Topical Authority With Andy Chadwick

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for the SEO show where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello, it is time for another episode of the SEO show. I'm not joined by Arthur again this week. Instead, I'm joined by Andy Chadwick. Andy is an SEO consultant based in the UK and he is a co-founder at a couple of different software tools, one of which deals with content spokes and hubs and clustering keywords together. And this is basically what we had a good chat about today. Another term for that is topical authority. It's something that's been touched on in previous episodes of the show. Matt Diggity most recently was talking about it, and I thought it would be good to have someone come onto the show and go quite in-depth on the topic of topical authority. So that's why we had Andy on the show, and it was a really great chat. It's a long one, went for over 50 minutes today, but we really got into the, I guess, the depths of hub-and-spoke content and how you can plan it all out and map it all out and internal linking and the types of results you can expect. when deploying a topical authority approach or a hub-and-spoke approach to your SEO. So, that's enough waffling for me, you don't want to hear me talk about it. Andy had a lot of gold, so without further ado, let's jump over to the chat with Andy Chadwick. Hi Andy, welcome to the show. For our listeners who may not have heard of you, if you could just give us a quick overview of who you are and what you do, that'd be awesome.

ANDY: Hey, yeah. Cheers, Michael. Yeah, no. So, um, I'm Andy. I'm one of the co-founders of Snippet Consulting, which is a boutique SEO agency, but then I'm also the founder of Snippet Digital, which is sort of an offshoot of Snippet Consultancy. And we make SEO tools. Um, it started off just making them for businesses who had, you know, little requirements and we've ended up spinning one. Well, our most famous one called Keyword Insights, which is a SaaS tool. which helps basically turbocharge your content strategy. So co-founder of Snippet Consultancy. And then I guess the main thing we're known for is Keyword Insights, which is the SEO SaaS tool to help with content.

MICHAEL: Awesome. Okay. Well, I came across you, funnily enough, I would say through your Keyword Insights tool. I was doing a bit of search on the topic of content hubs and spoke content. Another term for that is, you know, pillar and clusters, or I guess the general topic is topical authority, which is spoken about quite a bit in the SEO world at the moment. I found a blog post you'd done and I checked out the tool and thought it was pretty cool. And we hadn't actually had anyone on the show to talk about that topic before. And with your post being so in depth, I thought it would be great to get you on. But I always like to start with the very basics. And with this, you know, I've thrown a few terms there, you know, Pillar and Cluster, Hubs and Spoke, Topical Authority. If you could maybe fill in our audience on what that is exactly.

ANDY: Yeah, no problem. Yeah, as you said, they go by like 30 names, Topic Listers, Hub Pages, Spoke Pages, Topical Authority. They've got so many different names. But essentially, it's really simple. It's a simple and effective way of, well, increasing traffic to your site. And it works by creating these central pages known as hubs. And then these link out to various sub-pages known as cluster content or spoke content. So for example, you might have your central piece of content might be, let's say you were writing a blog around, well, keyword research. You might have a central blog called the ultimate guide to keyword research. Although just a caveat, I hate it. All these ultimate guides to anything, you know, we need a new name, but I know they can only be one ultimate, right? Yeah, and there's there's about 30 ultimate guides to whatever topic you're on. But essentially, you've got one central piece on the ultimate guide to keyword research. And this goes into loads of different aspects of keyword research talks about how very briefly, it covers how to do long tail keyword research, how to do short tail keyword research, how to generate your list doing something else or something else. But this ultimate guide links out to more specific guides on each topic. So even though we've briefly covered in our ultimate guide how to do long-tail keyword research, it links to a more in-depth guide on literally just covering how to do long-tail keyword research. So it's more of a more of an index almost that covers everything briefly and summarizes it and then links out to these cluster type pieces. And the reason it works really well is for two reasons. First of all, if you plan, it works for planning and it works for when you actually, you know, link them all up on your website. From a planning point of view, if you plan your content in this way, you're more likely to thoroughly cover a subject. before you've even started writing, if you plan it on, I don't know what sort of, I use Lucid, but there's Miro, there's some other, you know, diagram planning tools, or even just in Google Sheets, if you plan your, your hubs, and then all the spokes off of that, before you start writing, you know, you're going to cover a topic pretty thoroughly, because you've got all the various, you know, aspects around that topic. And then once you've actually written them, it works really well, again, because you're internally linking between everything that is topically similar, semantically similar. So you're giving, you know, search engines just a way to crawl from topic to topic, and really understand the similarities and the points between them. It's why Wikipedia was so successful. It's because if you go on any one of their pages, it links out to, you know, other pages, if you're reading about Barack Obama, it'll talk about the White House and you can click a link and then read about the White House. And once you're reading that, you can click a link that talks about the color white and it just all links up. It's really good for what's another idea known as the knowledge graph, which is this idea that you cover thoroughly a topic and everything around that topic. So, you know, Barack Obama is a person associated with the White House. The White House is a building associated with the government. The government is this idea, you know, you're giving it all this, this knowledge graph information. So that's why they work. And there's a bit of theory behind why they work.

MICHAEL: Okay, cool. Well, I want to jump into how this all works, you know, like how you actually go about building them and a few questions I have around, you know, I guess the focus of the pages, but before we get into that, so the listeners get a feeling for what might be possible, you know, traffic or visibility wise, let's say traditionally a website owner might throw up a few pages on the services they offer and they have their homepage and let's say they're a lawyer for argument's sake. what could they expect or what are the types of growth you've achieved with this strategy in the past that justifies going and really covering the topic of law in depth for a lawyer, you know? Is there any results? Yes.

