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Jordan Francis - Friends of Search '22 - Hypercompetitive keywords - how we stick to the top of SERPs.
- 1. slideshare.net/jordanfrancis16 jordseo Hypercompetitive keywords: How we stick to the top of SERPs Jordan Francis | Blue Array
- 2. What’s to come: What is a hypercompetitive keyword? Challenges Strategy Results Key Takeaways 1 2 3 4 5
- 3. Hello! SEO Director at Blue Array @jordseo @bluearrayseo
- 9. Lots of SERP pressure
- 11. Hypercompetitive SERPs can go one of two ways…
- 14. They’re very difficult to rank for TL;DR
- 15. Let’s jump into a case study
- 22. All competitors do most things either very well… Or at the very least, in an ‘OK’ way (“eh, it’ll do”) This limits the number of ‘big’ levers, ‘smoking guns’ or ‘silver bullets’ on offer Requires a strong strategy - both short and medium to long term! Hypercompetitive keyword struggles…
- 25. Technical health User experience Internal linking External backlinks On-page content quality Depth of supporting content Holistic site quality Page experience signals TECHNICAL TECHNICAL & CONTENT CONTENT LINKING / PR
- 26. 3 2 1 4 5 Your site Comp 1 Comp 2 Comp 3 Comp 4 Technical health
- 30. 3 2 1 4 5 Your site Comp 1 Comp 2 Comp 3 Comp 4 3 4 2 1 5 5 3 1 2 4 3 4 2 1 5 5 1 3 4 2 2 3 1 5 4 3 1 2 5 4 4 3 1 2 5 Technical health User experience Internal linking External backlinks On-page content quality Depth of supporting content Holistic site quality Page experience signals
- 31. Your site Comp 1 Comp 2 Comp 3 Comp 4 5 3 1 2 4 5 1 3 4 2 4 3 1 2 5 Depth of supporting content Holistic site quality Page experience signals
- 32. ENABLER 1 - STRATEGY GAP ● Avoid diminishing returns… ● Focus on your largest opportunities!
- 36. Time for a really bad analogy :)
- 41. Learning how to drive Fuel prices Route planning Low conversional opportunity High-conversion informational content General motoring news Buying/selling a car guides Interactive tools Very low to zero conversional opportunity Breakdown Advice Car Maintenance Product Page
- 42. How to jump start a car Car won’t start - What to do Why is my car smoking? Common breakdown problems Car Accident Advice Wrong fuel in your car Guide to Car Warning Lights What to do with a flat battery Breakdown Cover
- 43. Learning how to drive Fuel prices Route planning Low conversional opportunity High-conversion informational content General motoring news Buying/selling a car guides Interactive tools Very low to zero conversional opportunity Breakdown Advice Car Maintenance Product Page
- 44. Driving abroad & travel advice Guides Interactive tools eg. Fuel price checker Car reviews, Buying & Selling tips Route planner & traffic news Automotive news Breakdown advice Electric vehicles Breakdown Cover
- 45. Improved topical relevance Improved cross-sale opportunities Improved opportunity to backlink build Improved brand visibility This has a number of benefits…
- 51. ● Look past solely high-conversion content! ● Add relevant links from this content to your product pages! ENABLER 2 - TOPIC EXPERTISE
- 54. “When we look at the quality of the site overall, if you have significant portions that are lower quality it doesn’t matter for us why they would be lower quality.” Search Engine Journal - Google: One Part Of Site Can Hurt Entire Site Quality
- 55. “But if we see that there are significant parts that are lower quality then we might think overall this website is not as fantastic as we thought. And that can have effects in different places across the website.” Search Engine Journal - Google: One Part Of Site Can Hurt Entire Site Quality
- 56. “So in short, I guess if you have very low quality content that’s also indexed … … that can definitely pull down the good quality original content that you also have.” Search Engine Journal - Google: One Part Of Site Can Hurt Entire Site Quality
- 59. Great money pages + Great rest of site =
- 61. What are the benefits? Improved site quality Improved use of crawl budget Improved use of internal linking
- 63. 1. Use various sources to find all live pages 2. Pull as much supporting data as possible 3. Manually review pages for potential & quality
- 65. 1. Does the page have value? (organic, brand or supplementary) 2. Is the page high-quality?
