How to Outrank Bigger Sites: SEO Data Hacks Against Google’s AI

[Music] So, I want to start with just the um the uh unavoidable truth, which is that SEO SEO and AI their AI is now here. Um I don't think it's going to go away anytime soon, and most industry experts think the same. Um AI SERs are here to stay. they might not stay in this format um but it's already having a massive impact on the market. Now this isn't the first time Google and search engines have tried similar things. We know that with structured snippets with sort of localized map listings they've been trying to make search results more dynamic, more involved and more owned and dictated kind of by the search engine. Um AI seems to be the natural progression from this. this is the next version of your Amazon Echo device or your Hey Siri type thing. Um, and it just is such a natural fit for search engines because it's how we progress

things. They're questions and answers. It's how search engines work. It's how these AI tools work really effectively. So, what I want to do with the the time that I've got available is just run through kind of like how that impacts our sort of SEO campaign and when we're we're researching and we're planning to do, you know, our keyword and competitor research, how we can start to fit in the AI elements within this kind of research. Um, and obviously using SE ranking as of the example for it. So, we'll keep an eye on the chat and everything, but um happy to answer questions at the end for as well. For now, I just want to sort of go through a standard kind of like SEO campaign. I'll try not to skip through anything, but apologies if I say any acronyms. I will try to expand them. So, when we're looking at any kind of comparison, we're planning any SEO campaign and we're going to be looking at a handful of competitors. In this case, as an example, I'm going to be using monday.com. I'm sure plenty of us have either seen it, seen the ads, or had some experience with it. It is a very good project management tool. It's not the only one. It can be a good CRM. It's

not the only one. So, what I want to do is use them as the sample client. Monday.com, our imaginary client that we're working with, and we want to see how can we improve their SERs. How can we look at what they're doing, what they're ranking for, and work out where we can go from there. The first step that we always do is look at who are they currently ranking against? Who are they currently competing against? Um, and again, search engine competitors always make it clear to clients or to line managers, whoever you work with. It's not necessarily business competitors. These are only overlapping for search results. So, it might be someone completely irrelevant. But if we're competing for the search terms, we've got to put them against who their real rivals are, not who we think they are as a business. So, in this case, monday.com going to compare them just quickly against Asana and HubSpot. might not seem like a natural competitor, but HubSpot although being a CRM is a direct competitor because monday.com does try to be found for those CRM related searches. The first place that we always start with ideally uh is to look at sort

of domain trust um and you know domain trust, backlink and off-site SEO. Obviously offsite SEO EAT there's a lot more to it but domain trust is a really key starting point that just gives us that rough benchmark. I mean the way that I explain it to the clients over the years is if you imagine that search engine optimization is like a 200 meter race. You and your competitors racing to the finish line domain trust is not far off equivalent to the meters head start you get. Yeah, it's not a perfect analogy but it gives a hopefully a really good benchmark in terms of like an analogy that people can get their heads around. You know, it's your meters head start in this 200 meter race or so. And then looking at monday.com, they're ahead of Asana. They've got a good backlink profile. Um, but HubSpot's a bit ahead, but it's just a sense check. And again, the reason why we do this, and I always do this before we do any keyword analysis or anything, is to set a standard. You know, are these competitors that we genuinely have the

ability to compete against? The most important thing with all of our marketing campaigns is that yes, they're ambitious, but they're also realistic with their ambition. you know, I've I've worked with so many people over the years. We The last thing I want to see is for people to be a bit too aspirational, have slightly unrealistic um you know, goals, and then just fall short because if you fall too far short, and if you're setting yourself up against a competitor you can't really go against, you're setting yourself up to fail. Um, and what we want to do is we want to have small wins all the way up to the big wins. So with this, HubSpot are a little bit ahead, but Monday.com's got a really solid head start and they're ahead of the summer. So in this comparison, I would probably say 64% going into 71 and 58 initial estimations, we probably have a chance of taking on some of the giants. One second. So Alex has just asked a quick question. In competitive research, which filters metrics tend to scream

