So What? Marketing Analytics and Insights Live
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In this week’s episode of So What? we focus on SEO competitive analysis basics. We walk through determining your competitors, tools you can use for analysis, and what SEO data to pull. Catch the replay here:
In this episode you’ll learn:
- what SEO competitive analysis is
- how to extract competitor keywords & topics
- how to prioritize competitive topics for your own content creation
Upcoming Episodes:
- Putting your SEO data into action – 10/14/2021
Have a question or topic you’d like to see us cover? Reach out here: https://www.trustinsights.ai/resources/so-what-the-marketing-analytics-and-insights-show/
AI-Generated Transcript:
Katie Robbert 0:20
Well, hey there again friends, Happy Thursday. Welcome to so what the marketing analytics and insights live show I am joined by Chris and John. And today we’re gonna be talking about SEO competitive analysis basics. So last week, if you missed that episode, we talked about SEO keyword research basics. And so what we want to do this week was then talk about the competitive analysis basic basics. And, you know, competitive analysis in general is just one of those interesting things that I always find fascinating on how people approach it, and why they do it. And so some people do it to, you know, see what their perceived peers are doing so they can get ahead. Other people do it to see what they perceive peers are doing so that they can see if they’re falling behind. And then other people do it just to check a box, and then never do anything with the information at all. So we could probably spend the full, you know, 40 minutes talking about why you should do a competitive analysis. But specifically today we’re going to talk about SEO, competitive analysis, and we’re going to cover what it is, we’re going to cover how to pull that information, how to get your competitors, keywords and topics, and then how to prioritize those things for your own content creation. So, Chris, where do you want to start?
Christopher Penn 1:41
Well, let’s start with this first important announcement, this is going to be our last weekly show on Facebook, we are essentially, you know, trying to do less and less with Facebook as a channel. So if you are not already subscribed to our YouTube channel, go over to Trust insights.ai slash YouTube and follow us there that was that our LinkedIn channels will be the place where this show will be From now on, you know, just with everything going on with Facebook ads, it’s time to to reduce everyone’s dependence on it. So we’ve gotten the administrative stuff out of the way. Well, I asked you this, Katie, and actually, I asked you this to John first, since you do the majority of our sales, who are our competitors?
John Wall 2:27
Oh, yeah, that’s a great you know, we always fall back on the big consulting companies, you know, we just say that it’s the Andersons or whatever of the world where you’d normally pay half a million dollars, we do the same thing cheaper, faster, better. And then there are I mean, we will take a half a million dollars. Yeah, exactly. 400k special this week if you lock it in soon. But so that’s really our niche, we have really gone along that route of, we don’t tell our customers that there’s anybody who can do what we do, because what we have is unique, it’s on its own in the market. So yeah, in some ways, though, I regret that because in other spaces, it’s great if you have like five competitors, that you know, you’re going to get spreadsheet it against that you can just, you know, lay the landmines and let them get destroyed. So it’s it has both its benefits and drawbacks when you go that route as far as targeting somebody way outside of your normal reach.
Christopher Penn 3:25
Katie, what about you? What, who are our competitors, do you?
Katie Robbert 3:28
Well, you know, it depends. Um, what I’ve found through my own research is it depends on what our angle is for competition. So if we’re talking about services, competitors, then some of the consulting firms that John just mentioned, make the most sense. But if we’re talking about our organic search competitors, that’s a little bit different, because we, the keywords that we have decided we want to rank for, are not necessarily the keywords and topics that are that’s why I kept saying perceived peers that are perceived peers are ranking for. And so when I took a look at this information, I found that our organic search and SEO competitors were different from who we thought we were competing against for services and audience. So we’re looking at companies like Ben, Ben Terra and Pekin AI and data crunch Corp in terms of sharing the organic search space and trying to rank for the same keywords. That doesn’t mean that they do the same things that we do, but they have decided that those are the keywords that they want. We’ve decided that those are the keywords that we want. So we’re going to, you know, duke it out.