- 68. RE-OPTIMISE ● Content has a purpose on the site ● Is thin or low quality ● May be targeting the wrong intent REMOVE/NOINDEX ● Content no longer has a purpose on the site KEEP ● Content has a purpose on the site ● Is high-quality
- 70. ● Review your sites content regularly ● Ensure all pages have a purpose and are high-quality ENABLER 3 - EVIDENCE HIGH-QUALITY
- 71. The results
- 72. Google Search Console, Last 16 months
- 73. Google Search Console, Last 3 months
- 74. Sistrix, Last 5 years
- 75. 1. Aligned strategy with the client team 2. Our content strategy generates a vast amount of backlinks 3. Our site is easier to handle and generally higher-quality
- 76. To recap…
- 77. If you take anything away from today… Review & focus efforts on your key opportunities Scale up content within your wider remit Regularly review & improve your site’s wider quality
Editor's Notes
- Walk on intro: Hello everyone, thanks for attending my talk today which I’m hoping will provide you with some real practical value to take away. I’m here today to talk to you about hyper competitive SERPs - and hyper competitive keywords…
- There’s lots to get through - we’ll first touch on what hyper-competitive keywords are, and an example of a hyper-competitive SERP - then delving into a case study, touching on the challenges, the three key facets of strategy and the results, then recapping with the key takeaways of the day.
- Personal Intro: Before we get started, let’s quickly fly through the boring self-promotion stuff - why should you listen to anything I have to say today? I’m Jordan Francis and I’m an SEO Director at Blue Array, the UK’s largest pure-play SEO agency (creators of the Blue Array academy and Amazon best seller ‘mastering in-house SEO’) - I’ve worked in SEO at Blue Array for coming up to 4 and a half years, and in that time I’ve been lucky enough to have worked with both smaller-start ups through to international market leaders, and with a large variety of different site types including:
- Hyper-local directories (Yell, MyBuilder & FLOOM) eCommerce Platforms (Boden & Marie Claire) Global publishers (Future Publishing Group including TechRadar & GoodtoKnow) And, regardless of site type, we consistently come up against hyper-competitive SERPs
- These keywords usually hold the key to unlocking ROI and supercharging growth for our clients.
- Hypercompetitive keywords share a number of common features - they’re usually…
- High volume terms (anywhere over 1,000 search volume all the way up to multi-millions)
- They usually have a strong transactional intent behind them - users spend money on a product or sign up for a service, making these incredibly valuable for sites and as a result, a key focus for improvement
- There’s lots of SERP pressure both in terms of paid adverts but also additional SERP features such as the local map pack
- And they almost always feature highly reputable websites - sites that are well known, and provide very strong user journeys and reliable products or services.
- Hypercompetitive keywords share a number of common features - they’re usually…
- I’ve worked with hypercompetitive SERPs where rankings switch up a LOT - sometimes ranging from P1 all the way down to the bottom of Page 1 in a matter of days…
- But I’ve also worked with SERPs that are ironclad and positions 1, 2 and 3 very rarely (if at all) change for any real duration.
- In short: They’re very difficult to rank well in - and from my own experience they require an excellent strategy both at short and medium-to-long-term.
- We’ll run through a case study example of how we helped one of our longer-term clients to conquer their own hyper-competitive SERP for their core terms…
- We started working with a client in the automotive industry a couple of years ago - the ambition for them was to be the market leader for all things ‘breakdown cover’ We initially started in P5 for the core term ‘breakdown cover’ - we were also regularly negatively impacted by algorithm updates
- ‘Breakdown Cover’ is a 74k search volume term with 73% keyword difficulty - making it a difficult
- and at one point bottomed out at Position 9 of the SERPs, below comparison sites but also our biggest like for like competitors. We have been in both P9 and P1 of this SERP - and there’s a VERY significant difference in click-through rate from under 0.8% in P9 up to a massive 12% in Position 1 - that’s a LOT of clicks being lost on top of a whole load of potential revenue when we consider the sole keyword gets nearly 90.5k searches per month. And this is where it all became a little bit challenging - the nature of the core ‘Breakdown Cover’ SERP is extremely competitive for a number of different reasons…
- This SERP was very static at the top - MoneySuperMarket were deemed to be best-in-class and had an absolute stranglehold on P1 - Sistrix showed that during 2021, MSM had just 4 weeks where they were NOT in position 1
- Alongside this, the SERP features an extremely reputable set of competitors. Some are direct competitors in The AA, Green Flag & LV who offer one direct breakdown cover product (like our client) There are comparison sites such as MSM & CTM which offer the user the opportunity to browse different breakdown cover deals, choosing something more relevant for their needs As well as informational type websites such as MoneySavingExpert which aim to help the user to cut their costs
- The nature of the SERP/keyword is very heavily transactional - with Sistrix highlighting the average cost per click being around £7.00 or €8.20 - as a result, there’s a LOT of paid pressure, with 4 ads above the organic results (including a double indent listing from The AA), 3 below the results, and also a very annoyingly placed PAA box which for a large part of 2021 sat just after position 1 Meaning that if you weren’t MoneySuperMarket or a Paid listing, you weren’t in scroll!!!