winnable versus the giants? So, when we're starting to do this, the first thing I' I'd do, as I said, is really start with domain trust because and off-site factors because before you do anything else, technical technical SEO we can normally fix quite quickly. Hopefully, you've got a good technical team working with you. Optimize the website, get things sorted as you need to with your meta, your alt, your links, and so on. That's easy. Content we control, we write. Again, that's relatively easy, although a lot of work might need to go into it. Um, it's the keyword research and the domain trust that that are the key factors here, Alex. So, if you're planning to go up against anybody, start with domain trust as a benchmark because if you are too far behind, nothing you do is going to make a difference. You really need to focus here first and hopefully from here you can then start to look at your PR campaign, your off-site campaign, and how you want to build your backlink profile. As we know, Google hates the concept of backlinks, but as I like to explain to people, we're not trying to build back links. We're trying to build

a profile of citations and references. You know, we're trying to encourage other people to link back to us by a healthy means. Um, and that's what we're trying to raise as sort of the benchmark profile. If your domain interest is too far behind, focus on other competitors. Focus on other phrases. You know, don't be afraid to go a bit more longtail with your keyword phrases before you start going for some of those bigger terms. Everything you do adds up. So let's start with the small easy wins, start with realistic competitors and work our way up from there. If we then start to go from here looking at the domain trust, which again purely backlink profiles, we can then start to delve into some more of the details of the backlink gaps. So when you're running these tools and again it's another great tool that's built on testing ranking. We can actually see if we measure ourselves against some competitors we can see if there are any common domains where our competitors are frequently being listed but we are not. And just as a short f way to sort of get yourself started on this journey. Offsite SEO takes a lot

more than the five minutes or so I'll have to explain it now. If you're getting started, having a backlink gap anal analysis means that you can start to work out where am I missing the obvious. You know, are all of my competitors being listed on this set of directories or working with these publications, this industry magazine or a university that, you know, they're doing great collaborative work and sort of research with. Wherever you can find commonality, there's normally a precedent, which means that if someone else is doing it, you've got a chance of being able to get listed too. um the worst that you know it's much easier to work on a series of backlinks when there's evidence that it already exists say to somebody we would love to be featured in your blog because we see these other people have been than start from scratch. Um no guarantees but again it's it's a great way to get started with this. Um so just to quickly answer uh Deiana how can you increase domain trust? Again, it's the domain trust in short is the

quality and quantity of relevant and reputable inbound links. It's the shortest possible way I can explain it. Quantity and quality of relevant and reputable inbound links. So, our goal with this is to identify where are we missing links compared to our competitors. Where can we then find those opportunities and where can we then encourage those links back to our website um to encourage our domain trust to grow. It's not about link building. focus on it as being a citation and reference exercise. They might feel like the same thing, but semantically there's a really different there's a really big difference to it. The psychology behind going after it as a reference or citation building exercise is very different and hopefully will put you on the right path to kind of improving it and treating it like a P more a PR campaign um and an outreach campaign. So, first step before we do anything in terms of keywords, always set your expectations based on domain trust, your backlink profiles, and then work out who your competitors are and a plan to grow to meet them if you need to. Then we can start to look into the

keyword analysis. And the keyword analysis is start is where we it starts to get really exciting for a lot of us. Um, in this instance, I'm on the competitive research um report on SE Ranking. I've popped in HubSpot, who will be one of the main competitors for uh monday.com in this example, and I'm doing it by the UK because, you know, I'm biased. I live here. Um, have a quick scroll through and straight away you notice that there's a big old drop off in traffic. That becomes revealing in a little bit. And I'll just say to you now, the impact that AI is having on search results, especially organic rankings, is massive. we are seeing a huge drop off in terms of the amount of um engagement interaction the top five results are getting based on just the initial launch of these AI SER results. Um I don't see that changing too much. Um Google might be forced to change it. We don't know what will happen legislatively. But um for now with the current market the way it is, if your website's seeing a big old drop off in

terms of organic SEO, don't worry. we can start to have a look at the AI SEO and see if we're actually maintaining traffic through there. So, going into our set results to begin with as all things loads of branded searches, we'll exclude it based on uh anything that contains brand names because we're just not interested in trying to compete for our competitors. And then we'll filter out from there. And our goal, and you can use some of the presets built into Etsy ranking because they've got some good in-built preset ones, but our goal with our keyword research is to always identify opportunities. You know, if you're leading the pack, if you've got a great website, you're close or ahead with your domain trust, your technical SEO is there, everything's ready, and you've got some great writing um ready to go. You can go for the top keywords. You know this. You can go for the most difficult phrases. But really base your choice of keywords, phrases, and targeting on what you think is realistic based on your skill set, your website's performance, your website's domain trust

