MY SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION GUIDE

40 Essential SEO Terms Marketers Should Know

301 Redirect – A way to make one web page redirect the visitor to another page. Whenever you
change the web address of a page, apply a 301 redirect to make the old address point to the new
one. This ensures that people who have linked to or bookmarked the old address will automatically
get to the new one, and search engines can update their index.
A
ALT Text/Tag or Attribute - A description of an image in your site's HTML. Unlike humans, search
engines read only the ALT text of images, not the images themselves. Add ALT text to images
whenever possible.
Anchor Text - The actual text of a link to a web page. On most websites, this text is usually dark blue
and underlined, or purple if you’ve visited the link in the past. Anchor text helps search engines
understand what the destination page is about; it describes what you will see if you click through.
B
Blog - A part of your website where you should regularly publish content (e.g. commentary on
industry/company topics, descriptions of events, photos, videos, etc.). Each blog post on your
website is a new page that a search engine sees, and therefore a new opportunity to get found
online. Make sure you keep your blog within your own domain.
Bookmark - A link to a website saved for later reference in your web browser or computer. Social
bookmarking sites (example: Delicious.com) let users share websites they like with each other.
Having links to your site in social bookmarking sites is a sign to crawlers that your website content is
interesting to people.
C
Canonical URL - The canonical URL is the best address on which a user can find a piece of
information. Sometimes you might have a situation where the same page content can be accessed
at more than one address. Specifying the canonical URL helps search engines understand which
address for a piece of content is the best one.
Conversion Form - A form through which you collect information about your site visitor. Conversion
forms convert traffic into leads. Collecting contact information helps you follow up with these leads.
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) - The part of your code that defines how different elements of your
site look (examples: headers, links).
D
Directory - Just like directories for people and phone numbers, there are directories for
websites. Submitting your site to a directory gives you more than just an inbound link; it helps
people find you. The most popular web directories are Yahoo! Directory and Dmoz.
Domain - The main web address of your site (example: www.yoursite.com). It's good to renew
ownership of your domain for several years. Search engine rankings favor websites with longer
registrations because it shows commitment.
F
The Fold - The “fold” is the point on your website where the page gets cut off by the bottom of a
user’s monitor or browser window. Anything below the fold can be scrolled to, but isn’t seen right
away. Search engines place some priority on content above the fold, since it will be seen right away
by new visitors. Having too many ads above the fold can be seen as a negative issue, too. (See
Panda).
H
Headings - Text on your website that is placed inside of a heading tag, such as an H1 or H2. This text
is often presented in a larger and stronger font than other text on the page.
HTML - The code part of your website that search engines read. Keep your HTML as clean as
possible so that search engines read your site easily and often. Put as much layout-related code as
possible in your CSS instead of your HTML.
I
Inbound Link - A link from one site into another. A link from another site will improve your SEO,
especially if that site has a high PageRank.
Internal Link - A link from one page to another on the same website, such as from your homepage
to your products page.
Indexed Pages - The pages of your website that are stored by search engines.
J
Javascript - A scripting language that allows website administrators to apply various effects or
changes to the content of their website as users browse it. Search engines often have difficulty
reading content that is inside of Javascript, but they are getting better at it over time.
K
Keyword - A word that a user enters in search. Each web page should be optimized with the goal of
drawing in visitors who have searched specific keywords.
L
Link Building - The activity and process of getting more inbound links to your website for improved
search engine rankings.
Long Tail Keyword - An uncommon or infrequently searched keyword, typically with two or more
words in the phrase. Small businesses should consider targeting long tail keywords, as they are
lower difficulty and often have more qualified searchers. Common keywords such as 'software' are
more competitive, and very hard to rank high for them in search.
M
Metadata - Data that tells search engines what your website is about.
Meta Description - A brief description of fewer than 160 characters of the contents of a page and
why someone would want to visit it. This is often displayed on search engine results pages below
the page title as a sample of the content on the page.
Meta Keywords - Previously used by search engines in the 90s and early 00s to help determine what
a web page was about, the meta keywords tag is no longer used by any major search engines.
mozRank - A logarithmic ranking provided by SEOmoz from 0-10.0 of the number and quality of
inbound links pointing to a certain website or page on that website. A 10.0 is the best linked-to page
on the internet, and a 0 has no recognized inbound links.
N
Nofollow - When a link from one site does not pass SEO credit to another. Do not use nofollow
when linking to internal pages in your website. Use it when linking to external pages that you don't
want to endorse.
P
Page Title - The name you give your web page, which is seen at the top your browser window. Page
titles should contain keywords related to your business. Words at the beginning of your page title
are more highly weighted than words at the end.
PageRank - A number from 0-10, assigned by Google, indicating how good your overall SEO is. It is
technically known as 'Toolbar PageRank.' Note: PageRank relevancy is changing.
Panda - Refers to a series of updates released by Google to its search engine ranking algorithm that
are intended to discourage people who create large amounts of mediocre content in an attempt to
claim many keyword rankings without generating much value for users. Read a marketer's guide to
understanding Google Panda here.
PPC (Pay-Per-Click) - Advertising method in which an advertiser puts an ad in an online advertising
venue and pays that venue each time a visitor clicks on his/her ad. Google AdWords is the classic
example of this.
R
Ranking Factor - One element of how a search engine determines where to rank a certain page,
such as the number of inbound links to a page or the contents of the title tag on that page.
Referrer String - A piece of information sent by a user’s browser when they navigate from page to
page on the web. It includes information on where they came from previously, which helps
webmasters understand how users are finding their website.
RSS Feed - RSS stands for 'really simple syndication.' It is a subscription-based way to get updates on
new content from a web source. Set up an RSS feed for your website or blog to help your followers
stay updated when you release new content.
S
SERP (Search Engine Ranking Page) - The page that you are sent to after you run a query in a search
engine. It typically has 10 results on it, but this may vary depending on the query and search engine
in question.
Sitemap - A special document created by a webmaster or a piece of software that provides a map of
all the pages on a website to make it easier for a search engine to index that website.
Social Media - Online media created by and shared among individuals. Facebook, YouTube,
LinkedIn, Google+, and Twitter are popular social media websites. Links from many social media
sites now appear in searches. It's important to have links to your site spread throughout social
media.
Spider - A computer program that browses the internet and collects information about websites.
T
Traffic - The visitors to your site.
Title - The title of a page on your website, which is enclosed in a <title> HTML tag, inside of the head
section of the page. It appears in search engine results and at the top of a user’s web browser when
they are on that page.
Traffic Rank - The ranking of how much traffic your site gets compared to all other sites on the
internet. You can check your traffic rank on Alexa.
U
URL - The web address of a page on your site (example: www.yoursite.com/contact).
How to Find the SEO Strategy that Fits Your Business
Let’s talk about how to find the approach to SEO that fits YOUR business’s needs.

