for SEOs. In fact, they’ve made life harder by using volume ranges for Google Ads accounts with low activity. SEO tools have investors and customers to appease and must continually improve their products to reduce churn and grow their customer base. This makes things rosy for content-led SEO, right?

Well, not really.

The problem with historical keyword research is twofold:

1. SEOs spend too much time thinking about the decision stage of the buyer’s journey (more on that later).

2. SEOs spend too much time thinking about keywords, rather than categories or topics.

The industry, to its credit, is doing a lot to tackle issue number two. “Topics over keywords” is something that is not new as I’ll briefly come to later. Frameworks for topic-based SEO have started to appear over the last few years. This is a step in the right direction. Organizing site content into categories, adding appropriate internal linking, and understanding that one piece of content can rank for several variations of a phrase is becoming far more commonplace.

What is less well known (but starting to gain traction) is point one. But in order to understand this further, we should dive into what the buyer’s journey actually is.

What is the buyer’s journey?

The buyer’s or customer’s journey is not new. If you open marketing text books from years gone by, get a college degree in marketing, or even just go on general marketing blogs you’ll see it crop up. There are lots of variations of this journey, but they all say a similar thing. No matter what product or service is bought, everyone goes through this journey. This could be online or offline — the main difference is that depending on the product, person, or situation, the amount of time this journey takes will vary — but every buyer goes through it. But what is it, exactly? For the purpose of this article, we’ll focus on three stages: awareness, consideration, & decision.

Awareness

The awareness stage of the buyer’s journey is similar to problem discovery, where a potential customer realizes that they have a problem (or an opportunity) but they may not have figured out exactly what that is yet.

Search terms at this stage are often question-based — users are researching around a particular area.

Consideration

The consideration stage is where a potential consumer has defined what their problem or opportunity is and has begun to look for potential solutions to help solve the issue they face.

Decision

The decision stage is where most organizations focus their attention. Normally consumers are ready to buy at this stage and are often doing product or vendor comparisons, looking at reviews, and searching for pricing information.

To illustrate this process, let’s take two examples: buying an ice cream and buying a holiday.

Being low-value, the former is not a particularly considered purchase, but this journey still takes place. The latter is more considered. It can often take several weeks or months for a consumer to decide on what destination they want to visit, let alone a hotel or excursions. But how does this affect keyword research, and the content which we as marketers should provide?

At each stage, a buyer will have a different thought process. It’s key to note that not every buyer of the same product will have the same thought process but you can see how we can start to formulate a process.

The Buyer’s Journey – Holiday Purchase

The above table illustrates the sort of queries or terms that consumers might use at different stages of their journey. The problem is that most organizations focus all of their efforts on the decision end of the spectrum. This is entirely the right approach to take at the start because you’re targeting consumers who are interested in your product or service then and there. However, in an increasingly competitive online space you should try and find ways to diversify and bring people into your marketing funnel (which in most cases is your website) at different stages.

I agree with the argument that creating content for people earlier in the journey will likely mean lower conversion rates from visitor to customer, but my counter to this would be that you’re also potentially missing out on people who will become customers. Further possibilities to at least get these people into your funnel include offering content downloads (gated content) to capture user’s information, or remarketing activity via Facebook, Google Ads, or other retargeting platforms.

Moving from keywords to topics

I’m not going to bang this drum too loudly. I think many in of the SEO community have signed up to the approach that topics are more important than keywords. There are quite a few resources on this listed online, but what forced it home for me was Cyrus Shepard’s Moz article in 2014. Much, if not all, of that post still holds true today.

What I will cover is an adoption of HubSpot’s Topic Cluster model. For those unaccustomed to their model, HubSpot’s approach formalizes and labels what many search marketers have been doing for a while now. The basic premise is instead of having your site fragmented with lots of content across multiple sections, all hyperlinking to each other, you create one really in-depth content piece that covers a topic area broadly (and covers shorter-tail keywords with high search volume), and then supplement this page with content targeting the long-tail, such as blog posts, FAQs, or opinion pieces. HubSpot calls this “pillar” and “cluster” content respectively.

Source: Matt Barby / HubSpot

The process then involves taking these cluster pages and linking back to the pillar page using keyword-rich anchor text. There’s nothing particularly new about this approach aside from formalizing it a bit more. Instead of having your site’s content structured in such a way that it’s fragmented and interlinking between lots of different pages and topics, you keep the internal linking within its topic, or content cluster. This video explains this methodology further. While we accept this model may not fit every situation, and nor is it completely perfect, it’s a great way of understanding how search engines are now interpreting content.

At Aira, we’ve taken this approach and tried to evolve it a bit further, tying these topics into the stages of the buyer’s journey while utilizing several data points to make sure our outputs are based off as much data as we can get our hands on. Furthermore, because pillar pages tend to target shorter-tail keywords with high search volume, they’re often either awareness- or consideration-stage content, and thus not applicable for decision stage. We term our key decision pages “target pages,” as this should be a primary focus of any activity we conduct.

We’ll also look at the semantic relativity of the keywords reviewed, so that we have a “parent” keyword that we’re targeting a page to rank for, and then children of that keyword or phrase that the page may also rank for, due to its similarity to the parent. Every keyword is categorized according to its stage in the buyer’s journey and whether it’s appropriate for a pillar, target, or cluster page. We also add two further classifications to our keywords: track & monitor and ignore. Definitions for these five keyword types are listed below:

Pillar page

A pillar page covers all aspects of a topic on a single page, with room for more in-depth reporting in more detailed cluster blog posts that hyperlink back to the pillar page. A keyword tagged with pillar page will be the primary topic and the focus of a page on the website. Pillar pages should be awareness- or consideration-stage content.

A great pillar page example I often refer to is HubSpot’s Facebook marketing guide or Mosi-guard’s insect bites guide (disclaimer: probably don’t click through if you don’t like close-up shots of insects!).

Cluster page

A cluster topic page for the pillar focuses on providing more detail for a specific long-tail keyword related to the main topic. This type of page is normally associated with a blog article but could be another type of content, like an FAQ page.

Good examples within the Facebook marketing topic listed above are HubSpot’s posts:

How Do Facebook Stories Stack Up to Snapchat? How to Use Facebook Live: The Ultimate Guide

For Mosi-guard, they’re not utilizing internal links within the copy of the other blogs, but the “older posts” section at the bottom of the blog is referencing this guide:

The malaria map and your guide to traveling safe

Target page

Normally a keyword or phrase linked to a product or service page, e.g. nike trainers or seo services. Target pages are decision-stage content pieces.

HubSpot’s target content is their social media software page, with one of Mosi-guard’s target pages being their natural spray product.

Track & monitor

A keyword or phrase that is not the main focus of a page, but could still rank due to its similarity to the target page keyword. A good example of this might be seo services as the target page keyword, but this page could also rank for seo agency, seo company, etc.

Ignore

A keyword or phrase that has been reviewed but is not recommended to be optimized for, possibly due to a lack of search volume, it’s too competitive, it won’t be profitable, etc.

Once the keyword research is complete, we then map our keywords to existing website pages. This gives us a list of mapped keywords and a list of unmapped keywords, which in turn creates a content gap analysis that often leads to a content plan that could last for three, six, or twelve-plus months.

Putting it into practice

I’m a firm believer in giving an example of how this would work in practice, so I’m going to walk through one with screenshots. I’ll also provide a template of our keyword research document for you to take away.

1. Harvesting keywords

The first step in the process is similar, if not identical, to every other keyword research project. You start off with a batch of keywords from the client or other stakeholders that the site wants to rank for. Most of the industry call this a seed keyword list. That keyword list is normally a minimum of 15–20 keywords, but can often be more if you’re dealing with an e-commerce website with multiple product lines.

This list is often based off nothing more than opinion: “What do we think our potential customers will search for?” It’s a good starting point, but you need the rest of the process to follow on to make sure you’re optimizing based off data, not opinion.

2. Expanding the list

Once you’ve got that keyword list, it’s time to start utilizing some of the tools you have at your disposal. There are lots, of course! We tend to use a combination of Moz Keyword Explorer, Answer the Public, Keywords Everywhere, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Ads, ranking tools, and SEMrush.

The idea of this list is to start thinking about keywords that the organization may not have considered before. Your expanded list will include obvious synonyms from your list. Take the example below:

Seed Keywords

Expanded Keywords

ski chalet

ski chalet

ski chalet rental

ski chalet hire

ski chalet [location name]

etc

There are other examples that should be considered. A client I worked with in the past once gave a seed keyword of “biomass boilers.” But after keyword research was conducted, a more colloquial term for “biomass boilers” in the UK is “wood burners.” This is an important distinction and should be picked up as early in the process as possible. Keyword research tools are not infallible, so if budget and resource allows, you may wish to consult current and potential customers about which terms they might use to find the products or services being offered.

3. Filtering out irrelevant keywords

Once you’ve expanded the seed keyword list, it’s time to start filtering out irrelevant keywords. This is pretty labor-intensive and involves sorting through rows of data. We tend to use Moz’s Keyword Explorer, filter by relevancy, and work our way down. As we go, we’ll add keywords to lists within the platform and start to try and sort things by topic. Topics are fairly subjective, and often you’ll get overlap between them. We’ll group similar keywords and phrases together in a topic based off the semantic relativity of those phrases. For example:

Topic

Keywords

ski chalet

ski chalet

ski chalet rental

ski chalet hire

ski chalet [location name]

catered chalet

catered chalet

luxury catered chalet

catered chalet rental

catered chalet hire

catered chalet [location name]

ski accommodation

ski accommodation

cheap ski accommodation

budget ski accommodation

ski accomodation [location name]

Many of the above keywords are decision-based keywords — particularly those with rental or hire in them. They’re showing buying intent. We’ll then try to put ourselves in the mind of the buyer and come up with keywords towards the start of the buyer’s journey.

Topic

Keywords

Buyer’s stage

ski resorts

ski resorts

best ski resorts

ski resorts europe

ski resorts usa

ski resorts canada

top ski resorts

cheap ski resorts

luxury ski resorts

Consideration

skiing

skiing

skiing guide

skiing beginner’s guide

Consideration

family holidays

family holidays

family winter holidays

family trips

Awareness

This helps us cater to customers that might not be in the frame of mind to purchase just yet — they’re just doing research. It means we cast the net wider. Conversion rates for these keywords are unlikely to be high (at least, for purchases or enquiries) but if utilized as part of a wider marketing strategy, we should look to capture some form of information, primarily an email address, so we can send people relevant information via email or remarketing ads later down the line.

4. Pulling in data

Once you’ve expanded the seed keywords out, Keyword Explorer’s handy list function enables your to break things down into separate topics. You can then export that data into a CSV and start combining it with other data sources. If you have SEMrush API access, Dave Sottimano’s API Library is a great time saver; otherwise, you may want to consider uploading the keywords into the Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension and manually exporting the data and combining everything together. You should then have a spreadsheet that looks something like this:

You could then add in additional data sources. There’s no reason you couldn’t combine the above with volumes and competition metrics from other SEO tools. Consider including existing keyword ranking information or Google Ads data in this process. Keywords that convert well on PPC should do the same organically and should therefore be considered. Wil Reynolds talks about this particular tactic a lot.

5. Aligning phrases to the buyer’s journey

The next stage of the process is to start categorizing the keywords into the stage of the buyer’s journey. Something we’ve found at Aira is that keywords don’t always fit into a predefined stage. Someone looking for “marketing services” could be doing research about what marketing services are, but they could also be looking for a provider. You may get keywords that could be either awareness/consideration or consideration/decision. Use your judgement, and remember this is subjective. Once complete, you should end up with some data that looks similar to this:

This categorization is important, as it starts to frame what type of content is most appropriate for that keyword or phrase.

The next stage of this process is to start noticing patterns in keyphrases and where they get mapped to in the buyer’s journey. Often you’ll see keywords like “price” or ”cost” at the decision stage and phrases like “how to” at the awareness stage. Once you start identifying these patterns, possibly using a variation of Tom Casano’s keyword clustering approach, you can then try to find a way to automate so that when these terms appear in your keyword column, the intent automatically gets updated.

Once completed, we can then start to define each of our keywords and give them a type:

Pillar page Cluster page Target page Track & monitor Ignore

We use this document to start thinking about what type of content is most effective for that piece given the search volume available, how competitive that term is, how profitable the keyword could be, and what stage the buyer might be at. We’re trying to find that sweet spot between having enough search volume, ensuring we can actually rank for that keyphrase (there’s no point in a small e-commerce startup trying to rank for “buy nike trainers”), and how important/profitable that phrase could be for the business. The below Venn diagram illustrates this nicely:

We also reorder the keywords so keywords that are semantically similar are bucketed together into parent and child keywords. This helps to inform our on-page recommendations:

From the example above, you can see “digital marketing agency” as the main keyword, but “digital marketing services” & “digital marketing agency uk” sit underneath.

We also use conditional formatting to help identify keyword page types:

And then sheets to separate topics out:

Once this is complete, we have a data-rich spreadsheet of keywords that we then work with clients on to make sure we’ve not missed anything. The document can get pretty big, particularly when you’re dealing with e-commerce websites that have thousands of products.

