SEO

11 Best ChatGPT Alternatives To Try In 2023

Published

1 year ago

April 11, 2023

11 Best ChatGPT Alternatives To Try In 2023

Since the launch of ChatGPT, SEO professionals and creators everywhere have been trialing the AI chatbot to see how it can make life easier.

When it comes to automating tasks, creating content, and devising solutions for particular projects, ChatGPT has been extensively tested by the public.

But OpenAI isn’t the only chatbot on the block.

We now have Bard, Bing, and other ChatGPT alternatives in the AI market.

Until now, ChatGPT has been dominating headlines – but there are other ChatPGT alternatives that you can try.

What Is ChatGPT And What Can It Be Used For?

ChatGPT is a highly advanced artificial intelligence model which has the ability to interpret and utilize natural language for use in various types of applications.

The platform comes with natural language understanding capabilities, automated search and response features, and integrations with existing customer service systems.

There are a wide variety of tasks that ChatGPT can be used for, including:

Generating text content in a wide variety of flavors, from different writing styles to subject matter expertise and languages.
Figuring out solutions, answering questions or concerns, and breaking down the core components of issues.
Automating responses for chatbots. These responses can be tailored to a wide variety of circumstances.
As a developer resource tool to create landing pages and websites.
For SEO, to assist in keyword research and content ideation – and even for link suggestions.
Assisting in the heavy lifting of other SEO tasks by integrating queries in Excel with ChatGPT API.
Helping developers with code by creating complex code patterns and solutions. It’s also possible to write entire programs from scratch using ChatGPT – although if you don’t have coding knowledge, this is not recommended because doing so can cause issues where customized code is required. ChatGPT is only intended to create code to the minimal level required to achieve actual functionality.

But what if you might want to use an alternative platform to perform similar tasks in a way that lets you get away with more (or less), depending on the project you are working on?

Enter a few choice ChatGPT alternatives.

Some ChatGPT alternatives include those from Google to Bing and other platforms created for research purposes. These alternatives are rich and varied; some provide entertainment value only, allowing you to chat with specific characters who pique your interest.

In addition to these alternatives, there are AI writers and content generators that help creators generate next-level content with the help of AI technologies.

The Drawbacks Of ChatGPT

ChatGPT requires a lot of fact-checking, which can be time-consuming. If you’re working on an article, you may be better off writing it yourself if you have significant knowledge of the topic.

There are also other drawbacks to ChatGPT.

ChatGPT cannot generate real-time data. This means that it cannot monitor customer conversations in real time and identify potential issues as they arise. As a result, businesses may be unable to address customer queries and complaints quickly or effectively.

There are other ethical dilemmas for SEO professionals.

Should writers disclose to their clients that content is written with ChatGPT and not an original work? Do writers need to consider that they are passing off work that is not their own?

Another drawback for ChatGPT is that it can only work from a general frame of reference and information already on a site like Wikipedia or in its database.

If the information does not exist in its database or elsewhere, it’s impossible for ChatGPT to “learn” it because of its predictive nature. That’s why it’s important to be careful about AI claims regarding ChatGPT and its capabilities.

Despite the drawbacks, the benefits of ChatGPT in assisting creators with automating tedious tasks are significant. So long as you go in knowing about these drawbacks, you should be okay.

Just don’t expect ChatGPT to pick up everything for you where your lack of knowledge leaves off.

That is where most creators run into trouble with ChatGPT and AI-generated content: they let the application do most of the heavy lifting, when, in fact, creating factually-accurate and human-readable content is something that needs to be done with human minds.

Why Should You Use A ChatGPT Alternative?

One of the main reasons for using a ChatGPT alternative is to gain access to more advanced features.

For example, many of the alternatives offer sentiment analysis and speech recognition capabilities that can help businesses create personalized conversations with customers. This allows companies to tailor their responses based on the customer’s input and provide a more engaging experience.

Additionally, some of the alternatives include support for multiple languages and integrations with other customer service systems.

Another advantage of using a ChatGPT alternative is that it may be more cost-effective. While ChatGPT offers an impressive range of features, many businesses find that the pricing structure can be too expensive for their needs.

Alternatives often offer more flexible pricing structures and may even provide free plans for small businesses.