against its competitors, and then where you're currently ranking, search volumes, all these factors. It's not a single the biggest number is best. We've got to pick our battles. And sometimes instead of picking five top keywords, we might end up picking 50, 60, 70 longtail phrases that individually are going to add up to the same amount. Neither one's a right or wrong answer. It's about just creating that sort of portfolio of keywords that will generate the traffic because at the end of the day, what we care about is relevant traffic to the website. So through this, we're going to start to build up a list of relevant keywords. But and this is where the AI aspect comes in. There's a new part to the SE ranking search criteria and it's this AI search. Within the AI search feature, if we go to there, we can see how the search results are affected by AIO. So in this case, we can see that drop that I showed you in traffic is being

replaced with the traffic from AIO. Now these are estimated figures based on SE rankings kind of reports and algorithms and the way they interpret things. But you can measure this against your own Google Analytics, your own traffic to measure is it accurate, is it realistic? And what we should see and have seen so far is a fairly consistent representation that our SEO and organic traffic is dropping off in places from traditional search engine. But in the hopefully for a lot of you, we're seeing that being replaced with traffic from AIO sources. If not, you might find that you're losing traffic from organic search and the traffic that you should be gaining back through AIO is disappearing. And if that's the case is disappearing to your competitors. And this is the thing that we need to start identifying. This is the new part of SEO, the kind of exciting fringe area of SEO that we need to expand into and really kind of like try to work out where we sit in this landscape. Now, I've waited until now

for Charles Lisa's question. Do schema markups add to citations and therefore domain trust? Schema markups and any kind of markup is just a way of kind of like validating the data that you've got in your content. So if another website is using schema markup and references you as an author as a reference as an external source and citation in their schema markup sure that can help you that can benefit things. If you're doing it for your own website it will have minimal impact because the point of domain trust and offsite SEO is how the rest of the web perceives your website. What we do on our website is all about on-site SEO. what other people look to our website about how they talk about our website that's the offsite and to affect our domain trust and our offsite SEO if if those websites include us in relevant schema markup for author bios you know if we've guest authored a blog for someone else's website and we're in

that schema markup fantastic but it's non-essential the more important aspect of that is the reference and source reference source and citation as the inbound link. So hopefully that answers your question, Lisa. One thing schema markup can do is impact the AI results themselves. So I won't spend too long on structured snippets. I know that's coming up later in this presentation, but just to give you an idea of the work that we used to do in terms of structured skip snippets and schema markup to try and create those kind of like lovely results in Google. these things are being presented in um these things are being presented in the AIO results. So it's just one thing to bear in mind. It's it's sort of like part of the result. If we go into these and have a look at some of these results, we notice that the keywords that we're seeing are quite different because the keywords in general for organic search is what we used to. It's just searchs are normal

keyword phrases listed by popularity, difficulty, position, etc. The AI versions also have search volume and estimated traffic, but then they've got a bit more. They've got information like the the link or the type is a link, the snippet, which is the content from the AI snippet that's presented. So when you search for you know what is the best project management software in Google and it gives you this information that is what SE ranking and similar tools are trying to like snip and pull out to present to us because what you'll notice straight away is in this result there's no single best project management software and after it's got away with that nice disclaimer it's straight away mentions monday.com asana and others. Now, there's a lot to be said about a good brand name. I personally am not a big fan of monday.com because it's a day of the

week and therefore massively confusing for most people whenever you're talking about it. But one thing that they have achieved as a slight um accidental win is because their brand's name is Monday.com, when it's mentioned, it's automatically linked to the AI chat. I think this is probably a happy accident. I don't think they saw this far ahead. But it does go to show that when the others are talked about via just, you know, mentioning as words, mono.com is linked as it is a website address and they just automatically link it. Now, for the rest of them, they link them down here. But this goes to show a couple of things. One, this result is getting in the way of our organic SERs, which is why we can expect to see a significant drop off over time in our organic SEO. It might never get to zero. It might not go much further than it's gone below. It might even pick up a little, but our organic SERs will not be what they were. They will be negatively affected. We won't get the same level of