5. Keyword mapping and content gap analysis

We then map these keywords to existing content to ensure that the site hasn’t already written about the subject in the past. We often use Google Search Console data to do this so we understand how any existing content is being interpreted by the search engines. By doing this we’re creating our own content gap analysis. An example output can be seen below:

The above process takes our keyword research and then applies the usual on-page concepts (such as optimizing meta titles, URLs, descriptions, headings, etc) to existing pages. We’re also ensuring that we’re mapping our user intent and type of page (pillar, cluster, target, etc), which helps us decide what sort of content the piece should be (such as a blog post, webinar, e-book, etc). This process helps us understand what keywords and phrases the..

Read more: moz.com

[rodneyevesuarywk]

Evolving Keyword Research to Match Your Buyer&amp;rsquo;s Journey

Posted by matthew_jkay

Keyword research has been around as long as the SEO industry has. Search engines built a system that revolves around users entering a term or query into a text entry field, hitting return, and receiving a list of relevant results. As the online search market expanded, one clear leader emerged — Google — and with it they brought AdWords (now Google Ads), an advertising platform that allowed organizations to appear on search results pages for keywords that organically they might not.

Within Google Ads came a tool that enabled businesses to look at how many searches there were per month for almost any query. Google Keyword Planner became the de facto tool for keyword research in the industry, and with good reason: it was Google’s data. Not only that, Google gave us the ability to gather further insights due to other metrics Keyword Planner provided: competition and suggested bid. Whilst these keywords were Google Ads-oriented metrics, they gave the SEO industry an indication of how competitive a keyword was.

The reason is obvious. If a keyword or phrase has higher competition (i.e. more advertisers bidding to appear for that term) it’s likely to be more competitive from an organic perspective. Similarly, a term that has a higher suggested bid means it’s more likely to be a competitive term. SEOs dined on this data for years, but when the industry started digging a bit more into the data, we soon realized that while useful, it was not always wholly accurate. Moz, SEMrush, and other tools all started to develop alternative volume and competitive metrics using Clickstream data to give marketers more insights.

Now industry professionals have several software tools and data outlets to conduct their keyword research. These software companies will only improve in the accuracy of their data outputs. Google’s data is unlikely to significantly change; their goal is to sell ad space, not make life easy for SEOs. In fact, they've made life harder by using volume ranges for Google Ads accounts with low activity. SEO tools have investors and customers to appease and must continually improve their products to reduce churn and grow their customer base. This makes things rosy for content-led SEO, right?

Well, not really.

The problem with historical keyword research is twofold:

1. SEOs spend too much time thinking about the decision stage of the buyer’s journey (more on that later).

2. SEOs spend too much time thinking about keywords, rather than categories or topics.

The industry, to its credit, is doing a lot to tackle issue number two. “Topics over keywords” is something that is not new as I’ll briefly come to later. Frameworks for topic-based SEO have started to appear over the last few years. This is a step in the right direction. Organizing site content into categories, adding appropriate internal linking, and understanding that one piece of content can rank for several variations of a phrase is becoming far more commonplace.

What is less well known (but starting to gain traction) is point one. But in order to understand this further, we should dive into what the buyer’s journey actually is.

What is the buyer’s journey?

The buyer’s or customer’s journey is not new. If you open marketing text books from years gone by, get a college degree in marketing, or even just go on general marketing blogs you’ll see it crop up. There are lots of variations of this journey, but they all say a similar thing. No matter what product or service is bought, everyone goes through this journey. This could be online or offline — the main difference is that depending on the product, person, or situation, the amount of time this journey takes will vary — but every buyer goes through it. But what is it, exactly? For the purpose of this article, we’ll focus on three stages: awareness, consideration, & decision.

Awareness

The awareness stage of the buyer’s journey is similar to problem discovery, where a potential customer realizes that they have a problem (or an opportunity) but they may not have figured out exactly what that is yet.

Search terms at this stage are often question-based — users are researching around a particular area.

Consideration

The consideration stage is where a potential consumer has defined what their problem or opportunity is and has begun to look for potential solutions to help solve the issue they face.

Decision

The decision stage is where most organizations focus their attention. Normally consumers are ready to buy at this stage and are often doing product or vendor comparisons, looking at reviews, and searching for pricing information.

To illustrate this process, let’s take two examples: buying an ice cream and buying a holiday.

Being low-value, the former is not a particularly considered purchase, but this journey still takes place. The latter is more considered. It can often take several weeks or months for a consumer to decide on what destination they want to visit, let alone a hotel or excursions. But how does this affect keyword research, and the content which we as marketers should provide?

At each stage, a buyer will have a different thought process. It’s key to note that not every buyer of the same product will have the same thought process but you can see how we can start to formulate a process.

The Buyer’s Journey - Holiday Purchase

The above table illustrates the sort of queries or terms that consumers might use at different stages of their journey. The problem is that most organizations focus all of their efforts on the decision end of the spectrum. This is entirely the right approach to take at the start because you’re targeting consumers who are interested in your product or service then and there. However, in an increasingly competitive online space you should try and find ways to diversify and bring people into your marketing funnel (which in most cases is your website) at different stages.

I agree with the argument that creating content for people earlier in the journey will likely mean lower conversion rates from visitor to customer, but my counter to this would be that you're also potentially missing out on people who will become customers. Further possibilities to at least get these people into your funnel include offering content downloads (gated content) to capture user’s information, or remarketing activity via Facebook, Google Ads, or other retargeting platforms.

Moving from keywords to topics

I’m not going to bang this drum too loudly. I think many in of the SEO community have signed up to the approach that topics are more important than keywords. There are quite a few resources on this listed online, but what forced it home for me was Cyrus Shepard’s Moz article in 2014. Much, if not all, of that post still holds true today.

What I will cover is an adoption of HubSpot’s Topic Cluster model. For those unaccustomed to their model, HubSpot’s approach formalizes and labels what many search marketers have been doing for a while now. The basic premise is instead of having your site fragmented with lots of content across multiple sections, all hyperlinking to each other, you create one really in-depth content piece that covers a topic area broadly (and covers shorter-tail keywords with high search volume), and then supplement this page with content targeting the long-tail, such as blog posts, FAQs, or opinion pieces. HubSpot calls this "pillar" and "cluster" content respectively.

Source: Matt Barby / HubSpot

The process then involves taking these cluster pages and linking back to the pillar page using keyword-rich anchor text. There’s nothing particularly new about this approach aside from formalizing it a bit more. Instead of having your site’s content structured in such a way that it's fragmented and interlinking between lots of different pages and topics, you keep the internal linking within its topic, or content cluster. This video explains this methodology further. While we accept this model may not fit every situation, and nor is it completely perfect, it’s a great way of understanding how search engines are now interpreting content.

At Aira, we’ve taken this approach and tried to evolve it a bit further, tying these topics into the stages of the buyer’s journey while utilizing several data points to make sure our outputs are based off as much data as we can get our hands on. Furthermore, because pillar pages tend to target shorter-tail keywords with high search volume, they're often either awareness- or consideration-stage content, and thus not applicable for decision stage. We term our key decision pages “target pages,” as this should be a primary focus of any activity we conduct.

We’ll also look at the semantic relativity of the keywords reviewed, so that we have a “parent” keyword that we’re targeting a page to rank for, and then children of that keyword or phrase that the page may also rank for, due to its similarity to the parent. Every keyword is categorized according to its stage in the buyer’s journey and whether it's appropriate for a pillar, target, or cluster page. We also add two further classifications to our keywords: track & monitor and ignore. Definitions for these five keyword types are listed below:

Pillar page

A pillar page covers all aspects of a topic on a single page, with room for more in-depth reporting in more detailed cluster blog posts that hyperlink back to the pillar page. A keyword tagged with pillar page will be the primary topic and the focus of a page on the website. Pillar pages should be awareness- or consideration-stage content.

A great pillar page example I often refer to is HubSpot’s Facebook marketing guide or Mosi-guard’s insect bites guide (disclaimer: probably don’t click through if you don’t like close-up shots of insects!).

Cluster page

A cluster topic page for the pillar focuses on providing more detail for a specific long-tail keyword related to the main topic. This type of page is normally associated with a blog article but could be another type of content, like an FAQ page.

Good examples within the Facebook marketing topic listed above are HubSpot’s posts:

How Do Facebook Stories Stack Up to Snapchat?

How to Use Facebook Live: The Ultimate Guide

For Mosi-guard, they’re not utilizing internal links within the copy of the other blogs, but the "older posts" section at the bottom of the blog is referencing this guide:

The malaria map and your guide to traveling safe

Target page

Normally a keyword or phrase linked to a product or service page, e.g. nike trainers or seo services. Target pages are decision-stage content pieces.

HubSpot’s target content is their social media software page, with one of Mosi-guard’s target pages being their natural spray product.

Track & monitor

A keyword or phrase that is not the main focus of a page, but could still rank due to its similarity to the target page keyword. A good example of this might be seo services as the target page keyword, but this page could also rank for seo agency, seo company, etc.

Ignore

A keyword or phrase that has been reviewed but is not recommended to be optimized for, possibly due to a lack of search volume, it’s too competitive, it won’t be profitable, etc.

Once the keyword research is complete, we then map our keywords to existing website pages. This gives us a list of mapped keywords and a list of unmapped keywords, which in turn creates a content gap analysis that often leads to a content plan that could last for three, six, or twelve-plus months.

Putting it into practice

I’m a firm believer in giving an example of how this would work in practice, so I’m going to walk through one with screenshots. I’ll also provide a template of our keyword research document for you to take away.

1. Harvesting keywords

The first step in the process is similar, if not identical, to every other keyword research project. You start off with a batch of keywords from the client or other stakeholders that the site wants to rank for. Most of the industry call this a seed keyword list. That keyword list is normally a minimum of 15–20 keywords, but can often be more if you’re dealing with an e-commerce website with multiple product lines.

This list is often based off nothing more than opinion: “What do we think our potential customers will search for?” It’s a good starting point, but you need the rest of the process to follow on to make sure you’re optimizing based off data, not opinion.

2. Expanding the list

Once you’ve got that keyword list, it’s time to start utilizing some of the tools you have at your disposal. There are lots, of course! We tend to use a combination of Moz Keyword Explorer, Answer the Public, Keywords Everywhere, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Ads, ranking tools, and SEMrush.

The idea of this list is to start thinking about keywords that the organization may not have considered before. Your expanded list will include obvious synonyms from your list. Take the example below:

Seed Keywords

Expanded Keywords

ski chalet

ski chalet

ski chalet rental

ski chalet hire

ski chalet [location name]

etc

There are other examples that should be considered. A client I worked with in the past once gave a seed keyword of “biomass boilers.” But after keyword research was conducted, a more colloquial term for “biomass boilers” in the UK is “wood burners.” This is an important distinction and should be picked up as early in the process as possible. Keyword research tools are not infallible, so if budget and resource allows, you may wish to consult current and potential customers about which terms they might use to find the products or services being offered.

3. Filtering out irrelevant keywords

Once you’ve expanded the seed keyword list, it’s time to start filtering out irrelevant keywords. This is pretty labor-intensive and involves sorting through rows of data. We tend to use Moz’s Keyword Explorer, filter by relevancy, and work our way down. As we go, we’ll add keywords to lists within the platform and start to try and sort things by topic. Topics are fairly subjective, and often you’ll get overlap between them. We’ll group similar keywords and phrases together in a topic based off the semantic relativity of those phrases. For example:

Topic

Keywords

ski chalet

ski chalet

ski chalet rental

ski chalet hire

ski chalet [location name]

catered chalet

catered chalet

luxury catered chalet

catered chalet rental

catered chalet hire

catered chalet [location name]

ski accommodation

ski accommodation

cheap ski accommodation

budget ski accommodation

ski accomodation [location name]

Many of the above keywords are decision-based keywords — particularly those with rental or hire in them. They're showing buying intent. We’ll then try to put ourselves in the mind of the buyer and come up with keywords towards the start of the buyer’s journey.

Topic

Keywords

Buyer’s stage

ski resorts

ski resorts

best ski resorts

ski resorts europe

ski resorts usa

ski resorts canada

top ski resorts

cheap ski resorts

luxury ski resorts

Consideration

skiing

skiing

skiing guide

skiing beginner’s guide

Consideration

family holidays

family holidays

family winter holidays

family trips

Awareness

This helps us cater to customers that might not be in the frame of mind to purchase just yet — they're just doing research. It means we cast the net wider. Conversion rates for these keywords are unlikely to be high (at least, for purchases or enquiries) but if utilized as part of a wider marketing strategy, we should look to capture some form of information, primarily an email address, so we can send people relevant information via email or remarketing ads later down the line.

4. Pulling in data

Once you’ve expanded the seed keywords out, Keyword Explorer’s handy list function enables your to break things down into separate topics. You can then export that data into a CSV and start combining it with other data sources. If you have SEMrush API access, Dave Sottimano’s API Library is a great time saver; otherwise, you may want to consider uploading the keywords into the Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension and manually exporting the data and combining everything together. You should then have a spreadsheet that looks something like this:

You could then add in additional data sources. There’s no reason you couldn’t combine the above with volumes and competition metrics from other SEO tools. Consider including existing keyword ranking information or Google Ads data in this process. Keywords that convert well on PPC should do the same organically and should therefore be considered. Wil Reynolds talks about this particular tactic a lot.