Some of the ChatGPT alternatives are easier to use than others. Many of them come with simple user interfaces that make it easy to get started quickly without needing any prior coding knowledge.

This can save businesses time and money by allowing them to quickly set up their virtual agent without hiring a developer.

11 ChatGPT Alternatives For 2023

Here are 11 of the best ChatGPT alternatives for anyone who is looking for a leg up on their projects:

1. Google Bard

Screenshot from Google Bard, April 2023

Google Bard is Google’s answer to ChatGPT. It is an experimental AI conversational service that’s powered by Google’s LAMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications).

The simple explanation is that Bard is another AI Chatbot that is like ChatGPT.

According to Google’s FAQ page on Bard, LAMDA has been fed trillions of words. This helps it predict responses and enables it to maintain a conversation.

But, like ChatGPT, Bard is not all-knowing. In fact, Bard showcased its extraordinary capacity to get things wrong in a Google Bard demo that caused the company’s stock to plummet by billions of dollars overnight.

So, like any chatbot, you have to be careful about some of the information that Bard produces.

2. Microsoft Bing Chat

Screenshot from Bing Chat, April 2023

Microsoft Bing’s new chat, codenamed Sydney, is making waves in the AI marketplace.

This just goes to show that Google is not the only one who is working to penetrate the AI market. Microsoft has also introduced an upgraded version of Bing, utilizing an upgraded version of ChatGPT.

Microsoft also claims that this new version is even more accurate and faster than before.

3. Jasper.ai

Screenshot from Jasper.ai, April 2023

Jasper.ai is a conversational AI platform that operates on the cloud and offers powerful natural language understanding (NLU) and dialog management capabilities.

Like ChatGPT, it can provide writing inspiration, support for creating articles, and assist marketing teams in developing effective ad copy and generating images.

Jasper.ai uses Open’s GPT-3.5 in combination with internal NLU models, and it is particularly useful for customer service, sales, and marketing-related tasks.

4. Claude

Screenshot from Claude, April 2023

Anthropic has recently launched Claude, which is a next-generation AI assistant capable of performing a wide range of conversational and text-processing tasks.

The development of Claude is based on Anthropic’s research into training AI systems to be helpful, honest, and harmless.

Claude can help with use cases such as summarization, search, creative and collaborative writing, Q&A, coding, and more.

It is available through a chat interface and API in their developer console.

Anthropic offers two versions of Claude: Claude and Claude Instant, with the latter being a lighter, less expensive, and faster option. The company has partnered with several brands, including Quora, Juni Learning, Notion, and DuckDuckGo.

5. ChatSonic

Screenshot from Chatsonic, April 2023

ChatSonic is a ChatGPT alternative with factual content-creation capabilities.

Its page claims that it is powered by Google Search, meaning it can help you potentially create content with accurate, factual information about trending topics and current events in real time.

I say “claimed” because ChatGPT is based on Open AI’s GPT-3 language model, which has only been trained on information data sets up to 2021. So it seems that claims like this could be wrong about the capabilities of such applications – unless ChatSonic has introduced a brand new process that processes current information inside its software.

And if not, it is grossly overstating what the application can do.

However, I have not tried this application, so it may have found a way around the limitations of the original GPT-3 language model.

6. NeevaAI

Screenshot from NeevaAI, April 2023

As another ChatGPT alternative, NeevaAI is a proprietary search engine that creates a unique experience that merges ChatGPT and other specific language models.

It also enhances the experience with current data and the accuracy and precision provided by the Neeva search engine.

This system has the ability to look through many millions of pages to create a thorough response that’s also appended by sources that are relevant to the project.

The company claims that NeevaAI guarantees a browsing experience that’s free of trackers and ads. It also provides references in the search results, so you can verify the source of the information.

7. YouChat

Screenshot from YouChat, April 2023

You.com has introduced YouChat, an AI search assistant that allows users to have human-like conversations right in their search results.

YouChat is a ChatGPT-like AI assistant that provides real-time data and cites sources to offer increased accuracy and relevance.

With YouChat, users can ask complex questions, solve problems using logical reasoning, learn new languages, and create content in any language.

8. Perplexity

Screenshot from Perplexity, April 2023

Perplexity AI’s conversational search engine enables users to get answers to questions on any number of topics.

It uses OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 API and, unlike ChatGPT, responds by citing sites and sources from around the web.