How Search Engines Rank Your Content

How do search engines rank your content?

The key to getting your content to rank well in search is having a clear understanding of how Google finds,
analyzes, and ranks your content.

Getting your content to rank highly in search results depends predominantly on two things:

One, improving discovery and relevance by creating lots of high-quality content on the topics you want to be known
for; and
two, building authority by getting lots of high-quality backlinks to your website.

Discovery,
Relevance, and
Authority
three stages that cover how search engines work in a nutshell.

And each of these three stages correlates with an action the search engine takes:
crawling,
indexing, and
ranking.

DISCOVERY stage. Search engine bots discover your web page by “crawling” it
means it discovers your web page and takes note of all of the content within it.

RELEVANCE stage. Once a search engine bot discovers your content, it decides how relevant it is to certain search
queries by indexing it, based on signals like keywords within the content.

AUTHORITY stage. This means building enough credibility through backlinks and other factors, that search engines
consider your site authoritative enough to rank high in the search results.
Authority directly impacts ranking strength.

I find the best way to explain how search engines rank content is using the library metaphor. After all, isn’t Google
just a giant library?

Let’s pretend for a moment that you work in a library. You have a ton of books in a pile in front of you, and you need to
figure out where in the library these books need to be stored.

This is a GREAT way to think about how Google finds, analyzes, and ranks content.

Your first step is to FIND all these books.

This is CRAWLING.
If a book isn’t in the stack to begin with or you can’t see it, you won’t be able to put it on a shelf. That’s the discovery
stage.
In the sense of a website: Do you have a piece of content, and can the search engines access it?

Your second step is to CATEGORIZE the books.

This is INDEXING. The books in your library cover all sorts of topics: fiction, nonfiction, science, history, and technology.
How do you sort them?

This is where you assess the relevance of a book to a topic – by looking at the title, flipping through some pages, and
seeing who the author is and whether they’re known for writing about certain topics.

Search engine bots index content on a website in a similar way.

They crawl the content and say, ‘What are the contents of this web page? What do they mean?
Then, they bucket them into some sort of topic and start to create some semantic associations.

Your third step is figuring out which books to feature.

What should go on your best-sellers shelf?
Which books should you make easier to find than others? This is RANKING.

The way you determine which books are most easily discoverable for visitors to your library is mostly based on whether
the book comes from credible sources.

So, how do you determine authority?

This is a subjective exercise. In the case of books, you look for credible authors like Dan Brown and H.G. Wells. Those are
authoritative sources – we know that because they’re talked about a lot, referred to a lot, and they’re cited in other
works.
Getting cited is like having backlinks to your website – things that are mentioned in the press and are linked
to from other sites regularly. That’s what builds authority.

These three stages and actions are dependent on one another.

If your content isn’t relevant, then it has little chance of ranking, no matter how authoritative it is. If your website isn’t
authoritative, then it has little chance of ranking, no matter how relevant it is. And if your website can’t be discovered
in the first place, it has no chance of ranking at all.

We hope this helped you understand how search engines discover, index, and rank your content.

Which SEO Approach Fits Your Business?

When it comes to SEO, many small-to-mid-sized organizations look to well-known organizations for clues on where
to focus their efforts.

They think to themselves, “If that big, successful company over there is improving their SEO by creating tons of
content, then I’LL create tons of content and that will improve my SEO, too.”

Approaching SEO as a one-size-fits-all solution is one of the most common SEO mistakes we see.
The truth is, if your organization doesn’t have authority built up yet, then you can’t focus solely on creating content in
a vacuum. You need to be spending time on building authority.

Relevance refers to how well a document matches a search query.

Authority refers to ranking strength.

Even if you publish a lot of relevant content that search engines find, if those search engines don’t consider you an
authoritative source, then they’re not going to rank your content highly in the search results.

