SEO
15 Project Management Tools For SEO Professionals
Search engine optimization is complex.
Between changes to search algorithms, new keywords, and strategic changes made by competitors, the field is in a constant state of flux.
If you’re like most SEO pros, at any given time, you’re juggling numerous projects, plans, and tasks.
Just staying organized can feel like a full-time job in itself.
Luckily, you can put technology to work for you in the form of project management (PM) tools.
Why SEO Professionals Need Project Management Tools
If you’re already using a project management platform, you undoubtedly recognize the benefits it provides for busy digital marketers and web teams.
If you’re still getting by without one, you should get one as soon as possible. Why you ask?
Because it can uncomplicate your life and help you get more done in less time.
Some of the essential functions a good project management platform provides for SEO professionals are:
- Accurate planning. From a bird’s eye view of all your campaigns to detailed information on how a specific keyword performs, SEO project management software allows you to create structured plans.
- Task and time management. Whether you’re working solo or as part of a team, PM tools allow you to assign tasks and receive notifications about them, so you can more accurately work hours. This can also be used to generate accurate invoices for your clients.
- Resource allocation. An SEO PM software will give you at-a-glance information about where your budget and resources are going. Useful for SEO, it’s also extremely helpful if you’re also running pay-per-click ads.
- Reporting. Most modern PM platforms offer robust reporting features and dashboards, so you can generate and analyze data to improve efficiency.
It’s easy to see why so many SEO professionals have turned to PM platforms to help them stay organized and productive, but there are a lot of options.
How do you know which one is right for you and your team?
We’ve compiled a list of some of the top ones. Below, you’ll find our choices for the 15 best PM tools with a brief overview of each, including pros and cons.
Our Top 15 Project Management Platforms For SEO
1. Asana
The PM platform used by Search Engine Journal, Asana is a personal favourite.
This cloud-based platform provides a virtual workspace from which your team and various stakeholders can collaborate.
It’s useful for SEO and digital marketing because it allows you to clearly set and manage strategies, goals, tasks, and expectations.
Why It’s Good For SEO:
- Task management: Using the forms feature, you can create standard workflows customized to your SEO processes.
- Automated workflow: Rules-based automation can replace tedious manual tasks.
- Reporting features: Asana has dashboards, charts, and graphs with real-time reporting, so you can get a high-level view or dive into the details.
- Free for up to 15 users: Asana has a free tier that can be used by teams of 15 or less. It includes unlimited tasks, messages, projects, and 100MB of storage for each user.
- Integrations: Asana plays nice with more than 100 other apps and platforms, including Microsoft Office, Dropbox, and Salesforce.
Potential Drawbacks For SEO:
- Unintuitive design: If you’ve never used Asana before, it can be a little challenging to figure out. However, once you’ve mastered the learning curve, it’s quite easy to use.
- No time tracking functionality: There is no built-in time tracking functionality in this platform. This can cause complications in billing clients or resource allocation.
- Not ideal for small teams: With a range of advanced features and capabilities, it can be overwhelming for small teams or limited SEO projects.
2. Monday.com
Garfield may hate Mondays, but SEO professionals who use Monday.com for project management sure don’t.
With an operating system that can be customized to your preferred workflow, it’s a great choice for smaller SEO teams looking for a tool to help them stay on track.
Why It’s Good For SEO:
- Clean user interface: Monday.com has a clean interface that allows you to customize your dashboard and extend data in columns. You can easily get multiple views of an SEO project including calendars, Kanban boards, and collateral.
- Templates: Monday.com has many templates to choose from, so you will likely find one that matches your workflow.
- Notifications and communication: This platform streamlines team communication. Team members can leave comments on tasks or documents and stakeholders can be notified via email.
Potential Drawbacks For SEO:
- Steep learning curve: Like many PM platforms, it can be challenging to get the hang of Monday.com. Bigger tasks with more communication can begin to get a bit unwieldy.
- Slow dashboard loading: It can take some time for your Monday.com dashboard to load, particularly on larger projects where a lot of data has to be transferred from its servers to your computer.
