Finding Ongoing Content Optimization Opportunities in your SEO Process

Crawling Mondays. In today's Crawling Mondays, I would like to address a topic that I don't think that has been necessarily as well covered as it should. That is, how do you do an ongoing content optimization in, in the different iterations of your SEO process? Because of course you start and it's very straightforward Because you know that you need to identify how your audience searches. You need to identify the terms to target. You classify these terms based on their nature. If it is informational, if it is transactional, you prioritize them based on how relevant they are towards your business and your website offering. And then you map them with your website web structure. You identify if you already have the pages targeting towards these queries to optimize them further if needed, or if you need to create content from scratch in order to start addressing them. And based on that, you optimize the metadata, title, description, headings, then the main information, the main content, identifying what is the type format of this content that is needed or that is required in order to fulfill the intent and the need of the audience. You will also very likely also analyze your competitors in order to understand which are these players that are better ranked by Google for these queries and identify the patterns that they are following with their content in order to format yours. And after a while, of course, you see this, this positive trend over time because of course you, you have started also monitoring this, which are the queries that you have initially selected that are providing this positive evolution with your website and the Google Search Console performance report, right? So after this first iteration of SEO work, you will start seeing positive trend. And then the next question is like, what do you do next? What do you do after you have already optimized those top pages, the more meaningful pages towards your targeted queries already? Then you need to start prioritizing the resources for the next iteration. And this is something very important, right? Because SEO is an iterative and incremental type of process. And you need to tweak and optimize over time, identify opportunities based on the monitoring that you do after you do certain actions, certain work and see what is working, what is not. And this is what I want to talk to you in today's episode, especially with content, right? Like how do you expand or improve content? How do you identify these top pages, top terms that you need to address over time, prioritize over time when you very likely don't have the same type of resources as you initially did? Which are the usual steps that I follow? Which are the tools that I use to identify these opportunities, these low-hanging fruits? Let's take a look. So one of the best tools to identify these opportunities to continue improving your content is Ahrefs or Semrush. In this particular case, I'm going to show you how I do it with Ahrefs because I love this top pages report because they, they have an aggregation of your top-ranked pages that are bringing more traffic and they provide a single report the main metrics for them that you can use to not only identify further opportunities to improve your content with, to also address and start ranking for other permutations of the same terms, but also to identify potentially new ideas to create more content for. Which of these top pages for you are really much more important from a business perspective, right? In this case, I am doing this analysis for my website Remoters here, which is a remote work website. And I can see here that the best page at the moment, right, is this article about best virtual mailboxes for digital nomads. And it's already ranked in position 1. And you might say, Aleyda, you have already reached the ceiling for this page. There's nothing to do, which is wrong. You can still identify opportunities and improve further this page performance, content performance by checking here Which are these other terms? And this is why I love this report so much, right? Because it shows me all the terms for which this page is already ranking for. The tool by default shows you the best keyword, the top keyword, right? The one also with more search volume here, but you may also find additional permutations, synonyms, or other terms that you might not necessarily already be using in the content and for which you may want to even tweak, even if the search popularity is not necessarily as high, but it's a very low-hanging fruit, right? So for example, here I can see that this page is ranking in 3rd position for best virtual PO box or cheapest virtual mailbox. And then there's also opportunities for virtual mailbox for businesses. So this is the thing, for best virtual mailboxes and best virtual PO box, maybe these are permutations that I can include here, but realistically, this is much more addressed for digital nomads, towards digital nomads. And then I can see here term for business, which I will say that I might even target this article for this term, but it might not necessarily be the most relevant to rank with, right? So I can start already thinking that it might, there might be a good opportunity if I want to address and to start ranking better for this term to create another article for virtual mailbox for businesses or for remote-based businesses or with another type of nature and make it much more meaningful and useful for businesses instead of digital nomads. That is the thing. Important to differentiate and see if you will be able to provide something different enough, meaningful enough, authoritative enough, and valuable enough for this other type of query, of course, instead of continuing addressing it with this specific page that you already have. So this is perfect because it allows me to see if there are any other term permutations that I can better address or expand this content for, even if it is already in the first position for the main one, and I might be happy with it. And then of course there might be other pages like this one, right, that you see that are correctly performing at the moment, that is ranking position 8 for this term. But realistically, this term is not necessarily very important for me because it's the name of a company that I have included, that I have featured in the business listings that I have and the website for remote businesses. So this doesn't have necessarily