How to answer a question matching user intent ?
-
Hello,
How do you answer questions (the famous user intent) in your content when moz keyword tool, google related searches or all the other tools on the market don't have any questions to propose ?
For example take the keyword title tag, the questions are, the optimal length, title tag definition etc...
But what about with the keyword Provence bike tours ? what are the questions people have ? It is an informational query but I can't find any questions for it with the different tools out there ?
The only one that I find are "best base for a bike tour in Provence" or "one day bicycle tour in Provence" but this isn't what I offer or do and it will be very hard to integrate in my content other than I do a blog page that answer those questions...
Is there a way to answer for example "biking in Provence" which is a keyword the keyword tool gives me ?
Thank you,
-
Thank you for the info and I will re watch the whiteboard friday as they are very useful, I agree.
-
Yes of course. Why not? Why should you listen to LSI graph or answer the public if they are just not picking up your niche. If you just google cycling holidays in france (or wherever) there are many many results. I can see cycling for softies and 'the chain gang' which sounds more sporty.
So this is just as I thought it might be in my previous answer. The actual words you use are not the point. If you have a good level of English and write intelligently and at the level of your audience then google will understand what you are trying to say.
My strategy would be to model your clients site structure on some of the top performers in searches for the terms you are interested in.
But getting bogged down in the semantics of keywords is a 5 year-old strategy and is going to get you into trouble with the recent update that penalises sites that try to optimise for keyword variations like having two pages for "Cycling in France" and "French Cycling Tours" These mean the same thing and rankbrain understands they mean the same thing so just choose the one that sounds most natural and relevant and run with it.
Google doesn't rank keywords anymore it ranks topics. So put together a diagram of your topics and what you want to write about (a good place to start is by googling these sites and seeing what topics are present) and then start writing articles that are relevant to your audience.
If you google "cycling vacations in Provence" all the information you need is on that first page. Right there infront of you. I'm not sure why you're trusting LSI graph and these tools when the only tool you need is google itself.
But use you r own intelligence, creativity and intuition to inform what you should be writing about. That's a strategy that never fails. And as google gets smarter and smarter it's only going to reward great content and punish people for trying to game the system.
At the end of the day you are not fighting to understand the algorithm. It's designed and changed and updated in a way that intentionally obscures its intricacies. All you can do is be authentic, helpful, accurate and comprehensive. Then mark it all up with schema and when it's done you can then think about maybe benchmarking what you've got against the number one position and you might realise you're inadvertently using words too much or haven't mentioned important phrases.
But just get the thing researched and written first and see how it does. Research should be the longest part of the process. And that involves reading through each site and each page on those sites for the top five results. That will give you a feel for what is important. Screw LSI graph. Use your own brain to solve the problem - becoming overly reliant on SEO tools can lead into a downward spiral of confusion.
But I URGE you to watch some more whiteboard fridays. All the answers are there.
-
Hi Ed,
Thank you for your detailed reply. So you are saying to answer questions that I can think off even though I can't find those through related searches or lsi graph ?
Then, how do you answer a question when one of the related searches is Cycling vacations in Provence ? How do you answer that with the where are , what is a, why take ? is it the way to do it ?
Thank you,
-
Hi there,
I think you're being too 'keyword focussed' here. Google doesn't rank keywords anymore it ranks 'topics'. So the first thing I might do would be to remove the local identifier in your research (not on your page). So you might get more info about bike tours. I mean they are going to be fairly and broadly similar wherever they are in the world. If you're talking about a specific location then google will know about it if you make sure that the location is in the URL and in the H1 and mentioned in the copy etc.
But I see your point, Answer The Public and LSI graph have pretty limited choices about bike tours and they are mostly just relating to different parts of the world. So go low tech. Think 'what do my people want to know about bike tours in Provence?'
Answers I can think of off the top of my head might be:
Things to take with you, what to do in an emergency, great villas and wine stops, how long is a good day's biking without fatigue for different ages, families vs couples, what are the best bikes? bike racks for my car if i'm driving? What if I want to fly and hire a bike? Where are the best places to stay.
Google loves comprehensiveness and is like a library so it likes organisation. So I'd be tempted to divide my site into main topics like couples, families, wine enthusiasts, fitness fans, stag parties, whatever are the general groups of people you have. and then include subtopics like the best bikes, ways to travel, places to stay and other elements of the tour to suit each 'customer avatar'
Go low tech, speak to your customers, use your own expertise on the topic. Tools are great but some of the best positions and number one position articles I have were just really comprehensive and well ordered, nicely written and super helpful pieces addressing a topic or group of people. So like a customer avatar.
Then at the end of each page have an FAQ and that will pick up all the long tail keywords and questions that will appear in blue in the SERP and increase your click-through-rate. Rankbrain is smart and you don't need to think about keywords anymore so much.