More authority means better ranking strength, which means better positions in the search results.

Your SEO strategy starts with

creating compelling,
unique,
high-quality content that people might naturally want to reference and link to.
But you also have to TELL people about your content for anyone to find it and link to it.

A healthy SEO approach balances building relevancy with building authority.

That means balancing
creating high-quality, relevant content with building high-quality backlinks.
How much time you focus on one versus the other will depend on how much authority your website has right now.

So, take a moment to think about your own organization. Is your organization well known and talked about and
linked to a lot online?
If so, then you probably have pretty good search authority already. That means, when it comes to SEO, you won’t have
to spend AS MUCH time building authority. Instead, you can focus more on serving up more and more relevant content
that can be discovered by Google. Creating more content will also, in turn, help you acquire more backlinks.

Or, is your organization creating a lot of content but not getting many links? In other words, are you more like a
brand- new author who’s just thrown their book into the pile?
Then don’t make the common mistake of focusing entirely on the relevancy aspect of SEO by just creating lots and
lots of content.
It doesn’t matter how many books you publish;
unless you’re actually making an effort to build credibility by getting your books seen and known and talked about,
otherwise they’re just going to gather dust.

If your website doesn’t have authority built up yet, then all the content you’re creating isn’t going to get ranked as
quickly as you may want it to.
You don’t get authority and credibility through volume; you get it largely through high- quality, and more
importantly, relevant backlinks.
High-quality content is essential to getting quality backlinks.

For example, one piece of content that's better than anything else on the internet for that topic could get you
hundreds of backlinks, whereas a hundred pieces of poor-quality content might not even earn you a single link.
Make sure you’re balancing your content creation and link-building efforts in a way that reflects your organization’s
SEO needs.
Link Building for SEO: Scaling Your Backlink Strategy

Why is Link Building Important For SEO?

These days, creating great content just ISN’T ENOUGH when it comes to ranking in search.

Google doesn’t care how INTERESTING your content is – it cares about how interesting OTHER PEOPLE think your
content is.

And Google measures that primarily through links to your website, or BACKLINKS.

Backlinks are one of the most important factors in how search engines figure out how high they should rank your
content.
Why? Because backlinks are a signal to Google that your site is a high-quality resource that people want to reference.
That means that sites with MORE backlinks – and higher QUALITY backlinks – tend to earn higher ranking in search.
The folks at Google said it themselves – they said, "In general, webmasters can improve the rank of their sites by
increasing the number of high-quality sites that link to their pages."

So, now you know WHY links are important.

Now, how do you actually get other websites to link to you?

This is called LINK BUILDING.
Link building is the process of manually encouraging people to link to your website from theirs.

So, why take the time to MANUALLY build links, instead of just creating content that’s good enough for people
to naturally link to you?

The truth is, getting other websites to link to your website has been getting more and more difficult over the last few
years.
These days, when people like a piece of content you’ve written, they’re more likely to share it on social media than
they are to link to it from their blog. That’s why it’s more important now than ever before to proactively build links.

Remember: Not all content on your website is naturally linkable.

While people are more likely to organically link to informational content like blog posts, it’s far less natural for people to
link to something like a product page. But because your product pages have direct conversion paths, they’re important
pages to get links to so they can rank higher in search. By proactively reaching out to others for a product review, for
example, you can build links to these less “linkable” pages.

To sum it up, if you’re doing SEO and not doing anything with link building, then your SEO efforts will simply not be
effective. The key to effective link building is to complement creating great content with manually building links.

How Many Links Does Your Content Need to Rank on Page One?

One of the most common questions we hear is this:

How many links do I need for my website to rank high in search results?

There’s no magic answer here that’ll make Google suddenly rank YOUR web page over another page.
That said, in order for Google to consider you a contender with the results listed on page one, you need to make sure
you get AROUND the same number of links that the results ranking on page one already have.

Knowing how many links THESE highly ranked pages have will give you a baseline target for how many links YOU’LL
need.

Let’s go through how to calculate a baseline target for how many links you’ll need on a given web page.

To start,
choose a broad topic that you want to be known for – one that has a lot of long tail variations.

For example, if your business is a fitness center, you might go after a broad topic like “workout routines.”

Next,
plug that broad topic into Google in an incognito window and run a search.
Take note of the top 10 results that show up.
Then, one by one, pull the URL and run it through a link-checking tool.

Moz has a free one called

Open Site Explorer that lets you plug in a URL, and tells you how many root domains, or websites, link to that URL.

Once you’ve done this for all 10 results,

calculate the average number of domains that link to these sites.
That will give you a general idea of how many links you’ll need in order to compete with the results on the first page
of Google.

If you were trying to compete with page one results for the topic “workout routines,” you’d need about 30 backlinks
from unique websites.
The web pages you see here with fewer backlinks that still rank on page one probably live on websites that have high
domain authority.

Alright – once you figure out how MANY links your content should have in order to compete in search, you might be
thinking to yourself,
“How do I identify which piece of content should contain all those links?”

Again, you’ll look to the top 10 results in search for the same broad topic.
Click in to each URL and skim through the content.

What are the common themes and elements you see on these pages?
What commonalities do you see in the information itself, the words they use, the structure of the content, and the
length?

In order to compete with these results in search, you need to have a piece of content that includes these same
themes and elements.
Are the top results in search mostly long blog posts? Videos? Resource lists?