It also offers users follow-up questions to dive deeper into a particular topic.

9. Character.AI

Screenshot from Character.AI, April 2023

While ChatSonic has a “personas feature” built in, it’s just a feature. With Character.AI, this tool zeroes in on AI personalities entirely to provide chat-like experiences using AI characters.

You can choose from a variety of characters to chat with different types of personalities – from Mario to Tony Stark.

This is akin to the tone of voice feature that is provided in Jasper.ai, but on an entirely different level. It’s also something that’s more for entertainment rather than for real automation value.

Nevertheless, if you’re looking for an AI experience that’s different than what’s currently on the market, this is something you may be interested in.

10. Elicit

Screenshot from Elicit, April 2023

Elicit is a platform that calls itself an AI research assistant, meaning it can help assist with research and other tasks.

Its primary ability is a feature it calls Literature Review. The way this works is that when you submit a query, Elicit will provide summaries from relevant research papers and documents related to your question.

It’s very efficient in generating helpful summaries of information while prioritizing the veracity and accuracy of the source.

With Elicit, you can access a massive publication collection that is relevant to your query quickly. It also has the ability to answer research questions.

Although an excellent tool for completing research, there are some features that make other ChatGPT alternatives better for updated and more comprehensive research.

11. Learnt.ai

Screenshot from Learnt.ai, April 2023

Learnt.ai has been specifically created for the needs of education professionals.

Using the GPT language generation model, it can generate human-like text for learning objectives, icebreakers, assessment questions, and more.

It can help with the tedious tasks of manually creating lesson plans, learning objectives, and assessment questions. Automating these processes can help you save valuable time and effort.

The Future of ChatGPT And The AI Marketplace

There are so many wide-ranging applications for the use of ChatGPT that it is impossible to know them all at any given time.

New applications and processes are being released at a lightning pace, leaving creators to wonder if there is an end to the ChatGPT boom.

Some have even heralded the rise of ChatGPT as the end of SEO.

As many times as somebody has claimed that SEO is dead, they have been proven wrong. And this remains true with the arrival of ChatGPT in the marketplace.

While ChatGPT can be used for some things, it cannot replace a real SEO professional. There is still too much analysis and creativity required that a human mind can do, but ChatGPT cannot.

And those who are claiming otherwise are kidding themselves.

First of all, ChatGPT cannot write error-free content without factual errors.

If you’re writing a piece of content for a specific industry that requires specialized knowledge, you must also possess that knowledge yourself so you can verify and check that ChatGPT is actually correct.

ChatGPT cannot create more sophisticated SEO strategies.

ChatGPT cannot come up with a complete response that answers the question, “What happened to my website when the Google update hit last month?” It might create a very rough approximation based on already written articles, but it’s not going to diagnose and figure out that issue for you.

In Conclusion

There are many reasons why ChatGPT is a fantastic tool – and this author loves ChatGPT and what it can do.

I just advise creators to be cautious about more complex topics and make sure that they are not shooting themselves in the foot by relying on ChatGPT too much.

There’s such a thing as too much of a good thing.

We don’t want to get into the practice of relying on ChatGPT only to have it taken away later if regulators decide that’s the best thing to do.

SEO is definitely not dead – and ChatGPT will not be its killer.

But to keep it alive and kicking, SEO pros should stay focused on the details and committed to their work – and don’t rely too much on ChatGPT to get the job done!

More resources:

Featured Image: 13_Phunkod/Shutterstock

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SEO

Holistic Marketing Strategies That Drive Revenue [SaaS Case Study]

Published

12 hours ago

September 18, 2024

Max

Holistic Marketing Strategies That Drive Revenue [SaaS Case Study]

Brands are seeing success driving quality pipeline and revenue growth. It’s all about building an intentional customer journey, aligning sales + marketing, plus measuring ROI.

Check out this executive panel on-demand, as we show you how we do it.

With Ryann Hogan, senior demand generation manager at CallRail, and our very own Heather Campbell and Jessica Cromwell, we chatted about driving demand, lead gen, revenue, and proper attribution.

This B2B leadership forum provided insights you can use in your strategy tomorrow, like:

The importance of the customer journey, and the keys to matching content to your ideal personas.
How to align marketing and sales efforts to guide leads through an effective journey to conversion.
Methods to measure ROI and determine if your strategies are delivering results.