5. Aligning phrases to the buyer’s journey

The next stage of the process is to start categorizing the keywords into the stage of the buyer’s journey. Something we’ve found at Aira is that keywords don’t always fit into a predefined stage. Someone looking for “marketing services” could be doing research about what marketing services are, but they could also be looking for a provider. You may get keywords that could be either awareness/consideration or consideration/decision. Use your judgement, and remember this is subjective. Once complete, you should end up with some data that looks similar to this:

This categorization is important, as it starts to frame what type of content is most appropriate for that keyword or phrase.

The next stage of this process is to start noticing patterns in keyphrases and where they get mapped to in the buyer’s journey. Often you’ll see keywords like “price” or ”cost” at the decision stage and phrases like “how to” at the awareness stage. Once you start identifying these patterns, possibly using a variation of Tom Casano’s keyword clustering approach, you can then try to find a way to automate so that when these terms appear in your keyword column, the intent automatically gets updated.

Once completed, we can then start to define each of our keywords and give them a type:

Pillar page

Cluster page

Target page

Track & monitor

Ignore

We use this document to start thinking about what type of content is most effective for that piece given the search volume available, how competitive that term is, how profitable the keyword could be, and what stage the buyer might be at. We’re trying to find that sweet spot between having enough search volume, ensuring we can actually rank for that keyphrase (there’s no point in a small e-commerce startup trying to rank for “buy nike trainers”), and how important/profitable that phrase could be for the business. The below Venn diagram illustrates this nicely:

We also reorder the keywords so keywords that are semantically similar are bucketed together into parent and child keywords. This helps to inform our on-page recommendations:

From the example above, you can see "digital marketing agency" as the main keyword, but “digital marketing services” & “digital marketing agency uk” sit underneath.

We also use conditional formatting to help identify keyword page types:

And then sheets to separate topics out:

Once this is complete, we have a data-rich spreadsheet of keywords that we then work with clients on to make sure we’ve not missed anything. The document can get pretty big, particularly when you’re dealing with e-commerce websites that have thousands of products.

5. Keyword mapping and content gap analysis

We then map these keywords to existing content to ensure that the site hasn’t already written about the subject in the past. We often use Google Search Console data to do this so we understand how any existing content is being interpreted by the search engines. By doing this we’re creating our own content gap analysis. An example output can be seen below:

The above process takes our keyword research and then applies the usual on-page concepts (such as optimizing meta titles, URLs, descriptions, headings, etc) to existing pages. We’re also ensuring that we’re mapping our user intent and type of page (pillar, cluster, target, etc), which helps us decide what sort of content the piece should be (such as a blog post, webinar, e-book, etc). This process helps us understand what keywords and phrases the..

https://ift.tt/2Lbmvix

[conniecogeie]

Evolving Keyword Research to Match Your Buyer&amp;rsquo;s Journey

Posted by matthew_jkay

Keyword research has been around as long as the SEO industry has. Search engines built a system that revolves around users entering a term or query into a text entry field, hitting return, and receiving a list of relevant results. As the online search market expanded, one clear leader emerged — Google — and with it they brought AdWords (now Google Ads), an advertising platform that allowed organizations to appear on search results pages for keywords that organically they might not.

Within Google Ads came a tool that enabled businesses to look at how many searches there were per month for almost any query. Google Keyword Planner became the de facto tool for keyword research in the industry, and with good reason: it was Google’s data. Not only that, Google gave us the ability to gather further insights due to other metrics Keyword Planner provided: competition and suggested bid. Whilst these keywords were Google Ads-oriented metrics, they gave the SEO industry an indication of how competitive a keyword was.

The reason is obvious. If a keyword or phrase has higher competition (i.e. more advertisers bidding to appear for that term) it’s likely to be more competitive from an organic perspective. Similarly, a term that has a higher suggested bid means it’s more likely to be a competitive term. SEOs dined on this data for years, but when the industry started digging a bit more into the data, we soon realized that while useful, it was not always wholly accurate. Moz, SEMrush, and other tools all started to develop alternative volume and competitive metrics using Clickstream data to give marketers more insights.

Now industry professionals have several software tools and data outlets to conduct their keyword research. These software companies will only improve in the accuracy of their data outputs. Google’s data is unlikely to significantly change; their goal is to sell ad space, not make life easy for SEOs. In fact, they've made life harder by using volume ranges for Google Ads accounts with low activity. SEO tools have investors and customers to appease and must continually improve their products to reduce churn and grow their customer base. This makes things rosy for content-led SEO, right?

Well, not really.

The problem with historical keyword research is twofold:

1. SEOs spend too much time thinking about the decision stage of the buyer’s journey (more on that later).

2. SEOs spend too much time thinking about keywords, rather than categories or topics.

The industry, to its credit, is doing a lot to tackle issue number two. “Topics over keywords” is something that is not new as I’ll briefly come to later. Frameworks for topic-based SEO have started to appear over the last few years. This is a step in the right direction. Organizing site content into categories, adding appropriate internal linking, and understanding that one piece of content can rank for several variations of a phrase is becoming far more commonplace.

What is less well known (but starting to gain traction) is point one. But in order to understand this further, we should dive into what the buyer’s journey actually is.

What is the buyer’s journey?

The buyer’s or customer’s journey is not new. If you open marketing text books from years gone by, get a college degree in marketing, or even just go on general marketing blogs you’ll see it crop up. There are lots of variations of this journey, but they all say a similar thing. No matter what product or service is bought, everyone goes through this journey. This could be online or offline — the main difference is that depending on the product, person, or situation, the amount of time this journey takes will vary — but every buyer goes through it. But what is it, exactly? For the purpose of this article, we’ll focus on three stages: awareness, consideration, & decision.

Awareness

The awareness stage of the buyer’s journey is similar to problem discovery, where a potential customer realizes that they have a problem (or an opportunity) but they may not have figured out exactly what that is yet.

Search terms at this stage are often question-based — users are researching around a particular area.

Consideration

The consideration stage is where a potential consumer has defined what their problem or opportunity is and has begun to look for potential solutions to help solve the issue they face.

Decision

The decision stage is where most organizations focus their attention. Normally consumers are ready to buy at this stage and are often doing product or vendor comparisons, looking at reviews, and searching for pricing information.

To illustrate this process, let’s take two examples: buying an ice cream and buying a holiday.

Being low-value, the former is not a particularly considered purchase, but this journey still takes place. The latter is more considered. It can often take several weeks or months for a consumer to decide on what destination they want to visit, let alone a hotel or excursions. But how does this affect keyword research, and the content which we as marketers should provide?

At each stage, a buyer will have a different thought process. It’s key to note that not every buyer of the same product will have the same thought process but you can see how we can start to formulate a process.

The Buyer’s Journey - Holiday Purchase

The above table illustrates the sort of queries or terms that consumers might use at different stages of their journey. The problem is that most organizations focus all of their efforts on the decision end of the spectrum. This is entirely the right approach to take at the start because you’re targeting consumers who are interested in your product or service then and there. However, in an increasingly competitive online space you should try and find ways to diversify and bring people into your marketing funnel (which in most cases is your website) at different stages.

I agree with the argument that creating content for people earlier in the journey will likely mean lower conversion rates from visitor to customer, but my counter to this would be that you're also potentially missing out on people who will become customers. Further possibilities to at least get these people into your funnel include offering content downloads (gated content) to capture user’s information, or remarketing activity via Facebook, Google Ads, or other retargeting platforms.

Moving from keywords to topics

I’m not going to bang this drum too loudly. I think many in of the SEO community have signed up to the approach that topics are more important than keywords. There are quite a few resources on this listed online, but what forced it home for me was Cyrus Shepard’s Moz article in 2014. Much, if not all, of that post still holds true today.

What I will cover is an adoption of HubSpot’s Topic Cluster model. For those unaccustomed to their model, HubSpot’s approach formalizes and labels what many search marketers have been doing for a while now. The basic premise is instead of having your site fragmented with lots of content across multiple sections, all hyperlinking to each other, you create one really in-depth content piece that covers a topic area broadly (and covers shorter-tail keywords with high search volume), and then supplement this page with content targeting the long-tail, such as blog posts, FAQs, or opinion pieces. HubSpot calls this "pillar" and "cluster" content respectively.

Source: Matt Barby / HubSpot

The process then involves taking these cluster pages and linking back to the pillar page using keyword-rich anchor text. There’s nothing particularly new about this approach aside from formalizing it a bit more. Instead of having your site’s content structured in such a way that it's fragmented and interlinking between lots of different pages and topics, you keep the internal linking within its topic, or content cluster. This video explains this methodology further. While we accept this model may not fit every situation, and nor is it completely perfect, it’s a great way of understanding how search engines are now interpreting content.

At Aira, we’ve taken this approach and tried to evolve it a bit further, tying these topics into the stages of the buyer’s journey while utilizing several data points to make sure our outputs are based off as much data as we can get our hands on. Furthermore, because pillar pages tend to target shorter-tail keywords with high search volume, they're often either awareness- or consideration-stage content, and thus not applicable for decision stage. We term our key decision pages “target pages,” as this should be a primary focus of any activity we conduct.

We’ll also look at the semantic relativity of the keywords reviewed, so that we have a “parent” keyword that we’re targeting a page to rank for, and then children of that keyword or phrase that the page may also rank for, due to its similarity to the parent. Every keyword is categorized according to its stage in the buyer’s journey and whether it's appropriate for a pillar, target, or cluster page. We also add two further classifications to our keywords: track & monitor and ignore. Definitions for these five keyword types are listed below:

Pillar page

A pillar page covers all aspects of a topic on a single page, with room for more in-depth reporting in more detailed cluster blog posts that hyperlink back to the pillar page. A keyword tagged with pillar page will be the primary topic and the focus of a page on the website. Pillar pages should be awareness- or consideration-stage content.

A great pillar page example I often refer to is HubSpot’s Facebook marketing guide or Mosi-guard’s insect bites guide (disclaimer: probably don’t click through if you don’t like close-up shots of insects!).

Cluster page

A cluster topic page for the pillar focuses on providing more detail for a specific long-tail keyword related to the main topic. This type of page is normally associated with a blog article but could be another type of content, like an FAQ page.

Good examples within the Facebook marketing topic listed above are HubSpot’s posts:

How Do Facebook Stories Stack Up to Snapchat?

How to Use Facebook Live: The Ultimate Guide

For Mosi-guard, they’re not utilizing internal links within the copy of the other blogs, but the "older posts" section at the bottom of the blog is referencing this guide:

The malaria map and your guide to traveling safe

Target page

Normally a keyword or phrase linked to a product or service page, e.g. nike trainers or seo services. Target pages are decision-stage content pieces.

HubSpot’s target content is their social media software page, with one of Mosi-guard’s target pages being their natural spray product.

Track & monitor

A keyword or phrase that is not the main focus of a page, but could still rank due to its similarity to the target page keyword. A good example of this might be seo services as the target page keyword, but this page could also rank for seo agency, seo company, etc.

Ignore

A keyword or phrase that has been reviewed but is not recommended to be optimized for, possibly due to a lack of search volume, it’s too competitive, it won’t be profitable, etc.

Once the keyword research is complete, we then map our keywords to existing website pages. This gives us a list of mapped keywords and a list of unmapped keywords, which in turn creates a content gap analysis that often leads to a content plan that could last for three, six, or twelve-plus months.

Putting it into practice

I’m a firm believer in giving an example of how this would work in practice, so I’m going to walk through one with screenshots. I’ll also provide a template of our keyword research document for you to take away.

1. Harvesting keywords

The first step in the process is similar, if not identical, to every other keyword research project. You start off with a batch of keywords from the client or other stakeholders that the site wants to rank for. Most of the industry call this a seed keyword list. That keyword list is normally a minimum of 15–20 keywords, but can often be more if you’re dealing with an e-commerce website with multiple product lines.

This list is often based off nothing more than opinion: “What do we think our potential customers will search for?” It’s a good starting point, but you need the rest of the process to follow on to make sure you’re optimizing based off data, not opinion.

2. Expanding the list

Once you’ve got that keyword list, it’s time to start utilizing some of the tools you have at your disposal. There are lots, of course! We tend to use a combination of Moz Keyword Explorer, Answer the Public, Keywords Everywhere, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Ads, ranking tools, and SEMrush.

The idea of this list is to start thinking about keywords that the organization may not have considered before. Your expanded list will include obvious synonyms from your list. Take the example below:

Seed Keywords

Expanded Keywords

ski chalet

ski chalet

ski chalet rental

ski chalet hire

ski chalet [location name]

etc

There are other examples that should be considered. A client I worked with in the past once gave a seed keyword of “biomass boilers.” But after keyword research was conducted, a more colloquial term for “biomass boilers” in the UK is “wood burners.” This is an important distinction and should be picked up as early in the process as possible. Keyword research tools are not infallible, so if budget and resource allows, you may wish to consult current and potential customers about which terms they might use to find the products or services being offered.