a high business value. And it's important that you also do this, that if it is realistically an important page for you to rank from a business perspective. In this particular case, it is not for me. So even if it is second in the ranking at the moment, attracting more more traffic. Since my business model doesn't rely necessarily on pure traffic, it's okay. I mean, it's not traffic that I don't want, of course, but I might better prioritize my resources and my effort to look for opportunities in other pages that are already ranking more or less well, which have a much more important role for my business model. I will go to the next one. And this is the thing, right? I see in this 3rd page that I am targeting here that again, I am in position first again. The search volume is not so high. I see that I am including a featured snippet, which is very cool. And I can take a look that I have already 2 pages linking to this particular page because it's a useful page. It's an attractive page. So this already gives me a hint that I have done zero link building for it. It's already attracting a couple of links because it's useful, it's meaningful, it's relevant. Can give me more signals, more hints that it might be worth it for me to replicate the idea with a similar topic might be useful to cover, which is type of insurances for digital nomads, for remote-based companies, not only health. And I can see here that it's ranking already in the first position for digital nomadic insurance, which is cool, which is very, very relevant towards it, but the volume is very low, right? So I can see that there are other types of terms like nomad insurance, and in this particular case is in position 20. And take a look, it has a much higher search volume. Or international health insurance, in this particular case even higher search volume, although I have to say that this will be too niche, too specific to be necessarily relevant for it. So it might be worth it for me to assess again if I want to at some point create or develop a much more generic article to address international health insurance in general. Once that you identify a page that is very, very important for you, a content that is already relatively well optimized, that you have optimized the metadata, the information, that you have created a long-form even type of guide because you have seen that this was the format that the users were looking for. Ranking first for the very specific term, but that specific term doesn't have all the search volume that you wish to target with it. And then you can see here in this particular case that there are others like normal insurance, right? In the particular case of normal insurance, once you identify this additional term that you wish to be able to address and for which this page is still meaningful, still relevant and useful to rank with, the next step will be to take a look at why you are not yet ranking as well. In this particular case, it's in position 20, right? So that will be the next step. So once that I identified this keyword opportunity that I would like to, to better rank for, and I want to understand how I can improve and expand my content in order to, to rank for it, and I think that my already existing content will be meaningful enough. And even if, let's imagine if not, if I end up realizing that my current content is not. I, I, with this analysis, I will better understand what I need to create something that will be competitive enough to with the currently ranked pages. So not much insurance in this particular case, right? I come in and check which are the currently ranked pages already for this particular term. I use for this SEO Minion and I geolocate it for, uh, to see the results in the US and the UK, which are 2 of my top markets here that I want to rank for with my website, with this particular page. And I can see already here that in the first position it is World Nomads, the, the one that is ranking. In the case of the UK, it is World Nomads, but in the UK, the geolocalized version of, of the website with a specific TLD. And I can see that of course in this particular case it's much more specific because they are ranking with particular landing pages that has high relevance in the title, meta description. The same with the position here is a particular article here of the Broke Backpacker, relatively well-known website in the sector. A few of them I can see there's a mix of sort of transactional type of pages providing specifically the problem and not necessarily only informational guides. And so it's important also to understand here the mix of the nature and the format of these pages are already being ranked for, for this term and, and the role that not only the content but also the links are playing for these to rank for. Go and check and validate this further with SERP Checker in order to better understand the role of links and the popularity of these pages because I see that these are very well-established players and I, so I want to understand the role of links in the rankings. And I can take a look here for again nomad insurance in the US. We're Nomads again, uh, first position with a couple of pages, then the Broadway Parker the same. And when I check the volume of links for each one of these pages of backlinks, right, I can see that they, they have quite a few— 65, 122, 10, 36, 14, 27. And then I will say is to put that in context with my page, right? I see here position 18 my own specific page. And then I understand that yes, in my particular case, I only have one link. I am at a disadvantage from a link popularity perspective for this query that is much more competitive. Once that I have reviewed the role of link popularity for these pages to rank, I want to do the same from, of course, a content perspective because at the end of the day, remember that I wanted to identify also these pages that have a better content opportunity for me to update, to optimize, even to create at some point for this continuous content optimization process. So I can see that maybe Nomad Insurance won't only require more content or better content, right? But also links. But of course people link towards what? Towards content at the end of the day, right? So not only because I will need more links in order to be able to rank or be competitive for this term, that doesn't mean that I shouldn't improve the content. But maybe that, for example, if there is another page targeting another query with the same type of search volume and it