While the case study is SaaS, these strategies are for any brand.

Watch on-demand and be part of the conversation.

Join Us For Our Next Webinar!

Navigating SERP Complexity: How to Leverage Search Intent for SEO

Join us live as we break down all of these complexities and reveal how to identify valuable opportunities in your space. We’ll show you how to tap into the searcher’s motivation behind each query (and how Google responds to it in kind).

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SEO

What Marketers Need to Learn From Hunter S. Thompson

Published

15 hours ago

September 17, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

What Marketers Need to Learn From Hunter S. Thompson

We’ve passed the high-water mark of content marketing—at least, content marketing in its current form.

After thirteen years in content marketing, I think it’s fair to say that most of the content on company blogs was created by people with zero firsthand experience of their subject matter. We have built a profession of armchair commentators, a class of marketers who exist almost entirely in a world of theory and abstraction.

I count myself among their number. I have hundreds of bylines about subfloor moisture management, information security, SaaS pricing models, agency resource management. I am an expert in none of these topics.

This has been the happy reality of content marketing for over a decade, a natural consequence of the incentives created by early Google Search. Historically, being a great content marketer required precisely no subject matter expertise. It was enough to read widely and write quickly.

Mountains of organic traffic have been built on the backs of armchair commentators like myself. Time spent doing deep, detailed research was, generally speaking, wasted, because 80% of the returns came from simply shuffling other people’s ideas around and slapping a few keyword-targeted H2s in the right places.

But this doesn’t work today.

For all of its flaws, generative AI is an excellent, truly world-class armchair commentator. If the job-to-be-done is reading a dozen articles and how-to’s and turning them into something semi-original and fairly coherent, AI really is the best tool for the job. Humans cannot out-copycat generative AI.

Put another way, the role of the content marketer as a curator has been rendered obsolete. So where do we go from here?

“The only way to write honestly about the scene is to be part of it.”
—Hunter S. Thompson, Hell’s Angels

Hunter S. Thompson popularised the idea of gonzo journalism, “a style of journalism that is written without claims of objectivity, often including the reporter as part of the story using a first-person narrative.”

In other words, Hunter was the story.

When asked to cover the rising phenomenon of the Hell’s Angels, he became a Hell’s Angel. During his coverage of the ‘72 presidential campaign, he openly supported his preferred candidate, George McGovern, and actively disparaged Richard Nixon. His chronicle of the Kentucky Derby focused almost entirely on his own debauchery and chaos-making—a story that has outlasted any factual account of the race itself.

In the same vein, content marketers today need to become their stories.

It’s a content marketing truism that it’s unreasonable to expect writers to become experts. There’s a superficial level of truth to that claim—no content marketer can acquire a decade’s worth of experience in a few days or weeks—but there are great benefits awaiting any company willing to challenge that truism very, very seriously.

As Thompson proved, short, intense periods of firsthand experience can yield incredible insights and stories. So what would happen if you radically reduced your content output and dedicated half of your content team’s time to research and experimentation? If their job was doing things worth writing about, instead of just writing? If skin-in-the-game, no matter how small, was a prerequisite of the role?

We’re already seeing this shift.

“The closest analogy to the ideal would be a film director/producer who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least a main character.”
—Hunter S. Thompson, The Great Shark Hunt

Every week, I see more companies hiring marketers who are true, bonafide subject matter experts (I include the Ahrefs content team here—for the majority of our team, “writing” is a skill secondary to a decade of hands-on search and marketing experience). They are expensive, hard to find, and in the era of AI, worth every cent.

I see a growing expectation that marketers will document their experiences and experiments on social media, creating meta-content that often outperforms the “real” content. I see more companies willing to share subjective experiences and stories, and avoid competing solely on the sharing of objective, factual information. I see companies spending money to promote the personal brands of in-house creators, actively encouraging parasocial relationships as their corporate brand accounts lay dormant.

These are ideas that made no sense in the old model of content marketing, but they make much more sense today. This level of effort is fast becoming the only way to gain any kind of moat, creating material that doesn’t already exist on a dozen other company blogs.

In the era of information abundance, our need for information is relatively easy to sate; but we have a near-limitless hunger for entertainment, and personal interaction, and weird, pattern-interrupting experiences.