Just think about organising the content and covering all the bases with FAQ'a and you'll rank just fine. Even with a low domain and page authority. I have 'Veneers Cost' which is one of the most valuable dental terms imaginable in the number one position nationally here in the UK and I wrote the article before I knew a thing about SEO. I went around my dentists and asked them all what they thought and gave a no BS assessment that helps people find out how much veneers cost and makes useful comparisons rather than tries to get them in for a consultation. Watch Rand's WBF on searcher task accomplishment. That might help you. Good luck!
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Technical SEO Question: Why is our new platform showing a small decline in traffic?
Hi there! We are in the process of transitioning to a faster platform, and we recently moved a subset of URLs over. The subset that moved over saw a drop. We didn't change the URL pattern, or the content. The only thing that is different is the new platform. Here's a link to one of the URLs that is currently served from the new platform: http://bit.ly/1YjXD7H And, here is an example of a URL currently served from the older platform: http://bit.ly/1Jtx7Di Any ideas why the newer platform is seeing a decline in organic traffic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0 -
Medical / Health Content Authority - Content Mix Question
Greetings, I have an interesting challenge for you. Well, I suppose "interesting" is an understatement, but here goes. Our company is a women's health site. However, over the years our content mix has grown to nearly 50/50 between unique health / medical content and general lifestyle/DIY/well being content (non-health). Basically, there is a "great divide" between health and non-health content. As you can imagine, this has put a serious damper on gaining ground with our medical / health organic traffic. It's my understanding that Google does not see us as an authority site with regard to medical / health content since we "have two faces" in the eyes of Google. My recommendation is to create a new domain and separate the content entirely so that one domain is focused exclusively on health / medical while the other focuses on general lifestyle/DIY/well being. Because health / medical pages undergo an additional level of scrutiny per Google - YMYL pages - it seems to me the only way to make serious ground in this hyper-competitive vertical is to be laser targeted with our health/medical content. I see no other way. Am I thinking clearly here, or have I totally gone insane? Thanks in advance for any reply. Kind regards, Eric
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Eric_Lifescript0 -
Internal links question
I've read that Google frowns upon large numbers of internal links. We're building a site that helps users browse a list of shows via dozens of genres. If the genres are expose, say, as a pulldown menu as opposed to a list of static links, and selecting the pulldown option filters the list of shows, would those genres count against our internal links count?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheaterMania0 -
Quick htaccess question
Hi! I'm trying to do a 301 from www.stevesims.com/index.htm to www.stevesims.com. I know I need to use the request command to avoid an infinite loop, but I can't quite figure out the correct code. Here's the first part of the htaccess file. RewriteEngine On RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^stevesims.com
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Blink-SEO
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.stevesims.com/$1 [R=301,L] RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://stevesims.com/.$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://stevesims.com$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.stevesims.com/.$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://www.stevesims.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule .*.(jpg|jpeg|gif|png|bmp)$ - [F,NC] Any suggestions would be much appreciated.0 -
Canonical url question
i just search seomoz tooll it say duplicate content for www.mysite.com and www.mysite.com/index.php should i use canonical url for this ? is yes then is this right ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | constructionhelpline0 -
Interesting site migration question.
Hi all. I'm looking for some thoughts on a migrations option we have. At the moment we have two E-Com sites ranking well for some of the same terms. An older site, and a nice new site. The older site is ranking very well for category and product terms, the new one is slowly coming up. Ideally we would like to have one site, the nice new one, and get rid of the old one. If I 301 the old site url's to the new sites will that bring the new site url's into the same position as the old ones? I'm just not sure how this effects sites that are already ranking well. Any ideas are welcomed but I'm really looking for a definitive answer. It's a big decision after all.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | PASSLtd0 -
Nobody Can Answer This? What Can Google Tell About Videos?
I uploaded a video to youtube one time and then went to upload it again, but saved differently with different tags. Youtube rejected the second upload as being the same as the first. Really, it was the same... just a different file with different tags. Now, I was thinking about making and uploading some similar but not identical videos for embedding on some web pages. Was thinking I'd make the voice overs different, but the images mostly the same montage. Do you think Youtube/Google will see it as the same video? I kind of assume that it didn't fly when I first tried it some time ago because youtube was looking at the audio in the way it can make a transcription. Do you think if the audi,o, file name, tags were different, it wouldn't matter if the video was the same? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 945010 -
SEO question
Hi i changed my page titles for a competitive keyword last week and noticed it has dropped 9 search engine ranking positions. Was ranking 37 and now it 46. Would you guys leave it and see if it starts creeping back up or change again? the page title i used was across my pages for example was Primary keyword | secondary keyword | Heading on page thanks for you help
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wazza19850