ANDY: Yeah. So there's, I mean, there's plenty of, um, case studies, I think we post on the site, but we've grown, it depends again, you know, the niche and where you are and how competitive it is. We've grown a startups traffic from, nothing to 80,000 visits a month in a year, which was just massive. And that was in a very competitive niche. That's a furniture company in the UK. So they're competing with, you know, if for listeners, these are massive UK brands, but they're competing with Marks and Spencers, Next, Oak Furniture, Land, these huge furniture companies that they just didn't have a hope with before. And just covering content in this way. Yeah, we've basically blown even them out of the water in terms of our editorial content. And why that works with them as well, it's not just because you can just say, Oh, well, you've grown this site 80,000, but are they actually making any money from it? And the reason it works is a lot of those posts then have been guides about buying and we've made the calls to actions through to what products very clear and Wait, it's subtle and clear, which I know sounds like an oxymoron, but it doesn't, the blog isn't written to sell. The call to actions are put in a way which users are actually clicking through. And I think our top blog posts, which are just editorials, I think 20% of the people who read them. And there's, I think there's five to 6,000 visits a month on each one. Uh, 20% of people actually click through and view a byproduct of which. 3 to 4% of them actually then go ahead and buy. So our editorial for them is absolutely smashing in terms of bringing visitors in and actually converting interestingly. For more established companies, the growth is a little bit more modest, but in terms of percentages, but actually still works really well in terms of numbers. So we've got a massive American client. And they, we grew their traffic, I think it was by 110% over three or four months. And considering we're talking about moving it from, I think it was 500,000 to six, 700,000, they're still big numbers. And the problem there wasn't so much that their content was bad or the authority's bad. It's that we needed to know what topics they hadn't covered or covered thoroughly. And then all we did was plug the gap with adding more content into it. So yeah, you can see really good results for. both competitive niches and startups to really establish companies that already have a lot of content.

MICHAEL: Great. And so when you're writing this content, is every single piece written for the user and written to try and encourage like a click through to a product page or, you know, are you saving that for the hub pages and other spoke pages more just as backup, you know, to give that, you know, depth of coverage, but it's more for Google's benefit. How do you sort of decide, you know, when you're creating content, which is which?

ANDY: To be, yeah, to be honest, we write it all without any call to actions and we stick it on the site. And then, uh, we wait three or four months. So we look at analytics and we'll see how people are reacting to our people reading. Are they engaging with it? Where the ones they are, the ones that they are. And we feel like it would make sense to put a call to action. We do. So not all of them. Um, there's not even a rule. A lot of people talk about 80, 20, you know, the Pareto principle. We don't have that. It's just, we look at the blog. Is it getting traffic? If it is. Is there a way we can naturally introduce a call to action? So a good example, and actually another example of a client we've pushed their organic traffic to, I think from nothing to eight to 9,000 a month. Again, a startup, a company called Latham's Hardware. And the reason this was so impressive is they, they sell locks and, you know, screws and bolts. So they're up against, again, huge giants. So, uh, and again, in the UK, it's Screwfix and, um, B&Q, these massive hardware stores. And we can compete with them. And one of the things Latham's hardware wanted to rank for was Euro cylinders. So we wrote a load of, uh, hub and con cluster content around Euro cylinders. So the first one is the ultimate guide to Euro cylinders, and then the I know I sort of contradicting myself there about the ultimate guide, but I couldn't think of a more, a better name for that one. This one really was the ultimate guide. Yeah, this one was the ultimate guide and it ranks at number one for Eurocylinders. So it must be the ultimate guide. So yeah, we, we realized we couldn't go up against B&Q and Screwfix and these other massive companies for the term Eurocylinders and that's one of their main products. So what we did was made the ultimate guide to Eurocylinders. And that talks about Eurocylinders in general, how to choose them, what sizes they are, what they do, why they're a good type of lock. And individually it locks, it links into other blogs around what to do if your Eurocylinder gets stuck, how to replace a Eurocylinder, what's the best, what's the security ratings on Eurocylinder. And now if you type in Eurocylinders in the UK, we've almost changed the intent that Google used to show. Before it would show 10 out of 10 commercial pages, it would be, Buy Eurocylinders, buy Eurocylinders, buy Eurocylinders here, et cetera, et cetera. It's now nine and one. We've got the one blog spot there, which is really interesting because actually, if you looked at it, it was the SERPs. You'd go, we can never rank a blog there, but we thought we'd have a go by making this really helpful guide to buying them because you sometimes see that Google will push a guide there. And it did and it ranks and we didn't have any calls to action for it. It was doing really well. And obviously, quite naturally, we in that in that blog, in that ultimate guide, we talk about for the four different types of euro cylinders, one is like a thumb turn one, one is one with a key. And so it actually made sense to subtly put a little call to action under each one, you know, view or buy or view our euro cylinders collection here or buy this type of euro cylinder here. So we didn't do it to begin with, but we were looking at as I actually, we could have a call to action here without, without forcing it. There's other times you shouldn't really do it and maybe just a call to action at the bottom. So going back to that furniture company, we've got, there's a guide on there. One of their best performing guides is how to get rid of scratches off of your dining table. If you stuck a call to action near the top there, it looks really salesy. So we've just done a nice one at the bottom, which basically goes into. By the way, this whole guy's been telling you how to get scratches off your dining table. If that's simply too much effort, you know, view our range here. And it's just a nice call to action at the bottom. We haven't tried to ram it in at the top, so it looks natural. So yeah, to answer your question, we go back after the blog to start generating traffic and see if there's a way we can do it naturally. And if there's not, we maybe try and make it at the bottom, which doesn't have that much of a click through, but yeah, we just don't want it to look too salesy, the blog. Otherwise we've seen in the past where we've tried that and then ends up losing its ranking.

MICHAEL: Right. Yep. Okay. All right. Well, you mentioned they're competing with big brands and like, you know, retailers that are dominating the SERPs and you might think that you don't have a chance to compete, you know, with the, I guess on a like for like basis, you know, straight product page versus product page, but you could have a chance with this hub and spoke approach. What would be the first step in building out a hub-and-spoke strategy? I would imagine there's a range of steps you go through to research and filter and prepare content maps and the like. How do you go about it?