Gonzo content marketing can deliver.

“But what was the story? Nobody had bothered to say. So we would have to drum it up on our own.”
—Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

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SEO

I Got 129.7% More Traffic With Related Keywords

Published

21 hours ago

September 17, 2024

Entireweb News Bot

I Got 129.7% More Traffic With Related Keywords

A few weeks ago, I optimized one of my blog posts for related keywords. Today, it gets an estimated 2,300 more monthly organic visits:

In this post, I’ll show you how I found and optimized my post for these related keywords.

Related keywords are words and phrases closely linked to your main keyword. There are many ways to find them. You can even just ask ChatGPT.

ChatGPT can find related keywords... but I wouldn't recommend using it for this

But here’s the thing: These keywords aren’t useful for optimizing content.

If more traffic is your goal, you need to find keywords that represent subtopics—not just any related ones.

Think of it like this: you improve a recipe by adding the right ingredients, not everything in your fridge!

Not all related keywords are created equal when it comes to optimization

Below are two methods for finding the right related keywords (including the one I used):

Method 1. Use content optimization tools

Content optimization tools look for keywords on other top-ranking pages but not yours. They usually then recommend adding these keywords to your content a certain number of times.

Example recommendation from a content optimization tool

These tools can be useful if you take their recommendations with a pinch of salt, as some of them can lead you astray.

For example, this tool recommends that I add six mentions of the phrase “favorite features” to our keyword research guide.

Example of how these tools can lead you astray

Does that seem like an important related keyword to you? It certainly doesn’t to me!

They also usually have a content score that increases as you add the recommended related keywords. This can trick you into believing that something is important when it probably isn’t—especially as content scores have a weak correlation with rankings.

From our study on content score ranking correlations

My advice? If you’re going to use these tools, apply common sense and look for recommendations that seem to represent important subtopics.

For example, when I analyze our content audit guide, it suggests adding quite a few keywords related to content quality.

This is something we should definitely improve!

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that this is an extremely important consideration for a content audit—yet our guide mentions nothing about it.

This is a huge oversight and definitely a batch of related keywords worth optimizing for.

Try the beta version of our new AI Content Helper!

Instead of counting terms that you need to include in your content, Content Helper uses AI to identify the core topics for your target keywords and scores your content (as well as your competitors) against those topics as you write it. In effect, it groups related keywords by subtopic, making it easier to optimize for the broader picture.

For example, it looks like my post doesn’t cover Google Business Profile optimization too well. This is something it might be worth going into more detail about.

Method 2. Do a keyword gap analysis (this is the method I used!)

Keyword gaps are when competitors rank for keywords you don’t. If you do this analysis at the page level, it’ll uncover related keywords—some of which will usually represent subtopics.

If possible, I recommend doing this for pages that already rank on the first page for their main target keyword. These pages are doing well already and likely just need a bit of a push to rank high and for more related keywords. You can find these in Site Explorer:

Enter your domain
Go to the Organic Keywords report
Filter for positions 2-10
Look for the main keywords you’re targeting

How to find the best pages to optimize for related keywords

Once you have a few contenders, here’s how to do a keyword gap analysis:

a) Find competitors who are beating you

In the Organic Keywords report, hit the SERP dropdown next to the keyword to see the current top-ranking pages. Look for similar pages that are getting more traffic than yours and have fewer referring domains.

For example, our page ranks #10 for “local SEO,” has 909 referring domains, and gets an estimated 813 monthly visits:

Estimated traffic and referring domain stats for our page

All of these competing pages get more traffic with fewer backlinks:

Competitors with fewer links getting more traffic

Sidenote.

I’m going to exclude the page from Moz going forward as it’s a blog category page. That’s very different to ours so it’s probably not worth including in our analysis.

b) Send them to the content gap tool

Hit the check boxes next to your competitors, then click “Open In” and choose Content gap.

By default, this will show you keywords where one or more competitors rank in the top 10, but you don’t rank anywhere in the top 100.

I recommend changing this so it shows all keywords competitors rank for, even if you also rank for them. This is because you may still be able to better optimize for related keywords you already rank for.