3. Filtering out irrelevant keywords

Once you’ve expanded the seed keyword list, it’s time to start filtering out irrelevant keywords. This is pretty labor-intensive and involves sorting through rows of data. We tend to use Moz’s Keyword Explorer, filter by relevancy, and work our way down. As we go, we’ll add keywords to lists within the platform and start to try and sort things by topic. Topics are fairly subjective, and often you’ll get overlap between them. We’ll group similar keywords and phrases together in a topic based off the semantic relativity of those phrases. For example:

Topic

Keywords

ski chalet

ski chalet

ski chalet rental

ski chalet hire

ski chalet [location name]

catered chalet

catered chalet

luxury catered chalet

catered chalet rental

catered chalet hire

catered chalet [location name]

ski accommodation

ski accommodation

cheap ski accommodation

budget ski accommodation

ski accomodation [location name]

Many of the above keywords are decision-based keywords — particularly those with rental or hire in them. They're showing buying intent. We’ll then try to put ourselves in the mind of the buyer and come up with keywords towards the start of the buyer’s journey.

Topic

Keywords

Buyer’s stage

ski resorts

ski resorts

best ski resorts

ski resorts europe

ski resorts usa

ski resorts canada

top ski resorts

cheap ski resorts

luxury ski resorts

Consideration

skiing

skiing

skiing guide

skiing beginner’s guide

Consideration

family holidays

family holidays

family winter holidays

family trips

Awareness

This helps us cater to customers that might not be in the frame of mind to purchase just yet — they're just doing research. It means we cast the net wider. Conversion rates for these keywords are unlikely to be high (at least, for purchases or enquiries) but if utilized as part of a wider marketing strategy, we should look to capture some form of information, primarily an email address, so we can send people relevant information via email or remarketing ads later down the line.

4. Pulling in data

Once you’ve expanded the seed keywords out, Keyword Explorer’s handy list function enables your to break things down into separate topics. You can then export that data into a CSV and start combining it with other data sources. If you have SEMrush API access, Dave Sottimano’s API Library is a great time saver; otherwise, you may want to consider uploading the keywords into the Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension and manually exporting the data and combining everything together. You should then have a spreadsheet that looks something like this:

You could then add in additional data sources. There’s no reason you couldn’t combine the above with volumes and competition metrics from other SEO tools. Consider including existing keyword ranking information or Google Ads data in this process. Keywords that convert well on PPC should do the same organically and should therefore be considered. Wil Reynolds talks about this particular tactic a lot.

5. Aligning phrases to the buyer’s journey

The next stage of the process is to start categorizing the keywords into the stage of the buyer’s journey. Something we’ve found at Aira is that keywords don’t always fit into a predefined stage. Someone looking for “marketing services” could be doing research about what marketing services are, but they could also be looking for a provider. You may get keywords that could be either awareness/consideration or consideration/decision. Use your judgement, and remember this is subjective. Once complete, you should end up with some data that looks similar to this:

This categorization is important, as it starts to frame what type of content is most appropriate for that keyword or phrase.

The next stage of this process is to start noticing patterns in keyphrases and where they get mapped to in the buyer’s journey. Often you’ll see keywords like “price” or ”cost” at the decision stage and phrases like “how to” at the awareness stage. Once you start identifying these patterns, possibly using a variation of Tom Casano’s keyword clustering approach, you can then try to find a way to automate so that when these terms appear in your keyword column, the intent automatically gets updated.

Once completed, we can then start to define each of our keywords and give them a type:

Pillar page

Cluster page

Target page

Track & monitor

Ignore

We use this document to start thinking about what type of content is most effective for that piece given the search volume available, how competitive that term is, how profitable the keyword could be, and what stage the buyer might be at. We’re trying to find that sweet spot between having enough search volume, ensuring we can actually rank for that keyphrase (there’s no point in a small e-commerce startup trying to rank for “buy nike trainers”), and how important/profitable that phrase could be for the business. The below Venn diagram illustrates this nicely:

We also reorder the keywords so keywords that are semantically similar are bucketed together into parent and child keywords. This helps to inform our on-page recommendations:

From the example above, you can see "digital marketing agency" as the main keyword, but “digital marketing services” & “digital marketing agency uk” sit underneath.

We also use conditional formatting to help identify keyword page types:

And then sheets to separate topics out:

Once this is complete, we have a data-rich spreadsheet of keywords that we then work with clients on to make sure we’ve not missed anything. The document can get pretty big, particularly when you’re dealing with e-commerce websites that have thousands of products.

5. Keyword mapping and content gap analysis

We then map these keywords to existing content to ensure that the site hasn’t already written about the subject in the past. We often use Google Search Console data to do this so we understand how any existing content is being interpreted by the search engines. By doing this we’re creating our own content gap analysis. An example output can be seen below:

The above process takes our keyword research and then applies the usual on-page concepts (such as optimizing meta titles, URLs, descriptions, headings, etc) to existing pages. We’re also ensuring that we’re mapping our user intent and type of page (pillar, cluster, target, etc), which helps us decide what sort of content the piece should be (such as a blog post, webinar, e-book, etc). This process helps us understand what keywords and phrases the..

https://ift.tt/2Lbmvix

[fairchildlingpo1]

Evolving Keyword Research to Match Your Buyer&amp;rsquo;s Journey

Posted by matthew_jkay

Keyword research has been around as long as the SEO industry has. Search engines built a system that revolves around users entering a term or query into a text entry field, hitting return, and receiving a list of relevant results. As the online search market expanded, one clear leader emerged — Google — and with it they brought AdWords (now Google Ads), an advertising platform that allowed organizations to appear on search results pages for keywords that organically they might not.

Within Google Ads came a tool that enabled businesses to look at how many searches there were per month for almost any query. Google Keyword Planner became the de facto tool for keyword research in the industry, and with good reason: it was Google’s data. Not only that, Google gave us the ability to gather further insights due to other metrics Keyword Planner provided: competition and suggested bid. Whilst these keywords were Google Ads-oriented metrics, they gave the SEO industry an indication of how competitive a keyword was.

The reason is obvious. If a keyword or phrase has higher competition (i.e. more advertisers bidding to appear for that term) it’s likely to be more competitive from an organic perspective. Similarly, a term that has a higher suggested bid means it’s more likely to be a competitive term. SEOs dined on this data for years, but when the industry started digging a bit more into the data, we soon realized that while useful, it was not always wholly accurate. Moz, SEMrush, and other tools all started to develop alternative volume and competitive metrics using Clickstream data to give marketers more insights.

Now industry professionals have several software tools and data outlets to conduct their keyword research. These software companies will only improve in the accuracy of their data outputs. Google’s data is unlikely to significantly change; their goal is to sell ad space, not make life easy for SEOs. In fact, they've made life harder by using volume ranges for Google Ads accounts with low activity. SEO tools have investors and customers to appease and must continually improve their products to reduce churn and grow their customer base. This makes things rosy for content-led SEO, right?

Well, not really.

The problem with historical keyword research is twofold:

1. SEOs spend too much time thinking about the decision stage of the buyer’s journey (more on that later).

2. SEOs spend too much time thinking about keywords, rather than categories or topics.

The industry, to its credit, is doing a lot to tackle issue number two. “Topics over keywords” is something that is not new as I’ll briefly come to later. Frameworks for topic-based SEO have started to appear over the last few years. This is a step in the right direction. Organizing site content into categories, adding appropriate internal linking, and understanding that one piece of content can rank for several variations of a phrase is becoming far more commonplace.

What is less well known (but starting to gain traction) is point one. But in order to understand this further, we should dive into what the buyer’s journey actually is.

What is the buyer’s journey?

The buyer’s or customer’s journey is not new. If you open marketing text books from years gone by, get a college degree in marketing, or even just go on general marketing blogs you’ll see it crop up. There are lots of variations of this journey, but they all say a similar thing. No matter what product or service is bought, everyone goes through this journey. This could be online or offline — the main difference is that depending on the product, person, or situation, the amount of time this journey takes will vary — but every buyer goes through it. But what is it, exactly? For the purpose of this article, we’ll focus on three stages: awareness, consideration, & decision.

Awareness

The awareness stage of the buyer’s journey is similar to problem discovery, where a potential customer realizes that they have a problem (or an opportunity) but they may not have figured out exactly what that is yet.

Search terms at this stage are often question-based — users are researching around a particular area.

Consideration

The consideration stage is where a potential consumer has defined what their problem or opportunity is and has begun to look for potential solutions to help solve the issue they face.

Decision

The decision stage is where most organizations focus their attention. Normally consumers are ready to buy at this stage and are often doing product or vendor comparisons, looking at reviews, and searching for pricing information.

To illustrate this process, let’s take two examples: buying an ice cream and buying a holiday.

Being low-value, the former is not a particularly considered purchase, but this journey still takes place. The latter is more considered. It can often take several weeks or months for a consumer to decide on what destination they want to visit, let alone a hotel or excursions. But how does this affect keyword research, and the content which we as marketers should provide?

At each stage, a buyer will have a different thought process. It’s key to note that not every buyer of the same product will have the same thought process but you can see how we can start to formulate a process.

The Buyer’s Journey - Holiday Purchase

The above table illustrates the sort of queries or terms that consumers might use at different stages of their journey. The problem is that most organizations focus all of their efforts on the decision end of the spectrum. This is entirely the right approach to take at the start because you’re targeting consumers who are interested in your product or service then and there. However, in an increasingly competitive online space you should try and find ways to diversify and bring people into your marketing funnel (which in most cases is your website) at different stages.

I agree with the argument that creating content for people earlier in the journey will likely mean lower conversion rates from visitor to customer, but my counter to this would be that you're also potentially missing out on people who will become customers. Further possibilities to at least get these people into your funnel include offering content downloads (gated content) to capture user’s information, or remarketing activity via Facebook, Google Ads, or other retargeting platforms.

Moving from keywords to topics

I’m not going to bang this drum too loudly. I think many in of the SEO community have signed up to the approach that topics are more important than keywords. There are quite a few resources on this listed online, but what forced it home for me was Cyrus Shepard’s Moz article in 2014. Much, if not all, of that post still holds true today.

What I will cover is an adoption of HubSpot’s Topic Cluster model. For those unaccustomed to their model, HubSpot’s approach formalizes and labels what many search marketers have been doing for a while now. The basic premise is instead of having your site fragmented with lots of content across multiple sections, all hyperlinking to each other, you create one really in-depth content piece that covers a topic area broadly (and covers shorter-tail keywords with high search volume), and then supplement this page with content targeting the long-tail, such as blog posts, FAQs, or opinion pieces. HubSpot calls this "pillar" and "cluster" content respectively.

Source: Matt Barby / HubSpot

The process then involves taking these cluster pages and linking back to the pillar page using keyword-rich anchor text. There’s nothing particularly new about this approach aside from formalizing it a bit more. Instead of having your site’s content structured in such a way that it's fragmented and interlinking between lots of different pages and topics, you keep the internal linking within its topic, or content cluster. This video explains this methodology further. While we accept this model may not fit every situation, and nor is it completely perfect, it’s a great way of understanding how search engines are now interpreting content.

At Aira, we’ve taken this approach and tried to evolve it a bit further, tying these topics into the stages of the buyer’s journey while utilizing several data points to make sure our outputs are based off as much data as we can get our hands on. Furthermore, because pillar pages tend to target shorter-tail keywords with high search volume, they're often either awareness- or consideration-stage content, and thus not applicable for decision stage. We term our key decision pages “target pages,” as this should be a primary focus of any activity we conduct.

We’ll also look at the semantic relativity of the keywords reviewed, so that we have a “parent” keyword that we’re targeting a page to rank for, and then children of that keyword or phrase that the page may also rank for, due to its similarity to the parent. Every keyword is categorized according to its stage in the buyer’s journey and whether it's appropriate for a pillar, target, or cluster page. We also add two further classifications to our keywords: track & monitor and ignore. Definitions for these five keyword types are listed below:

Pillar page

A pillar page covers all aspects of a topic on a single page, with room for more in-depth reporting in more detailed cluster blog posts that hyperlink back to the pillar page. A keyword tagged with pillar page will be the primary topic and the focus of a page on the website. Pillar pages should be awareness- or consideration-stage content.

A great pillar page example I often refer to is HubSpot’s Facebook marketing guide or Mosi-guard’s insect bites guide (disclaimer: probably don’t click through if you don’t like close-up shots of insects!).

Cluster page

A cluster topic page for the pillar focuses on providing more detail for a specific long-tail keyword related to the main topic. This type of page is normally associated with a blog article but could be another type of content, like an FAQ page.

Good examples within the Facebook marketing topic listed above are HubSpot’s posts:

How Do Facebook Stories Stack Up to Snapchat?

How to Use Facebook Live: The Ultimate Guide

For Mosi-guard, they’re not utilizing internal links within the copy of the other blogs, but the "older posts" section at the bottom of the blog is referencing this guide:

The malaria map and your guide to traveling safe

Target page

Normally a keyword or phrase linked to a product or service page, e.g. nike trainers or seo services. Target pages are decision-stage content pieces.

HubSpot’s target content is their social media software page, with one of Mosi-guard’s target pages being their natural spray product.

Track & monitor

A keyword or phrase that is not the main focus of a page, but could still rank due to its similarity to the target page keyword. A good example of this might be seo services as the target page keyword, but this page could also rank for seo agency, seo company, etc.

Ignore

A keyword or phrase that has been reviewed but is not recommended to be optimized for, possibly due to a lack of search volume, it’s too competitive, it won’t be profitable, etc.

