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Content Automation at Scale | Michael Costanzo @ #brightonSEO 2021
- 4. iOS rating from UK App Store as of 29 November 2019
- 7. Optimising one page at a time…
- 9. What will the finished product look like?
- 11. (Your cake)
- 12. Now for the recipe..
- 15. Step 1: Pick 3-5 of your top pages for your chosen category Example: An automotive website could choose different car models to run their analysis
- 16. Pick 3-5 of your top pages for your chosen category
- 17. Step 2: Open your pages in Search Console & filter by the first URL you chose Example shown: An automotive car brand’s top keywords for model pages Page: +/your-url BMW i3 BMW i3 new model BMW i3 cost BMW i3 top speed BMW i3 price BMW i3 used BMW i3 coupe BMW i3 saloon BMW i3 touring BMW i3 black BMW i3 blue
- 18. Tip: Add a translation column if you’re doing this in other languages ^ Step 3: Start jotting down your seed keywords and group into layers to use later Keyword layer Seed keywords Translation Price Cost, price, how much - Colour Blue, black, red, white - Speed Speed, how fast - Body type Coupe, saloon, touring - Used Used, second hand -
- 19. Step 4: Find a way to download lots of your GSC data in bulk Get the Google Sheets add-on: www.thetrainline.com/brightonSEO
- 20. See these settings: www.thetrainline.com/brightonSEO Step 4: How to set it up/extract the best data Setting Recommendation Date Range 12 months is good. Make sure it’s the same for every export Group By: Query Filter By: Page includes /your-category (or use regex to stitch multiple together) Filter By: (#2) Query includes [seed keyword] Results Sheet: New Sheet
- 21. Download this template: www.thetrainline.com/brightonSEO Step 5: The results
- 22. Step 6: Tie it together Example shown: Automotive website Download this template: www.thetrainline.com/brightonSEO
- 23. Now to start planning and implementing
- 24. How do I get it on the page? Your site H1 heading Your new introduction paragraph. Your new introduction paragraph. Your new introduction paragraph. How much is a [model name]? Features Body types: Coupe, hatch, sedan Colours available: Black, blue, green Top speed: 138 mph (222 kmh) New New FAQs New www.mysite.co.uk
- 25. Download this template: www.thetrainline.com/brightonSEO Option 1: Do it manually Example shown: Automotive website (not recommended for dynamic content) Your data Page HTML
- 26. Download these formulas: www.thetrainline.com/brightonSEO Option 1: Do it manually (not recommended for dynamic content) How the formula works: • Use manual text inside inverted commas, including spaces before/after • Click the cell you want to include, separated by & on both sides • Double-click or drag the small green box in the bottom right of the cell to duplicate this for every row Formulas: C ="<h2>"&B2&" top speed</h2>" D ="The top speed of the "&B2&" is "&C2&"mph."
- 27. Option 2: Do it programmatically SMART Page title: BMW i3 | Prices, Top Speed, Models & More | BMW H2 heading: BMW i3 top speed Body copy (snippet-friendly): The top speed of the BMW i3 is 138mph, and it can go from 0 to 60 in 7.8 seconds. Bucket word: [model] top speed Download these formulas: www.thetrainline.com/brightonSEO
- 28. Option 2: Do it programmatically SUPER-SMART Page title: BMW i3 | Prices, Top Speed, Models & More | BMW Optimise each category differently Download these formulas: www.thetrainline.com/brightonSEO Page title: BMW 4WD Series | Prices, Tyre Size, Ground Clearance & More | BMW Top keywords for Electric cars: 1. Price 2. Top speed 3. Charge time Top keywords for 4WDs: 1. Price 2. Tyre size 3. Ground clearance
- 29. Option 2: Important tips Don’t try to over-optimise for every keyword! This approach shouldn’t be used interchangeably with good taxonomy. Don’t be a robot! Use your writing skills to make it sound natural. Test content that you stitch together to make sure it reads like a human would read it. (e.g., you’re, we’re)
- 31. How to measure it: Google Search Console
- 32. How to measure it: Pre/post testing Variant Control vs.
