What if I told you you could perform a five-hour SEO task in only one hour?
No bullshit. Just keep reading and try our SEO tool Mazen today.
Keyword suggestion tools have been around for years, so why is keyword research still such a pain? How much time have you wasted digging through keyword suggestion tools and Excel spreadsheets to create your keyword list? Today I’m going to show you how to get your time back and focus on what really matters to you and your clients: results.
Our SEO software Mazen can save you hundreds of working hours previously spent on keyword research.
Here’s how we do it:
1. We don’t just spit out 500 derivatives of the same expression. Save 15 minutes for every 100 keywords selected.
Ever since the introduction of Panda, Fred, and most recently RankBrain, Google doesn’t like it when you create pages that target keywords that are too similar to one another. For example, if I was doing SEO for a digital agency, I would avoid creating different pages to target close variations of the same keyword:
- Digital agency
- Web agency
- Digital web agency
- Digital web company
- Digital creative agency
I don’t need a tool that generates a million permutations of the same idea. I need a tool that can suggest different topics to target if I want to attract users searching for, in this case, a digital agency.
For example, you could…
Focus on business size
Focus on price
Focus on the client’s sector or persona (here, an e-commerce site):
Focus on the different services a digital agency offers (digital marketing, web design, SEO, etc.):
At the end of the day, a keyword tool that only gives you a bunch of terms closely related to your original keyword will only eat your time and hold you back.
2. We automatically group keywords that relate to the same topic. Save 20 minutes or every 100 keywords selected.
As you may know, RankBrain wants websites to create longer content that targets a ton of keywords about the same topic. That’s why SEOs spend hours optimizing keyword lists in tedious spreadsheets, grouping together keywords that will target the same topic on one webpage.
3. You can easily manage your keyword groups without using Excel. Save 20 minutes for every 10 keywords managed.
I’d like to use a personal example here, if I may. My SEO strategy for this website, mazen-app.com, is to create a comprehensive guide to SEO. When I was researching keywords in Mazen (big shock!), my keyword suggestions were automatically grouped together. Take a look:
An “SEO guide” is obviously something that provides “SEO tips,” answers “SEO questions,” and explains how to manage “SEO results.” I was really happy with this part of the automatic that grouping Mazen did. But, to my mind, an SEO guide is not an “SEO Test.” And while I will almost definitely create an SEO test in the future, I think that would merit it’s own page and can be left out of the “SEO Tips” group.
Managing keyword lists in Mazen is easier than ever. You just click on this little arrow (CAPTURE A METTRE) and the keyword “SEO Test” becomes a priority keyword, associated with a different URL on your website. See? Easy!
4. Automatically find the best landing page for each keyword group. Save 30 minutes for every 100 keywords managed.
Let me ask you this: In your spreadsheet, how much time does it take you to map each keyword to a specific landing page? Let’s say you’re working on a new e-commerce website with 3,000 keywords and you need to prepare title tags, H1s, and content for each keyword. This mapping operation could takes hours! You would need to go to the website, find the right product or category, copy the URL of the page, go back to your Excel sheet, and paste the URL next to the keyword the page is going to target.
Fortunately, Mazen automates this repetitive and low value task for you. For each keyword, Mazen automatically finds which page on your site would be best suited to target it. If no suitable page exists, Mazen will suggest that you create a new page for that keyword.
5. Add questions people ask
Customer intent is one of the most important things you need to know when crafting your SEO strategy. Mazen provides all the questions people are asking about your topic in Google: How, What, Which, etc.
6. Create a dashboard and stop using Excel to manage your keyword list. Save 2 hours for every 100 keywords managed.
Stop me if this sounds familiar. In Excel, you paste all the keywords you found from different sources like Adwords, SEM Rush, or other keyword tools. Then, you add multiple columns in which you display the information that is most important/relevant to you or your clients. And to get that data in the first place, you’ll likely use different tools like keyword ranking tools, Google Analytics, your CMS, Moz, or Majestic SEO (for backlinks).
With Mazen, you don’t need to copy anything to Excel. Mazen is your spreadsheet: you can add any column you want to provide only the information you need.