Christopher Penn 4:40
So this is a really, really, really important part of competitive SEO. Before you open up a single tool or spreadsheet. You’ve got to figure out what you’re competing for. And John and Katie have illustrated the two different schools of thought on competitive SEO. One is who’s got the traffic right? That’s gonna be around specific terms and search engine rankings and stuff for those terms that you duking it out for. So, as Katie mentioned something like other other AI technology, friends, we write a lot about data science and AI. And so in a certain SEO tool, we would we would be going if we wanted the traffic for those terms, specifically, we will be going after those traps. And so and that’s, that’s what most people do when they think competitive SEO, they open a tool like spy who were SEM rush or whatever, say, here’s my term, who am I competing with? And then you get your list, and it’s off to the races. But the question that we should be asking is, where are our customers? Right? Who are our customer? Who’s got our customers? Who could we take customers away from that more goes to the question I asked John, which is, who do we lose sales to? Right? Who do we? Who do we compete with who has a competitive thing? Because when we think about it, we’ll go back to last week’s different categories of search, right? There’s branded search, which is people searching for us by name, there’s competitive branded search was people searching for our competitors by name, then there’s unbranded, adjacent and novel. Last week, we looked a lot at unbranded competitive branded search is when people are searching for a competitor by name. So to John’s example, if we wanted to rank well, for things around management consulting, neither us nor our our peer competitors are really getting any traction for that, you know, when our peer competitors, especially because they’re all software, a lot of their software companies, they’re not showing up for change management. So a big part of that first step is okay, well, who are who are our competitors that we need to be looking at? Who’s got the audience? And then what are the terms that attract that audience? And that’s a big difference of those two strategies.
Katie Robbert 6:53
It is, and it’s, it’s a lot more in depth than just opening up a SpyFu. And just plugging in your company name and seeing, you know, who do we compete with, in the search space? You know, and so it does take a lot more thoughtful planning, and this is something that we’ve seen with a lot of our clients is they, we struggled to answer the question as well. So it’s not just them, but who are your competitors? Nobody really knows. And I think that, you know, the digital marketing space has really changed what that means, you know, so, you know, back, you know, before, believe it or not, there was a time before the internet. So back before time, you know, before there was internet, you know, you would compete with people who have similar products and similar services. And that was it, there was really no other way to slice it. But now when you bring it to the Internet, and you have all those different channels, you know, you have search and social and, you know, email and all those things. It just changes the rules. And so you may have different competitors for each and every channel.
Christopher Penn 8:02
Exactly. So in search, Twitter, he was saying, let’s go ahead and look at one of the tool, but the more popular tools out there for competitive, this is a tool called SpyFu. Again, if you have an SEO tool, you know, SEM, rush h refs, mas, all these tools essentially do more or less the same thing, the difference is going to be on data quality and UI. But functionally, if we’re using a tool that you don’t see that you don’t have like, don’t worry about it yet, the one that you’re paying for probably does something very similar. So this is this is the the search traffic perspective, the what Katie has said, initially, which is plug in your company’s domain name, and see who who’s the tool thinks you’re competing with based on the amount of overlap you have with keywords. So here we have us in blue, and this data crunch Corporation in in red. Now, the big question to ask is, is this actually competitive, so let’s go to their website.
They build software analytics, AI, that changes the world to an educational institution, that would be just fine, massive gains with predictive insights.
Katie Robbert 9:16
So the first thing that I would do is I would go to the services at the very top, I would look at education, I would look at website, I would look at custom, because we do a fair amount of education, we just that’s not one of the services that we lead with. Um, and so then we need to make the decision of what are the things that we might want to lead with so they do analytics, you know, data science based technology, those are terms that we use.