- 33. How to measure it: Pre/post testing Pages with the new content vs. (Before & after launch) Pages that haven’t changed (Before & after launch)
- 34. How to measure it: SEOtesting.com Chart: SEOtesting.com
- 35. Benefits of pre/post testing See if the content changes work as you expect Forecast the actual impact of your changes Save on developing solutions that don’t work SEO testing dos and don’ts: www.thetrainline.com/brightonSEO
- 36. Key takeaways 1 Use your own GSC data to look across pages as groups
- 37. Key takeaways 1 2 Use your own GSC data to look across pages as groups Always think at scale, first!
- 38. Key takeaways 1 2 3 Use your own GSC data to look across pages as groups Always think at scale, first! Be smart about your content generation. You don’t need to make everything unique to get results.
- 39. Key takeaways 1 2 3 4 Use your own GSC data to look across pages as groups Always think at scale, first! Be smart about your content generation. You don’t need to make everything unique to get results. Measure to see if it’s working
- 40. Get today’s resources: www.thetrainline.com/brightonSEO I’m Michael Costanzo, Senior SEO Manager at Trainline @michaelcostanz0 #brightonSEO LinkedIn Download our app
Editor's Notes
- Hey everyone, My name’s Michael and I’m the Senior SEO Manager at Trainline. Today I’m going to be giving you some really ACTIONABLE tips about how to optimise your content at scale, and how to test the impact of your changes on your click-through-rate and your ranks to see if they actually work.
- Everyone’s started baking over lockdown it seems, so I thought I’d make it a bit more relatable and turn this talk into a recipe to show you how to bake the perfect automated content cake (as cheesy as that sounds)… …But as with every recipe website these days, I need to tell you our entire life story first before we get to the recipe…
- We’re not in the business of baking cakes, but if we were, they’d definitely look like this one
- But we’re Trainline, and we’re the world’s leading independent rail and coach travel platform. What do we do? If you’re in the UK and haven’t heard of us then you’re probably living under a rock, but what a lot of people don’t realise is we actually sell train and coach tickets worldwide for travel in 45 countries in Europe and beyond. Obviously when it’s safe to do so, that means you can buy Eurostar tickets with us, you can go all over France, Spain, Germany, Italy and even Japan!
- A bit more about SEO at Trainline though. Our website is huge! We’ve got over 12 million indexable landing pages…
- In 18 different languages on one domain…
- Obviously with that many landing pages and languages, it’s literally impossible for us to go and optimize one page at a time, so we always have to think at scale first.
- Now we’ve told you about us, we’re going to get into the recipe on how to bake the perfect cake of automated content. I’m going to cover 3 steps on how to do this - obviously there are loads of ways to do it but this is usually how we do it at Trainline: First, we’re going to learn how to build the layers of the cake. (I’m going to show you how to look at your search console data probably like you’ve never done it before!) which you can use to get a better understanding of where your impressions are coming from and what's common across a bunch of pages if you've got a lot. Second, we’re going to prep the ingredients and put it in the oven (with some quick implementation hacks, whether you have access to developers or not) Thirdly, we’re going to savour the flavour (This is where we sit back and let the rankings do their thing, then I'll introduce you to a fairly advanced testing method to try out so you can see if you baked it right)
- What are we trying to get to?
- We're trying to pull this number apart in search console, and lift up the hood and see what you’ve got inside…. (pun on next slide)
- PUN DEFINITELY INTENDED... because I’m going to use BMW cars as an example throughout this presentation just for something a little bit different but also so I can use some really simple examples that most people will be able to understand. If the data in here is wrong or if I’ve included car models that don’t exist, that’s because I’ve made it all up. Please don't hate me if you're a car lover. Long story short though: At the end of all this, What you’re trying to do here is build a picture of what type of keywords are common across multiple pages and see all the keywords that are worth optimising for at scale. And what do I mean "at scale?" I'm talking about things I can change once or create once, and add them to every page to try to get loads of growth and better rankings for every page in one go.