ANDY: I'm trying to do this without plugging the tool because- Plug away, plug away if you've got a way to do it. If you've got a way to do it. Yeah, so I'll talk about how we do it and then I'll talk, maybe touch on like some free and alternative methods of doing it. But to be honest with you, it's why we created Keyword Insights. It was for our own agency because we were spending so long doing this. Just to cover top level what Keyword Insights does, it does three things. First of all, it allows you to generate a list of keywords. So you can use Ahrefs or SEMrush or any other tool keyword planner or there's some free ones out there as well. I think Ubersuggest is free or maybe it's paid for now. But we have that built into our tool. So you can plug in a seed keyword, let's call it dining tables, and we'll generate another 1000, 2000 odd keywords for you. Again, like I said, you can use Ahrefs or SEMrush to do that keyword research for you. And then it's got a clustering part. So that part is called keyword discovery, discovering loads of keywords around a topic. And then it's got a keyword clustering module. And what keyword clustering does is we scrape. So what we do is you dump your list of keywords and it can be from keyword discovery within our own tool, or you can bring your own data from Ahrefs or SEMrush. Either way, you upload it into the clustering module. And what we do is analyze the search engine results for every single keyword in that list. And you can adjust the settings, but if you leave them at default, we cluster them together if a keyword shares four or more URLs in the top 10 in common with another keyword. What that means is, to simplify that, what we're saying is, if this keyword shares at least four URLs in the top 10 with this keyword, according to Google, then Google thinks they mean the same thing. They're the same intent. So we're clustering them together. And actually it's here we see some really interesting things because sometimes keywords you think should be in the same cluster and targeted on the same page and sometimes you think they should be in two different ones and you see surprising results either way. A good example was we did one the other day and it also depends on which country you're doing it for. So we analyze whatever country you select in the tool, we analyze that specific country and you see it differ from country to country. A good example was we had cluster, we're doing it for a skating company. And we had skate wheel and various terms around skate wheel in one cluster. And they were skate wheels in a different cluster. And the user of the tool came to us and said, I think your tools broken, why isn't skate wheels in the same cluster of skate wheel, one's just a plural of the other one. We always say, well, look, Google the two results. And you'll see, actually, the results are at least 60% different, because that's how our tool works. It literally works by, you know, analyzing the live search results page. And if Google is showing two different results, then that means if you want to target those two different keywords, you need two different pages. And interestingly, in that example, what was what was happening is Skatewheel was showing very transactional pages, how where to buy them, well, you know, buying them or that kind of thing, which Skatewheel was showed more informational pages comparing the different types of wheels. So they were two very different keywords. Just a caveat here. where I am going to plug other free tools. There are fleet free clustering is very useful for basically grouping keywords together and working out what pages you need to create. There are free versions of clustering that uses NLP and natural language processing. The problem and there's loads of great scripts out there. There's loads of free tools out there. The problem with using NLP is in that example I've just given, it would group skate wheel and skate wheels together because on a, on a word vector diagram, those two words mean the same thing. Yeah. That's why we actually scrape search result pages and analyze search result pages because you know, we're, we're playing in Google's universe, right? So we want to optimize towards Google showing not to what natural language processing, not to what you and me think the same thing means. So there are free tools out there to cluster and it will still be useful. The reason we have a paid tool is because we are using, we're literally analyzing the live search result. So there's that. Anyway, coming back to clustering. So by grouping these keywords together, we're already showing you, and you get this report, it'll show you these keywords can be targeted on the same page, these keywords can be targeted on the same page, these keywords can be, so now you can see what pages you need to create. Then what we do, and there's another report that we give you, is we cluster the clusters, so to speak, So we've clustered the keywords, and that shows you what pages you need to create. And then what we do is cluster the clusters, which means we then work out how the clusters are related to each other. And we do use natural language processing for that. And then what you'll see in the report is this dropdown, and it'll have a head cluster, and it'll show you all the related clusters under that. So you can really quickly see the head cluster is your hub, and you can see all the clusters that form under that. So there's a really quick way for us to dump in thousands of keywords and within five to 10 minutes, or depending on how many keywords you put in, if you dump in a thousand keywords, it'll take five to 10 minutes. If you dump in 250,000 keywords, it'll take two or three hours. There's a very quick way for us to dump it all in and quickly find all the clusters and spokes. How I used to do this for free, just if you don't want to use a pay tool, is first of all, I would use the free clustering. tools out there. And like I said, if you just type in free clustering, you'll get loads. I have said as the caveat, there is an issue with that in that it will be grouping keywords together that Google wouldn't group together. But I used to use a free tool and then I would manually be going through and adding filters to let's say it was anything to do with scratches. I'd add a filter on my keyword table to find all the clusters that had scratches. And then I'd put another filter on to do with everything to do with oak tables. and I'd basically be manually trying to find my cluster and hubs like that. But yeah, that's why we invented the clustering tool. There is then a third module in our tool. So once we've mapped out all our hubs and clusters, and what we do is we still have this on our screen, on the right-hand screen. On the left-hand screen, I'm looking through the report we send you, I'm mapping it all out on Lucid again. So here's a hub, everything you need to know about fixing dining tables, and our clusters are to do with how to fix scratches and dining tables, how to fix crayon marks and dining tables, how to fix spilled dinner on dining tables. And because we've clustered them together using live result pages, we know that these group of keywords can be targeted on this page, these can be targeted on this page. And yeah, I'm just mapping them out on on Lucid or Mira. A lot of people would use Excel or Google Sheets. I am more visual than that. And I like to then plan all the internal links between all the clusters themselves and all the hubs. Because another problem people have is they think if you've got a hub and a cluster, a hub or a topic, don't just make them in isolation of each other. Hubs can link to other hubs and clusters can link to other clusters. It's still not siloed 100% and it definitely shouldn't be. So that's why I use Lucid because then I'm going to start mapping the links between various hubs and things as well.