Once the keyword research is complete, we then map our keywords to existing website pages. This gives us a list of mapped keywords and a list of unmapped keywords, which in turn creates a content gap analysis that often leads to a content plan that could last for three, six, or twelve-plus months.

Putting it into practice

I’m a firm believer in giving an example of how this would work in practice, so I’m going to walk through one with screenshots. I’ll also provide a template of our keyword research document for you to take away.

1. Harvesting keywords

The first step in the process is similar, if not identical, to every other keyword research project. You start off with a batch of keywords from the client or other stakeholders that the site wants to rank for. Most of the industry call this a seed keyword list. That keyword list is normally a minimum of 15–20 keywords, but can often be more if you’re dealing with an e-commerce website with multiple product lines.

This list is often based off nothing more than opinion: “What do we think our potential customers will search for?” It’s a good starting point, but you need the rest of the process to follow on to make sure you’re optimizing based off data, not opinion.

2. Expanding the list

Once you’ve got that keyword list, it’s time to start utilizing some of the tools you have at your disposal. There are lots, of course! We tend to use a combination of Moz Keyword Explorer, Answer the Public, Keywords Everywhere, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Ads, ranking tools, and SEMrush.

The idea of this list is to start thinking about keywords that the organization may not have considered before. Your expanded list will include obvious synonyms from your list. Take the example below:

Seed Keywords

Expanded Keywords

ski chalet

ski chalet

ski chalet rental

ski chalet hire

ski chalet [location name]

etc

There are other examples that should be considered. A client I worked with in the past once gave a seed keyword of “biomass boilers.” But after keyword research was conducted, a more colloquial term for “biomass boilers” in the UK is “wood burners.” This is an important distinction and should be picked up as early in the process as possible. Keyword research tools are not infallible, so if budget and resource allows, you may wish to consult current and potential customers about which terms they might use to find the products or services being offered.

3. Filtering out irrelevant keywords

Once you’ve expanded the seed keyword list, it’s time to start filtering out irrelevant keywords. This is pretty labor-intensive and involves sorting through rows of data. We tend to use Moz’s Keyword Explorer, filter by relevancy, and work our way down. As we go, we’ll add keywords to lists within the platform and start to try and sort things by topic. Topics are fairly subjective, and often you’ll get overlap between them. We’ll group similar keywords and phrases together in a topic based off the semantic relativity of those phrases. For example:

Topic

Keywords

ski chalet

ski chalet

ski chalet rental

ski chalet hire

ski chalet [location name]

catered chalet

catered chalet

luxury catered chalet

catered chalet rental

catered chalet hire

catered chalet [location name]

ski accommodation

ski accommodation

cheap ski accommodation

budget ski accommodation

ski accomodation [location name]

Many of the above keywords are decision-based keywords — particularly those with rental or hire in them. They're showing buying intent. We’ll then try to put ourselves in the mind of the buyer and come up with keywords towards the start of the buyer’s journey.

Topic

Keywords

Buyer’s stage

ski resorts

ski resorts

best ski resorts

ski resorts europe

ski resorts usa

ski resorts canada

top ski resorts

cheap ski resorts

luxury ski resorts

Consideration

skiing

skiing

skiing guide

skiing beginner’s guide

Consideration

family holidays

family holidays

family winter holidays

family trips

Awareness

This helps us cater to customers that might not be in the frame of mind to purchase just yet — they're just doing research. It means we cast the net wider. Conversion rates for these keywords are unlikely to be high (at least, for purchases or enquiries) but if utilized as part of a wider marketing strategy, we should look to capture some form of information, primarily an email address, so we can send people relevant information via email or remarketing ads later down the line.

4. Pulling in data

Once you’ve expanded the seed keywords out, Keyword Explorer’s handy list function enables your to break things down into separate topics. You can then export that data into a CSV and start combining it with other data sources. If you have SEMrush API access, Dave Sottimano’s API Library is a great time saver; otherwise, you may want to consider uploading the keywords into the Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension and manually exporting the data and combining everything together. You should then have a spreadsheet that looks something like this:

You could then add in additional data sources. There’s no reason you couldn’t combine the above with volumes and competition metrics from other SEO tools. Consider including existing keyword ranking information or Google Ads data in this process. Keywords that convert well on PPC should do the same organically and should therefore be considered. Wil Reynolds talks about this particular tactic a lot.

5. Aligning phrases to the buyer’s journey

The next stage of the process is to start categorizing the keywords into the stage of the buyer’s journey. Something we’ve found at Aira is that keywords don’t always fit into a predefined stage. Someone looking for “marketing services” could be doing research about what marketing services are, but they could also be looking for a provider. You may get keywords that could be either awareness/consideration or consideration/decision. Use your judgement, and remember this is subjective. Once complete, you should end up with some data that looks similar to this:

This categorization is important, as it starts to frame what type of content is most appropriate for that keyword or phrase.

The next stage of this process is to start noticing patterns in keyphrases and where they get mapped to in the buyer’s journey. Often you’ll see keywords like “price” or ”cost” at the decision stage and phrases like “how to” at the awareness stage. Once you start identifying these patterns, possibly using a variation of Tom Casano’s keyword clustering approach, you can then try to find a way to automate so that when these terms appear in your keyword column, the intent automatically gets updated.

Once completed, we can then start to define each of our keywords and give them a type:

Pillar page

Cluster page

Target page

Track & monitor

Ignore

We use this document to start thinking about what type of content is most effective for that piece given the search volume available, how competitive that term is, how profitable the keyword could be, and what stage the buyer might be at. We’re trying to find that sweet spot between having enough search volume, ensuring we can actually rank for that keyphrase (there’s no point in a small e-commerce startup trying to rank for “buy nike trainers”), and how important/profitable that phrase could be for the business. The below Venn diagram illustrates this nicely:

We also reorder the keywords so keywords that are semantically similar are bucketed together into parent and child keywords. This helps to inform our on-page recommendations:

From the example above, you can see "digital marketing agency" as the main keyword, but “digital marketing services” & “digital marketing agency uk” sit underneath.

We also use conditional formatting to help identify keyword page types:

And then sheets to separate topics out:

Once this is complete, we have a data-rich spreadsheet of keywords that we then work with clients on to make sure we’ve not missed anything. The document can get pretty big, particularly when you’re dealing with e-commerce websites that have thousands of products.

5. Keyword mapping and content gap analysis

We then map these keywords to existing content to ensure that the site hasn’t already written about the subject in the past. We often use Google Search Console data to do this so we understand how any existing content is being interpreted by the search engines. By doing this we’re creating our own content gap analysis. An example output can be seen below:

The above process takes our keyword research and then applies the usual on-page concepts (such as optimizing meta titles, URLs, descriptions, headings, etc) to existing pages. We’re also ensuring that we’re mapping our user intent and type of page (pillar, cluster, target, etc), which helps us decide what sort of content the piece should be (such as a blog post, webinar, e-book, etc). This process helps us understand what keywords and phrases the..

https://ift.tt/2Lbmvix

[kraussoutene]

Evolving Keyword Research to Match Your Buyer&amp;rsquo;s Journey

Posted by matthew_jkay

Keyword research has been around as long as the SEO industry has. Search engines built a system that revolves around users entering a term or query into a text entry field, hitting return, and receiving a list of relevant results. As the online search market expanded, one clear leader emerged — Google — and with it they brought AdWords (now Google Ads), an advertising platform that allowed organizations to appear on search results pages for keywords that organically they might not.

Within Google Ads came a tool that enabled businesses to look at how many searches there were per month for almost any query. Google Keyword Planner became the de facto tool for keyword research in the industry, and with good reason: it was Google’s data. Not only that, Google gave us the ability to gather further insights due to other metrics Keyword Planner provided: competition and suggested bid. Whilst these keywords were Google Ads-oriented metrics, they gave the SEO industry an indication of how competitive a keyword was.

The reason is obvious. If a keyword or phrase has higher competition (i.e. more advertisers bidding to appear for that term) it’s likely to be more competitive from an organic perspective. Similarly, a term that has a higher suggested bid means it’s more likely to be a competitive term. SEOs dined on this data for years, but when the industry started digging a bit more into the data, we soon realized that while useful, it was not always wholly accurate. Moz, SEMrush, and other tools all started to develop alternative volume and competitive metrics using Clickstream data to give marketers more insights.

Now industry professionals have several software tools and data outlets to conduct their keyword research. These software companies will only improve in the accuracy of their data outputs. Google’s data is unlikely to significantly change; their goal is to sell ad space, not make life easy for SEOs. In fact, they've made life harder by using volume ranges for Google Ads accounts with low activity. SEO tools have investors and customers to appease and must continually improve their products to reduce churn and grow their customer base. This makes things rosy for content-led SEO, right?

Well, not really.

The problem with historical keyword research is twofold:

1. SEOs spend too much time thinking about the decision stage of the buyer’s journey (more on that later).

2. SEOs spend too much time thinking about keywords, rather than categories or topics.

The industry, to its credit, is doing a lot to tackle issue number two. “Topics over keywords” is something that is not new as I’ll briefly come to later. Frameworks for topic-based SEO have started to appear over the last few years. This is a step in the right direction. Organizing site content into categories, adding appropriate internal linking, and understanding that one piece of content can rank for several variations of a phrase is becoming far more commonplace.

What is less well known (but starting to gain traction) is point one. But in order to understand this further, we should dive into what the buyer’s journey actually is.

What is the buyer’s journey?

The buyer’s or customer’s journey is not new. If you open marketing text books from years gone by, get a college degree in marketing, or even just go on general marketing blogs you’ll see it crop up. There are lots of variations of this journey, but they all say a similar thing. No matter what product or service is bought, everyone goes through this journey. This could be online or offline — the main difference is that depending on the product, person, or situation, the amount of time this journey takes will vary — but every buyer goes through it. But what is it, exactly? For the purpose of this article, we’ll focus on three stages: awareness, consideration, & decision.

Awareness

The awareness stage of the buyer’s journey is similar to problem discovery, where a potential customer realizes that they have a problem (or an opportunity) but they may not have figured out exactly what that is yet.

Search terms at this stage are often question-based — users are researching around a particular area.

Consideration

The consideration stage is where a potential consumer has defined what their problem or opportunity is and has begun to look for potential solutions to help solve the issue they face.

Decision

The decision stage is where most organizations focus their attention. Normally consumers are ready to buy at this stage and are often doing product or vendor comparisons, looking at reviews, and searching for pricing information.

To illustrate this process, let’s take two examples: buying an ice cream and buying a holiday.

Being low-value, the former is not a particularly considered purchase, but this journey still takes place. The latter is more considered. It can often take several weeks or months for a consumer to decide on what destination they want to visit, let alone a hotel or excursions. But how does this affect keyword research, and the content which we as marketers should provide?

At each stage, a buyer will have a different thought process. It’s key to note that not every buyer of the same product will have the same thought process but you can see how we can start to formulate a process.

The Buyer’s Journey - Holiday Purchase

The above table illustrates the sort of queries or terms that consumers might use at different stages of their journey. The problem is that most organizations focus all of their efforts on the decision end of the spectrum. This is entirely the right approach to take at the start because you’re targeting consumers who are interested in your product or service then and there. However, in an increasingly competitive online space you should try and find ways to diversify and bring people into your marketing funnel (which in most cases is your website) at different stages.

I agree with the argument that creating content for people earlier in the journey will likely mean lower conversion rates from visitor to customer, but my counter to this would be that you're also potentially missing out on people who will become customers. Further possibilities to at least get these people into your funnel include offering content downloads (gated content) to capture user’s information, or remarketing activity via Facebook, Google Ads, or other retargeting platforms.

Moving from keywords to topics

I’m not going to bang this drum too loudly. I think many in of the SEO community have signed up to the approach that topics are more important than keywords. There are quite a few resources on this listed online, but what forced it home for me was Cyrus Shepard’s Moz article in 2014. Much, if not all, of that post still holds true today.

What I will cover is an adoption of HubSpot’s Topic Cluster model. For those unaccustomed to their model, HubSpot’s approach formalizes and labels what many search marketers have been doing for a while now. The basic premise is instead of having your site fragmented with lots of content across multiple sections, all hyperlinking to each other, you create one really in-depth content piece that covers a topic area broadly (and covers shorter-tail keywords with high search volume), and then supplement this page with content targeting the long-tail, such as blog posts, FAQs, or opinion pieces. HubSpot calls this "pillar" and "cluster" content respectively.

Source: Matt Barby / HubSpot

The process then involves taking these cluster pages and linking back to the pillar page using keyword-rich anchor text. There’s nothing particularly new about this approach aside from formalizing it a bit more. Instead of having your site’s content structured in such a way that it's fragmented and interlinking between lots of different pages and topics, you keep the internal linking within its topic, or content cluster. This video explains this methodology further. While we accept this model may not fit every situation, and nor is it completely perfect, it’s a great way of understanding how search engines are now interpreting content.

At Aira, we’ve taken this approach and tried to evolve it a bit further, tying these topics into the stages of the buyer’s journey while utilizing several data points to make sure our outputs are based off as much data as we can get our hands on. Furthermore, because pillar pages tend to target shorter-tail keywords with high search volume, they're often either awareness- or consideration-stage content, and thus not applicable for decision stage. We term our key decision pages “target pages,” as this should be a primary focus of any activity we conduct.