- Now we can get into the recipe
- What do we need first? We need to put together our ingredients list Most importantly, you’ll need a website that’s already semi-automated. That could be anything from an ecommerce website, travel or hotel site, car manufacturers…almost anything. The only things this won’t really work for is if you’re a blogger or site that publishes content 1 page at a time. Second, you need a large website that has been around for a while so you have enough data in your search console. If your website is new or it doesn't rank very well for many things, you’re probably going to find this doesn’t work so well for you… A way to extract the data from search console at scale A developer, or if you don’t have one of those, you have to be great at copy and pasting because I’m going to show you how to generate content with an excel formula for hundreds of pages in less than a minute And lastly, you need some coffee and a bit of time to analyse the results properly and learn from them
- Now, the method to the madness. I’ve tried to make the next couple of sections really actionable, and you can also go to thetrainline.com/brightonSEO to download any templates and resources I mention so you shouldn’t need to take too many notes. I’ll flash the link on screen every time I’ve included something on the page.
- Back to the cars for a second. This was by far my favourite part of this task because it gave everyone in my team a chance to really take a step back and see every type of keyword we’re getting impressions for for every language. Basically the first thing you want to do is to pick around 3 to 5 of your top product pages within a category - ones that are the same type. It's important that you don’t mix up different types of pages here, so for example if you’re in ecommerce, don’t go mixing a category page with a product page because they’re not the same thing. You're not going to be able to optimise it the same way. I think the more effort you put in at this stage, the better you’ll set yourself up for success. Yeah, you can automate this part and I’ve seen other talks in the past to use AI and sentiment tools to do categorise stuff, but in my opinion this is by far the most important part for a human to do, because you should be using this to learn about your audience behaviour. Don't just rely on tools and scripts to do this all the time. So we've picked 3 to 5 of our top pages. On our example here with cars, what I would do is group every car model page in the same bucket. Another example - if you’re in fashion, you might group all your shoes together. The more granular you go, the more work this is obviously going to be. If you’re having trouble trying to figure out where to start, align it with your business priorities and focus on what you want to sell more of first really.
- Cool, so you’ve chosen 3-5 of your top pages. From here, you’re going to be deep diving into your categories and start building a list of seed keywords. This is what I’ll be referring to as layers for the rest of the presentation, so just remember that. Why am I calling them layers? Well, when you start stacking keyword layers on top of each other, the first one you do you might end up optimizing a couple of % of your total impressions here, then stack the next one, stack the next one, and the next one until all of a sudden you realise you're able to optimise for 10 things at once.
- Step 2: Now it’s time to start your deep dive. To start off, grab one of the URLs you chose in step 1, open up your performance report in Search Console, filtering by just that URL, choosing a fairly large date range - 12 months should be good - and sort the rows by most impressions first. Make note of the date range you use because you’re going to need that later! And now you're going to start going through the report on the screen and jotting down your keywords to use as seed keywords...
- What do I mean by seed keywords? By that I mean all the different variations of things that pop up and include semantics too, so for example we might see the words cost (for example BMW X3 COST). but you will probably also see "BMW X3 price" and "BMW X3 how much" pop up as well. If you do a search they're all going to be the same thing. Same goes for colours, you might see blue, black, red, white, and a million more but if you were to optimize a page based on the colours available, it’s the same thing, and that's going to be easy to scale. Hopefully you can see a pattern emerging here. Don’t be lazy in this step because it’s going to trip you up. We went through probably around top thousand keywords for each page in depth and it took us probably at least half a day to do this properly per language but it was definitely worth it. Now if that sounds like a lot of work, I promise you it will get easier as you go along. The first page you do will the most amount of work by far, but the reason why you're choosing more than one page is that you want to make sure you're not letting any extra keywords slip through the cracks. Just make sure you only include things you might expect to pop up often for other pages too. If you think the keyword is only unique to this page or product, don’t include it. To make it easy, just make a spreadsheet like the one you see here with a couple of columns because you'll need to use this later too.
- Once you've got a nice big list of seed keywords, now it's time to find a way to download lots of your Search Console data using that list. We don’t actually use this way because we feed all our search console data into our data lake but there’s a really cool google sheets extension called Search Analytics for Sheets which I’ve included a download link at the bottom of the screen. This plugin basically connects to the search console API and can download the most amount data I've found across any SEO tool for this kind of purpose – much more than you can by exporting straight out of search console.