organic search traffic that we are used to. Now as a result of that we know that this is then an important part of it. Same like the map pack you know the product pack all these other aspects that come in where depending on whether you're looking for a localized search or product search this is now one of those things and most specifically when you ask a question rather than just a short statement. So if you ask a question what is the best project management software and what is this what is that who is this how do I do that AI overviews trigger much more readily but within that there is opportunity so within that you'll find that a lot of the time we still get these lists and within those they have the links and that's where the traffic is coming from or the expected traffic is coming from. So with SE ranking and the AI search tool, we can see all of these AI searches that we're appearing for, we can see the snippets that are being presented

and from there we can work out which pages are being indexed. And this is our first protocol just like with our old um keyword research and knowing ah we're being ranked for these pages because of these keywords. this is our opportunity to say, "Ah, we're being ranked for these AI search results on this specific page." And we can then start to use that to go into detail to work out, okay, what are these doing effectively that we can interpret. So hopefully that's making sense so far. Beyond that, we can then go into there we go into our detailed reports. There we go. So into the AIO tracker. So when we're pulling these in to our project management or our project tools and we're looking at the project tracking over time, we can start to pull these things together to work out how to track these over time and look at our performance and where we're ranking as

these keywords progress. It's still early days, but between this and the competitor tool, we can actually see where our result is in those listings. So, it's like we've got two types of search rankings that we need to be visible for. Now, we've got our normal SERs. Now, where are we in the top 100 on Google, which we can measure through our ranking tracking, but now we've also got this AIO tracking that we need to do. And just like with organic search, the top results tend to have the majority of the click so far. They're also the most likely to be recommended via voice result and other sort of less interactive results. So, you know, if we're looking for what are the best recommendations, we're not going to go much past the first few. It will give us plenty. It will give us guidance, but like with most search results, people tend to stick towards the top. So this is again another one of those opportunities where we can start to go into this and measure right where are we being mentioned and where are we in the top.

Now just as a caveat one challenge with this is our brand name and measuring our brand name and our brand identity. Monday.com is a bit challenging because their name is a bit varied but another one to watch out for is if you have a more generic name. you know, greatdigital marketing agency.com. You know, if we have a more generic brand name, it will become more difficult to measure tools like this. And we have found that AI tools like this don't always recognize brands quite as easily if they are too descriptive. You know, it's finding that nice balance of here is a name that is memorable, a bit different, and is sort of like standalone or at least alone in its industry. At least monday.com is different. No one else has decided to go for a day of the week, but HubSpot arguably is a better name because HubSpot is more kind of like it's less descriptive.

It doesn't rely on any sort of other name and it's a unique naming identifier that we can sort of measure on here. ClickUp is the same. You'll find sometimes you have no choice of the brands that you work with. If you're your own business, great, you can set it up. Otherwise, it's just something to bear in mind if these tools at the moment can be quite brand name sensitive. So, when we're working on it, we've got this challenge of can the AI tools recognize our brand name as a starting point. Once they have recognized our brand name, can we measure and rank that tracking performance over time? Can we see how these things are listed? So whilst we're looking at the results, if we start to measure these either via tracking them in the um AIO tracker or over here, we can start to bring these out and sort of expand on these. When we're looking into these, we can actually get a cached copy. So you see where it says cached copy up here by the

results. We can get a cached copy to see what the AI result looked like at the time. And this is literally just a screenshot directly from SE ranking. Their software will record what the AI result said as a perfect screenshot and then just save it for future um sort of reference. So really powerful for us to kind of like pull that data out and start to understand right this is the landscape. This is where we are. This this alone isn't isn't enough. But like with all SEO tools, what we need to do is combine all of these things together. So hopefully all of these individual things are starting to kind of like give you a flavor of what they can do. But the challenge the challenge that we've got now and the thing that we have to do next is to say right how do we then start to piece these things together how do we then start to build a plan out of all of these bits and pieces. So beginning from the going back to the beginning working out the domain