- Client licenses not included: If you want to invite clients to participate in your workspace, you will need to buy a license for them.
3. GanttPro
For more than a century, PM professionals have been using Gantt Charts to track their project schedules.
GanttPro is a web-based PM solution based around these visual trackers.
Why It’s Good For SEO:
- Readily understandable: You don’t have to have a project management certificate to track tasks with GanttPro. It gives you status information in an easy-to-understand visual format.
- Undo functionality: A simple mistake doesn’t have to derail your project because this tool saves your history and lets you undo actions with CTRL + Z.
- Customizable fields: You can create custom fields for every task.
Potential Drawbacks For SEO:
- Not as many integrations: Unlike other PM platforms, GanttPro is light on integrations with other apps.
- No billing or invoicing tools: You will need an outside program to generate invoices for your SEO services.
- Manual date input: Changing dates for benchmarks and project completion must be input manually, which some users find tedious.
4. Trello
One of the most popular platforms for project management, Trello uses boards, lists, and cards to help keep you organized.
With a free basic plan, it is useful for SEO teams of all sizes.
Why It’s Good For SEO:
- Free basic plan: Your entire team can try Trello for free. If you like it, there are premium plans available that add integrations, automation, and other functionality.
- Intuitive Kanban boards: Trello’s drag-and-drop card system makes it easy to track the status of any project.
- Useful for campaigns of all sizes: Trello works just as well for huge, complex campaigns as it does for simple projects.
Potential Drawbacks For SEO:
- Kanban-reliant: If you don’t like to use Kanban boards, this is not the PM tool for you, as most of its functionality is built around them.
- Upload sizes limited: Trello restricts free users to 10 MB of online storage and paid users to 250 MB. For most SEO teams this probably won’t be a problem, but you may differ.
- Timeline relationships are not always clear: Trello does not allow users to manipulate relationships for a better understanding of how they work together.
5. Teamwork
Another Kanban-based PM tool, Teamwork offers a drag-and-drop interface with more advanced reporting features.
Teamwork lets you create custom branding accounts, which is useful if you’re working on more than one client.
Why It’s Good For SEO:
- Unlimited users: You can add any number of users to a single task.
- Clear vision of scope: Teamwork’s board view makes it easy to understand what is going on with each project.
- Repeating tasks: Teamwork lets you simply copy any task, which is especially useful for SEO professionals.
Potential Drawbacks For SEO:
- Can be overwhelming: The upside is Teamwork has a lot of features. The downside is all those features can get confusing, especially when you’re a new user.
- No in-platform chat functionality: You’ll need to use an outside app to “chat” with your team and/or stakeholders.
6. Zoho Projects
A cloud-based platform, Zoho Projects provides the functionality you need to manage several SEO projects at once.
You can choose from a limited free version with basic features and four premium plans with different features and user caps.
Why It’s Good For SEO:
- Communication tools: Zoho Project has real-time chat and forum pages, so you can quickly and easily share information with your team.
- Timekeeping: If you bill your SEO clients by the hour, this platform is a good choice because it has excellent time tracking functionality.
- At-a-glance-info: Zoho makes it easy to spot delays, lags, and bottlenecks.
Potential Drawbacks For SEO:
- Features can be overwhelming: Because it offers so much functionality, some users may be intimidated by this PM platform. It also has a steeper learning curve.
- Inflexible: It can be difficult to customize projects to your needs with this platform.
7. Wrike
Wrike can help you simplify planning while keeping your SEO projects on track.
Customizable workflows and ample communication options help you reduce emails, meetings and status updates.
Why It’s Good For SEO:
- Task prioritization: With Wrike, you can push critical tasks to the front to make sure you don’t miss deadlines.
- Natural workflow: Wrike is structured in a way most people will find logical and easy to use.
- Advanced features: Functionality for task management, Gantt charts and real-time newsfeed is built-in.
Potential Drawbacks For SEO:
- Pricier than some options: There is a free version available with limited functionality, but premium plans with more functions are more expensive than other PM tools.
- Difficult onboarding new users: Adding new users and assigning tasks to them must be done manually, which can be time-consuming.