You might be tempted to stand out by creating a piece of content that’s different and unique, but that will NOT serve
you well with SEO.
When it comes to SEO, doing what others that are ranking well are doing is generally the way to go.

So, take a moment to ask yourself:

Does your website already have a piece of content that is structured similarly and contains those common elements?

If so, then that’s the piece of content you’ll want to build links to.
If not, you’ll need to create a new piece of content that does have a similar look and feel to the results on page one –
BEFORE you start building links for that topic.

Why Relationships are the Key to Link Building at Scale

When it comes to link building, most people get stuck around SCALING link building.

This is often because people focus on scaling individual link building tactics, instead of building and scaling
RELATIONSHIPS.

Think about it: Relationships have EVERYTHING to do with building links.

In order for a blog post to link to your website, you need to have a RELATIONSHIP with the person writing it.
To get a publication to let you publish a news piece on their site, you need to have a RELATIONSHIP with a news outlet.

So you see – link building isn’t about sending cold email blasts to every blogger, journalist, or influencer in your
niche.
It’s about carefully and tactfully building meaningful relationships with the right people who can and WANT to link
to your website.

Let me illustrate what I mean.

This graph shows the most common link building tactics on a scale, with “resources required” on the X-axis, and
“potential reward” on the Y-axis.

The tactics you see on the top right – things like acquiring a website, or publishing a newsjack on a top-tier publication
– they require a lot of resources and yield a big reward.
You may try one of these high-resource, high-reward tactics 10 times and only succeed once – but all you’ll need is
that one success to make months of work worth it.

The tactics at the bottom left require fewer resources and yield a small reward. These are the more day-to-day
tactics you’d use:
things like “link reclamation,” which means asking for a link when your brand is mentioned on a site without one, or
“resource pages,” which means getting a link to your site on a listicle somewhere.
What’s the common thread that you see in all of these link building tactics?
They all require you to build a RELATIONSHIP with another person or business in order to work.

SCALING your link building efforts becomes especially important with those lower-risk, lower-reward tactics.

The only way to scale these tactics is by building lasting relationships – with bloggers, journalists, partners, business
owners, and influencers. That way, you can actually check off multiple tactics with just one relationship over time.

One thing I’ve found is that

freelance journalists are a gold mine for link building. Why?
Because they make their living on pitching stories to different publications and getting paid for it.
So if you continually give them content to pitch, then you’re actually helping THEM and making THEIR lives easier.

Speaking of helping others, don’t forget that relationship-building should always start with YOU delivering value to
the person you want a link from.

When you’re initiating a relationship, never open by asking them to do something for you. That simply won’t work.

The quickest way to start an effective relationship that will lead to more backlinks is by delivering some value to them
first.
For example, if you’re interested in building a relationship with a certain blogger, you might reach out to them saying
you’re a long-time admirer of their blog and are wondering if they’re looking for a guest post you can write on a
certain topic.
Uncover their personal and business goals, and
create a compelling case that demonstrates the value of a partnership with your brand.

Now, take a moment to think about

how YOU’RE doing on relationship-building so far.
What relationships does your organization already have with journalists, bloggers, influencers, and others who might
link to your site?
Whom do you wish your organization had a relationship with, and
what value can you offer them to initiate a relationship?

The more meaningful relationships you can build with folks who can link to you from high-quality websites, the more
effectively you’ll scale your link building efforts over time.

How to Scale Link Building Using Press Request Alerts

Building and maintaining relationships with people who might link to your website will help you build links at scale.

So, how can you start building effective relationships TODAY that will help you scale your link building efforts?

Working with big publications and influencers can be really difficult, but it’s well worth the effort because of the
quality of those links and the new audiences your brand will be able to reach.

The easiest way to build relationships with journalists is through responding to press request alerts.

Press request alerts are an absolute gold mine for earning high-value links and are a way to initiate relationships with
journalists that will open doors to more and more link building opportunities down the road.

What are they?

Press request alerts are requests that journalists send out asking for sources of information, like quotes on a certain
topic from an industry expert.

Journalists will send out these requests every day through certain services, and you can sign up for those services to
get the requests in your inbox.
If you sign up to get these requests sent to your inbox,
all you have to do is read the requests and look for topics relevant to your organization, and
then respond VERY quickly with a quote or two that solves the journalist’s need.
If you respond quickly enough and give the journalist exactly the information she wants, then you’ll likely get a link to
your site from a high-quality publication.
I’ve been responding to press requests for years and have gotten tons of high-quality links from publications like
The Guardian. It takes me less than two minutes to respond.

There are a lot of alert services out there, and each have their own pros and cons.
Here's a list to get you started. Make sure you screenshot it.

The tough thing about some of these press alert tools is that you’ll get hundreds of requests every day, and you have
to be lightning-quick in order for your quote to be considered.

A lot of people shy away from responding to press alert requests because the sheer NUMBER of alerts you get can be
overwhelming.

Pro tip:- But if you use your email client’s filters,

you can surface the requests that have specific keywords and phrases that are relevant to you, and
file them into a separate folder that you can go through regularly every day.

Let me quickly take you through how to respond to these requests in a way that increases the likelihood that
the journalists will pick you.
To get started,

pick only one press request alert service to sign up for. Then,
take a week or two to browse through these request emails WITHOUT responding, just to get an idea of what
journalists are asking for.Then,
put together a list of people inside your organization who can be thought leaders around certain topics and could
offer input in the form of short, written quotes.
Email these people and ask for a couple of quotes across specific topics they have expertise on, and organize them into
a document by topic.