authority domain trust and domain plan but the next thing that we're going to look at is okay where do we then go in terms of the keyword phrases both in terms of the organic and our AI related phrases and I'd say that it's not two separate exercises that we need to do more when we're creating our keyword manager lists when we're working out what keywords we want to be going after and which keywords we want to be targeting and selecting them to create our keyword management lists. Here we go. Let's find a few of these. Get some more. Digital marketing marketing value proposition. Once we start adding them to lists, use keywords. Add to keyword manager lists. Create a new list. Test. Classic name. When we start to add these, we can start to then go into the keyword list itself and filter them and tag them. So, as we're going through here, we can identify keywords that we think are going to be AI relevant tools

or AI relevance keywords, and we can start to tag those in our keyword manager list because we know we've got a list of our normal keywords, but then we've also got these specific keywords, which aren't just normal, they're kind of like AIO. And for those keywords, we're going to have to do a little bit extra work or we might have to change the way that we structure our content, structure our articles to really work to not just the organic search results, but the AI based search results. Sarah's just asked a question. Hi Sarah. What ranking views do you show stakeholders to prove momentum? It's a really good question actually. So she's asked I'll ask the question. So what ranking views do you show stakeholders to prove momentum against large brands? And how do you call out gains when AIO's are changing which results get seen? Ah, thank you for for heart. I would always be very selective. So, when we're creating a project list, if I go back to where I've got it, here we go. Just find my all the tabs open. So, going back to keyword keyword

overviews. I always focus on groups and selective keywords. So when we're going into here, it's very easy to get bogged down with so much data and stakeholders, if nothing else, like actionable, clear insights. What they're looking for is information that tells them what are you doing well, what are you not doing well, what's an area that's succeeding, what's an area that's not succeeding. The most common or the most um efficient way of doing that tends to be from going to grouping your keywords together and showing things by those key groupings. So looking through here, if I'm going to look at these keywords I've added to the tracking, I want to look at project management. So project project management. Right here are all the keywords that we're tracking in our current project. I'm going to select them all. Make sure that they're all relevant. Yeah. And then I'm going to add them to a subfolder. Create a new folder and call them project management. There we go. Those are all added to project management. We're then going to go and look at all of the other areas.

There we go. And we're going to start grouping by the different the different folders because what I want to do is I want to create a series of folders where we have one for each core bit. So we're going to have project management, CRM, Gant charts, whatever else it might be. Now for me, if I was doing one for for digital marketing, it might be we're looking at one for SEO, SEM, social media, website development. We want to sort of group by those key areas. But within those areas, we have to be careful. It's very easy to get focused on tracking all of the detailed keywords. And that can be great for us, but if that's the case, we probably need to be running two projects. One that gives us all of the information and another one that focuses on highlight or highlights core indicator keywords. So for me, core indicator keywords are like sort of like cornerstone. you know, these are the keywords that we really need to make sure that this keyword ranks well. It

doesn't matter if all the variations do or don't because generally speaking, what we'll find is for every time that we've got a keyword that goes up, we've got a couple that go down, they might be very similar and so you get all this little fluctuations and that's just too much granular detail. All we're looking for is here is a good indicator keyword. How is this one performing? If it's performing well, it should we should note that all of the others are performing well. So when we're presenting to stakeholders or to um clients, we want to make sure that we're very selective about the keywords, not to hide anything, but more to be clearer and more transparent with what we're showing to them. We don't need them to see all of the data. We need them to see a selection of key data that gives them instant insights. And I would suggest that we do this by having fewer targeted keywords and grouping them together based on topic interest so that the clients can just say, "Ah, that group is doing well. That group has gone back a little bit." And then if they have questions, you can then go to the original database, expand that out for a lot more information. So hopefully that

answers your question. Sarah Becky, how Becky's answer, so don't forget about this. How has the recent uh Google move away from top 100 results function affected SE ranking's ability to provide accurate ranking data? and probably one for the SE ranking team though I would sort of suggest that the once you get beyond sort of 50 so the the results have always fluctuated quite a bit because top 10 top 20 those can be fairly standardized but there is always some level of personality or personalization and some sort of like dynamic tuning you know you're almost always signed into Google it's got your location it's got so many factors about you. It's got your Google signals coming in from Google Analytics and the other sources. So, having a completely anonymized research results all the way up to 100 for me always seemed ambitious for any platform. Um, and the accuracy wasn't always there to a extent that I would