- All competitors (for the most part) are doing most things either very well… Or at the very least, in an ‘OK’ way (“eh, it’ll do”) - This means that there aren’t many huge levers that can be pulled - There’s not a smoking gun or silver bullet to propel you up vs. your competitors This makes it incredibly important to have a strong strategy both at short but also medium to long term… which brings us into enabler 1 - how do you identify your areas of opportunity?
- We do this by conducting what we call a ‘Strategy’ Gap analysis
- We very frequently discuss the keyword gap in SEO - for anyone unaware, this is the process of identifying keywords that your competitors rank for, which you either don’t rank for at all, or rank for in a lower position. This is a very key part of any SEO strategy, and in less competitive markets, utilising a gap to create and improve your content can usually lead to some very quick success. The problem with hypercompetitive SERPs and the ‘breakdown cover’ SERP in particular is that all sites on Page 1 are doing a very good job of building out high-quality product pages that help the user to fulfil their intent. With this in mind, we wanted to ‘take stock’ of wider opportunities vs. our set and set out to build out what we call a ‘Strategy GAP analysis’
- We defined some key metrics that we wanted to measure - we split these out into 4 different ‘areas’ in Technical, Content, Tech & Content and finally Linking / PR Technical health - limiting the amount of non-200 status codes, ensuring consistent signals being sent to Google, making the site fast to load and quick to interact with UX - How easy is the site to use generally? Is it accessible and easy to find what you’re looking for? On-page content - Is the content optimally created with search intent and relevant keywords in mind? Do important conversion pages make it easy to go through the user journey? Linking - Is the linking hierarchy clear for both users and search engines? Are we optimally linking through to our conversion pages? These are the key metrics that we used with our client site - however there may be more that you would like to consider depending on your niche - eg. ‘Level of stock’ for an eCommerce client, or ‘EAT signals’ for a site that operates in more sensitive or ‘YMYL’ topics that require true expertise.
- We outlined a competitor set of 4 core sites to benchmark against and one-by-one we went through our outlined metrics and ranked each site in order of how well they were hitting the metric There are some metrics that are more objective than others and easier to measure -
- PX signals: Running PSI/GTMetrix scores on competitor sites: homepage, transactional page, blog post - here we can see MSM pass their CWV for the homepage with an LCP of 1.7, an FID of 50ms and a CLS of 0 - comparing this with our site and competitor sites will provide clear objective comparisons
- External backlinks: Quality scores - in this instance ‘trust flow’ from Majestic, also looking into backlink + referring domain count into domain and specifically into core pages
- There are some that are a little more subjective than others eg. User Experience - with this, you’ll need to manually use and review the sites to draw conclusions. Here we’ll be judging things like how easy is the content to follow, is it accessible, does it provide users with good CTAs and additional sources to follow if they need information.
- Pulling all of these metrics together, you will then have something that looks like so - we used this as proofing to the wider team to aid implementation into technical hygiene fixes as well as to put more focus on page experience signals. This was regularly updated every quarter to provide a view of our progress over time and remaining actions. This is also a great opportunity to pinpoint WHO is doing those areas well and use them as inspiration - having real-world examples of competitor success is very useful in gaining buy in from your own POCs or internal stakeholders. This wider strategy gap analysis is one of my go-to tasks to perform for a hypercompetitive site as it really helps to focus the strategy early and ensure we focus efforts on our true opportunities.
- Doing this helped us to focus in on our largest opportunities to improve (holistic site quality + depth of supporting content) - rather than spending time and resource improving on the things we were already doing very well.
- We now regularly check in on content quality every 3-6 months to ensure everything on our site is high-quality
- The next thing we wanted to put effort into was being the market leader for automotive related content - and not purely transactionally based content!