Christopher Penn 9:47
So I would say, this is a good overlap for search terms, right? I don’t think it’s who our audience is. I don’t think that’s the the audience. So one of the things that It’s interesting here is that we have a lot of overlap. And what this this tool like MAE, the competitors does a really good job of saying, okay, you can look at just the words that are unique to you, just the words that are unique to a competitor. And then the things that you share, which is 45, out of, you know, 10,000. So even though that it looks like there’s a larger, there really isn’t, there’s not a ton of overlap here, which indicates that this is probably not super competitive now to what John was saying, let’s put in BCG, which is a Boston Consulting Group. Can you get them in here? And here, we have now have almost what 20 times as much keyword vive almost 400,000 keywords? When we look at there’s no one, there’s nothing that all three of us have in common. Right? So now we’ve got a, we’re starting to get a sense of, Okay, this large consulting firm may be may have the audience we want, you know, companies that that need help with things like change management metrics, salting, but from a content perspective, there really is no overlap at all.
John Wall 11:08
Yeah, and so I’m not missing anything, right, like their Venn diagram game needs some work there. That’s not how Venn diagrams work as far as I know.
Christopher Penn 11:16
Now, yeah, this is just now what I take away data crunch. And now it’s just us and the giant consulting firm, we actually have 128 terms that are shared and we’ve still got our 2000 over here, and then they’ve got that 300,000 over here. So at this point, this is now where we can start to say okay, let’s apply the same techniques that we were using last week and keyword basics to figure out what’s going on. So let’s start with these these core, the core essentially means the overlap the 120 terms that we share in common, I’m going to go ahead and just export this as a CSV file. And then I also want to look at what we don’t have right so everything gonna take because we know where we from last week, we know we do have let’s take a look at this. This is what they call the missing keywords. These are the ones that are exclusive to them, we’re going to export those as well. And as we did last week, I’m going to go into Tableau and again you can use Microsoft Excel you can use our if you want to get fancy, you can use alteryx any any of the data processing tools that that we all know and love you can use to get this get this data let’s go ahead and pull up our first the the core keywords This is the 120th overlap. And let’s use our keyword and we’re going to do our search volume right and we’re going to look at our Keyword Difficulty and let’s put this on a scatterplot as we did last week we’re gonna take the search volume and let’s make it logarithmic so that it’s a little easier to see adds fitness to the entire view. Let’s put our keywords as the hover points so you can see what we’ve got here and we’re going to reverse our ranking difficulty because again, the closer to zero a number is the easier it is to rank for being there’s more opportunity so let’s put also our couple of reference lines on here so for our search oh you don’t need at this point. So if you just imagine a two by two matrix here, stuff that has high volume and low difficulties in this quadrant is largely absent right it’s it’s pretty barren up here there’s not a whole lot stuff that is low difficulty and low volume the consulting newsletter that’s the voice of the customer consulting these are things that you know there’s there’s some opportunity there but not not a ton. where things get challenging is high difficulty and high volume outside the box thinking change management framework digital customer journey so from a an opportunity perspective here we have to figure out how to create other related content around these terms because there isn’t an easy opportunity there’s not something here that that we could do really well protecting ourselves with okay let’s see if the other still working on generating 400,000 keywords
Katie Robbert 14:32
Yeah, and I like I’m just I’m taking it all in because this is I feel like you can start to see like the wheels spinning the smoke coming out. I’m like, Oh man, I definitely have been looking at our competitors, the wrong competitors. And so it’s it’s, it’s interesting. I feel like when I have this aha moment on our own show, I will be interested to hear you know when people have that aha moment for themselves after they’ve watched the live stream but like to me I’m like oh damn Okay, we’ve been doing it wrong so how do we do better and so this is how we do better
Christopher Penn 15:13
right? So now let’s that other file finally finished downloading this this might crash Tableau because 400,000 keywords is a lot to deal with but we’re going to repeat the exact same process now this is just the keywords that BCG does well for that we have no we’re not ranking for at all so there’s there’s no chance for us right now.