- Can be difficult to navigate: Users who are unfamiliar with Wrike may have difficulty navigating projects.
8. Smartsheet
With project and work management tools, Smartsheet is an online work execution platform that allows you to automate tasks and generate real-time visuals, including Gantt charts and dashboards.
Why It’s Good For SEO:
- Robust communication and collaboration: Smartsheet makes it easy to create and implement communication plans.
- Adding tasks and dependencies: Smartsheet has an intuitive design that allows you to add tasks and dependencies with ease.
- Custom dashboards: Set up your dash to display the information you want.
Potential Drawbacks For SEO:
- Doesn’t support detailed documents: Users are only allowed to upload 10 documents per ticket, which can be troublesome for highly specific campaigns.
- May be too simple for larger teams: If you’re overseeing a big team with many stakeholders, you may find this platform doesn’t include all the functionality you want.
9. Celoxis
Designed to be an all-in-one PM platform for enterprise-level organizations, Celoxis has nearly all the functionality an SEO professional could ever want.
It has high-level visibility and numerous reports, to help your campaigns stay on track and on budget.
Why It’s Good For SEO:
- Easy to use: Celoxis gives you the tools to dive deep into a project, without sacrificing usability. It’s also easy to set up.
- Includes time tracking, resource management, and budgeting: It also has ample reporting features to keep you on track.
- Good value: Celoxis offers the functionality of a top-tier PM platform at the price point of a mid-tier one.
Potential Drawbacks For SEO:
- No billing or invoicing functionality: You will have to use an outside program to bill your clients.
- No free version: If you’re looking for a free-to-use PM platform for your SEO team, this isn’t it.
10. ProofHub
ProofHub doesn’t have as many features as some other PM platforms, but it’s still a good fit for SEO.
It provides a centralized hub for task lists, workflows, calendars, and documents.
Why It’s Good For SEO:
- All the tools you need: ProofHub gives you everything you need for SEO planning, team collaboration, and management.
- Unlimited users: You can add as many people to the platform as you need.
- Communication: All discussions can be centralized in one place thanks to built-in chat and document sharing features.
Potential Drawbacks For SEO:
- Recurring tasks must be entered manually: ProofHub does not provide you with the option to repeat tasks.
- No budgeting: You will need to use a third-party platform to oversee budgeting for your SEO tasks.
11. ClickUp
ClickUp is a cloud-based platform that combines centralized company information and business tools in one place.
It allows you to create and manage to-do lists, workflows, and schedules in a variety of formats.
Why It’s Good For SEO:
- Easy to use: ClickUp has a short learning curve, meaning you and your team can start benefiting from it faster.
- Multiple views: Track your campaigns via a list, board, calendar, and workload view, among others.
- Perfect balance of functions and ease of use: ClickUp falls in the Goldilocks zone by including the features you want without the complexity.
Potential Drawbacks For SEO:
- Navigation can be confusing: The differences between tabs is subtle.
- Implementation can require significant planning: Because it’s highly customizable, you may have to systematically plan workflows to maximize ClickUp’s benefits.
12. Forecast
With Forecast, you can put all your SEO projects, resources, and budgeting in one convenient tool.
An AI-native platform can significantly reduce your administrative workload.
Why It’s Good For SEO:
- Easily track the lifecycle of projects: You can assign and allocate tasks and budget for your entire SEO PM operation through this platform.
- Schedule visualization: You can get information on a team member’s workload at a glance.
- Gathering data is easy: Want to compare a current campaign to an old one? Forecast makes it easy to pull data.
Potential Drawbacks For SEO:
- Updating time and task entries can be tedious: Manual entry can be a time-consuming process.
- Not ideal for larger teams: Visualization elements can be overwhelming if you have a lot of people working under you.
13. Adobe Workfront
Adobe’s solution for project management needs, Workfront is configurable to your needs and includes extensive integrations, so you can easily track the latest developments in your SEO projects.
Why It’s Good For SEO:
- Well-designed user interface: Workfront is easy to use and visually appealing.