- These are the settings for the tool on how to get stuff out of it. I’ve put these on our website down the bottom there - Quite a bit to go through - but essentially you want 12-16 months worth of data, group by keywords, filter by your URL path of the pages you want to look across and repeat this step again and again til you’ve done it for every seed keyword basically.
- Once you’ve run your report for every seed keyword, your report should now be looking something like this. You should have loads of tabs down the bottom – one for each seed keyword – and a big list of all your keywords with clicks, impressions, CTR and average position. Cool, now what do we do with all of this?...
- …We want to roll it up and start making some sense of it all. Step 6: You want to go ahead and use that seed keyword spreadsheet as your master sheet and add a few extra columns (or you can use the template at thetrainline.com/brightonSEO to start you off). First, use a formula to count up the number of keywords in each layer – this makes it easy to figure out why you might have a ridiculously high click-through-rate, average position or something like that, but also more importantly whether it’s even worthwhile doing it in bulk. One of our examples we saw this on is night trains – a fairly big chunk of impressions, but there’s only actually a handful of night trains in Europe so automation here would have been way more effort than it was actually worth. Next, you’ll Sum up the clicks column, then the impressions one Then you'll get the average CTR and positions .. Then finally in my opinion this gave us the most insightful part of this analysis (click mouse)… calculate the percentage of the total impressions each layer makes up. This bit’s easy enough to do – I’ve included all these formulas in the link down the bottom there, but it’s essentially dividing the impressions of each layer by the total number of impressions for your page category. From this you're going to start being able to tell stories like “if I optimize for price keywords, I’m going to be optimizing for about 2-and-a-half-percent of all the impressions we get” and so on for every category. Once you’ve got all these numbers you can easily face the optimisations off against each other, to basically help you prioritise them or what you can group together to get some quick wins. There's loads of things you can do here to build your business case but you can layer this on with the potential uplift of sales from a ranking improvement for each keyword layer, the numbers start to add up pretty quickly.
- Cool, so now you’ve got your prioritized list of which keywords will bring the most value,,your business case is signed off, and everyone's happy.
- How do I get this content on all of my pages? If you're just starting out at this, start with the basics here then work onto something smarter! By the basics, I mean things like: Page title & meta description Headings (so your h1’s, h2s, all that) First few paragraphs on the page – which a lot of people often forget about. Perhaps you could include a “most popular features box” that includes a bunch of the keyword buckets on the page (e.g. body type, colours available, top speed if it makes sense) Maybe a new FAQ section to go after snippets? The options are literally endless, just don’t be constrained by what you already have. Just remember that your content doesn’t always have to be dynamic to get more keywords on there either.
- What are my options? Option 1: Now, I definitely don’t recommend this method because this talk is about automated content optimization, but I know a lot of people don’t have the luxury of having dev resource so if this is the only way you can get content on the page, then this method is still ok as long as you love copying and pasting. If this is your only option, you can either use your own data and prep a nice big spreadsheet with all the details you need, or if you need to scrape content off your website (or someone else’s) you can use some smart conditions in Screaming Frog. There’s a really cool guide from Screaming Frog on how to do that in the link down below, but as you can see here I’ve grabbed the URLs, the model name and the top speed number from all the pages in seconds with this method.
- Now, I say we don’t do it like this but I’m actually lying – if we want to test this on 50 or 100 pages or so to prove a business case, this is actually exactly how we’d do it using our CMS. So how do I actually generate automatic content manually? Well luckily excel or google sheets makes it really easy to stitch cells together using a simple formula and the & symbol. If you look at the example on the screen, what I’m doing here is just stringing together a formula that grabs the car model and the top speed number and puts it inside some text I wrote between inverted commas and job done. Say if you have 50 models of cars, you’ve just spent 1 minute writing that formula, then paste that to every row and you’ve just written 50 sentences and titles in about a minute. You can even use HTML in the cells if you need to if it makes it easier to copy and paste it into your pages as well. Then If you want to be reallllly clever, you can also write multiple versions of the same content and stitch it together with the CHOOSE & RANDBETWEEN formulas so you can have different content on different pages if you want to. Go and grab this template with all these formulas from the link on screen so you can try it out yourself.