Katie Robbert 15:40
And I heard that if you look at the list really quick and so you mentioned that it’s you know 400,000 or something some crazy number like there’s a lot on there that if you were just trying to clean up the list before you started doing this analysis you could probably get rid of a lot of them like we’re not going to try to rank for the
John Wall 15:56
rocket peptides that are Pepe is not on the list. Yeah,
Katie Robbert 16:00
Boston Tea Party. Those are things that we will never care about in terms of terms we want to rank for with the business
Christopher Penn 16:10
right. Okay, let’s do a little bit of filtering here see if we can clean up at least some of this stuff knock out the things have no search volume at all. And let’s go back to a plot Alright, ranking difficulty so this needs to be an average because there’s duplicates in the list and we should do that here as well. Okay we’re going to rescale our search volume to logarithmic I’m going to risk alter our ranking difficult to reverse it so even in this gigantic huge 300,000 data point mess you can still tell that upper right hand quadrant is still largely empty right there’s not a lot in there which indicates that you know this this is a this keyword list for this site is very mature right there’s anything that you can rank for you are ranking for this that there’s there’s not some hit not a ton of hidden gems in here. This still a few here and there like seamless customer service for example the sharing economy which is it which is interesting commodities trading steps for buying a car management consultants that one’s interesting that has such low difficulty even though this stuff several others 1000 or so searches, let’s do a little bit filtering to on the average search volume, let’s increase this to 10. So at least it gotta have at least 10 searches. And you can clean up the left hand side of the graph a bit more. So in something like this, this is everything that BCG ranks for it would be impossible to try and build a content plan from 193,000 different keywords that’s what we have left here. So the next question that we would want to ask is, is there a way and the answer is yes is there a way to to filter this down to essentially terms that are at least relevant to what we do with things or marketing and data stuff like that. And for all of these tools there absolutely is are ways to do that let’s take a build so as a quick keyword filter here and we’re going to wildcard contains market just that and now where we’ve got a lot more visibility into what you like marketing in the digital age breaking the supermarket to the apocalypse that’s interesting marketing because I
Katie Robbert 19:05
feel like there’s there’s a decent amount of cleanup that can probably be
Christopher Penn 19:09
exactly market share synonym things like that so there’s there’s definitely some cleaning that can be done here as you said but there there are it’s a little easier to see some of the things that you might want to work out let’s take a look let’s do the same thing let’s do beta and now you see a lot of job stuff Java things but yeah, there’s snowflake is first party data. So first party data has is relatively difficult, but there’s some decent search volume for it. Up here you’ve got data analysts, salary surveys and things. So one thing that would be very interesting to do so if you want to create a piece of competitive content would be to do a salary survey and publish it as pillar content on the blog. Sort of rounding up what what the world out there seems to be think would be appropriate surveys for data engineers for a marketing analytics specialist and stuff. It’s a it’s a possibility. You do have other stuff in here to zero party data, which is something we were just talking about. Gosh, I think was about a month ago about difference between zero and first party data. So there’s There are still a decent number of topics. If we go in, let’s do one more on changed and look, see if we can see what we got a change management, change master consultant salaries at change consultant salary, behavior change, consulting, change versus transformation. That’s actually sounds like a good, a good topic. Why is changed so hard? But what’s interesting about this, and what’s important about this is that, again, from the analysis we were doing, these are all the terms that we don’t show up for it all, we’re not in the game on any of these terms. So these would be opportunities for us to go and dig in and say, Okay, can we create content for these things? Knowing that bcgs audience is the right audience for us? We know that, you know, the same would be true if we were to go back to here to put in McKinsey, right.