- Now - of course - the product page is where the money is! Without a doubt - it’s vital having an all-singing, all-dancing, immersive experience on your product landing page This page helps people convert - and rightly gets the most ‘love’ in SEO strategies But just having a brilliant product page is no longer enough to rank at the top of these hyper-competitive SERPs. There’s only so much we can improve a product page!!!!
- We identified an opportunity to cast a wide net with our content with the view to become a ‘one stop shop’ for all things relevant to the automotive industry. Why? This requires lots of content resource - how will this lead to conversions?
- Try and stick with me with this pretty awful analogy… :)
- Let’s take an example of a high-street shopping experience - a person is going shopping for a new pair of shoes and has two stores that are adjacent to one another with the exact same price points.
- In shop A (visual on left) - all they sell are shoes. No added benefits or features in store.
- In shop B (visual on right) - they sell the same stock - however, they also have: shoe sizers shoe stylists offering tips on how to style each pair product experts who can help you to buy the perfect shoe for your own personal needs.
- It’s a fairly wishy-washy analogy, but you get the point - in this instance, most people are usually (not always… but usually!) going to opt for Option B for a more immersive and reliable experience. They’re differentiating their services, showing expertise/high quality and ultimately providing the customer with more reasons to trust and actively want to use their services.
- And we took this same approach to differentiate ourselves in a crowded, competitive market - helping to provide information to users in our niche at all stages of the funnel. The usual approach is to focus on your product pages, improve them, and then look for informational content opportunities that may have direct links and provide cross-sale opportunities (eg. ‘What to do in a breakdown’ would then potentially lead to a user needing to buy instant breakdown cover).
- These high conversion type articles are a key part of strategy and could easily be our main source of content like so -
- The content higher up this funnel is frequently ignored by sites due to not possessing a very clear route to conversion - and this is an opportunity we looked to exploit when creating content We took this a step further - working in the automotive / breakdown cover industry, there’s a very wide remit that we are able to tap into:
- We have then exploited opportunities higher up these ‘lower-conversion’ type articles - still utilising our advice section, but building on this with: Interactive tools eg. fuel price checker General motoring news: Laws, Driverless Cars, Fuel Prices, Driving Tech Advice/guides: Car Maintenance, Emissions, Driving Advice, Learning to Drive, Road Safety Alongside a number of other sections including Traffic News, Car Reviews, Buying/Selling a Car Tips, Learning to Drive and Driving Abroad tips
- This has a number of benefits: Improved brand visibility - we’re able to rank for a far wider scope of queries to ensure that when a user searches for something automotive related - we’re there and front of mind Improved topic relevance - additional content on all things car or vehicle related helps to provide Google and other search engines with further proof that we’re an authority within the niche Improved cross-sale opportunities - yes, of course not everyone who lands on an informational piece of content is going to purchase our product - but some absolutely will and have from primary data Improved opportunity to backlink build… and funnel that into your transactional pages!
- The blog section’s scope is incredibly large and the content is both relevant and of high quality - this makes it a goldmine in terms of backlink building, which in turn provides us with an opportunity to pass this value onto our important transactional pages
- An example is an article written on Fuel Saving Tips - this is a fairly new article to the site which has already received links from over 250 unique domains, including: Relevant automotive sites such as Uber Large national publications including The Guardian, The Daily Mail & The Liverpool Echo University websites offering students tips on how to save money
- Or another example for an article written about Mobile Phone Laws… this received links from over 100 different sites including Large news publications such as The Mirror, The Daily Mail & The Week A large spread of local news publications such as The Leicester Mercury or Cheshire Live Local government websites such as The Wakefield Gov
- These are just two examples of articles which generate external backlinks which improve the trustworthiness of our domain. Where relevant, we also use these articles to pass the linking benefit directly through to the proposition pages - for example on the ‘car warning lights’ article it made complete sense to add a link to our breakdown cover page
- Or a piece where we provide tips and a ‘guide’ on how to learn to drive. Scaling up content on additional areas wider than our transactional offering will enable us to take advantage of opportunities that competitors usually do not - collecting backlinks relevant to our niche which we can then funnel into our product pages. This is a massive value add and scaling up content has huge amounts of worth - I’m gonna do a slight 180 for enabler 3
- The actionable steps you can take for your own sites are as follows: Whilst enabler 2 focuses on improving the depth of content we have on the site - Enabler 3 looks at how we can limit the amount of LOW VALUE content on site.