I also recommend turning the “Main results only” filter on to exclude rankings in sitelinks and other SERP features:

c) Look for related keywords worth optimizing for

This is where common sense comes into play. Your task is to scan the list for related keywords that could represent important subtopics.

For example, keywords like these aren’t particularly useful because they’re just different ways of searching for the main topic of local SEO:

These are just different ways of searching for the same thing, not "related keywords"

But a related keyword like “what is local SEO” is useful because it represents a subtopic searchers are looking for:

If this process feels too much like trying to find a needle in a haystack, try exporting the full list of keywords, pasting them into Keywords Explorer, and going to the “Cluster by terms” report. As the name suggests, this groups keywords into clusters by common terms:

This is useful because it can highlight common themes among related keywords and helps you to spot broader gaps.

For example, when I was looking for related keywords for our SEO pricing guide (more on this later!), I saw 17 related keywords containing the term “month”:

Term clustering reveals that lots of people are searching for monthly SEO pricing in different ways

Upon checking the keywords, I noticed that they’re all ways of searching for how much SEO costs per month:

This is an easy batch of related keywords to optimize for. All I need to do is answer that question in the post.

If you’re still struggling to spot good related keywords, look for ones sending competing pages way more traffic than you. This usually happens because competitors’ pages are better optimized for those terms.

You can spot these in the content gap report by comparing the traffic columns.

For example, every competing page is getting more traffic than us for the keyword “how much does SEO cost”—and Forbes is getting over 300 more visits!

Now you have a bunch of related keywords, what should you do with them?

This is a nuanced process, so I’m going to show you exactly how I did it for our local SEO guide. Its estimated organic traffic grew by 135% after my optimizations for related keywords:

Results of related keyword optimization: 129.7% more traffic

Sidenote.

Google kindly rolled out a Core update the day after I did these optimizations, so there’s always a chance the traffic increase is unrelated. That said, traffic to our blog as a whole stayed pretty consistent after the update, while this post’s traffic grew massively. I’m pretty sure the related keyword optimization is what caused this.

Here are the related keywords I optimized it for and how:

Related keyword 1: “What is local SEO”

Every competing page was getting significantly more traffic than us for this keyword (and ranking significantly higher). One page was even getting an estimated 457 more visits than ours per month:

Competitors were getting significantly more traffic than us for this keyword

People were also searching for this in a bunch of different ways:

People are searching for the subtopic in a bunch of different ways too

My theory on why we weren’t performing well for this? Although we did have a definition on the page, it wasn’t great. It was also buried under a H3 with a lot of fluff to read before you get to it.

Our guide is full of fluff before getting to what people want to know!

I tried to solve this by getting rid of the fluff, improving the definition (with a little help from ChatGPT), and moving it under a H2.

Result? The page jumped multiple positions for the keyword “what is local SEO” and a few other similar related keywords:

Result = higher rankings for this keyword and variations

Related keyword 2: Local SEO strategy

Once again, all competing pages were getting more traffic than ours from this keyword.

I feel like the issue here may be that there’s no mention of “strategy” in our post, whereas competitors mention it multiple times.

To solve this, I added a short section about local SEO strategy.

I also asked ChatGPT to add “strategy” to the definition of local SEO. (I’m probably clutching at straws with this one, but it reads nicely with the addition, so… why not?)

Result? The page jumped seven positions from the bottom of page two to page one for the related keyword:

Related keyword 3: “How to do local SEO”

Most of the competing pages were getting more traffic than us for this keyword—albeit not a lot.

However, I also noticed Google shows this keyword in the “things to know” section when you search for local SEO—so it seems pretty important.

Google seems to indicate the importance of this subtopic

I’d also imagine that anyone searching for local SEO wants to know how to do it.

Unfortunately, although our guide does show you how to do local SEO, it’s kind of buried in a bunch of uninspiring chapters. There’s no obvious “how to do it” subheading for readers (or Google) to skim, so you have to read between the lines to figure out the “how.”

Again, the information is unnecessarily buried in our guide

In an attempt to solve this, I restructured the content into steps and put it under a new H2 titled “How to do local SEO”:

This looks much better after restructuring!

Result? Position #7 → #4

No. Nothing in SEO is guaranteed, and this is no different.

In fact, I optimized our SEO pricing guide for related keywords on the same day, and—although traffic did improve—it only improved by around 23%:

23% traffic improvement to our SEO pricing guide

Sidenote.