In total, you should collect 10-20 different quotes across different varying topics that you can then use, splice, and
change, and give back at HIGH SPEED to journalists.
Once you’re armed with quotes you can send off at any moment, you’re ready to respond to relevant press requests.

When you DO respond,

first introduce yourself and offer one sentence to explain why you – or the person you’re giving the quote on behalf
of – are qualified to give this quote.
Are they a specialist within their job?
Do they speak at events on this topic? Keep this part short – all you need is one sentence that sets the scene and
establishes credibility.

You can link your company name to your company’s website or a relevant webpage, but don’t specifically ask for a
link at this point.

Most journalists will use the link you sent to link to you, but even if they don’t, the main point here is to start
building relationships with the journalists who use your quotes.

Next, give several quotes in bullet-point form that they can pick from – two or three max.
Let them know if they need anything else, sign, and you’re done.

Responding to press request alerts can be a great reactive play that will get you some quality backlinks from high-
authority websites.
The best part is that you don’t have to put together a big piece of new content – all you have to do is send a few one-
liners.
Plus, it’s a great way to start building these early relationships so that when you start doing BIGGER link building plays,
you already have relationships with some of these journalists that you can go and tap in to.
 The Fundamentals of an Effective SEO Content Strategy

What’s a holistic content strategy?

In this course, we’re going to talk about “holistic” content strategies,

the topic- cluster methodology,
what a “Search Insights Report” is, and –
how to create your very own Search Insights Report.

First thing’s first: What do I mean by “holistic” content strategy?

Content can be categorized into three broad buckets.

The first category, content that generates traffic, is probably the most well understood. This
content is the bread and butter of SEO.
You’re creating a piece of content that’s designed to drive traffic from organic search.

What are the benefits of this type of content? Not only do you help a lot of people, which
introduces them to your business, but you also make your website more competitive in search
overall. That authority extends to your product pages, landing pages, and so on.

To give you an idea of what I’m talking about here, let’s look at an example of a blog post in this
category. It’s doing pretty well, right?

The second category of content we create is typically billed as “thought leadership” or “link bait.”
Unlike the first type of content, its goal isn’t ranking for keywords, although it might do that anyway.

The objective is generating buzz and backlinks.

Here’s an example. This page has gotten over 2,100 backlinks. It was covered by Forbes,
Entrepreneur, Moz, and Buffer. But it’s not getting that much organic traffic, since people don’t
search for “future of content marketing” very often— that query only has a monthly search volume
– also called MSV – of 50.

The last category of content is lead gen content.

This content tends to bring in less traffic, but that traffic is higher- qualified. We see these
visitors download our content offers;
they’re the most ”bottom of the funnel” visitors.
This content is much closer to revenue than the other two buckets.

Here’s an example: Nearly 2,000 people download the social media content calendar template after
visiting this blog post every month. It’s really hard to prioritize all three buckets of content equally.
I see most teams creating one type of content and forgetting about the other two.
And to be honest, that’s exactly the trap HubSpot fell into.
It’s time for a brief story. This is an “error of our ways” story. In February 2018, the HubSpot blog
was getting several million organic users a month. Which is enough traffic to make most marketers
very, very happy. But when you take a step back… you see our organic traffic is actually steadily
declining over time.

We needed to do something. In March 2018, I crafted a brand-new strategy around what we at

HubSpot call the “Search Insights Report,” which is what we’ll learn how to create today.

Right after we release a new Search Insights Report and the blog team uses it as a map to create
content, the blog starts ranking for tens of thousands of new keywords.

Traffic is going up and to the right... The blog’s backlink profile has gone up to 5 million plus links
from 84,000 referring domains… And we’ve set new records for the number of leads and free
software users generated from the blog, which shows that when you use a holistic content
strategy, every type of content pulls more weight. In other words, 1 + 1 =3.

Okay, so that’s the why. Now let’s talk about the how.

The topic-cluster methodology

We’ll start with the topic-cluster strategy. Here’s how HubSpot’s Matthew Howells-Barby defines topic
clusters.

I’ve come up with my own definition inspired by the cosmos.

A topic cluster is a universe of content. You have your pillar page at the center, and that’s the star –
literally. It’s the biggest, highest-level piece of content. And then, surrounding the pillar page, you
have blog posts. Each blog post dives into a specific aspect of the topic.

So, your pillar page is shallow but wide.

Your cluster posts are narrow but deep.

From a keyword perspective, your pillar page will target a head keyword with 1,000 or more MSV
and your posts will each target 2-5 longer-tail keywords with 50 or more MSV.

Between the pillar page and the blog posts, you’re devoting at least eight pages – usually more – to a
discrete topic. So, how do you know when you should actually create a topic cluster?

Here’s the formula I’ve developed.

Essentially, you need a head keyword for the cluster with a certain amount of monthly search
volume.
You need 15 to 100 longer-tail keywords that also hit an MSV minimum, although it can be
smaller than the topic cluster head keyword.

And finally, you can have all the search volume in the world, but if the topic doesn’t align with
your audience and offering, it doesn’t matter.