MICHAEL: That was quite long-winded. Did that make sense? No, it totally makes sense. Personally, when I've done this stuff in the past, I would get my big keyword list, expand on the seed keywords, dump them into Excel, and then apply a bunch of filters and just filter stuff based on a hunch, a guess, stuff that looks like it should go together. and then map it out in Excel. So I'd have the hierarchy of pages and then different hubs beneath that. So this approach that you've got here, where you're looking at what Google is telling you in plain sight, these are the things that are relevant or related to inform your maps, makes a lot of sense. I want to go to the very start of it. You mentioned putting seed keywords into a tool like Keyword Insights or Ahrefs or SEMrush. What's your process for finding seed keywords? Like, are you going as deep as pulling up all of the competitors in a space and pulling, you know, I guess, keyword themes off their site and then maybe looking at questions and answers? You know, people also ask that sort of stuff. Like, where are you hunting down the seed keywords to start with?

ANDY: Yes. So, some of it is some of it is, you can't really put a process on it. It's just obvious. So in the in the table, let's say going back to the furniture company example, we know we want to write about dining tables. So I stick dining table as my seed keyword in, and it, you know, just comes up with loads of potential ideas, of which then one of those ideas might be. So when you dump keywords into our clustering tool, if it doesn't have at least another keyword that shares four URLs in common, it gets categorized into this thing called no cluster. So what happens is when you get your report, you've got, let's say you stick 1000 keywords in there, that 1000 keywords might turn into 50 clusters. And then one of those clusters is a big one called no cluster. And that's full of all the keywords that didn't have anything in common. And I go through that. So if it's just stuck in dining tables, There'd probably be a lot of keywords clustered around dining tables, kitchen tables, dining tables, where to buy dining table, all that. And then in the no cluster, there might be how to get rid of a scratch from a dining table, because it might be, well, that had nothing in common with the other 999. like, Oh, that was actually quite interesting. So I'm going to do more on that one. So I just take that one and put that one back in. And now I've got 1000 ideas just to do with scratches and dining tables, which then form another 50 clusters. And then there's another big node cluster there with other ones, like specifically, how to fix the dining table once you so it's quite, it's an iterative process there, once you're looking at whatever you plug into our tool. And it's just based off of your your idea that okay, Um, dining tables. Yeah. Look at them. Oh, there's some of this note cluster. Okay. Let's get some more around that. So that's one way. The other ways, as you've said, I just get a number of competitors, uh, and keyword insights doesn't do this yet, but I think we're building out to do this, but you plug in a competitor's domain or a few competitive domains into Ahrefs or SEMrush or SERPstat is another one. Um, and yeah, you just plug in the domain and just get loads of their keywords or all of them. Um, if it's specifically editorial keywords you're looking for, you can, and they've structured their blog in a nice way. You could just put the, you know, their blog folder in. So if it's www.example.com slash blog and just get all the keywords to do in their blog, if you want all the keywords, you know, just put the main domain in. And then what I do is I, yeah, go through and, um, I get, plug in three or four competitors, download all their keywords, de-duplicate or merge them all together into one, de-duplicate all of them. And then again, I do now, I wouldn't have done this before, but I do now just whack them straight into Keyword Insights. The reason being is it suddenly makes, say if you've done that exercise and you're left with 30 to 40,000 keywords, that can be quite daunting. So if you stick that into Keyword Insights, your 40,000 keywords suddenly turns into maybe three or 4,000 because it's It's grouped all the bike ones together and it just shows you all the pages. But yeah, to answer your question on how I get them, one is an iterative process where I'm looking at the node cluster and going, okay, there's more to be done around that. The other one is quite simply just plugging competitors domains in. And if it's just editorials into Ahrefs or SEMrush and downloading the keywords that way.

MICHAEL: Okay. And then I guess, you know, coming to that, the topic of topical authority, um, is it more, like, how do you know when you're done? I guess it's more, you feel you've just done enough research. You've got enough in there. The list is big enough. Like, how do you know when you've exhausted everything?

ANDY: Yeah, that's a good question. Um, I guess just when I'm fed up, but like, if you, as you're, as you're mapping them out, like you can see, I guess it starts is how confident are you in your, your keyword research, I guess. So we, we make sure our keyword research is always, as massive as it can be. I used to work at an agency and we would spend, I think, four to five hours on a keyword research, which just didn't. Now we spend 20 to 30 hours on it. And it's literally making sure we've come. I know when I'm done, when I start adding loads of keywords, or when I'm deduplicating, it's still saying like, Oh, yeah, we removed 1000, we moved 1000 again. Yeah, if you keep getting all we've only removed, you know, five, still keep adding to it, You can still keep adding to it. So I guess I know what I'm done at the keyword research stage because I'm just keep adding to it until as I'm de-duping it saying like, oh yeah, now you're really removing a lot of rows.

MICHAEL: Awesome. And I like that this can make what's normally an overwhelming, I guess, end result. You know, a big keyword research doc like that is great and all, and you can give it to a client and say, look at all these keywords we've researched. But this is a way of taking it and actually breaking it down into, I guess, you know, quantifiable deliverables that can be created in terms of content, right? Once you've got your clusters and everything figured out and build out your map. The next bit of course is writing content. What's your process? Like do you, do you use, um, a preferred sort of vendor or you use freelancers, um, even AI content, you know, for spoke pages, have you played around with AI content? How do you approach content writing?