Katie Robbert 21:14
So what we’re not, you know, it’s interesting, as someone who would be creating some of this content, you know, and maybe this is where I just need to do some, you know, I guess for lack of a better term, I’ll call it experimental writing, writing, basically, to see sort of like what comes out? Because right now, when I’m, when I’m thinking about some of these terms, I’m like, but how does that relate to the services that we do? Because isn’t the whole point to create content to educate people around the types of things that we have capabilities for? So I’m looking at some of these terms? And even though they are opportunities? Are they still the right terms for us? I don’t know. You know, so you’re talking about the salary surveys? Yeah, that would be an interesting thing that would drive people to our website, but doesn’t have anything to do with the services that we offer. You could maybe draw like a dotted line to our data analysis and surveying skills but are Is that why people are looking into that piece of content? So that’s where I kind of get stuck when we do exercises like this.
Christopher Penn 22:20
Think about it in terms of the marketing operations follow right so when you’re talking about content to attract people to us for our products and services, that really is middle of the funnel content, right? We if you are looking for, you know, Google Analytics, consulting help, you have unbranded intent that’s saying like I have a problem I need I need help with this problem. Who does this right? You know, bottom of the funnel content would be the branded stuff like I need Trust Insights to come help us with this thing. I need Katie Robbert to come in and and shout at all the idiots I have working for me. That’s happily. We’re all this stuff comes into play is at the top of the funnel, where Yeah, we don’t we know you don’t have buying intent, right? Otherwise, you would have shown up in those middle of funnel traps, we know for sure that we don’t have you have no buying intent. But you’re the right audience. If we can attract your attention, and enroll you in something, just like the newsletter and just as a way to hold on to your attention for just a little bit longer. With each issue, then, like we talked about a few episodes ago, when that that spotlight of purchasing briefly sweeps across your brand, right for the two seconds here in the spotlight. People will get Oh, I you know, I get the TrustInsights.ai newsletter every week. And hey, we’ve got a marketing analytics problem, I go give them a call. Right? So there’s this is very much when we talked about sort of the three year marketing strategy, you have brand building at the top, you have publishing in the middle, and you have community at the bottom. And we have publishing with the Trust Insights newsletter and this show and stuff like that. We have that nailed down, right? We’re pretty good at that. We have bought in the fall a community a slack group analytics for markers. We have that pretty well in handy of 2000 people in that group, where we don’t have as much isn’t the top of the funnel, right in that in that? Do people even know who we are. And we have talked in the past about things like Well, hey, we have to go to a lot of conferences and events and be speaking just to get in front of crowds. We discussed You know, this conference is a better crowd than this conference. But one of the interesting aspects about doing this kind of competitive SEO analysis is to say yeah, there’s a lot of stuff where somebody like take a look at this intersection here this 177,000 keywords that McKinsey and BCG share, right. Again, not all these are going to be relevant. But some of them you know, like artificial intelligence and things or quantum computing, or even just your basic digital marketing, or Schumpeter’s creative destruction are things that this audience which we know as a valuable audience, wants more of. Can we get any slice of that pie
Katie Robbert 25:03
As usual, Chris, you always give me a lot to think about. And now I’m just trying to figure out how to delegate this to John instead of me. And I just haven’t quite figured that piece out yet. Because it wouldn’t be a live stream without giving John a big to do with my list, right? I’m the one who gets the to do list this time.
Christopher Penn 25:22
You know, to that point, if you think about it, if you were to stick a clearer thing on here, it’s marketing over coffee in here.
Katie Robbert 25:31
Here we go, John, John’s project,
John Wall 25:33
this will find we’ll definitely find work that needs to be done here.
Christopher Penn 25:39
So there’s there’s these other things that that currently have some overlap. But are these people that have an audience that we want as as podcasters? Right, as people have? I would argue that probably not probably, if we want to attract people to our podcast, we want people who are interested in marketing in general, right? So we would probably want more people who go like, you know, our friends and clients, full disclosure, marketing profs, you know, they have a really good audience, we would look at people who go to places like martec.org, because, again, a really good group of folks. And so the question there is, okay, well, what was that world look like? Where, what? what topics? Are those talking about that, that marketing over coffee is not brand building, for example, LinkedIn sales, navigator, inbound marketing, these are all terms that those two other sites do well for that marketing over coffee does not. So as we’re trying to come up with show topics or things like that, these things we want to talk about, talk about brand loyalty on the show, like we have, I’m pretty sure we’ve not done a whole lot with with brand loyalty. Or if we have we have not optimized those episodes for it.
