Rethinking SEO: How to win more qualified traffic by optimizing for topics instead of keywords

This guide will look at how a smart brand took advantage of this new era in SEO and won by optimizing on topics instead of keywords.

Hands-on, practical advice? Of course. Follow this step-by-step process and you’ll be able to better understand this new approach and learn how you can apply it to your business. I’ve gathered some great resources and a list of essential tools you’ll need to get started.

There’s practically no doubt that topical optimization is the way to go, ever since Google released the Hummingbird update. As we’re used to, in SEO, that’s easier said than done. From keyword research to choosing a topic, to actually producing the right content, to measuring its impact in visibility – every step of the way has to be different, in order to transition from “traditional SEO” (that’s not really working as good as it used to) to a more Inbound approach to optimization.

Cutting through the clutter

How can you become an authority in your domain? It all starts with content, but not just any content. Writing authoritative content requires 2 things:

1. Knowing your audience.
2. Being an expert in the field they’re interested in.

It’s no secret that our biggest challenge as content marketers is grabbing people’s attention. It’s now harder than ever to get it, with them being bombarded with information. It’s tough, but there’s a way to get through all that noise: by bringing them really good content.

Just add “purpose” to the recipe and you’re on the right track.

Don’t be that SEO guy who walks into a bar, pub, club…

There was a time when this joke used to paint a pretty good picture of what’s it like to be an SEO, especially the keyword research part of the job. Fortunately, time has challenged us (Google algorithms even more so) to focus more on users’ natural way of researching products, services or information. This means that we’re no longer targeting sets of keywords per landing page, but rather trying to understand the way our audience uses search engines.

The Inbound methodology describes the type of content users look for depending on where they are in the Buyer’s Journey. A user in the Awareness phase could just be looking for information on a topic, while others might be seeking out a comparison between specific products. Therefore, your keyword research should start with looking at the type of content your audience is looking for. This means that, for someone in the awareness stage, product- or service-related topics wouldn’t be what they are looking. You might want to consider optimizing for a more problem-focused topic, such as: “how to win more qualified leads”.

Image credit: The Buyer’s Journey [Hubspot]

Let’s go through a case study to explain this even better.

The downside of traditional keyword research

Let’s say we’re trying to find the best topic opportunities for the help desk software segment. A typical keyword research would imply looking for keywords that describe these products. SEMrush comes in handy at this point. By excluding brand related queries, you’ll be left with a ready-made keyword research. I’ve selected the keywords that contain the word “software”, to help me create a group that contains only product-related phrases.

Keyword research [SEMrush]

Obviously, this is a very competitive market segment. Just by looking at Helpscout.net’s rankings for this section, one can understand that these aren’t keywords easy to rank for.

Competitors’ keyword analysis for the “help desk software” segment [SEMrush]

In order to tell if this is an opportunity or not, we need to see the bigger picture. I’ve imported some of the keywords in SEOmonitor’s Competition Insights dashboard. The tool automatically tracks all of the websites that rank in Google’s first 2 pages of results, for the entire list of keywords I’m looking at. Even more useful, it sorts the websites based on their Visibility Score.

Here’s the list of websites ranking for this topic:

Competitors’ Visibility for the “help desk” topic | SEOmonitor Competition Insights

Competitors’ rankings on the keywords in the “help desk” topic [SEOmonitor – Competition Insights]

In the end, this type of research didn’t lead to find a topic opportunity. So let’s try changing the perspective: instead of looking at the products, let’s try a more user-centric approach.

Use the Buyer’s Journey framework to find Topic Opportunities

A potential customer in the Awareness stage would rather look for solutions to their problem, than for “customer support software”. So why try competing there? If they’re more likely to be looking for a solution on “how to increase customer loyalty”, let’s try to find the content opportunity there.

Back to square one. I used SEMrush again, to look for keywords containing “loyalty”, to ease things up, and I found a satisfactory list. With the new “customer loyalty” group imported in SEOmonitor, I can now see how competitive this “new” market is, in comparison to “help desk” or “customer support”.

Competitors’ Visibility for the “help desk” topic [SEOmonitor – Competition Insights]

Helpscout.net seems to have found the way to its audience’s heart. “Customer loyalty” is unquestionably a better and more fortunate topic to cover than the previous one.