ANDY: Yeah. So the third module in Keyword Insights is, and it was only released two weeks ago, but it is a content outlining tool or a content briefing tool. And, Basically, yeah, once you've got your topics mapped out, so again, it was to solve a problem we had. What I used to do, so the idea when you're writing a piece of content, right, is that you want to create a piece which is better than everyone else's. It's gonna be more informative, more comprehensive, and cover more topics. And so the way I used to do that was I'd take one of the pages, or one of the clusters that our tool had shown you, and I'd choose the head keyword, so say there's 20 keywords in a cluster, I choose the one with the most volume, because if you optimize towards that one, in theory, you should rank for all the other ones as well, because that's the point of the cluster. So I'd look at that head keyword, and then I'd Google that, and then I'd open up a tab for each of the 20 results. And what I'd be doing is scanning down and basically just pulling in all the headings, the heading twos and rewording them slightly, but pulling in all the headings that had to Basically, what ranks in position one isn't necessarily the most comprehensive, it might cover quite a few topics that the one in position two isn't, but position two might also cover quite a few topics that position one doesn't. And position three might have a different angle together. And so the idea is I'm going through and I'm pulling in headings to each, I'm deleting certain ones, I'm adding other ones, until I've got like a load of heading outlines, which includes the best headings from all 20. And then what I do is go to the people also ask questions and I go, okay, there was also these other questions that people are asking, let's include them. And then what I would do is go to Reddit and Quora and get typing the question there because my theory being, if people are going to people also are, if people are going to Reddit and Quora, it's because, and asking a question on a forum, it's because they haven't found a satisfactory answer to that question on a blog. So I'm getting those questions involved as well. And it used to take me, so this is what I call the research stage. It used to take quite a while because you're going through like 20 tabs. Um, and so what we did was create this content brief generator. Sorry, business partners messaging me. So I'm just going to turn that on to do not disturb. Um, so yeah, what we did was create this content brief generator, which analyzes the top 24 year, it shows you all the headings in one really neat place. And so you can see. it's like a pick and mix. You can really quickly see all the top headings, heading ones, heading twos, heading threes. And you can just fire them across into the content brief on the right hand side. We also pull in all the people also ask questions, we pull in all the Reddit questions, you can pull them across. And then to make it easier for our writers or for us. So to answer your question, we do it in two different ways. We create a content outline or content brief. And we either use it internally to to then write, or we send that to a freelancer to write. But the qualities in that research stage, and that's what used to take the most time. So yeah, we give you all the headings, or we show you all of them in one place, you can fire across the ones you'd like without having to open up 20 tabs. They've got this other button in our content brief generator called extract bullet points. And what we do is if you click that, it also analyzes the actual paragraphs under the headings. And because we don't, and we're very clear about this, we could because our tool is built on that. We could make it so that we could generate AI paragraphs for you. We don't think that's a good idea because they all are working in the same way. There's tools out there that can actually detect if text has been AI written and it's pretty accurate. We've been trying it and we even tried to outsmart it and it can't be outsmarted. So what our tool does is summarizes the points in a paragraph and generates bullet points. So you can fire the bullet points across into your brief. Um, and what that means is when you come to writing, because if you give, if you give a, um, a writer, an AI generated paragraph and ask them to rewrite it, there's still this bias in their mind where they basically just re change a few words and it doesn't quite work. So what we've done is giving them the bullet points of it, and then it still forces them to write that into prose, which very much has their own spin on it.

MICHAEL: Yeah.

ANDY: So yes, we have played with AI content. We've even tried to do it in our tool. It doesn't work to a quality that well, can cannot be detected. So what we do do use is AI to generate summaries of each topic. And that still has to get written into prose. So yeah, we have this content brief writer that allows you to see all the results really quickly allows you to see all the headings, actually summarizes the main points under them. And you can fire it all across in, you know, 510 minutes, make this really detailed brief, add in the people also ask. We've also got another part in the brief called title AI, where we use AI to come up with headings that aren't covered in the top 20 that aren't in the people also ask and that aren't in the Reddit, but could be related. So you can even include these topics that others haven't written about at all. And then we generate the brief that way. So that's how we or the outline and then that either goes to, like I said, freelancer or we use it internally just to to build upon.

MICHAEL: Cool. And so when that content's written, when it comes to internal linking strategy, is that something that is just done after the fact? Like you sort of look through the content and see words that make sense to link elsewhere? Or, you know, you mentioned your map had internal links in it. Are you feeding that into your brief and you're very specific about, you know, which other articles these articles should be linking to?

ANDY: Yeah, so that's part of the brief. We have notes saying this should link to this one, this one and this one. Uh, if it's not already written yet, just it's in a spreadsheet so that when it's live, we remember, you know, where they are going to be linking to. We try and get. A few of the costs we try and do a few of the, so this is the other thing. Um, we're big on it would make sense. And a lot of guides tell you to write the hub piece first and then write the clusters around it. We often go the other way. We write the clusters first. Uh, and then, cause you can start into only linking between them and you'll see results quicker. And then we write the hub that covers all of the clusters. And then we link that back to all of them, if that makes sense. So we go the opposite way to what most guides would tell you, but it works really well.

MICHAEL: And do you, um, do you publish this stuff as, and when it's ready, or do you try and batch it all up and publish in one hit to try and have a topic?

ANDY: It really depends on the client at this stage. So internally we publish it when it's ready. Um, some clients like to wait until they're all done because their mind works that way. And they, you know, link up all the internal links. That's just how they want to do it. It's, I mean, it's fine either way, I guess. We just want to get them up and get them indexed and get them. You know, at least on Google's radar or Bing's radar or any search engines radar first, but it doesn't really matter as long as you remember that you've got to go back in and add those internal links when the other ones are ready and you've got a system for doing that.

INTRO: Hmm.

MICHAEL: And what about like, let's say you've, you've, you publish a few spoke pages and then you go and publish your hub and all the links and everything. And then that hub starts ranking well, you know, the main head terms you were going for a ranking well, but you haven't necessarily covered that whole topic super in depth. There might be extra articles. Are you still seeing this all the way through or are you sort of letting the traffic dictate when you stop publishing content within a, I guess, a topic?

ANDY: Do you mean like, if we're still seeing…

MICHAEL: Let's say you had a pillar page and then all of the hubs, let's say you had like the spoke pages, you had like 50 topics that you wanted to cover and you published maybe 20 of them and then you started to see really good results already in terms of rankings. Your main page is ranking well. Are you still going to see it out and publish all of those extra 30 pages that you haven't published or are you going to sort of move on? I guess I'm coming back to this point of like, how are you really trying to go super in-depth always, even if you're starting, if you're seeing good traffic results?