probably quote on. You know, for me, if you're in the top 100, it's just to show signs. Are you gaining or are you going backwards? That's that's about it. Really what we care about is when we're getting into the top 20. You know, top 30 shows you're close, but really top 20 onwards is when we care about the specific accuracy of the rankings. Anything beyond top 20, I'd say, is more of like an indication for your momentum. You know, are you gaining, are you losing? Are you kind of stagnating, but I would always treat those results as a pinch of salt. And the same with any data, you know, and this is probably coming more from my degree than from AVLs. You know, when you look at numbers, what we're looking at is an estimation of the information. None of these things are actually 100% real. Because yes, 20 people might have searched for that search result last month, but it might have been 23. It might have been 16. It might have been 58 and we had a spike, but they didn't quite catch it. Because none of these tools are perfect and none of these tools are all invasive. We wouldn't want them to be as consumers. I mean, in

fact, that's one thing that GDPR and other data protection laws are coming into play. They are obscuring our access to analytics. And that's a good thing for consumers, a a more challenging thing for marketers. I won't say it's a bad thing, more challenging thing for marketeers, but it means that when we're looking at data, I would strongly recommend that we don't try to treat numbers at true face value. We look at them as patterns, as as behaviors, as models that we can kind of use to predict things. Um, but again, one system will not equal another system. So, Google Analytics won't equal SE ranking. SE ranking won't equal any others. They all measure that in their own way. As long as they're consistent within themselves and they show trends and patterns, that's what we're after. Lisa has asked again, what keywords are included in the tracking setup for AIO tracker? Um, so with this it will be looking for keywords that we're ranking well for in the same sense of if I if I flick over to the AIO tracker. There we go. This is based on the keywords that

we add to the project. So if we're looking at the AIO tracker, this is what we're looking at as a we are looking to measure these results over time just like you would with your project keywords. And the way that we do this is actually through adding your project keywords. So, first you would add your keywords as you normally would in your rankings to a project. Once you're happy with that, you would go into your tracking setup and then you can select the keywords from your project and add them into your AIO tracker. If you want to research them as something slightly differently, I'd recommend that we start doing that with our competitive research. And we can do that against ourselves. And again, one of my favorite uses for the competitive research tool is to look at your own website or your client's own website and understand what is the lay of the land as it is because it gives you so much more information than just Google search console or something similar and it will help you find those AI results that we're already ranking for and therefore we would

probably want to include in our um keyword ranking reports or AIO tracking. Hopefully that answers that question, Lisa. Yeah, going back to this that kind of helped to to come back to where I was. I know that I've I've whistled through this already, but we we've, you know, have limited time and I wanted to get the information out there. the pattern for this. Check the check the domain trust, check your profile, then go on to your keyword analysis as you normally would, but in your keyword analysis this time in addition to looking at the Google search results, which is what we're used to when we would go in here and we would look at our keywords. We'd look at our competitors keywords. We try and find patterns, keywords that have the right combination of, you know, difficulty, position, search volume, intent, SER features, and so on. maybe even some papers, you know, PPC information if we're looking at combining it with an SEM campaign, search engine marketing campaign, and we start to add these to our keyword manager lists. As part of that process, please

go into the AI search tab. It's it's part of the same result. It's one level down on the nav, and in there, you'll find all this extra detail, and it will start to show you some of the keywords that you're being found for the AIO. If nothing appears just yet, then either your website doesn't currently have the volume or SEM ranking doesn't recognize the search terms yet. These tools are developing. The database behind them is developing. And just like with all things, you can submit keywords that SE ranking doesn't have in its database to be indexed and and over time this database will just get better and better. If you have a reasonable volume of tracking of of traffic, you will find that your AI search results will start to appear in here. And from there, you can identify the keywords that you like, pull those through into your keyword manager lists. But when we're operating our keyword manager lists, let's just tag them up. Let's just make sure that when we're adding in a keyword list and we're saying, okay, you know, we want project management tools. We're going to add that in. Fantastic.