- Option 2 – the best option in my opinion, you’ll need developers for. This one just means you can add sections on your pages to dynamically update, but you can also be really clever here and if it’s important enough, you can pop specific keywords into your page titles, meta descriptions, somewhere on the page and job done quite easily. Cool, so we’ve now launched a content component on every single page to try to rank in the top spot for every single model of BMW + Top Speed for example, which if you remember back to our fake layered cake, this represented about 3% of all of our impressions for this type of page. Sounds simple and smart?
- If you want to get super-smart though and take this to the next level, you can break it down into different categories and have different stuff in your page titles and on the page for different categories if it makes sense. Now this is a fairly overexaggerated example here but lets say your 3 biggest layers for electric cars are price, top speed and charge time, but for 4 wheel drives the top 3 things might be price, tyre size and ground clearance so you could have different templates for your page titles and things like that based on these conditions. Loads and loads and loads of ways to be creative here!
- If there’s one thing that’s incredibly important about this is that you can’t, and shouldn’t, try to optimise for every single keyword layer you have. This method IS NOT a substitute for good taxonomy, so you need to always go to Google and see what’s in the search results. And... Don’t be a robot. Automated content has a really bad wrap because it can sound rubbish if you don’t read it in its final forms. In my experience, you'll ALWAYS find stuff doesn’t flow as well as you hoped no matter how hard you try, especially when stitching a few different sentences or paragraphs together.
- So finally, You’ve finished baking your cake. Now it’s time to eat it like bruce bogtrotter here. By eat it I mean launch it and let it do its thing for a few weeks.
- Now it’s time to see if it's working. There's a few different ways you can measure it. The obvious one - You can use the search console interface and filter by query, but we found it’s often way too noisy when you have a lot of pages when search behaviour is changing so often.
- How did we do it? We’ve been looking for an easy way to do this for a while and this is the brainchild of our marketing analyst Aggy Bungsey. She helped us set up this testing method called variant vs control testing. This is fairly similar to the concept of AB testing which most of you have probably heard of…
- …but we can’t really test 2 versions of a page for rankings because Google will only see one so what we do is measure the rankings, click through rate and clicks before and after we make changes on a group of pages that have changed, vs pages that haven’t changed at all which is the control. Sometimes we compare 10 pages, sometimes 20, sometimes 100 and we usually do this across around 2-6 weeks which is usually enough time to see a ranking change across the page group.
- I really wanted to include an example here of how to do this, but if you’re just getting started there are tools like SEOtesting.com that actually specialize in this type of split testing and they have a lot of articles on how to set everything up.
- Why pre-post testing? Firstly it’s great to forecast the actual impact of your changes on a small set before you do anything big It’s also beneficial to see if the content changes actually improve rankings as you expect. Sometimes they surprise you, sometimes they make things worse And thirdly it will obviously save on development costs before you go and build something properly. I’ve also included some more do’s and don’ts of SEO testing on our website there with some further readings if you’re keen to have a go with testing yourself. It takes a bit of extra time but if you need to build business cases this is the best way to do it.
- I could sit here for hours and talk about all the smart stuff you can do around content automation but if there’s anything I want you to take away from this talk, it’s: Use the data you’ve already got to look at key themes, because the keyword discovery tools never tell you the full picture on their own
- If you want to work smart, not hard, you should be thinking “how do I scale this out” every time you find new keywords or go to write new SEO'd content
- Your content doesn’t always need to be unique to give you results with improving rankings, and
- Always measure it to see if it works.
- So that’s it from me. Hopefully you’ve learnt a thing or two today . Don’t forget to go to thetrainline.com/brightonSEO to download all the resources and more readings … Go and download our app, and When it’s safe to travel again or whenever you're heading to the next brightonSEO, buy your Train and Coach tickets to Brighton or almost anywhere in Europe with us. I'm Michael Costanzo, Thanks for watching!