ANDY: Again, it depends on, I think it depends on your business goals. So for the knowledge graph, it's good to cover as many hubs and spokes as possible in a given topic. So let's go back to this hardware shop I was talking about. We should really, in theory, be talking as much about DIY and building and things as possible, because we're going to cover this topic of building DIY, fixing things, adding, you know, locks as in-depth as possible. We're casting our net out wider to top of the funnel audience. But there are specific hubs and spokes that are more likely to convert than others. So, for example, on that same site, we have got hubs and spokes around how to fix decking or something like that. We don't actually sell many tools that help with doing decking. So if that hub and spoke is doing okay, I'm not probably not going to add to it and cover much around decking and how to fix it, how to paint it and all that, because it's good to get that, you know, knowledge graph that Google sees an authority on the subject of DIY and whatever, but just covering decking to its death is not a good use of their time or budget because they don't really sell many tools to do with it. And the only users that will convert will just see that we're a hardware store and potentially buy something else that relates to decking as a byproduct. On the other hand, they do sell euro cylinders. And so I have tried and made it a mission to leave no stone unturned with coming up with topics to do with euro cylinders. What are they? How do you fix them? What happens when they break? Are they easy to break? what are the different security, right? So that is a lot more aligned with what we want. So I guess it does come down to your business goals. And there's no sense in covering a topic in its entirety for the sake of it. It just I would do that where it aligns to your products more. Of course, over time, you'll start to, you know, go back and add to your decking one, especially if you think you've covered everything, but I don't think that will ever be the case for most niches.

MICHAEL: Yeah. It reminds me of when people say they're a T-shaped marketer where you do enough on the site to cover a topic to have that topical authority, but you're going really deep on the stuff that's actually going to lead to commercial outcomes to you.

ANDY: Yeah, exactly. I think that's a good way of putting it.

MICHAEL: Okay, cool. Is there anything I haven't asked you about this that you're doing or that you're seeing out there that you think would be beneficial to the audience?

ANDY: I'll tell you something we found a lot of success in lately and it's a question we keep getting asked predominantly because actually another part of what the tool gives you, and it's something you just flagged to me yesterday, but another part of what the tool gives you is it tells you the intent behind every keyword and every cluster. So what we do is you'll have a number, there'll be three columns in the report, one that says product, one that says says blog or transaction, one that says blog or one that says other, and we'll give you a number out of 10, being the 10 results of Google. So if in the column, if say the keyword was CBD oil, the other column might say that sorry, the transactional column might say nine, and the informational column might say one. And what that means is nine results were informational, and one result was transactional. And what we're seeing, and what we get asked a lot, and it's just something to bear in mind is, and so there are other tools out there, like Semrush does this, and I'm not going to say they copied us, but it did come out after us. But basically, they, they will just give you this, this keyword is transactional, or this keyword is informational. And it's not that clear cut. And the reason we give you numbers is because it isn't that clear cut. So we say five and five or six and four or three and seven. And it's this idea of fragmented intent. So, uh, some keywords have a very fragmented intent and you can rank both a transactional and a informational page. I think iPhone, if you type in iPhone 11, that's a good example. Five of the results will be informational, uh, iPhone specs, everything you need to know about iPhone should you get an iPhone and the other five will be commercial. Buy an iPhone here, um, buy iPhone 99, 99, whatever it might be. So you have five and five. And a lot of people ask us, Oh, if I create a page targeting iPhone 11, buying iPhone 11 and another page about everything you need to know, I'm not going to cannibalize myself for that keyword. And we say like, no, you're not because the intent is fragmented and you can actually rank twice. We've made a whole strategy out of going after these. Fragmented keywords by going after the ones where we can rank twice. And there's so many keywords, especially with that hardware example I gave you earlier. where we have both the transactional and informational page. So I guess what I'm saying is, and what I'm noticing is a lot more people are worried about cannibalization when there is that intent difference. And it's actually why I thought I would write, I had a little experiment with myself where I wanted to see if we could change the intent out of the top 10. which is why I wrote that ultimate guide to Eurocinemas, because actually our tool showed us that 10 results were transactional. So I wanted to see if I wrote a detailed enough guide, could I change the intent to make it at least a bit more fragmented? And it happened. And it's a really good strategy. And I've done the same with the furniture store. If you type in, if you're in the UK anyway, and type in extendable dining tables, nine results will be where to buy, well, buying them. And then we've got one result, which is our little furniture client, which is, uh, I don't think it's called the ultimate guide to extendable dining tables, but it's where the best places to buy dining tables and why. And our guide little rank, a little guide ranks there. And we have 80% of the people who learn on that guy, click through to our products and buy them. We've just physically changed the intent to make it more fragmented. And it's in no way cannibalizing our product page, which also still ranks on page two. So. I guess to answer your question, don't worry about cannibalizing yourself if the actual intent between the two pages is completely different. You can still go after a keyword with two very different pages.

MICHAEL: That's, that's awesome. And are you, are you finding like in the spaces where you've managed to shift the intent of a search result or like the search results page sort of have mixed up intent? Um, are you up against other websites that are deploying this sort of, um, hub and spoke strategy and it's been yours that has been able to change the intent or are you going in there and doing it for the first time? And that's why this intense changing.