John Wall 26:49
Yeah, as you know, I’ve always stayed away from brand stuff, I kind of have this marketing ops bias of like, oh, the people that sit around and talk branding all day, like they don’t really work, I don’t want to have anything to do with those people. And obviously, this is telling me that like, yeah, we’re missing a huge opportunity, I need to give some glad handing to the brand term.
Christopher Penn 27:08
You know, it’s funny, you say that, because I used to think that way, a lot about brand, you know, like, it’s just fluffy stuff. But ever since we started doing more and more with really advanced regression models, and seeing more brands of cropping up not going you know, what, there is a there, it’s it, a lot of the folks who do brand stuff don’t have access to those, you know, a great regression models, but if they did, they would very clearly see, hey, this stuff is actually important. And here are the like the brand new metrics that you need to pay attention to, you know, we talked about from time to time, things like Google Search Console, like just looking at branded search, like how much does your branded search go up. But there’s a lot to unpack inside a brand.
Katie Robbert 27:55
I mean, I feel better knowing John, that you have stuff to do now to
John Wall 28:00
four episodes on branding, I’m actually psyched. That’s a good one I can definitely more show topics is a wonderful thing.
Katie Robbert 28:07
But no, I mean, like, you know, it’s funny, being so close to everything, like being in the company every day. This is the stuff that we just gloss over. But then when we do these shows, I feel like I can sit almost in the seat of an audience member and get a lot out of it. Because you’re using you always using Trust Insights, as the example and I feel like after every live stream, I’m like, man, like, I feel like I’ve walked out of like a really good, you know, event session where people are like, energized, like, I need to do all the things and you know, so I always feel like that after the shows, and this one, especially because now I’m like, Well, I have a lot more research that I have to do. And I have to, you know, get up to speed on all of these competitors that I didn’t realize were competitors, and what’s the language that they’re using? And how can I apply all of our tech, all of our like, you know, processing techniques to learn more about what they’re doing? And then how can I write the content that helps them compete. And so I just I find this exercise fascinating from that standpoint, where you would think that the person who owns the company wouldn’t have their mind blown so much, talking about what we do with the company, but without fail every week. With my little disclaimer,
Christopher Penn 29:27
no, it’s good, because it’s part of if you’re doing data driven marketing properly, and well, you should have a lot of discovery sessions a lot of Oh, no, this is a thing or, Wow, I’ve been thinking about this entirely wrong because we instinctively as people just don’t do a great job of being able to think about data is just not not in the cards for us. You know, here now we’re looking at McKinsey versus BCG, so we’re not in this fight. We have no horse in this race 177,000 terms. I just looked at market and something like marketing in the ditch. Till age zero difficulty right? It’s it’s on the radar but not there and yet it is you know it gets a couple 100 searches a month that’s that’s not zero right you know that’s that’s not insignificant market access analytics answering specific question who are Uber’s relevant market and non market stakeholders. So there’s there’s some interesting stuff in here let’s look at data see what these two giants are fighting over data science salary data science interview. So that was an interesting one we don’t necessarily need to know McKinsey’s. But it would be interesting to see, like, if we were to put up a blog post about how to interview an agency for data science capabilities, how to interview data science candidates, again, these are things that, not services we offer, but actually we do.
Katie Robbert 30:51
See, but that’s sort of where like, you try to wrap your head around tying it back directly to Trust Insights. But Chris, I think, to your point, you know, it’s, it doesn’t need to be that direct line from here’s the things we can talk about to here’s the thing is that we can do, because right now, our goal is to just attract more traffic to the website with content that is topically relevant to what the company Trust Insights is, and that’s something that I’m still, you know, wrapping my head around in terms of like, which of these things make sense, you could make an argument that they all do.