Project management tools. We know it's in there, but we know it's an AI tool. Well, let's just tag it. So, let's just make sure that we're adding in a tag. Add a tag. Call it AIO. Give it a lovely color. There we go. And this is just going to help us manage which of our keywords might be more of a set priority. So that when we then go to handle these for our content plan, you know, converting this into our content plan for content generation, we can start to work out which of these might be cornerstone keywords and might require that extra bit of effort or different structure or different approach due to the fact that they are AI based keywords in addition to SEO or organic keywords. So hopefully that makes sense and that follows. As a final tip, I went through this last time, but when we're when we're looking into the kind of the process of this and we're looking into how we want to utilize these keywords, um, I really do find it helpful to build up that keyword manager list as big as

you can. Expand your term, expand your glossery. So, although I've got, you know, six in this demo, if I was working with a normalsized client, I would expect anywhere from 300 to maybe 7 or 800 keywords by the time we are finished. It sounds like a lot for some of you, but once you have that many keywords, a it's very easy to get there. Find a phrase, search for it in the keyword uh research tool, and then you'll find all the expansions, all the derivations, all the, you know, alternative ways of saying it. And then you keep going down that rabbit hole until you fleshed out all the relevant keywords. Pull that into your first keyword manual list. From there, then start to refine it, start to reduce them. And for me, I normally end up with multiple keyword manual lists. my V1, my V2, my V3, etc. And each time I go through them, I start with the most possible options and then I refine them down, refine them down, refine them down until I'm left with a manageable size based on the content plan we want to achieve. But the whole way through, we need to be keeping our tags in place.

You know, if we have things that are either cornerstone content, branded content, essential content, the sales director says he must include these because that's what he wants, anything like that. or now AIO. Let's make sure that we're including that, including it in our tags, including in the keyword manager list. And as we go from iteration to iteration, refining our process down, we want to keep that information going so that by the time we're ending up with the final result, that final keyword manager list that's going to basically define our content plan for the next 12 to 30 12 to 36 months, you know, one to three years. um we're going to know which of these are going to be AI combin contents and also what the priority might be on them. So hopefully that is a very intense whistle stop tour um of kind of how we can get started into that. But before we before we sort of wrap up does anyone have any questions or would like to go through anything in more detail? Just reading what ranking says. Okay, SE ranking has posted a little statement on there. Fab.

So before we wrap up, does anyone have any questions they'd like to ask? If you do, please feel free to ask away. I want to make sure that the last 5 minutes are are of my time or your time. Whilst you're whilst you're having a think and having a chat, rejoice. Did that answer some of the questions that you had? >> Yeah, of course. No, honestly, it was it's you know, some of the questions that was coming up, I was like, yeah, that was what I was thinking. And I think is really is really really cool how you sort of tied in how we can utilize the AI tool within SE ranking and kind of complement traditional SEO because um I think that's what a lot of people are confused about you know they they think it's a whole switch but actually it's a quite a complimentary thing. So how you sort of delivered it it was yeah was so insightful. So thank you so much. >> That's all right. I I do find it's it's it's a it's an evolution and it's a sort of a new adjacent arm, you know, in the same way that when we're researching our search keywords and it just fits in with our you pay-per-click or or Google ad,

you know, research, this is part of that. And I have a feeling this isn't the end of it. We might end up with a single act of keyword research might end up funneling our search engine optimization, our search engine marketing, our AIO, and the next thing, whatever it is. >> No, absolutely. And and I think even like now how sort of Google is now sort of really slowly kind of feeding in the concept of social search I really do feel that that is going to now um come into play because of just where the consumer journey now starts and it's you know Google has noticed it's not starting on the search engine as much as it did before. So that's pretty cool. We do have a question that just came in um from speed to sky consultants. Um quite a really fun question actually. What makes SU rankings AI visibility tool unique from others? >> Oo, interesting. So, I haven't used, full disclaimer, I haven't used um some of the competitors with the these tools recently. So, best bet would be to have a little hands on and explore. But the

one thing that I can tell you it's we've been working with the SE ranking team and they are so incredibly receptive to feedback um ideas and suggestions. It's the thing that actually made me kind of focus and end up working almost not solely but ve very focused with SE ranking for the long term. It's they take on all feedback and ideas that we have. So when we're talking about things you can see that all of these suggestions are built in. Years ago they didn't have a keyword manager tool. It's something that we asked for multiple times and then they built it. And not only did they build it, they started to add features that we've requested. Yeah. >> Something that came up in a recent chat with one of their product um team. It's we have an issue with tracking where things come from especially now that we have more um data protection issues or data protection laws. Good thing bad for marketing, good for consumers. Um we now have less tracking. We have more things appearing as unspecified, not you know, etc. on Google. One of those is AI