ANDY: I couldn't, I, I haven't seen, people. So when we've written those guides, no one else has written one, which is why it's ranking. We forced it in terms of the hub and the spoke. I, I haven't seen anyone. So with a, with a small startup ones like, um, Latham's hardware and the furniture store. Uh, yeah. I mean, these teams with these huge sites like Screwfix and BQ have amazing SEO teams behind them. The content they write is really good. But because they've got the authority that those sites have, they don't, if you really analyze their hubs and spokes and how they've linked all the content together, they haven't really ever covered a content, like a piece, any particular topic in a huge amount of detail because they haven't felt as though they've needed to, which is where we've come in and capitalize on that. And it's, it actually comes down to the quality of your keyword research. They're not nothing to do with you planning your hubs and spokes. It's going after, like I said, the keywords that being very thorough in covering a topic and making sure you've got every keyword that covers that. So I didn't mention it earlier because this talk wasn't about keyword research, but as part of our keyword research, we actually once we've got the seed keywords or the big group, we then actually scrape Reddit for a lot of those questions, for the questions. And then we use the Reddit questions. And we actually use AI to summarize the Reddit questions. So because you know, people on Reddit ask things in really weird ways, like, Hey, guys, anyone done? That's not you don't want a keyword that starts with Hey, guys, no keyword research. So we actually use a bit of AI to just summarize it. So if it was Hey, guys, anyone know how I can replace a mural art we summarize that is replace Euro lock. And then we scrape all the people also ask questions to do with Euro locks. And then we add that to our keyword research as well. So we've got like a really thorough, we know we're covering even these long tail keywords that are being asked on forums that perhaps won't show up in keyword tools. So we're covering our topics in a lot more detail than the established guys. And if you don't have access to AI, so if you don't, you don't need to do that. That all sounds very complex. There are again, free ways or cheap ways to do this. I would go and open a Reddit or open if you're in the medical niches, loads of medical sites with the last questions, you know, there's, there's literally a forum for everything. If you're a Shopify store, or you want to sell shop, because I had a Shopify client recently, and he wanted to create, as in, he sells Shopify apps, he didn't have a Shopify store, he sells literally Shopify apps. So we went on the Shopify community, and we got loads of questions from the community. And he didn't have the tech to obviously run it and scrape it and use AI. So to give you something actionable, we just had the community up on one page and we had an Excel sheet on the other. And there are little extensions you can get where you can just click and scrape all on one page. So we did that, got a load of questions, and then we just dumped them into People Also Asked. There's a cheap tool by a gentleman known as Mark called, I think it's called People Also Asked actually. people also ask. Yeah. People also ask. It's really, it's called also asks.com.

MICHAEL: Yes. Um, yeah. Played around with that too. Yeah.

ANDY: Yeah. So you could, you could just upload all of the questions you've just manually taken from a, um, a community or a forum into that. And then it will send a CSV with all the long tail questions and honestly go after them as well. Like the, all the people also ask questions. These are zero volume keywords. If you start going after them, and to plug our tool again, if you cluster them together, you'll also then get all the questions that are very similar in nature. So we found, we did this the other day, we scraped, we had 3,000, 4,000 keywords, which generated another 2,000 or 3,000 people also asked questions. And when we clustered all the people also asked questions along with the forum questions, there was loads of zero volume keywords, but there was like 50 to 60 of them in each cluster. So you can imagine, keyword tools aren't picking them up because people are asking the same question in about 1000 different ways. So you don't have to cluster them or do that. I'm just saying that just from our little experiment, we found that people also ask questions and forum questions. When we scrape tons and tons of them and cluster them together. There were just loads and loads and loads in a cluster all that's had zero. But the fact was is they have zero because people are just asking them and you know, 100 different ways. So I guess what I'm saying is even when you look at people to ask and it says zero volume, I can guarantee if you optimize towards it, just based on our research, people have asked that in 100 different 1000 different ways across forums as well. So definitely worth creating articles around that.

MICHAEL: Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Well, this has been really good. You know, it's something we haven't spoken about a lot on the show, but it's definitely stuff that we're doing a lot more of in terms of trying to systemize and I guess build process around this. I think definitely Keyword Insights is something that I'm interested to play around with in our business. But before we wrap up, I just wanted to ask you a couple of questions because I ask everyone that comes on the show the same three questions. It's not related to hub and spoke or topical authority. It's more general SEO questions. So it's interesting to get your take on these. The first one, what would you say is the biggest myth in SEO?

ANDY: Word count. I think, I think, So in our content brief part of the tool, we've tried to be careful not to give a word count. We have now because so many people ask for it, but we've purposely made the range quite big. So we make, you should make a brief or an outline of your content as comprehensive as possible in that you cover all the titles that others are covering and add to it. But in terms of the actual content that goes under those titles, in terms of answering the question that that title is, It doesn't need to be it doesn't need to be long if it doesn't have to. If you and actually, for some topics, the brief doesn't even have to be long. We've seen clusters that have like answer a question. Remember, if they're in a cluster is because they need its own page to rank We've seen classes that answer a question in literally two or 300 words and go after it, uh, and, and write two or 300 words. You might get a bit more if there's a few people also ask questions that you can also add that it doesn't need to be long. If it doesn't have to be just answer it comprehensively and, and don't waffle. I've got this thing with writers who waffle on that. I try and not tell them. I always, I think it's the word blog. When you tell them they're writing a blog. their minds goes into this idea where they either go really chatty and informal. I've got the, I think I'm a writer's nightmare cause I hate, I've got, I, there's a load of things I hate. I hate rhetorical questions. I hate, I hate this. Um, I hate this sentence that everyone uses, especially in sales copy, whether you're looking for this or this, this is sure to be the thing for you. I hate all of that. And I try and get rid of that. Um, so I, I try and not tell, I tell our writers, they're not writing a blog, they're writing a guide or something. And just that shifted mindset, because I don't know what it is. When you tell someone that it's a blog, which is why I hate the word blog, they suddenly start going, oh, it's a chatty thing. And they ask these rhetorical questions. You know, if you're looking to buy a new table, this is the guide for you. Why not read more? It's just, I hate it. So getting rid of all that waffle and just going, this guide will help you do this. I think that's better. And you don't need to worry about word count.