One thing to note: For HubSpot, we look for head keywords for the topic cluster with 1,000 or more
MSV and longer-tail keywords with 50 or more MSV, but these numbers should absolutely be
adapted based on

A) how much authority your site has. Obviously, the less authority you have, the lower-volume your
target keywords should be. And
B) the niche. If most of the keywords in your niche simply don’t have much MSV, you’ll need to
lower your minimum accordingly.

So, keeping in mind our “holistic content strategy,”

here’s what a balanced topic cluster looks like.

It has content from all three buckets:

organic,
“linkbait,” and
“conversion bait.”

It’s a lot easier to understand these concepts with actual examples.

We’re going to talk about a HubSpot customer TradeGecko.
TradeGecko is an inventory and commerce operating system for wholesalers and retailers.
TradeGecko has done a fantastic job with content marketing and SEO, and even they still have
content gaps, just like we do here at HubSpot – which just goes to show that there is always work to
be done, no matter how much search optimization you’ve already accomplished.

I went to TradeGecko’s blog,

I identified a topic gap they should fill: demand planning.

A topic gap is a group of inter-related and relevant keywords your blog or site isn’t ranking for.

You might have content targeting some of the keywords in this cluster, but if those pages aren’t on
page one, they might as well not exist.
TradeGecko has several posts around “demand planning”, but they’re not ranking for these
keywords.
There’s a great opportunity to optimize and build on their current content.

Something interesting to note here—a few of the head keywords for the cluster posts have
greater volume than the pillar page. That’s completely okay! You want to structure the topic
cluster so that it makes sense logically.
As long as the head keyword of the pillar page is the broadest, most general, it doesn’t matter if it’s
the highest-volume.

People are often confused about the difference between

product pages,
listing pages, and
pillar pages.
A product page is not a pillar page. A product page should be all about, you guessed it, your product.

A pillar page is far more educational, far more top-of-the-funnel.

And listing pages – like a category page for ecommerce or a topic page for a blog – should help users
navigate.

It’s time to play “is it a pillar page.” If you win, you will have endless bragging rights. It’s a big deal.

Is this is a pillar page? Let’s walk through it. “Ultimate” sounds pretty high-level and comprehensive.
“Everything you need to know” definitely sounds high-level and comprehensive. Sixteen minutes…
that’s a long piece of content. Grab a beverage and pick a comfy chair; we’re in for it.

How about this one – is this a pillar page? We can see “Startups” is linked as a main category in the
left-hand nav. It looks like we’re seeing the recent articles related to startups.
Yep, this is a listing page, not a pillar page.

Last one. ”Man cave.” Check out that NFL hover helmet. Just $120... What a steal! Okay, so we’re
looking at around 15% of the total items in “Man cave.” And yeah, we’re clearly being directed to
other pages. Definitely a listing page.

There you have it: the pillar-cluster strategy.

 Building Your Own Search Insights Report

Introducing the Search Insights Report

Now, let’s talk about Search Insights Reports.

A Search Insights Report is an SEO-driven outline of everything your blogging team will create
over the next month, quarter, or even six months
It’s like you took an editorial calendar, merged it with a keyword report, and that’s how you
get the Search Insights Report, or S.I.R. for short.

To create an S.I.R., you’re going to need tools for keyword research, competitive analysis, and
reporting.
You’re also going to need a good old spreadsheet.

Luckily, you don’t need to create an SIR from scratch, since I’ve created a template. Go ahead and
download the report, then click on the next video so we can get to the good stuff: filling out the report.

Identifying your topic gaps

We’ll start with the topic-cluster strategy. Here’s how HubSpot’s Matthew Howells-Barby defines topic
clusters.

Step one is identifying your topic gaps, or the “holes” in your content.

Every product or service you provide?

It should have at least two, usually more, topic clusters. That typically drills down to one topic
cluster per feature. The fewer products you sell, the more topic clusters per product you’ll want
to create.

It’s easiest to do this mapping exercise by starting with your product/service pages.

Let’s go back to our TradeGecko example. One of the features of their platform is accounting
inventory management.
As we discussed earlier, the pillar page and the product page have different purposes.

The head keyword for this topic cluster is not “accounting inventory management”—that’s a term
someone searches when they’re ready to consider their options. The head keyword for this cluster
could be “accounting for ecommerce.” Or maybe “D2C (direct-to-consumer) accounting."

Ask yourself,
“What would someone search before they got to my product page?”
Another way to put it:
“What would someone search if they were looking for general information about this subject?”
Write all your ideas down, then validate those ideas with keyword research.
Out of our potential topic clusters for TradeGecko, I found “ecommerce accounting” has the
most monthly search volume – and the organic results are the most aligned with
TradeGecko’s target audience. So I’d go with that.

Now it’s time to see how much content TradeGecko has, if any, on ecommerce accounting. To see
what TradeGecko has published about ecommerce accounting, if any, let’s run a quick site search.
Just one blog post, and it’s very product- focused. I’d definitely count this as a topic gap.

Keep track of these gaps as you go.

Here’s I generally organize my notes:
feature on the left,
matching topic clusters on the right.

Now it’s your turn! Take the next 15 minutes to map your products/services to topic clusters in a
notebook, a Google Doc, or something you can reference again.

Next, you need to figure out how much content exists for that cluster.
As a reminder, I do that with a site search. Mark if you need to expand, maintain, or fill the cluster.