is as important for me from a business perspective, that doesn't require as many links to rank with. So maybe I can start with that even before, right? And prioritize even further because I will tend to see even same type of results quicker because for that query, page won't need necessarily as many links to rank for, for example. So this is the type of thinking, right? Let's continue to check for this one. What is the role of content? What type of content does it need in order to perform better? What is the role that content has for the rankings of these top pages. And I do this analysis in this particular case with Content Assistant of Cognitive SEO. I added here the keyword Norman Insurance and select the English US database and go to the rankings analysis. So it tells me, look, it is identified to be an informational type of query and these are the top pages that are being ranked and their content performance, the type of focus keywords that they are included, the number of words that they are featuring, etc. Right? So I can Check specifically each one of the top ranking ones, and I can see that the the first one even even if it is travel insurance, there's not a exact match in the terms. I can see that of course the content performance is high. As you can see, more than 2,600 words, and this content is relevant not only for travel insurance but also for world nomads. At the end of that, this is their their brand name: Nomad Travel Insurance Company, Nomad Travel Insurance, Medical Insurance, World Nomad Travel Insurance. The readability score of these particular pages, which helps me to open these pages and understand how they are structured, how they are formatted, if these are listings, if these are comparisons, if there are images, if there are videos, if there are also opportunities with SERP features that we can optimize for to maximize our visibility in SERPs. That is another step, of course. But in general, I can see that it was not only that these pages had more links than mine, but Let's take a look. The content that these top pages are featuring is not trivial. It's like 2,000 words, more than 2,600 words in the first position. This other one has more than 4,000 words, more than 2,000 again, 5,000 in this other case, 12,000. But yes, all these top pages that are being ranked, although there might be a few that are much more transactional focused, these older ones I can see that they are guides, definitely of an informational nature, providing very long-form content that we can go and check and revise and see how all this compares versus ours. But very quick way, we can go and check ours here. And I can see that yes, remote tours is relevant, but it doesn't have as much content as the other ones here, not including as many keywords, focus keywords. That the others have. Of course, we can see here that if I go and compare any of these players that are ranking in the first positions. So in the case of Remoters, we can see that this is the article, right? Which is not bad. It's a comparison of the pros and cons of the top players in the industry, but it's very short. I have to say we could have done a much better work with a bigger type of summary at the end of the article for sure. It's a real assistant in order to choose the best nomad insurance besides providing the, the overview of the most important ones. And in this particular case, we can see that this is definitely, uh, what I mentioned before, much more long-form content. So yes, even if the first player is transactional type of landing page providing this particular product, we can see that this other player here that is much better ranking than, than my own page here It's doing that and also fulfilling in a much more complete way all of the needs, all of the types of questions that a nomad, digital nomad will have. Take a look, it's huge, it's long, and not only because it's long it might be necessarily better, but in this particular case we can see how this article better addresses and better fulfills query of the user. And in these other cases the same, right? It provides a much longer intro here for the information. It addresses many other questions that, as I mentioned before, are the typical FAQs that we could have addressed too. You will be fulfilled by content like this, and it's very likely that the answer will be yes. And not only yes, but yes, and in a much better way than the content that you are providing here. This is why, of course, Google is giving a better ranking to a page like this because it's actually doing much better work than you. If I want to actually expand this particular page to better rank for this term because it has a much higher search volume, realistically I will need to attract a little bit more links. But the way to attract links is to create also good content, relevant content that actually fulfills well the user. And realistically, those players ranking in the first top positions are already doing a much better work than I do. If for the first iteration this article was good, was okay, it allows me to rank for this very specific, not necessarily as competitive term, but if I want to go and rank for a much more competitive term that is still relevant, I will definitely need to expand that content. How? I have the best examples here with these articles that are already ranking in the first positions. I expanded well, if I formatted well, if I if I do a much better work addressing these queries, I will be able to compete with them. And maybe I should do also a little bit of further work because there might be other opportunities to include comparisons, features, or even try to generate some features as feature snippets, for example, as I am already generating with this other article here. Why not? And this is the logic by analyzing my already top-ranked pages. Low-hanging fruits again, which are those next pages that you should optimize, expand further in order to take them from position 8, from position 5 to position 3rd, position 2nd, position 1st, right? For queries that are meaningful for you, for topics that are really, really important for you from a business perspective. And this is where you can better prioritize and allocate your resources. So hopefully this was helpful. And if you have any other aspect that you would like me to cover in the next Quality Mondays, please let me know. Of course, if you have any questions, let me know also in the comments. I'll be more than happy to answer you. Thank you very much.