Episode Summary
Website optimization, which primarily involves changing the content and HTML code, is used to improve a site’s overall ranking. But for most businesses, it’s challenging to find untapped opportunities in today’s highly competitive SERPs.
In this episode of Content Logistics, Camille Trent welcomes Steve Toth, SEO advisor and the former SEO Manager at FreshBooks. Camille and Steve get into how to grow your website from 0 to 50k clicks per day. And they talked about the importance of using Google tools, Chrome extensions, SEO tools (SEO Minion and Ahrefs), keyword clustering tools, and text tools.
Guest Profile
- Name: Steve Toth
- What he does: Steve is an SEO advisor and the former SEO Manager at FreshBooks.
- Noteworthy: He is an SEO Consultant to growth-focused companies throughout North America and a trusted resource to over 10,000 subscribers of seonotebook.com, where sends weekly emails with his strategy notes. In February 2020, he took FreshBooks on as a client after ranking #1 for a 300,000 search keyword, quintupling organic traffic in under a year, and being named the Best In-House SEO Team at the 2020 Canadian Search Awards.
Key Insights
- Be patient, and you'll see SEO success. If you have a new site, you will probably have difficulty finding growth opportunities. And SEO, the process of improving the quality and quantity of traffic on your website, will help you grow. According to Steve, one of the issues with SEO is that it's a lot harder to succeed today than it was ten years ago, and you have to be patient before you see the results. "There was a lot of spam that would typically be able to get you to page one or even position one. And now it's a much more complicated game than it once was. Not everybody knows that going in, and there are a lot of people who have failed because of that. And that's where you see a lot of naysayers come into the fore. So there are always gonna be those people who've had tremendous success, those companies that have crushed it with SEO. But then there are gonna be even more of them who have failed and wasted money because it also takes a ton of patience. And if you don't have that patience or the right person guiding your strategy, you're probably going to fail."
- Use "People Also Ask" on Google to find blue ocean opportunities. If you are trying to optimize your content and grow your website but find traffic falling, it’s probably because you are using the wrong strategies. Steve notes that using "People Also Ask" questions on Google is a helpful tactic to find blue ocean opportunities. "Those are accordion menus that appear in the search results when you type in pretty much any query nowadays. So Google is trying to guess the intent or guess the possible other questions that people are asking and trying to make your search experience that much shorter and more efficient. So targeting those questions can be extremely valuable because people don't always know what they're searching for at the beginning, and Google's actively trying to funnel people into the answer that they want."
- SEO Minion is a handy tool for everyday SEO tasks. According to Steve, you can mine "People Also Ask" questions with a tool called SEO Minion, which is also extremely valuable. "If you just go to seominion.com, you can download the Chrome extension and literally expand 200 'People Also Ask' questions and copy them to a spreadsheet in one click. You can get a ton of interesting topics with that. You can then take those URLs that are ranking for those 'People Also Ask' questions and put them into Ahrefs' batch analysis to see which of those questions and pages gets a lot of organic traffic and try to go after those. [...] You can also take those questions and then run them through a keyword clustering tool like keywordcupid.com. It will Google each of those questions, and it will look for similarities in the search results. When it sees similar search results for different keywords, it's going to suggest that you group those keywords together in one piece of content. So it's an efficient way of clustering those types of question-based keywords en masse."
Episode Highlights
Using SEO Minion and Ahrefs to Get Valuable Data
“If for some reason your keywords do not trigger ‘People Also Ask,’ just put ‘What is’ in front of your main keyword, and then you’ll start to get those questions. And basically, you install that SEO Minion plugin. So go to seominion.com and just go to the Chrome store from there and then install that extension. And then, when you’re on the SERP itself, SEO Minion will be overlaid on the right-hand side, and then you would just click ‘Expand.’ So you can expand 5, 10, 20 results up to 200 results. And then, click ‘Go’ […] Once it’s done expanding all that, it’s going to copy it to your clipboard. Then, head over to Excel or Google Sheets and paste those results in. So you’ll be pasting the ‘People Also Ask’ question, the title tag, the URL, and the meta description. So, you have four columns for all of that. And, from there, if you want to see which of those ‘People Also Ask’ topics are getting the most traffic, you can take those URLs and put them into a tool like Ahrefs, which has a thing called batch analysis, where you can just dump up to 200 URLs and get a bunch of valuable data on those URLs.”
How to Use Data from Ahrefs
“There are a couple of things you can do to improve your chances of replicating your topic and being successful with it. The thing that I’ve done in the past, which has worked really well, is to have a note on my email list, SEO Notebook, where I email a piece of strategy every week. And one of the notes was, ‘Put these PAAs into Ahrefs and filter by traffic. And then also sort those rows by their domain rating.’ So, a site with a low domain rating means that it’s a site with not many links, and it’s most likely a newer site. So, if you see a newer site with a bunch of traffic for a keyword that is triggering PAAs and is also ranking, that is a very prime opportunity for you to create a piece of content. Because you see right in front of your eyes that this site, that’s not mature at all, is able to rank with a very thin backlink profile and just on the merits of the content itself. So, you can identify some really easy wins that are going to be closely related.”
Steve’s Case Study with “People Also Ask” at FreshBooks
“Prior to becoming a freelance consultant, I had worked at FreshBooks for about two years. And then, I ended up actually becoming a consultant for FreshBooks after I left the company as an employee in 2020. But when I was there, my boss Chris Cisco came up to me and said, ‘Steve, I need a thousand articles,’ and then he walked away. That’s all he said to me. So I was like, ‘Okay, I have a content background; he knew who he was coming to.’ But, at that time, I also had no idea where to start to produce a thousand articles. That was obviously a huge challenge. And I thought, ‘Hey, what can I do?’ And then, it was like that cliche moment — I was in the shower, and I was like, ‘People Also Ask, we’ve got to do it like that. That’s where we start.’ So we started mining ‘People Also Ask’ questions around accounting, invoicing, entrepreneurship, taxes, and all those things closely related to FreshBooks. And we got thousands of them.”