- Something that I believe all too often is overlooked is the REMOVAL of content… which takes us into the third and final enabler of success.
- Going back to the typical challenge we face when trying to build out SEO strategies - “let’s just focus on the pages that will drive revenue”, usually the homepage, product pages and a handful of blog posts - and as we covered in enabler 2, this holds us back. I’ve had personal experience with clients who were simply not interested in sections of their site that did not drive sales or revenue - regardless of how many reasons and benefits I cited. This often meant there were lots of low or no value pages on their site - something Google have regularly spoken about as being an issue.
- And over the past few years, Google have been talking about ‘quality’ being influenced at site level. Here’s what John Mueller (Search Advocate at Google) has said on just one occasion…
- John puts it very eloquently in saying that quality should be shown all across your site. I regularly come back to this meme to outline the same point…
- Your money pages are fantastic = great! But if the rest of your site is low-quality, potentially spammy, and generally not where you want your users to land up…
- Ultimately your site - just like this drawing - just isn’t as good as it could be!
- Great money pages + great rest of site = maximising opportunity
- Great money pages and great rest of site = maximising opportunity
- We’ve touched on improved site quality being a key factor to this strategy - ensuring that if Google were to use your overall site quality as a metric, that we’re doing all we can to tick this box and evidence high-quality. On top of this, we’re also able to better control and improve the use of crawl budget - ensuring that we’re providing only pages that genuinely serve a purpose whilst stopping search engines from crawling low or no value content. By reviewing our holistic content - we’re also improving the use of our internal linking on-site - again only linking through to pages that have a purpose, ultimately sending stronger signals through our internal linking.
- So what did we do? We reviewed everything - this was one of the most laborious (yet strangely satisfying) processes and was vital to strategy and our success
- We pulled pages from every possible source available to us to ensure we were viewing the full scope: Crawling the site & sitemaps Using primary data from GA & GSC Using external tools like SEMrush, Majestic, Ahrefs We then pulled as much performance data as possible to provide a fair assessment of how pages were currently performing: GSC data (clicks, impressions, average position) GA data (page views, organic entrances, bounce rates) Tool data (number of keywords ranked for, search volume) Backlink data (number of external backlinks/ref. domains)
- Aleyda has created an awesome, more detailed flow chart which you can use to define whether pages have value and if not, what to do with them - I recommend using that for more detailed steps in merging, purging and improving content, but for times sake, I’ve made a more basic version:
- With each page, we essentially wanted to work out if it held true value (either organic, brand or supplementary to the user), and if so, whether it was optimised to be high-quality.
- With each page, we essentially wanted to work out if it held true value (either organic, brand or supplementary to the user), and if so, whether it was optimised to be high-quality.
- With each page, we essentially wanted to work out if it held true value (either organic, brand or supplementary to the user), and if so, whether it was optimised to be high-quality.
- From this, we outlined thousands of pages that were able to be classified into a number of categories: Pages which are performing as we expect them to and should be kept Pages which need to be improved (either thin, duplicate or mixed up intents) Pages which need to be removed (either NoIndexed or Removed)
- This process enabled us to reduce the number of low-value pages on the site and ensure we were moving forward with a smaller, higher-quality base of pages.
- We now regularly check in on content quality every 3-6 months to ensure everything on our site is high-quality
- In case you were in suspense… the fact I’m giving this talk confirms that we did and continue to see some incredibly strong results from the strategies I’ve discussed today…
- Breakdown cover saw a previous low of 8 2022 has been very positive with the last 2 months average position 1.2 We rank incredibly well for transactional terms across more than just breakdown cover
- 2022 has been very positive with the last 2 months average position 1.2 We rank incredibly well for transactional terms across more than just breakdown cover
- We’ve seen strong, consistent growth for our main proposition page which is shown by the Sistrix graph
- On top of this - we’ve seen
- It’s not enough to be doing just ‘enough’ anymore - you need to be multifaceted in your SEO approach to really conquer a hypercompetitive SERP Cover your niche at as many levels as possible - act as a ‘one stop shop’ for all things relevant to your industry - it’ll repay you through brand awareness, topical authority and relevant external links Don’t be a hoarder! Regularly review and remove or improve old/irrelevant content