searches because when you see those AI search results and we've got the link list, there's not necessarily any tracking information on those. And there's no industry standard at the moment for how those search engines or AI tools should present tracking information on the links. And this is something I've kind of said to S Rankings like is this something we can feed back to the industry? >> Yeah. >> And they're keen on it. So, so again, whether or not this tool is is better than that other tool at this specific thing, have a play, see which one works for you. All I can say is as a company to work with, they've been amazing in terms of receiving feedback. So, the suggest the suggestions that you guys are making in the comments right now, genuinely, their product team will be seeing these later and putting them on the to-do list if any of them are really good ideas. So, don't feel like your your lost voices here. this every question and suggestion is heard which I which >> I love. >> Yeah. And I think for me I think one thing I do love about the the AI visibility tool is I'm a huge API girly.

I I love how I need something to be seamless to sort of activate and to sort of utilize. And I do find with the AI visibility tool, it's easy to understand the data um in terms of like just explaining what that data is, just kind of seeing it for exactly what it is. I think some other tools I've tested it was quite finicky in a way. You don't know what this metric mean and and how they've applied it. Um but I think with SE ranking it it was so seamless to kind of get the bigger picture from it. Um, Reuben has asked that in backlink checker, how do you cut through the noise, topical relevance, the link velocity, referring domain quality to build a copy and improve link plan that actually leaprogs bigger rivals. >> So this is a combination of if you look for the in fact if I find it if you look at the where it is the backlink gap an analyzer we can see the commonalities. So if we can see straight away if there are common domains that we have in in

place where we know some of our major competitors have certain domains in that they are all sharing that they are sort of emphasizing that can be a key indicator that they're in these publications they're in these these websites. Beyond that we can then start to look at the um we can start to look at the individual backlink profiles and start to rank and filter them. Now for me it just comes down to filters. You know you building out filters based on the results you're seeing. Sometimes you get high toxicity. Sometimes you get um a lot of FAF. Sometimes you find there are certain domain types you just want to exclude. So going through and working out what filters are going to work best to then cut it down. And then finally within SE ranking option to show one backlink per domain. >> It's a single check box. Very useful especially when you're sorting out the initial filters. Once you found the websites that you then want to focus on, you can uncheck that to then see the rest of the results. But to begin with, showing one um link backlink per domain is a very easy way of filtering the signal versus the noise on that.

>> Amazing. Thank you for that. We have time for one more question and this is from Joanne. How many keywords should we track in AIO tracker? Does it depend on the company? Should they all be longtail? >> It does depend on the company and it depends on your resource. Um because fundamentally it's all going to come down to time. If we imagine that, you know, to create content that ranks well for normal SEO, we have the simple task of creating the best content that has ever existed, bar none. You know, to then make it also an AI result that then an AI tool will understand. It not only has to be the best result that anyone could see, it has to has to be the best result that anyone can see, that's also then structured and designed in such a way that it is easier for AI tools to interpret. which means that our language, our context, our semantics need to be slightly better. So the best result ever and semantically well built. Um that takes time. Um I would suggest that you treat AI AIO results and AIO keywords as priority keywords on par

with sort of your cornerstone content. You select a handful of them, but you make that a percentage of your overall result. Not every keyword is going to be AI. We're going to have very specific search results and they need to be high value. Ideally, that midtail search where you've got they are questions, they are queries, they're more of a question than a normal short statement, but they're also high value with their volume, with their popularity, and you've got a chance of competing for it, you know. So, a a handful to begin with, expand it once you start to win. >> Yeah. No, I definitely agree with that. Um, so just like everyone else, especially Lisa, myself, those in the comments, how can we connect with you, Ben? >> Uh, find me on LinkedIn. My name is Ben Fatwell and there's only one of me as far as I know. You know, it's a fairly odd name. Um, find me, connect with me, and if if I have skipped over any other questions, if you do want to follow up, feel free to ask away on LinkedIn. I'll happily help as much as I can.