We’ll also look at the semantic relativity of the keywords reviewed, so that we have a “parent” keyword that we’re targeting a page to rank for, and then children of that keyword or phrase that the page may also rank for, due to its similarity to the parent. Every keyword is categorized according to its stage in the buyer’s journey and whether it's appropriate for a pillar, target, or cluster page. We also add two further classifications to our keywords: track & monitor and ignore. Definitions for these five keyword types are listed below:

Pillar page

A pillar page covers all aspects of a topic on a single page, with room for more in-depth reporting in more detailed cluster blog posts that hyperlink back to the pillar page. A keyword tagged with pillar page will be the primary topic and the focus of a page on the website. Pillar pages should be awareness- or consideration-stage content.

A great pillar page example I often refer to is HubSpot’s Facebook marketing guide or Mosi-guard’s insect bites guide (disclaimer: probably don’t click through if you don’t like close-up shots of insects!).

Cluster page

A cluster topic page for the pillar focuses on providing more detail for a specific long-tail keyword related to the main topic. This type of page is normally associated with a blog article but could be another type of content, like an FAQ page.

Good examples within the Facebook marketing topic listed above are HubSpot’s posts:

How Do Facebook Stories Stack Up to Snapchat?

How to Use Facebook Live: The Ultimate Guide

For Mosi-guard, they’re not utilizing internal links within the copy of the other blogs, but the "older posts" section at the bottom of the blog is referencing this guide:

The malaria map and your guide to traveling safe

Target page

Normally a keyword or phrase linked to a product or service page, e.g. nike trainers or seo services. Target pages are decision-stage content pieces.

HubSpot’s target content is their social media software page, with one of Mosi-guard’s target pages being their natural spray product.

Track & monitor

A keyword or phrase that is not the main focus of a page, but could still rank due to its similarity to the target page keyword. A good example of this might be seo services as the target page keyword, but this page could also rank for seo agency, seo company, etc.

Ignore

A keyword or phrase that has been reviewed but is not recommended to be optimized for, possibly due to a lack of search volume, it’s too competitive, it won’t be profitable, etc.

Once the keyword research is complete, we then map our keywords to existing website pages. This gives us a list of mapped keywords and a list of unmapped keywords, which in turn creates a content gap analysis that often leads to a content plan that could last for three, six, or twelve-plus months.

Putting it into practice

I’m a firm believer in giving an example of how this would work in practice, so I’m going to walk through one with screenshots. I’ll also provide a template of our keyword research document for you to take away.

1. Harvesting keywords

The first step in the process is similar, if not identical, to every other keyword research project. You start off with a batch of keywords from the client or other stakeholders that the site wants to rank for. Most of the industry call this a seed keyword list. That keyword list is normally a minimum of 15–20 keywords, but can often be more if you’re dealing with an e-commerce website with multiple product lines.

This list is often based off nothing more than opinion: “What do we think our potential customers will search for?” It’s a good starting point, but you need the rest of the process to follow on to make sure you’re optimizing based off data, not opinion.

2. Expanding the list

Once you’ve got that keyword list, it’s time to start utilizing some of the tools you have at your disposal. There are lots, of course! We tend to use a combination of Moz Keyword Explorer, Answer the Public, Keywords Everywhere, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Ads, ranking tools, and SEMrush.

The idea of this list is to start thinking about keywords that the organization may not have considered before. Your expanded list will include obvious synonyms from your list. Take the example below:

Seed Keywords

Expanded Keywords

ski chalet

ski chalet

ski chalet rental

ski chalet hire

ski chalet [location name]

etc

There are other examples that should be considered. A client I worked with in the past once gave a seed keyword of “biomass boilers.” But after keyword research was conducted, a more colloquial term for “biomass boilers” in the UK is “wood burners.” This is an important distinction and should be picked up as early in the process as possible. Keyword research tools are not infallible, so if budget and resource allows, you may wish to consult current and potential customers about which terms they might use to find the products or services being offered.

3. Filtering out irrelevant keywords

Once you’ve expanded the seed keyword list, it’s time to start filtering out irrelevant keywords. This is pretty labor-intensive and involves sorting through rows of data. We tend to use Moz’s Keyword Explorer, filter by relevancy, and work our way down. As we go, we’ll add keywords to lists within the platform and start to try and sort things by topic. Topics are fairly subjective, and often you’ll get overlap between them. We’ll group similar keywords and phrases together in a topic based off the semantic relativity of those phrases. For example:

Topic

Keywords

ski chalet

ski chalet

ski chalet rental

ski chalet hire

ski chalet [location name]

catered chalet

catered chalet

luxury catered chalet

catered chalet rental

catered chalet hire

catered chalet [location name]

ski accommodation

ski accommodation

cheap ski accommodation

budget ski accommodation

ski accomodation [location name]

Many of the above keywords are decision-based keywords — particularly those with rental or hire in them. They're showing buying intent. We’ll then try to put ourselves in the mind of the buyer and come up with keywords towards the start of the buyer’s journey.

Topic

Keywords

Buyer’s stage

ski resorts

ski resorts

best ski resorts

ski resorts europe

ski resorts usa

ski resorts canada

top ski resorts

cheap ski resorts

luxury ski resorts

Consideration

skiing

skiing

skiing guide

skiing beginner’s guide

Consideration

family holidays

family holidays

family winter holidays

family trips

Awareness

This helps us cater to customers that might not be in the frame of mind to purchase just yet — they're just doing research. It means we cast the net wider. Conversion rates for these keywords are unlikely to be high (at least, for purchases or enquiries) but if utilized as part of a wider marketing strategy, we should look to capture some form of information, primarily an email address, so we can send people relevant information via email or remarketing ads later down the line.

4. Pulling in data

Once you’ve expanded the seed keywords out, Keyword Explorer’s handy list function enables your to break things down into separate topics. You can then export that data into a CSV and start combining it with other data sources. If you have SEMrush API access, Dave Sottimano’s API Library is a great time saver; otherwise, you may want to consider uploading the keywords into the Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension and manually exporting the data and combining everything together. You should then have a spreadsheet that looks something like this:

You could then add in additional data sources. There’s no reason you couldn’t combine the above with volumes and competition metrics from other SEO tools. Consider including existing keyword ranking information or Google Ads data in this process. Keywords that convert well on PPC should do the same organically and should therefore be considered. Wil Reynolds talks about this particular tactic a lot.

5. Aligning phrases to the buyer’s journey

The next stage of the process is to start categorizing the keywords into the stage of the buyer’s journey. Something we’ve found at Aira is that keywords don’t always fit into a predefined stage. Someone looking for “marketing services” could be doing research about what marketing services are, but they could also be looking for a provider. You may get keywords that could be either awareness/consideration or consideration/decision. Use your judgement, and remember this is subjective. Once complete, you should end up with some data that looks similar to this:

This categorization is important, as it starts to frame what type of content is most appropriate for that keyword or phrase.

The next stage of this process is to start noticing patterns in keyphrases and where they get mapped to in the buyer’s journey. Often you’ll see keywords like “price” or ”cost” at the decision stage and phrases like “how to” at the awareness stage. Once you start identifying these patterns, possibly using a variation of Tom Casano’s keyword clustering approach, you can then try to find a way to automate so that when these terms appear in your keyword column, the intent automatically gets updated.

Once completed, we can then start to define each of our keywords and give them a type:

Pillar page

Cluster page

Target page

Track & monitor

Ignore

We use this document to start thinking about what type of content is most effective for that piece given the search volume available, how competitive that term is, how profitable the keyword could be, and what stage the buyer might be at. We’re trying to find that sweet spot between having enough search volume, ensuring we can actually rank for that keyphrase (there’s no point in a small e-commerce startup trying to rank for “buy nike trainers”), and how important/profitable that phrase could be for the business. The below Venn diagram illustrates this nicely:

We also reorder the keywords so keywords that are semantically similar are bucketed together into parent and child keywords. This helps to inform our on-page recommendations:

From the example above, you can see "digital marketing agency" as the main keyword, but “digital marketing services” & “digital marketing agency uk” sit underneath.

We also use conditional formatting to help identify keyword page types:

And then sheets to separate topics out:

Once this is complete, we have a data-rich spreadsheet of keywords that we then work with clients on to make sure we’ve not missed anything. The document can get pretty big, particularly when you’re dealing with e-commerce websites that have thousands of products.

5. Keyword mapping and content gap analysis

We then map these keywords to existing content to ensure that the site hasn’t already written about the subject in the past. We often use Google Search Console data to do this so we understand how any existing content is being interpreted by the search engines. By doing this we’re creating our own content gap analysis. An example output can be seen below:

The above process takes our keyword research and then applies the usual on-page concepts (such as optimizing meta titles, URLs, descriptions, headings, etc) to existing pages. We’re also ensuring that we’re mapping our user intent and type of page (pillar, cluster, target, etc), which helps us decide what sort of content the piece should be (such as a blog post, webinar, e-book, etc). This process helps us understand what keywords and phrases the..

https://ift.tt/2Lbmvix

[dainiaolivahm]

Evolving Keyword Research to Match Your Buyer&amp;rsquo;s Journey

Posted by matthew_jkay

Keyword research has been around as long as the SEO industry has. Search engines built a system that revolves around users entering a term or query into a text entry field, hitting return, and receiving a list of relevant results. As the online search market expanded, one clear leader emerged — Google — and with it they brought AdWords (now Google Ads), an advertising platform that allowed organizations to appear on search results pages for keywords that organically they might not.

Within Google Ads came a tool that enabled businesses to look at how many searches there were per month for almost any query. Google Keyword Planner became the de facto tool for keyword research in the industry, and with good reason: it was Google’s data. Not only that, Google gave us the ability to gather further insights due to other metrics Keyword Planner provided: competition and suggested bid. Whilst these keywords were Google Ads-oriented metrics, they gave the SEO industry an indication of how competitive a keyword was.

The reason is obvious. If a keyword or phrase has higher competition (i.e. more advertisers bidding to appear for that term) it’s likely to be more competitive from an organic perspective. Similarly, a term that has a higher suggested bid means it’s more likely to be a competitive term. SEOs dined on this data for years, but when the industry started digging a bit more into the data, we soon realized that while useful, it was not always wholly accurate. Moz, SEMrush, and other tools all started to develop alternative volume and competitive metrics using Clickstream data to give marketers more insights.

Now industry professionals have several software tools and data outlets to conduct their keyword research. These software companies will only improve in the accuracy of their data outputs. Google’s data is unlikely to significantly change; their goal is to sell ad space, not make life easy for SEOs. In fact, they've made life harder by using volume ranges for Google Ads accounts with low activity. SEO tools have investors and customers to appease and must continually improve their products to reduce churn and grow their customer base. This makes things rosy for content-led SEO, right?

Well, not really.

The problem with historical keyword research is twofold:

1. SEOs spend too much time thinking about the decision stage of the buyer’s journey (more on that later).

2. SEOs spend too much time thinking about keywords, rather than categories or topics.

The industry, to its credit, is doing a lot to tackle issue number two. “Topics over keywords” is something that is not new as I’ll briefly come to later. Frameworks for topic-based SEO have started to appear over the last few years. This is a step in the right direction. Organizing site content into categories, adding appropriate internal linking, and understanding that one piece of content can rank for several variations of a phrase is becoming far more commonplace.

What is less well known (but starting to gain traction) is point one. But in order to understand this further, we should dive into what the buyer’s journey actually is.

What is the buyer’s journey?

The buyer’s or customer’s journey is not new. If you open marketing text books from years gone by, get a college degree in marketing, or even just go on general marketing blogs you’ll see it crop up. There are lots of variations of this journey, but they all say a similar thing. No matter what product or service is bought, everyone goes through this journey. This could be online or offline — the main difference is that depending on the product, person, or situation, the amount of time this journey takes will vary — but every buyer goes through it. But what is it, exactly? For the purpose of this article, we’ll focus on three stages: awareness, consideration, & decision.

Awareness

The awareness stage of the buyer’s journey is similar to problem discovery, where a potential customer realizes that they have a problem (or an opportunity) but they may not have figured out exactly what that is yet.

Search terms at this stage are often question-based — users are researching around a particular area.

Consideration

The consideration stage is where a potential consumer has defined what their problem or opportunity is and has begun to look for potential solutions to help solve the issue they face.

Decision

The decision stage is where most organizations focus their attention. Normally consumers are ready to buy at this stage and are often doing product or vendor comparisons, looking at reviews, and searching for pricing information.

To illustrate this process, let’s take two examples: buying an ice cream and buying a holiday.

Being low-value, the former is not a particularly considered purchase, but this journey still takes place. The latter is more considered. It can often take several weeks or months for a consumer to decide on what destination they want to visit, let alone a hotel or excursions. But how does this affect keyword research, and the content which we as marketers should provide?

At each stage, a buyer will have a different thought process. It’s key to note that not every buyer of the same product will have the same thought process but you can see how we can start to formulate a process.

The Buyer’s Journey - Holiday Purchase

The above table illustrates the sort of queries or terms that consumers might use at different stages of their journey. The problem is that most organizations focus all of their efforts on the decision end of the spectrum. This is entirely the right approach to take at the start because you’re targeting consumers who are interested in your product or service then and there. However, in an increasingly competitive online space you should try and find ways to diversify and bring people into your marketing funnel (which in most cases is your website) at different stages.