Christopher Penn 31:30
Exactly, I would say one of the things you might want to do, if you’re looking at this kind of data, is bucket it, you know, put up, you know, top of funnel, middle funnel, bottom of funnel, red, yellow, green, or whatever schema, and then you can start looking at these different search terms and say, okay, where does this fit in data strategy consulting, that’s every middle, right? You know, like, if you were searching for data strategy consulting, you have some level of intent there, as opposed to say marketing in the digital age, that’s very much the top of the funnel. Hey, I’m exploratory curious, that there’s not a need, right, there’s, there’s, there’s not that implicits kind of need. So bucketing these things out would be a way to to help classify and categorize again, this is, these are the things that if we, if you know, your your funnel reasonably well, you can map these terms to, and then if you want to kick it up a notch, you look at your funnel, because Katie, you do this every month with our marketing analytics, you look at the funnel, see, okay, here’s where, you know, top of the funnel numbers are, here’s the middle phone numbers, or here’s the bottom the phone numbers are. And we know the transition stages between the 2% conversion rate here 7% conversion rate here, you figure out which is the, which is the bucket that is leakiest. And then say, Okay, how does that map to our search terms? Do we need more content in the middle of the funnel stage? bring people from one stage to another?
Katie Robbert 32:53
Mm hmm. Yeah, I mean, that makes sense. Because even just off the top of my head, I know, for our funnel, there’s a huge disconnect from people who, you know, visit our website, to people who actually raise their hand and say, I want to work with you, once people raise their hand, you know, our close rates are really great, because they know what they need. And they know that we’re the ones who can help. But it’s getting people to that stage of, Okay, that was really interesting information, and that I read, and then I go away to, I know that I need your help. And that’s the piece of the funnel. I guess it’s sort of like that, like, top two middle piece that definitely needs the most work.
Christopher Penn 33:35
Yep. One other thing to think about, is also when you look at the topics that have very high volume, and have very high ranking difficulty. Those are things you’re not going to win on in SEO ain’t gonna happen, right? You’re not going to beat McKinsey. Ping McKinsey. You’re not gonna beat McKinsey at big data analytics. But where this data become becomes very helpful than say, Okay. If I did a predictive analysis on big data analytics, I know I’m not gonna win in search. But could I use that to inform the topics in my newsletter, right to for the audits I have managed to retain just serve them up something like, Oh, you guys know this, too. It’s not just McKinsey that knows, like, Oh, yeah, a lot of people no big data analysts not that special. But if you can intercept the search volume, and maybe you publish a week or two or three weeks before the trend peaks, you’re using essentially McKinsey’s own competitive SEO data against them by anticipating the audience and beating them to the punch.
Katie Robbert 34:49
So really, I think the moral of the story is, you can’t just write whatever content you feel like and expect to get the audience from better if you actually have to do a fair amount of planning and research and data analysis before you even get to the content writing phase, because you could like me, admittedly, be thinking about the exact wrong competitors, and going after the wrong kinds of keywords and then sort of scratching your head going, why aren’t we getting the results?
Christopher Penn 35:26
And if you’re, if you one of the things that people forget about, a lot of times when you look at the super high volume trends, like change management 17 times 1000 searches a month 95% Keyword Difficulty, right? Again, you’re not ranking for Change Management anytime soon. But if you create a post using like we talked about last week, and so the public, we have much longer tail terms like, how do I implement change management in a small business? How do I implement change management in real estate? How do I implement change management in a travel company, you will check the box to a degree on the core term. But you can pick up a lot of extra extra traffic that is much lower and competition, because it’s not even on there. Right now. If you look here, in what they’re ranking for, none of these are long questions. This is simply not what they are ranking for right now. So you can use these big, audacious terms change, organizational change, management, 94%, difficulty, organizational change, 95% difficulty, but splitting out to something that’s your own spin on it, you can rank for those longer term questions. And we know thanks to these lovely devices that live on our desks and our smartphones, that search queries are getting longer, because people are asking and that in natural language. So what can we do to anticipate getting those times again with predictive calendaring so that we know when to have our content market, the bigger the the the higher the Keyword Difficulty, the lower in the funnel, that content should go because the lower the Fall is we have more control over it should be in things that are podcasts and things that are emails that go directly to the audience that don’t rely on Google as an intermediary. And you can an entry, try and capture so that top and middle funnel on the super long tail stuff.