Great. Now take five minutes to pick one topic cluster you’ve marked as “fill,” and put it
through the topic cluster test.
Here’s the formula. We’ll keep working on this cluster for the rest of the course, so it’s
important to pick one.

Adding your cluster to the report

Time to add your cluster to the report.

Open up the report template.
Now, go to the Settings tab and replace the first example cluster with the one you’ve chosen.

Let’s take five minutes to fill out columns A-G in the report.
We’re starting with row 2.
A2 and B2 should say the same thing, since your topic cluster and head keyword for the pillar
page are the same.

Enter the MSV of that keyword, which you should pull the KW research tool of your choice.
Leave the content type as “pillar page” and the status as “not started.”

Feel free to leave the “writer” column blank for now.

Finally, add your recommended URL—I usually go with the head keyword with hyphens.

We’re leaving the other columns blank for the time being.
When I’m writing out insights for a blog post, I fill in an entire row at once.
But pillar pages are slightly different; it’s easiest to fill in the other columns once you’ve mapped out
the rest of the cluster.
So here’s where we stand now. We have one pillar page. Time for the next step.

Finding content competitors

The next stage of the process:

Finding content competitors.

What’s a content competitor?
It’s not always your typical competitors. You see, most people use “competitors” to refer to other
companies selling similar solutions or services. If you run, say, a recruitment agency, your competitors
are all the other recruiting and staffing providers who work in the same area as you.

However, your content competitors include anyone who’s trying to rank for terms in your
wheelhouse.
Maybe there’s a blog that publishes posts like “how to hire software engineers” or “interview
questions for executive assistants.”
That blog is a content competitor, even though it doesn’t sell a competitive service.

We want to find content competitors because, as you’ll see, that makes it much easier to
figure out which specific keywords you should target with your own content.

So, how do we track these websites down?

I use these searches to identify content competitors for every topic cluster I research.
Here’s what I’d search for TradeGecko’s ecommerce accounting cluster.
Websites that publish a lot of content on the topic I’m investigating nearly always rank for one, if
not the majority of, these terms.

There are a few more methods you can use.

Look for blog round-ups (“best + [your head keyword] + blogs”).

They do all the hard work of scouring the internet for relevant blogs for you.

I also recommend finding the subreddit dedicated to your topic.

Look for the sites that users are sharing content from. These sites tend to be trusted authorities in
the niche.

Finally, search content curation sites like Growth Hackers, Pocket, Flipboard, and so on for your
keyword and note which domains appear multiple times.

If you can only find a few content competitors, you’re probably looking at a topic cluster with pretty
low search volume.
That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t create it, but it DOES mean it will be a smaller cluster in terms of
posts you can get out of it.
If you find TONS of content competitors, like 20 or more, you’re probably going after a topic that
can actually be split into multiple clusters.

Take “SEO.” There are hundreds of blogs dedicated to SEO. While you can, and should, create an
“SEO 101, intro to SEO” topic cluster, you’ll also want to create topic clusters around individual
SEO sub-topics—such as link-building, JavaScript and SEO, international SEO, and so forth.

Once you’ve gotten a seed list of content competitors,

you can use an SEO tool to find the domains they’re competing with.
Keep track of competitors in a spreadsheet so you can easily run this process again in 8-12
months when you’re updating/expanding a topic cluster.

We’ve provided a template you can use for this.

Not only does this make it easy to refresh or expand existing topic clusters, it’s also very useful if
you need to hand off this process to a freelancer or team member.

You can also use this list for link-building—if a website has linked to a content competitor, there’s a
good chance they’ll link to you as well if you reach out.

Look for content competitors in the specific topic cluster you’ve already selected.
Aim for five to 15.

The next step is going to your competitive analysis tool of choice and plugging in all the sites
you just found.

Here’s what we get for TradeGecko. A huge number of keywords. Way more than we could sort
through. So, I adjust the number of intersections from all to 3 or more. This means 3+ domains must
rank for a keyword for it to show up in my results. A little less than 1600. Still a lot, but much better.
I could keep playing with the keyword volume and difficulty to make the results even more curated.

Take 10 minutes or so to enter the websites you found in the last step into the tool of your
choice. As a reminder,
I recommend Ahrefs, Moz, SEMrush, or The Hoth.

Doing your keyword research

Our next step is performing actual keyword research.

I recommend treating every keyword in the competitive analysis as a potential piece of cluster
content.

Here’s how I do it.

I’ll skim the list of keywords. Once I find a promising one, I’ll open the page in a new tab.

First I’ll look at the parent topic, which is a data point unique to Ahrefs.
I look to this to see if there’s a higher-volume version of the keyword.
In this case, the parent topic is the same as the keyword I’m investigating, so the answer is “no.”
Next I check out the keyword difficulty. This isn’t a make-it-or-break metric, but it reflects the avg.
number of backlinks the top-ranking results for this keyword have. The higher the keyword
difficulty, the more backlinks you’ll need, in general, to rank.

Let’s say the keyword difficulty is medium—around 50. To get a better sense of how feasible it is for
your site to rank for this term, scroll down.
You can see which websites are ranking on page one for this query and what their domain rating is.

Suppose the lowest is 70 and the highest is 90. If your domain rating is 30, you’re going to have a
tough time ranking for this keyword.
So keep keyword difficulty in mind. It’s a good counter-balance to the monthly search volume.

