You Ask, I Answer: Best Practices for SEO Related Keywords?

In today's episode, Kylie asks, are there any best practices to use for updating content and focus keywords on established pages that already rank well for an existing keyword? We're trying to go from uh using financial planning to using wealth management. Absolutely. The there are a number of uh best practices for this, but one of the things that is an important pivot to make in your mind is that Google doesn't look at specific keywords anymore. Google now looks at topics and it looks at uh when it's doing its assessments for whether a page is authoritative or not, um whether the words, the phrases, the content, the structure, all mirror what an authority on that subject would say.

Uh so if you were talking about financial planning and wealth management, you should probably be talking about asset management. You should probably be talking about uh fiduciary uh responsibility, all the things that if you were to sit down and talk to a subject matter expert about, uh, it would come up naturally in their in their talk with you. That's one of the reasons why uh doing uh subject matter interviews, uh uh interviews with subject matter experts, is so vital because in those natural conversations with established authorities, you will get a lot of the language that uh will fit Google search algorithms, but also naturally be the kind of thing that uh a customer would have as an experience when they're talking to an advisor like yours. So that's really important. In terms of the the technology itself, the best practice today, I will just disclaim this by saying uh this is not necessarily easy and it's not necessarily cheap, but the best practice is to take every page that ranks and attracts traffic for your stated terms of choice, both old and new, and run it through natural language processing software to find every other related term.

Uh let me show you a brief example of this. Let's bring up uh a web browser here. So I would first start with uh an SEO tool like RFs, for example, their content explorer, BuzzSumo would be another good choice here. And you can see there's about uh 1800 pages here that are getting at least five visits from organic traffic that are working uh in the English language, uh published anytime about both of these terms, financial planning and wealth management. Now, if you wanted to just focus on the term you were pivoting to, you could uh just do that search alone, and that's of course going to give you uh a more broad uh index of what are those terms.

What you would do then is export this data to natural language processing software. Um I write my own. Uh there are plenty of really good uh cloud-based ones. Google Cloud natural language processing software is excellent. IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding is excellent.

Uh Amazon has some in their AWS stack as well. But what you will do is uh you will well, you will need to extract the text from all, in this case, 12,300 pages, and put it into a giant document. Actually, the best practice is put into a database. Uh, put it in a database, and then once you have that text, you're gonna run natural language processing to see as effectively what are the other words and phrases that appear in this text that are that you know are targeted around the search terms of your choice and build content around that. So, for example, I was doing some work last week uh for Trust Insights for our own site about marketing analytics.

What are the terms that are most co-located with marketing analytics? And of course, no surprise here social media, digital marketing, Google Analytics, content marketing. So as we create content around marketing analytics, we know that the pages we create, the content we create has to have these terms in it. And it's not going to be just on one page on your website. Uh what's going to happen?

Let's go ahead and put that away. Um, what you're going to do is you're going to create content that is uh robust across many pages on your site so that you get those combinations of terms, you know, wealth management and fiduciary responsibility, wealth management and asset classes, wealth management and tax strategy, and so on and so forth. And by doing that over time on a blog, on white papers, on whatever it is, as long as it's visible but to Google, you will create that authority that says, we know about wealth management because we've got all this content that checks the box on all of these different topics. Now, the easiest way to get started with that again is to take your little portable digital recorder, right? Sit down at a conference room table with your subject matter experts, turn this on, say, hey, Jamal, tell me what you know about wealth management and tax strategy.

And they'll be like, Well, what specifically do you want to know? Uh, if I was a new customer, what should I know about tax strategy? He will probably go on uh uh presumably as as many subject matter experts do at length about different tax strategies for wealth managers, shell corporations, S Corps, LLCs, all these different things to to um to manage your money. And in doing so, uh you're gonna get a rich amount of content that uh you can you know based on the keyword lists you've been pulling is going to be on target. So whatever those keyword lists are that come out of the already top ranking content, those are the things you ask your subject matter expert on.

That way not only do you check the box on the terms and the topics, but you have your company's unique point of view on those things. Yes, there are a million pages about you know wealth management or financial planning, whatever, but they're not your perspective. And by bonding those multiple topics together, you can get that information out of your subject matter experts and get their their perspective that you can then use for content. So that's the best practice. Again, it's not easy it's not inexpensive in either time or budget if you don't have the ability to to write the code yourself, but it is the best practice for getting to exactly the kind of content that will help you rank well.

So that's the answer. If you have follow up comps, please leave the comments in the comments box below. Subscribe to the YouTube channel and the newsletter I'll talk to you soon. Take care. Want help solving your company's data analytics and digital marketing problems.

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