Katie Robbert 37:21
I got a lot of work to do, Chris. I mean, that’s really that’s really, I mean, but that’s a good thing. Because it definitely speaks to, you know, at least at Trust Insights, we try not to be stuck in our ways. And like this is the way we’ve always done it. You know, it’s daunting, but also exciting, to have to rethink about the way that you’re approaching stuff, because it means that you’re paying attention to, you know, the latest and greatest tools and techniques. Yes, you have to maybe redo some things, but hopefully, you know, you can build upon what you’ve already done and not just completely start over. So I definitely have some ideas of what we can do with this information. And, you know, when we get into our, you know, planning for the company sessions, then this is the information that we’ll be using to do that. But it’s definitely you know, it’s exciting. Because it’s, I feel like it’s just all it’s green space, in the sense of we haven’t done it yet. It’s obviously not new to our competitors. But to us, it’s like, well, I mean, we just kind of get to do whatever we want and write about it, however we feel like it. So like, that’s exciting to me.
Christopher Penn 38:30
It is exciting. And I, one of the things that I think is so important for for us as a company is looking at those, you know, those big bottom of the funnel terms like big data analytics, for example, and making sure it gets into publications, because we have I have lost track of the number of people’s interest. I didn’t know you did that. Right? Well, that’s that’s our fault. Because like we didn’t tell you we did that do so. But these topics, give us a reminder to say, Oh, yeah, we do that too. And it can go in our publications, even if we never rank for a day. on Google. We don’t have to we just we know it’s of interest, we know that our audience has an interest in it if our audiences if we’re getting the audience that we want. So from a prioritization perspective, so as we talked about the do that two by two grid, your topic funnel stuff is going to be your adjacent queries that our competitors are ranking for. Your middle funnel is going to be those intent terms that the competitors rank for and the bottom, the font is going to be either branded stuff or stuff that you’re not going to be able to compete with an SEO, but you know, you can reach your audience in other ways. So that’s how you prioritize. So we’ve looked at what SEO competitive analysis and I think it’s really important that we emphasize it’s not, you’re using SEO data. But it’s not just for SEO, it is for any kind of marketing where you want to know what’s inside your customers head, looked at how to extract the keywords and topics and we just talked about how to prioritize them. So Any any final parting words?
Katie Robbert 40:03
John, you have a long to do list now get started.
John Wall 40:06
That’s it. Yeah, let’s get back to work. That’s always the punch line with this show.
Katie Robbert 40:11
And just a friendly reminder for our viewers, this is our last show that we will be broadcasting live on Facebook. So if you’re looking for us, you can find us on youtube at TrustInsights.ai or AI slash YouTube. That’s our YouTube channel and the show always goes out live over that channel and you can always catch the replay there as well. Exactly.
Christopher Penn 40:30
You can always find on the blog over TrustInsights.ai dot AI. Thanks for tuning in, folks, and we’ll talk to you next week. Thanks for watching today. Be sure to subscribe to our show wherever you’re watching it. For more resources. And to learn more. Check out the Trust Insights podcast at Trust insights.ai slash ti podcast and a weekly email newsletter at Trust insights.ai slash newsletter. got questions about what you saw on today’s episode. Join our free analytics for markers slack group at Trust insights.ai slash analytics for marketers. See you next time.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
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