Next, I’ll take a look at the keyword ideas. This section gives me a sense of how many related
keywords we’ll be able to target within the post itself.

Ahrefs also gives you the history of the search engine results page – called “SERP” for short –
for this keyword.

If the same results have been ranking for a long time, you know that
A) they match the searcher intent quite well, which means you should take cues from their
content and positioning, and
B) it’s probably going to be somewhat tough to break into these SERPs.

On the flip side, SERPs where the results have been really volatile tell you there’s potential
to meet unanswered searcher demand.

Go back to your competitive analysis and look for five or more head keywords that are good
candidates for blog posts. Don’t forget to open each in a new tab so you can come back to them.

For each blog post, there are still lots of questions to answer.

Who’s your specific audience?

Which long-tail keywords should you target?
Which terms trigger featured snippets, and what format are they in?
Should you add graphics or videos?

If you use Ahrefs, click on “having same terms” in the left-hand sidebar. Lots you can do with filters
here.
If you want to target less competitive keywords, make the keyword difficulty range from 1 to, say,
30.

Get rid of keywords that have less than 50 monthly searches or more than 200.
At 200 or more, MSV, you probably should target that keyword with its own post.)

Specify search features if you want to find opportunities to win the featured snippet or rank in
the image pack. Find longer-tail keyword opportunities by increasing the word count.
Finally, if you see a lot of irrelevant keywords in the results – brand names are a great example –
use the “include” and “exclude” filters.

If you don’t have Ahrefs, or even if you do, there’s an amazing free tool called Autocomplete API
that will take your seed keyword and give you the autofill recommendations for nearly every
variation on it.

You can also use Keywords Everywhere, which gives you related keywords and MSV right on the
SERPs. I recommend using the “export to CSV” feature.

Then you can create a spreadsheet for each topic cluster. Then import your keyword suggestions
and sort by MSV. And from here, you’re in great shape to start choosing keywords.

Finally, I highly recommend doing an incognito search for every head keyword you target.
A few things to look out for:
multimedia,
featured snippets, and
searcher intent.

What recommendations would you make based on this SERP?

Here’s what I’d take away:

First, we should try to get into the knowledge graph panel (which it seems like it’s getting
progressively easier to do). Second, frame the post as for beginners.
Third, put user flow creation into the context of design process.

Here’s how I’d give those insights to my blogging team. Very layperson-friendly.

Filling out the Search Insights Report

Finally, we’ll actually fill out the Search Insights Report.

Go back to the “Master” tab of the SIR template, if you don’t already have it up.

Take 10 minutes to write out the insights for one blog post.
I recommend using your keyword research tool and seeing what you can glean from the SERPs.
Remember, you need five things:

1. A recommended URL: short and simple is best; stay away from numbers or years.
2. A recommended title: base this off what’s ranking. If most of the results are listicles,
suggest a title like “X Strategies Every Copywriter Should Know.” Make sure your title
includes your target keyword.
3. Recommended H2s and H3s, or sections and sub-sections. These recommendations
come from the long-tail keyword research you just completed.
4. Recommended snippets. If there are any featured snippets you want to try to win,
include the relevant questions or terms here and the format of the snippet (i.e.
paragraph, list, or table.)
 5. Add any miscellaneous notes or suggestions you have here.

So here’s where we stand now.

Time for the next step: content that will attract backlinks.

I’ll get a good handle on what’s earning backlinks for each cluster by putting the head keyword
into Ahref’s content explorer.
Then I sort by “referring domains”… here’s what the results look like.
Or, you can pick a competitor, put them into Ahrefs Site Explorer, and then look at the pages with
the most links.

Want a general cheat sheet?

There are three types of content that always get backlinks:

data and research,

dissenting opinions (as long as you’re not provocative just for the sake of it), and
glossary-style,

“here’s-what-a-beginner-should- know-about-X” content.

I’d like you to add one piece of “linkbait” to your insights report.
Don’t forget to check the type of content in Column B from “blog post” to “link asset.”

Generating leads

The last step is figuring out how you’ll generate leads:

Conversion-bait.

According to HubSpot’s analysis of nearly 1,000 of our own offers, kits, templates, and ebooks
convert at the highest rate.

In general, you want to consider which tools or resources your audience would require on this
subject.
It’s not as important for this asset to rank for a keyword, since you can funnel visitors from your
high-traffic blog posts into this one.

I’ll get inspiration by doing a site search with the content competitors for this cluster.
I search specifically for pages with “download”, “template”, “ebook”, ”webinar”, etc. in their titles.
The intitle search operator is great here.

I’d like you to add one piece of “conversion-bait” to your insights report.
This could be a downloadable checklist, a free tool, an email course—anything that’s

A) related to the topic cluster and

B) valuable enough that people will want to give you their contact information in exchange for it.

Make sure you’ve changed the content type in Column D to “conversion asset.” Fill out the rest of the
row like normal.

Let’s do a quick check-in.

We’ve completely filled out one topic cluster! To continue building your SIR, you’re going to do the
same process again with a new topic cluster. It might feel like a lot of work, but trust me, the more
clusters you complete, the quicker you’ll work.

And that’s how you build your own Search Insights Report. Now, you have the tools you need to
build your own Search Insights Report and reap the rewards of an SEO-powered content strategy.
Good luck, and may the search volume be with you.