Step 1: Select the keywords you like (or import an existing list if you have one)
Step 2: In our intuitive and dynamic SaaS spreadsheet, select any information you would like to know about the keyword: current ranking of your website for this keyword, current ranking of a competitor for the keyword, most suitable landing page, search volume, current traffic to the page targeting the keyword, title tag of the page… Sky’s the limit.
Want to see this in action? We made the video below when we applied to TechCrunch Dirsupt, even before Mazen was actually finished. And you know what? It worked! We were selected for Disrupt NY and were able to show our budding technology to the world.
7. Adapt your strategy to RankBrain
Keyword research Is still very important to your SEO strategy, but the game has changed.
a.With RankBrain, and even moreso with the Fred update, you shouldn’t use exact-match keywords. What you need are strong topics to implement.
Fred is the latest development Google’s long and successful effort to prevent SEOs from simply using lists of exact match keywords in their content. That means that traditional keyword tools are no longer useful for finding phrases you should use in your text. You need to find the right topics, and then write a story for each topic. That’s why organizing your keyword list is so important. Here’s what you need to do:
- Group keywords that target the same topic and tell the same story. You might group 20 or 30 keywords together, and that’s totally fine!
- Add up the search volume of all the keywords in a group to see if the topic is important enough. Don’t just focus on a specific keyword; you want to look at the whole group.
Does that sound tedious? Well, good news! Mazen does this job for you. When you group keywords together on your dashboard, you’ll see the total search volume for each group or topic, which today is far more important than the a single keyword’s search volume.
b. People are using fewer short keywords. 50% of search queries are four words or longer these days. Be careful, though! Some folks don’t fully understand RankBrain and they’re actually giving bad advice to people.
As is usual when Google issues a major update, a lot of so-called experts misinterpret certain aspects of it. I’ve seen some people say that keywords aren’t important anymore because RankBrain. That’s not true. We still need to know what people search for on Google to create content that matches their search intentions. So while broad and generic keywords are less useful, we still need to create topics, stories, and questions using strategic keywords.
I’ve been working as an SEO specialist for 8 years, in-agency and in-house. I’ve done thousands of keyword searches and I have a number of great success stories (i.e. +250% traffic, +80% revenue after one year) just from targeting new keywords and showing our clients what their own users/customers want and how they express that want via Google.
Those were great times, huh? No! SEO is getting better because Google forces us to be better, smarter, and more clever
After RankBrain, this strategy became less profitable. Our SERPs started changing. I noticed that some of our longer content was generating even more traffic than before, and that the search console showed a larger variety of keywords and long expressions. Those expressions sometimes didn’t even have a single word in common with the keywords we were targeting. However, they were still targeting the same topic. Piwik shared an interesting example of this happening.
Later, Ahrefs published a study that confirmed my impressions and showed that a single page could rank on thousands of keywords if all of them are about the same thing. RankBrain is a game-changer because Google isn’t looking for specific keywords on your page anymore. Instead, it tries to understand (via overall content and the lexical field) what your page is about. You don’t even need to have used a specific keyword to rank for that keyword.
With RankBrain, you need to find your topic’s lexical field (and we can help you do that)
You can’t just write content and hope Google’s AI will understand what it’s about and rank you for a bunch of keywords you didn’t insert in your text out of fear of being penalized for keyword stuffing. You have to use the right lexical field to help Google really understand what your content is about. What’s a lexical field, you ask? Simply put, it’s a group of words or phrases that refer to the same topic.
For example, if you want to rank for the keyword “horse-riding summer camp,” you’ll need to use the full lexical field of horses, vacations, and kids:
I should clarify that the idea here is not to find keywords for which to rank; you don’t need to rank on “horses” or “ponies.” It’s more about showing Google how relevant your content is by using all the relevant terms that RankBrain found in other pages about the same topic. If you provide Google with this rich vocabulary, you’ll rank better with far fewer backlinks than before. To learn more about that, check out our complete guide to semantic optimization.
But wait, there’s more!
Mazen can actually provide you with this lexical field. Our unique algorithm delivers a list of lexically-related word suggestions that you can then insert into your text in a natural way. Once again, Mazen saves you hours of work and helps you get better results with fewer backlinks. Our goal is to help you save time so that you can focus on what really matters: your creativity.