You might have noticed the results were a bit delayed here. I think this is because the keywords the post ranks for aren’t so popular, so they’re not updated as often in Ahrefs.

For full transparency, here’s every related keyword I optimized the post for and the results:

Related keyword 1: “How much does SEO cost”

Each competing page got more traffic than ours from this keyword, with one getting an estimated 317 more monthly visits:

When I clustered the keywords by terms in Keywords Explorer, I also saw ~70 keywords containing the word “much” (this was around 19% of all keywords in the Content Gap report!):

Lots of searches for keywords containing "much"

These were all different ways of searching for how much SEO costs:

The issue here appears to be that although we do answer the question on the page, it’s quite buried. There’s no obvious subheading with the answer below it, making it hard for searchers (and possibly Google) to skim and find what they’re looking for:

To solve this, I added a H2 titled “How much does SEO cost?” and added a direct answer below.

Result? No change in rankings for the related keyword itself, but the page did win a few snippets for longer-tail variations thanks to the copy I added:

Example featured snippet won thanks to the new section

Related keyword 2: “SEO cost per month”

Nearly all competing pages were getting more traffic than us for this keyword, with one getting an estimated 72 monthly visits more than more us.

The term clustering report in Keywords Explorer also showed that people are searching for the monthly cost of SEO in different ways:

Lots of searches for keywords containing "month"

This is not the case for hourly or retainer pricing; there are virtually no searches for this.

I think we’re not ranking for this because we haven’t prioritized this information on the page. The first subheading is all about hourly pricing, which nobody cares about. Monthly pricing data is buried below that.

Example of me burying important information yet again :(

To fix this, I moved the data on monthly pricing further up the page and wrote a more descriptive subheading (“Monthly retainer pricing” →“Monthly retainer pricing: How much does SEO cost per month?”).

I also changed the key takeaways in the intro to focus more on monthly pricing, as this is clearly what people care about. Plus, I simplified it and made it more prominent so searchers can find the information they’re actually looking for faster.

Result? The page won the featured snippet for this related keyword and a few other variations:

Related keyword 3: “Local SEO pricing”

I found this one in the term clustering report in Keywords Explorer, as 16 keywords contained the term “local.”

Lots of people are searching for local SEO pricing in various ways

Upon further inspection, I realized these were all different ways of searching for the cost of local SEO services.

I think the problem here is although our post has some data on local SEO pricing, it doesn’t have the snappy figure searchers are likely looking for. Plus, even the information we did have was buried deep on the page.

So… I actually pulled new statistics from the data we collected for the post, then put them under a new H3 titled “How much does local SEO cost?”

Result? Small but notable improvements for this keyword and a few other variations:

Results = improved rankings across many related keywords

Related keyword 4: “How much does SEO cost for a small business”

I saw that one competing page was getting an estimated 105 more monthly organic visits than us from this term.

When clustering by terms in Keywords Explorer, I also saw a cluster of nine keywords containing the word “small.” These were all different ways of searching for small business SEO pricing:

Lots of people searching for small business SEO pricing in various ways

Once again, the issue here is clear: the information people are looking for isn’t on the page. There’s not even a mention of small businesses.

This is good as it means the solution is simple: add an answer to the page. I did this and put it under a new H3 titled “How much does SEO cost for small businesses?”

Result? #15 → #5 for this related keyword, and notable improvements for a few other variations:

Results = improved rankings for many related keywords

Related keyword 5: “SEO pricing models”

This related keyword probably isn’t that important, but I spotted it looking through the Content gap report and thought it’d be pretty easy to optimize for.

All I did was create a new H2 titled “SEO pricing models: a deeper breakdown of costs.” I then briefly explained the three common pricing models under this and re-jigged and nested the rest of the content from the page under there.

New section I added, with existing content nested within

Result? #5 → #1:

Final thoughts

Related keyword optimization isn’t about shoehorning a bunch of keyword variations into your content. Google is smart enough to know that things like “SEO” and “search engine optimization” mean the same thing.

Instead, look for keywords that represent subtopics and make sure you’re covering them well. This might involve adding a new section or reformatting an existing section for more clarity.

This is easy to do. It took me around 2-3 hours per page.

Got questions? Ping me on X or LinkedIn.

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