Conveniently, SEOmonitor lets me test the theory in the Topics section. This smart grouping gives me the total search volume for the entire list of keywords forming a topic; it also adds an opportunity indicator, which is much higher for the “customer loyalty” group.

Keywords are automatically grouped by Topics in SEO Campaign [SEOmonitor]

If you want to further explore the “Topics” feature, here is a video walkthrough and a comparison between keywords and topics.

The “Opportunity Score” shows you what topic is likely to bring the most revenue with the least effort. The opportunity is given by the necessary effort to reach the top 3 versus the monthly estimated revenue. Opportunity levels range from 1 to 10, so you should look for full orange bullets (10).

As you can see, our topic has a promising Opportunity Score of 3, as compared to the much lower score of the others, while also having a low Difficulty rate. This is yet another validation that we are on the right track.

Topics Analysis based on the Opportunity Score in SEO Campaign | SEOmonitor

Now that& the best topic – the one with the highest opportunity – has been pinpointed, let’s move on to producing the winning content.

Increase your visibility for a topic you have chosen

You still need to test and see if this is something worth investing in. That can be done by looking at how many relevant articles can be& found on the topic and how many social signals they gathered, in order to validate them. BuzzSumo is a great tool to analyze what’s already out there.

There is a fair chance to become the most visible website on a particular topic, if you manage to write a piece that’s better than anything else that’s already available. Ian Cleary – founder of RazorSocial and one of the top 40 Digital Strategists and influencers in the world – gives a sound and concise interpretation:

If you want to read more of Ian’s tips and tricks on how to win the content wars, read the full interview here.

Optimize for readers first

Search engines are getting smarter and smarter. They virtually know if a reader liked your content or not. Take some time to optimize the landing page from a user experience perspective, point them to useful external sources, and overall make sure you give them enough reasons to stay on your website and interact with that page.

Anum Hussain, Growth Hacker at Sidekick by Hubspot, published a helpful list of 20 optimization tips, from which we highlight some of the most important ones:

• Optimize the URL: separate your target keywords with a dash and keep is short, so it doesn’t look like keyword stuffing.
• Start with a clear and catchy headline, that accurately represents the content of the post.
• Captivate on your first sentence / meta text, but once more, keep it succinct.
• Let readers scan content, through section headers.
• Use easy-to-read visuals, to enhance the experience.
• Integrate both internal and external links, where relevant.

If you’re interested in reading the full list, you can find it here.

If you only try to optimize a single piece of content for every relevant phrase, you will end up in losing your final purpose of building a consistent single-focused authoritative piece. Hence, you will need to invest your time and effort in creating and optimizing a page for each keyword group in your topic, even if this will result in optimizing over 20 pages. Not only will you rank for hundreds of keyword phrases, you’ll also dominate that topic.

Remember, you need to address all of the intentions in the buyer’s journey.

Promote it through Outreach, PR efforts or paid campaigns, so that you earn inbound links

Getting back to Ian Cleary: in the above-mentioned interview, he also gives some useful tips on how to successfully promote your articles.

Link your Content Marketing and Outreach efforts to your SEO performance

The challenge in proving content value is connecting it to SEO performance. On the one hand, we have content-related metrics, such as views, social shares and visits generated. On the other (SEO) side, we’re always looking at rank performance and, overall, at the website’s visibility performance.

You can link these metrics using the targeted landing page as the common denominator. You can do so by finding all of the keywords that trigger that landing page in SERPs and monitor their rank changes from the moment an article (referring to that LP) was published.

Take a look at this video to learn more about SEOmonitor’s Content Performance module.

If you’re doing plenty of outreach or you get many referrals, you might find it useful to automate this measurement process. SEOmonitor’s Content Performance dashboard is built to automatically find articles pointing to your website, group the relevant keywords by landing page and also report changes in the pages’ visibility score.

Keep an eye on these metrics (at least on a weekly basis), to see if you’re building in the right direction.

Conclusion

The more valuable the content you build is, the more more people will find answers to their problems in your articles and will share them. Therefore, Google will start considering you a relevant source for these searches and consequently regard you as an authority in your industry. This will make both search engines and customers fall in love with your brand.

Written by Irina Nica, Marketing Manager of SEOmonitor and contributed by Maria Cernatescu, Inbound Executive of SEOmonitor