I agree with the argument that creating content for people earlier in the journey will likely mean lower conversion rates from visitor to customer, but my counter to this would be that you're also potentially missing out on people who will become customers. Further possibilities to at least get these people into your funnel include offering content downloads (gated content) to capture user’s information, or remarketing activity via Facebook, Google Ads, or other retargeting platforms.

Moving from keywords to topics

I’m not going to bang this drum too loudly. I think many in of the SEO community have signed up to the approach that topics are more important than keywords. There are quite a few resources on this listed online, but what forced it home for me was Cyrus Shepard’s Moz article in 2014. Much, if not all, of that post still holds true today.

What I will cover is an adoption of HubSpot’s Topic Cluster model. For those unaccustomed to their model, HubSpot’s approach formalizes and labels what many search marketers have been doing for a while now. The basic premise is instead of having your site fragmented with lots of content across multiple sections, all hyperlinking to each other, you create one really in-depth content piece that covers a topic area broadly (and covers shorter-tail keywords with high search volume), and then supplement this page with content targeting the long-tail, such as blog posts, FAQs, or opinion pieces. HubSpot calls this "pillar" and "cluster" content respectively.

Source: Matt Barby / HubSpot

The process then involves taking these cluster pages and linking back to the pillar page using keyword-rich anchor text. There’s nothing particularly new about this approach aside from formalizing it a bit more. Instead of having your site’s content structured in such a way that it's fragmented and interlinking between lots of different pages and topics, you keep the internal linking within its topic, or content cluster. This video explains this methodology further. While we accept this model may not fit every situation, and nor is it completely perfect, it’s a great way of understanding how search engines are now interpreting content.

At Aira, we’ve taken this approach and tried to evolve it a bit further, tying these topics into the stages of the buyer’s journey while utilizing several data points to make sure our outputs are based off as much data as we can get our hands on. Furthermore, because pillar pages tend to target shorter-tail keywords with high search volume, they're often either awareness- or consideration-stage content, and thus not applicable for decision stage. We term our key decision pages “target pages,” as this should be a primary focus of any activity we conduct.

We’ll also look at the semantic relativity of the keywords reviewed, so that we have a “parent” keyword that we’re targeting a page to rank for, and then children of that keyword or phrase that the page may also rank for, due to its similarity to the parent. Every keyword is categorized according to its stage in the buyer’s journey and whether it's appropriate for a pillar, target, or cluster page. We also add two further classifications to our keywords: track & monitor and ignore. Definitions for these five keyword types are listed below:

Pillar page

A pillar page covers all aspects of a topic on a single page, with room for more in-depth reporting in more detailed cluster blog posts that hyperlink back to the pillar page. A keyword tagged with pillar page will be the primary topic and the focus of a page on the website. Pillar pages should be awareness- or consideration-stage content.

A great pillar page example I often refer to is HubSpot’s Facebook marketing guide or Mosi-guard’s insect bites guide (disclaimer: probably don’t click through if you don’t like close-up shots of insects!).

Cluster page

A cluster topic page for the pillar focuses on providing more detail for a specific long-tail keyword related to the main topic. This type of page is normally associated with a blog article but could be another type of content, like an FAQ page.

Good examples within the Facebook marketing topic listed above are HubSpot’s posts:

How Do Facebook Stories Stack Up to Snapchat?

How to Use Facebook Live: The Ultimate Guide

For Mosi-guard, they’re not utilizing internal links within the copy of the other blogs, but the "older posts" section at the bottom of the blog is referencing this guide:

The malaria map and your guide to traveling safe

Target page

Normally a keyword or phrase linked to a product or service page, e.g. nike trainers or seo services. Target pages are decision-stage content pieces.

HubSpot’s target content is their social media software page, with one of Mosi-guard’s target pages being their natural spray product.

Track & monitor

A keyword or phrase that is not the main focus of a page, but could still rank due to its similarity to the target page keyword. A good example of this might be seo services as the target page keyword, but this page could also rank for seo agency, seo company, etc.

Ignore

A keyword or phrase that has been reviewed but is not recommended to be optimized for, possibly due to a lack of search volume, it’s too competitive, it won’t be profitable, etc.

Once the keyword research is complete, we then map our keywords to existing website pages. This gives us a list of mapped keywords and a list of unmapped keywords, which in turn creates a content gap analysis that often leads to a content plan that could last for three, six, or twelve-plus months.

Putting it into practice

I’m a firm believer in giving an example of how this would work in practice, so I’m going to walk through one with screenshots. I’ll also provide a template of our keyword research document for you to take away.

1. Harvesting keywords

The first step in the process is similar, if not identical, to every other keyword research project. You start off with a batch of keywords from the client or other stakeholders that the site wants to rank for. Most of the industry call this a seed keyword list. That keyword list is normally a minimum of 15–20 keywords, but can often be more if you’re dealing with an e-commerce website with multiple product lines.

This list is often based off nothing more than opinion: “What do we think our potential customers will search for?” It’s a good starting point, but you need the rest of the process to follow on to make sure you’re optimizing based off data, not opinion.

2. Expanding the list

Once you’ve got that keyword list, it’s time to start utilizing some of the tools you have at your disposal. There are lots, of course! We tend to use a combination of Moz Keyword Explorer, Answer the Public, Keywords Everywhere, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Ads, ranking tools, and SEMrush.

The idea of this list is to start thinking about keywords that the organization may not have considered before. Your expanded list will include obvious synonyms from your list. Take the example below:

Seed Keywords

Expanded Keywords

ski chalet

ski chalet

ski chalet rental

ski chalet hire

ski chalet [location name]

etc

There are other examples that should be considered. A client I worked with in the past once gave a seed keyword of “biomass boilers.” But after keyword research was conducted, a more colloquial term for “biomass boilers” in the UK is “wood burners.” This is an important distinction and should be picked up as early in the process as possible. Keyword research tools are not infallible, so if budget and resource allows, you may wish to consult current and potential customers about which terms they might use to find the products or services being offered.

3. Filtering out irrelevant keywords

Once you’ve expanded the seed keyword list, it’s time to start filtering out irrelevant keywords. This is pretty labor-intensive and involves sorting through rows of data. We tend to use Moz’s Keyword Explorer, filter by relevancy, and work our way down. As we go, we’ll add keywords to lists within the platform and start to try and sort things by topic. Topics are fairly subjective, and often you’ll get overlap between them. We’ll group similar keywords and phrases together in a topic based off the semantic relativity of those phrases. For example:

Topic

Keywords

ski chalet

ski chalet

ski chalet rental

ski chalet hire

ski chalet [location name]

catered chalet

catered chalet

luxury catered chalet

catered chalet rental

catered chalet hire

catered chalet [location name]

ski accommodation

ski accommodation

cheap ski accommodation

budget ski accommodation

ski accomodation [location name]

Many of the above keywords are decision-based keywords — particularly those with rental or hire in them. They're showing buying intent. We’ll then try to put ourselves in the mind of the buyer and come up with keywords towards the start of the buyer’s journey.

Topic

Keywords

Buyer’s stage

ski resorts

ski resorts

best ski resorts

ski resorts europe

ski resorts usa

ski resorts canada

top ski resorts

cheap ski resorts

luxury ski resorts

Consideration

skiing

skiing

skiing guide

skiing beginner’s guide

Consideration

family holidays

family holidays

family winter holidays

family trips

Awareness

This helps us cater to customers that might not be in the frame of mind to purchase just yet — they're just doing research. It means we cast the net wider. Conversion rates for these keywords are unlikely to be high (at least, for purchases or enquiries) but if utilized as part of a wider marketing strategy, we should look to capture some form of information, primarily an email address, so we can send people relevant information via email or remarketing ads later down the line.

4. Pulling in data

Once you’ve expanded the seed keywords out, Keyword Explorer’s handy list function enables your to break things down into separate topics. You can then export that data into a CSV and start combining it with other data sources. If you have SEMrush API access, Dave Sottimano’s API Library is a great time saver; otherwise, you may want to consider uploading the keywords into the Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension and manually exporting the data and combining everything together. You should then have a spreadsheet that looks something like this:

You could then add in additional data sources. There’s no reason you couldn’t combine the above with volumes and competition metrics from other SEO tools. Consider including existing keyword ranking information or Google Ads data in this process. Keywords that convert well on PPC should do the same organically and should therefore be considered. Wil Reynolds talks about this particular tactic a lot.

5. Aligning phrases to the buyer’s journey

The next stage of the process is to start categorizing the keywords into the stage of the buyer’s journey. Something we’ve found at Aira is that keywords don’t always fit into a predefined stage. Someone looking for “marketing services” could be doing research about what marketing services are, but they could also be looking for a provider. You may get keywords that could be either awareness/consideration or consideration/decision. Use your judgement, and remember this is subjective. Once complete, you should end up with some data that looks similar to this:

This categorization is important, as it starts to frame what type of content is most appropriate for that keyword or phrase.

The next stage of this process is to start noticing patterns in keyphrases and where they get mapped to in the buyer’s journey. Often you’ll see keywords like “price” or ”cost” at the decision stage and phrases like “how to” at the awareness stage. Once you start identifying these patterns, possibly using a variation of Tom Casano’s keyword clustering approach, you can then try to find a way to automate so that when these terms appear in your keyword column, the intent automatically gets updated.

Once completed, we can then start to define each of our keywords and give them a type:

Pillar page

Cluster page

Target page

Track & monitor

Ignore

We use this document to start thinking about what type of content is most effective for that piece given the search volume available, how competitive that term is, how profitable the keyword could be, and what stage the buyer might be at. We’re trying to find that sweet spot between having enough search volume, ensuring we can actually rank for that keyphrase (there’s no point in a small e-commerce startup trying to rank for “buy nike trainers”), and how important/profitable that phrase could be for the business. The below Venn diagram illustrates this nicely:

We also reorder the keywords so keywords that are semantically similar are bucketed together into parent and child keywords. This helps to inform our on-page recommendations:

From the example above, you can see "digital marketing agency" as the main keyword, but “digital marketing services” & “digital marketing agency uk” sit underneath.

We also use conditional formatting to help identify keyword page types:

And then sheets to separate topics out:

Once this is complete, we have a data-rich spreadsheet of keywords that we then work with clients on to make sure we’ve not missed anything. The document can get pretty big, particularly when you’re dealing with e-commerce websites that have thousands of products.

5. Keyword mapping and content gap analysis

We then map these keywords to existing content to ensure that the site hasn’t already written about the subject in the past. We often use Google Search Console data to do this so we understand how any existing content is being interpreted by the search engines. By doing this we’re creating our own content gap analysis. An example output can be seen below:

The above process takes our keyword research and then applies the usual on-page concepts (such as optimizing meta titles, URLs, descriptions, headings, etc) to existing pages. We’re also ensuring that we’re mapping our user intent and type of page (pillar, cluster, target, etc), which helps us decide what sort of content the piece should be (such as a blog post, webinar, e-book, etc). This process helps us understand what keywords and phrases the..

https://ift.tt/2Lbmvix

[mercedessharonwo1]

Evolving Keyword Research to Match Your Buyer&amp;rsquo;s Journey

Posted by matthew_jkay

Keyword research has been around as long as the SEO industry has. Search engines built a system that revolves around users entering a term or query into a text entry field, hitting return, and receiving a list of relevant results. As the online search market expanded, one clear leader emerged — Google — and with it they brought AdWords (now Google Ads), an advertising platform that allowed organizations to appear on search results pages for keywords that organically they might not.

Within Google Ads came a tool that enabled businesses to look at how many searches there were per month for almost any query. Google Keyword Planner became the de facto tool for keyword research in the industry, and with good reason: it was Google’s data. Not only that, Google gave us the ability to gather further insights due to other metrics Keyword Planner provided: competition and suggested bid. Whilst these keywords were Google Ads-oriented metrics, they gave the SEO industry an indication of how competitive a keyword was.

The reason is obvious. If a keyword or phrase has higher competition (i.e. more advertisers bidding to appear for that term) it’s likely to be more competitive from an organic perspective. Similarly, a term that has a higher suggested bid means it’s more likely to be a competitive term. SEOs dined on this data for years, but when the industry started digging a bit more into the data, we soon realized that while useful, it was not always wholly accurate. Moz, SEMrush, and other tools all started to develop alternative volume and competitive metrics using Clickstream data to give marketers more insights.

Now industry professionals have several software tools and data outlets to conduct their keyword research. These software companies will only improve in the accuracy of their data outputs. Google’s data is unlikely to significantly change; their goal is to sell ad space, not make life easy for SEOs. In fact, they've made life harder by using volume ranges for Google Ads accounts with low activity. SEO tools have investors and customers to appease and must continually improve their products to reduce churn and grow their customer base. This makes things rosy for content-led SEO, right?

Well, not really.

The problem with historical keyword research is twofold:

1. SEOs spend too much time thinking about the decision stage of the buyer’s journey (more on that later).

2. SEOs spend too much time thinking about keywords, rather than categories or topics.

The industry, to its credit, is doing a lot to tackle issue number two. “Topics over keywords” is something that is not new as I’ll briefly come to later. Frameworks for topic-based SEO have started to appear over the last few years. This is a step in the right direction. Organizing site content into categories, adding appropriate internal linking, and understanding that one piece of content can rank for several variations of a phrase is becoming far more commonplace.