MICHAEL: Yeah, I agree. It's like with sales copywriting, you know, you're writing a headline and a sub headline, you want to write it and then get rid of as many words from it as possible to really make it cut through. And I think with content in general, that needs to happen a lot more because the big ones like recipe sites, for example, you've got to read like 500 words about this person's history with the recipe before you even get to the recipe.

ANDY: Yeah, yeah. So frustrating.

MICHAEL: Word count is the biggest myth. That's a myth. Okay. What would you say is the most underrated thing in SEO?

ANDY: Internal linking, probably. We've seen massive results just going through. So everyone talks about backlinks and they're great, but we've seen massive results just by going through and just optimizing our internal links. And there's loads of ways you can do it. We've actually got a little internal, I think there's a free script actually I've seen out there. I'll have a look for it and post it after. But we've got our own script, which looks at each URL and groups them together if there's something similar, if they're talking about something similar, so you can find internal links that way. thing within it that allows you to, basically, the problem with Ahrefs' one is it looks for if you've actually used the keyword, which is a good way of doing it, but it's not the only way because, you know, two topics might have a lot in common, but you might not have used a keyword. So Ahrefs looks for anchor text that you can include internal links. Well, there's loads of guides out there to find internal links quickly using cheap or even free software if your site's small enough, like Screaming Frog, the Crawling Spider software. So there's loads of links out there. or even just manually, sometimes I'm literally reading through, especially on smaller sites, clients blog. And yeah, easily, I've just read another blog, oh, that'd be a good place to turn the link to. So internal links is really underrated.

MICHAEL: Yep, totally agree with that. We've had examples where, you know, a page that we're trying to rank for a particular keyword, it's just stuck. It's not going anywhere. There's been links built, you know, all the onsite's good. And then going through the site and manually adding links in content that's relevant back to that page, getting Google to come recrawl it and then changing nothing else. There's no updates in the meantime. And you see the rankings jump up. So definitely agree with you on that one. The last one is about tools. In the SEO world, we love software, we love tools. We've already spoken about a bunch today, but if you had to get three tools to get the job done for the rest of your SEO days, or not even that, what would you say are the three most vital SEO tools you use?

ANDY: I'm not going to plug our own one. Our own one aside, because we made it because it's useful. Keyword insights aside, I would use What sort of size are we aiming at? Cause again, it depends on the site. Cause these, these, these, some of these tools that have ridiculous pricing points for like enterprise clients. And I, you know, I worked at an enterprise agency and I think we use them a handful of times. So I guess ones that are transferable tool are an Ahrefs or a SEMrush and go with either way you want. I find Ahrefs a lot easier to use. Um, I think SEMrush has lost its way a bit, just cramming loads of stuff in. Hmm. So Ahrefs, I would then look at something like Screaming Frog, definitely. I mean, that's a must. I can't live without that one. If I use that daily. And what other one do I use that wouldn't be? I want to see. Again, we used to use three or four, and that's what we just made our own one because we combined it all into that one. Yes. Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, and oh, actually, Well, a VPN or something like there's, um, it's called SERP something. We do a lot of work in different countries and stuff. So I like to see the results in different places. So I use, what's it called? SEO browse. It's like a, yeah, I can view the SERPs from different places, but I wear that might not be completely irrelevant to people who aren't doing that, but that's the one that we use a lot of.

MICHAEL: Okay. Yeah. We use a VPN for that. It's pretty cool that there's a sort of in browser type thing. It sounds like that. So. That's interesting.

ANDY: There's a few of them actually. SEO Browsers is a good one, but there's some other ones as well.

MICHAEL: Okay. Well, awesome. Well, that's been a really great chat, you know, and an introduction to this topic. And it's been really great finding out how you go about things there. I'm sure people that are listening are probably going to be interested and they want to check out Keyword Insights or Snippet Digital or even yourself directly. So, you know, if people want to go find out a bit more about you or get in touch, where can they go?

ANDY: Yeah, so actually, can I just quickly change one of my answers? I just remembered a tool that we use a lot of that a lot of people struggle with. If you especially if you're doing tech SEO, there's this there's a company called Merck. What's it called? There's technical seo.com. And there's and it's great for free tools. There's loads of free tools on it technical seo.com slash tools. And on that there's like I'm just looking at them now because I use it daily. There's so many, there's a main one I use is the robots.txt tester. So the amount of people who, and I've never found another tool that does the same thing. The amount of people who want to actually see if they've blocked a URL accidentally in robots.txt, this will test that. This also tests your htaccess file. It also does fetch and renders, um, hreflang testing. It's got so many things on there, so it's free and that's a really good tool that we use daily. But yeah, sorry. Going back to your question. So I'm on Twitter. Funnily enough, under the tag, digital quokka. And I'm aware I'm speaking to an Australian. So hopefully you'll know what a quokka is, but not me.

MICHAEL: I do very much.

ANDY: Have you got any? Yeah, he's the reason the reason I chose is because I absolutely love them. And It was a really bad. So my original, when I was the first to freelance and my, my domain was digital quokka.com, my handle was digital quokka. And it presented me with so many issues that people didn't have to spell quokka. They didn't know what quokka was. It was more problems that it caused more problems that it solves. So I changed everything rebranded. It's just my personal website is now andychadwick.com, which is dull. Definitely check out keyword insights.ai, which is our tool. My Twitter is still Digital Quokka because I found the guy who owns Andy Chadwick as a Twitter handle and I reached out to him and he wanted money for it, which is fine. And I changed it and then I realized I'd lost everything I was ever tagged in, which was bad. So I had to change it back again, which, so I paid for a Twitter handle I don't use now and someone else has probably nicked it. But yeah, Digital Quokka on Twitter, Andy Chadwick on LinkedIn, Andy Chadwick's my website, Keyword Insights is our tool.

MICHAEL: Awesome. Well, Andy, it's been really great chatting to you. Thanks for joining us on the show today. And yeah, I've really enjoyed it.

ANDY: No, thank you very much. And yeah, I've really enjoyed it. Thanks. Thanks for listening to me and for your time as well.

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