What is less well known (but starting to gain traction) is point one. But in order to understand this further, we should dive into what the buyer’s journey actually is.

What is the buyer’s journey?

The buyer’s or customer’s journey is not new. If you open marketing text books from years gone by, get a college degree in marketing, or even just go on general marketing blogs you’ll see it crop up. There are lots of variations of this journey, but they all say a similar thing. No matter what product or service is bought, everyone goes through this journey. This could be online or offline — the main difference is that depending on the product, person, or situation, the amount of time this journey takes will vary — but every buyer goes through it. But what is it, exactly? For the purpose of this article, we’ll focus on three stages: awareness, consideration, & decision.

Awareness

The awareness stage of the buyer’s journey is similar to problem discovery, where a potential customer realizes that they have a problem (or an opportunity) but they may not have figured out exactly what that is yet.

Search terms at this stage are often question-based — users are researching around a particular area.

Consideration

The consideration stage is where a potential consumer has defined what their problem or opportunity is and has begun to look for potential solutions to help solve the issue they face.

Decision

The decision stage is where most organizations focus their attention. Normally consumers are ready to buy at this stage and are often doing product or vendor comparisons, looking at reviews, and searching for pricing information.

To illustrate this process, let’s take two examples: buying an ice cream and buying a holiday.

Being low-value, the former is not a particularly considered purchase, but this journey still takes place. The latter is more considered. It can often take several weeks or months for a consumer to decide on what destination they want to visit, let alone a hotel or excursions. But how does this affect keyword research, and the content which we as marketers should provide?

At each stage, a buyer will have a different thought process. It’s key to note that not every buyer of the same product will have the same thought process but you can see how we can start to formulate a process.

The Buyer’s Journey - Holiday Purchase

The above table illustrates the sort of queries or terms that consumers might use at different stages of their journey. The problem is that most organizations focus all of their efforts on the decision end of the spectrum. This is entirely the right approach to take at the start because you’re targeting consumers who are interested in your product or service then and there. However, in an increasingly competitive online space you should try and find ways to diversify and bring people into your marketing funnel (which in most cases is your website) at different stages.

I agree with the argument that creating content for people earlier in the journey will likely mean lower conversion rates from visitor to customer, but my counter to this would be that you're also potentially missing out on people who will become customers. Further possibilities to at least get these people into your funnel include offering content downloads (gated content) to capture user’s information, or remarketing activity via Facebook, Google Ads, or other retargeting platforms.

Moving from keywords to topics

I’m not going to bang this drum too loudly. I think many in of the SEO community have signed up to the approach that topics are more important than keywords. There are quite a few resources on this listed online, but what forced it home for me was Cyrus Shepard’s Moz article in 2014. Much, if not all, of that post still holds true today.

What I will cover is an adoption of HubSpot’s Topic Cluster model. For those unaccustomed to their model, HubSpot’s approach formalizes and labels what many search marketers have been doing for a while now. The basic premise is instead of having your site fragmented with lots of content across multiple sections, all hyperlinking to each other, you create one really in-depth content piece that covers a topic area broadly (and covers shorter-tail keywords with high search volume), and then supplement this page with content targeting the long-tail, such as blog posts, FAQs, or opinion pieces. HubSpot calls this "pillar" and "cluster" content respectively.

Source: Matt Barby / HubSpot

The process then involves taking these cluster pages and linking back to the pillar page using keyword-rich anchor text. There’s nothing particularly new about this approach aside from formalizing it a bit more. Instead of having your site’s content structured in such a way that it's fragmented and interlinking between lots of different pages and topics, you keep the internal linking within its topic, or content cluster. This video explains this methodology further. While we accept this model may not fit every situation, and nor is it completely perfect, it’s a great way of understanding how search engines are now interpreting content.

At Aira, we’ve taken this approach and tried to evolve it a bit further, tying these topics into the stages of the buyer’s journey while utilizing several data points to make sure our outputs are based off as much data as we can get our hands on. Furthermore, because pillar pages tend to target shorter-tail keywords with high search volume, they're often either awareness- or consideration-stage content, and thus not applicable for decision stage. We term our key decision pages “target pages,” as this should be a primary focus of any activity we conduct.

We’ll also look at the semantic relativity of the keywords reviewed, so that we have a “parent” keyword that we’re targeting a page to rank for, and then children of that keyword or phrase that the page may also rank for, due to its similarity to the parent. Every keyword is categorized according to its stage in the buyer’s journey and whether it's appropriate for a pillar, target, or cluster page. We also add two further classifications to our keywords: track & monitor and ignore. Definitions for these five keyword types are listed below:

Pillar page

A pillar page covers all aspects of a topic on a single page, with room for more in-depth reporting in more detailed cluster blog posts that hyperlink back to the pillar page. A keyword tagged with pillar page will be the primary topic and the focus of a page on the website. Pillar pages should be awareness- or consideration-stage content.

A great pillar page example I often refer to is HubSpot’s Facebook marketing guide or Mosi-guard’s insect bites guide (disclaimer: probably don’t click through if you don’t like close-up shots of insects!).

Cluster page

A cluster topic page for the pillar focuses on providing more detail for a specific long-tail keyword related to the main topic. This type of page is normally associated with a blog article but could be another type of content, like an FAQ page.

Good examples within the Facebook marketing topic listed above are HubSpot’s posts:

How Do Facebook Stories Stack Up to Snapchat?

How to Use Facebook Live: The Ultimate Guide

For Mosi-guard, they’re not utilizing internal links within the copy of the other blogs, but the "older posts" section at the bottom of the blog is referencing this guide:

The malaria map and your guide to traveling safe

Target page

Normally a keyword or phrase linked to a product or service page, e.g. nike trainers or seo services. Target pages are decision-stage content pieces.

HubSpot’s target content is their social media software page, with one of Mosi-guard’s target pages being their natural spray product.

Track & monitor

A keyword or phrase that is not the main focus of a page, but could still rank due to its similarity to the target page keyword. A good example of this might be seo services as the target page keyword, but this page could also rank for seo agency, seo company, etc.

Ignore

A keyword or phrase that has been reviewed but is not recommended to be optimized for, possibly due to a lack of search volume, it’s too competitive, it won’t be profitable, etc.

Once the keyword research is complete, we then map our keywords to existing website pages. This gives us a list of mapped keywords and a list of unmapped keywords, which in turn creates a content gap analysis that often leads to a content plan that could last for three, six, or twelve-plus months.

Putting it into practice

I’m a firm believer in giving an example of how this would work in practice, so I’m going to walk through one with screenshots. I’ll also provide a template of our keyword research document for you to take away.

1. Harvesting keywords

The first step in the process is similar, if not identical, to every other keyword research project. You start off with a batch of keywords from the client or other stakeholders that the site wants to rank for. Most of the industry call this a seed keyword list. That keyword list is normally a minimum of 15–20 keywords, but can often be more if you’re dealing with an e-commerce website with multiple product lines.

This list is often based off nothing more than opinion: “What do we think our potential customers will search for?” It’s a good starting point, but you need the rest of the process to follow on to make sure you’re optimizing based off data, not opinion.

2. Expanding the list

Once you’ve got that keyword list, it’s time to start utilizing some of the tools you have at your disposal. There are lots, of course! We tend to use a combination of Moz Keyword Explorer, Answer the Public, Keywords Everywhere, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, Google Ads, ranking tools, and SEMrush.

The idea of this list is to start thinking about keywords that the organization may not have considered before. Your expanded list will include obvious synonyms from your list. Take the example below:

Seed Keywords

Expanded Keywords

ski chalet

ski chalet

ski chalet rental

ski chalet hire

ski chalet [location name]

etc

There are other examples that should be considered. A client I worked with in the past once gave a seed keyword of “biomass boilers.” But after keyword research was conducted, a more colloquial term for “biomass boilers” in the UK is “wood burners.” This is an important distinction and should be picked up as early in the process as possible. Keyword research tools are not infallible, so if budget and resource allows, you may wish to consult current and potential customers about which terms they might use to find the products or services being offered.

3. Filtering out irrelevant keywords

Once you’ve expanded the seed keyword list, it’s time to start filtering out irrelevant keywords. This is pretty labor-intensive and involves sorting through rows of data. We tend to use Moz’s Keyword Explorer, filter by relevancy, and work our way down. As we go, we’ll add keywords to lists within the platform and start to try and sort things by topic. Topics are fairly subjective, and often you’ll get overlap between them. We’ll group similar keywords and phrases together in a topic based off the semantic relativity of those phrases. For example:

Topic

Keywords

ski chalet

ski chalet

ski chalet rental

ski chalet hire

ski chalet [location name]

catered chalet

catered chalet

luxury catered chalet

catered chalet rental

catered chalet hire

catered chalet [location name]

ski accommodation

ski accommodation

cheap ski accommodation

budget ski accommodation

ski accomodation [location name]

Many of the above keywords are decision-based keywords — particularly those with rental or hire in them. They're showing buying intent. We’ll then try to put ourselves in the mind of the buyer and come up with keywords towards the start of the buyer’s journey.

Topic

Keywords

Buyer’s stage

ski resorts

ski resorts

best ski resorts

ski resorts europe

ski resorts usa

ski resorts canada

top ski resorts

cheap ski resorts

luxury ski resorts

Consideration

skiing

skiing

skiing guide

skiing beginner’s guide

Consideration

family holidays

family holidays

family winter holidays

family trips

Awareness

This helps us cater to customers that might not be in the frame of mind to purchase just yet — they're just doing research. It means we cast the net wider. Conversion rates for these keywords are unlikely to be high (at least, for purchases or enquiries) but if utilized as part of a wider marketing strategy, we should look to capture some form of information, primarily an email address, so we can send people relevant information via email or remarketing ads later down the line.

4. Pulling in data

Once you’ve expanded the seed keywords out, Keyword Explorer’s handy list function enables your to break things down into separate topics. You can then export that data into a CSV and start combining it with other data sources. If you have SEMrush API access, Dave Sottimano’s API Library is a great time saver; otherwise, you may want to consider uploading the keywords into the Keywords Everywhere Chrome extension and manually exporting the data and combining everything together. You should then have a spreadsheet that looks something like this:

You could then add in additional data sources. There’s no reason you couldn’t combine the above with volumes and competition metrics from other SEO tools. Consider including existing keyword ranking information or Google Ads data in this process. Keywords that convert well on PPC should do the same organically and should therefore be considered. Wil Reynolds talks about this particular tactic a lot.

5. Aligning phrases to the buyer’s journey

The next stage of the process is to start categorizing the keywords into the stage of the buyer’s journey. Something we’ve found at Aira is that keywords don’t always fit into a predefined stage. Someone looking for “marketing services” could be doing research about what marketing services are, but they could also be looking for a provider. You may get keywords that could be either awareness/consideration or consideration/decision. Use your judgement, and remember this is subjective. Once complete, you should end up with some data that looks similar to this:

This categorization is important, as it starts to frame what type of content is most appropriate for that keyword or phrase.

The next stage of this process is to start noticing patterns in keyphrases and where they get mapped to in the buyer’s journey. Often you’ll see keywords like “price” or ”cost” at the decision stage and phrases like “how to” at the awareness stage. Once you start identifying these patterns, possibly using a variation of Tom Casano’s keyword clustering approach, you can then try to find a way to automate so that when these terms appear in your keyword column, the intent automatically gets updated.

Once completed, we can then start to define each of our keywords and give them a type:

Pillar page

Cluster page

Target page

Track & monitor

Ignore

We use this document to start thinking about what type of content is most effective for that piece given the search volume available, how competitive that term is, how profitable the keyword could be, and what stage the buyer might be at. We’re trying to find that sweet spot between having enough search volume, ensuring we can actually rank for that keyphrase (there’s no point in a small e-commerce startup trying to rank for “buy nike trainers”), and how important/profitable that phrase could be for the business. The below Venn diagram illustrates this nicely:

We also reorder the keywords so keywords that are semantically similar are bucketed together into parent and child keywords. This helps to inform our on-page recommendations:

From the example above, you can see "digital marketing agency" as the main keyword, but “digital marketing services” & “digital marketing agency uk” sit underneath.

We also use conditional formatting to help identify keyword page types:

And then sheets to separate topics out:

Once this is complete, we have a data-rich spreadsheet of keywords that we then work with clients on to make sure we’ve not missed anything. The document can get pretty big, particularly when you’re dealing with e-commerce websites that have thousands of products.

5. Keyword mapping and content gap analysis

We then map these keywords to existing content to ensure that the site hasn’t already written about the subject in the past. We often use Google Search Console data to do this so we understand how any existing content is being interpreted by the search engines. By doing this we’re creating our own content gap analysis. An example output can be seen below:

The above process takes our keyword research and then applies the usual on-page concepts (such as optimizing meta titles, URLs, descriptions, headings, etc) to existing pages. We’re also ensuring that we’re mapping our user intent and type of page (pillar, cluster, target, etc), which helps us decide what sort of content the piece should be (such as a blog post, webinar, e-book, etc). This process helps us understand what keywords and phrases the..

https://ift.tt/2Lbmvix