- Real-time information: It keeps you abreast of any status changes.
- Good transparency: This platform helps eliminate confusion about who is supposed to do what, as stakeholders and project scope are easily visible.
Potential Drawbacks For SEO:
- Lengthy setup process: A high level of customization means Workfront requires a more in-depth initial setup.
- May offer too much detail: With Workfront, you can get as granular into tasks as you like, which may lead to some people becoming lost in the details.
- Finding tasks can be difficult: If you don’t know what project a task is assigned to, it can be difficult to locate.
14. WorkOtter
With WorkOtter, you can plan resources for your SEO campaigns at a project, rather than task level.
One of the easiest PM platforms to use, it’s an excellent choice for SEO work.
Why It’s Good For SEO:
- Very easy to use: You don’t have to be a tech wiz to use WorkOtter for SEO project management.
- Good communication and reporting tools: Real-time information keeps your entire team on the same page.
- Good for resource management: This platform is useful for deciding exactly where your SEO resources will be allocated.
Potential Drawbacks For SEO:
- Cloud-only: There is no local version available, which can be problematic if you are trying to work offline.
- English-only support: This may present challenges for non-native English speakers.
15. PSOHub
This versatile PM platform is as useful for SEO teams as it is for architect firms or financial companies.
It has predictive project management to allow you to more accurately project how your SEO campaigns will run.
Why It’s Good For SEO:
- Excellent time tracking functionality: PSOHub is one of the best platforms for tracking where your team’s time is going, on both group and individual levels.
- CRM Integrations: This platform integrates with Hubspot and other CRMs, so you can track your SEO campaigns alongside email initiatives.
- Flexible reporting: PSOHub lets you choose the data you want to include in reports.
Potential Drawbacks For SEO:
- Time-consuming setup process: It can take some time to manually enter all your campaigns and tasks into this platform.
- All users must have the same license level: You cannot have some users on a basic level and others on a more complex one.
How To Pick The Right PM Tool For Your SEO Needs
We’ve given you 15 different project management options that can work for your needs as an SEO professional. But how do you pick the right one for you?
It all comes down to your specific needs. Any of these platforms will help you streamline your operations, manage campaigns more effectively, and eliminate wasted time. But each of them has slightly different functionality.
It’s up to you to decide what will work best for your needs. But hopefully, by this point, we’ve given you enough information to get started.
Featured Image: Paulo Bobita/Search Engine Journal
![Holistic Marketing Strategies That Drive Revenue [SaaS Case Study]](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Holistic-Marketing-Strategies-That-Drive-Revenue-SaaS-Case-Study-400x240.png "Holistic Marketing Strategies That Drive Revenue [SaaS Case Study]")
![Holistic Marketing Strategies That Drive Revenue [SaaS Case Study]](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Holistic-Marketing-Strategies-That-Drive-Revenue-SaaS-Case-Study-80x80.png "Holistic Marketing Strategies That Drive Revenue [SaaS Case Study]")
SEO
Holistic Marketing Strategies That Drive Revenue [SaaS Case Study]
![Holistic Marketing Strategies That Drive Revenue [SaaS Case Study]](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Holistic-Marketing-Strategies-That-Drive-Revenue-SaaS-Case-Study.png "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).
SEO
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?
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.
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.
SEO
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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:
All of these competing pages get more traffic with fewer backlinks:
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:
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”:
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:
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:
People were also searching for this in a bunch of different ways:
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.
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:
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.
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.”
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”:
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%:
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!):
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:
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:
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.
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.”
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:
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:
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:
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.
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.
Daily Search Forum Recap: September 11, 2024
14 Tools for Creating and Selling Digital Products (Expert Pick)
Daily Search Forum Recap: September 12, 2024
How to Connect Your WordPress Site to the Fediverse – WordPress.com News
Google Warns About Misuse of Its Indexing API
Daily Search Forum Recap: September 13, 2024
OpenAI Claims New “o1” Model Can Reason Like A Human
How to Build a Fandom by Talent-Scouting Great Content
![SEO Experts Gather for a Candid Chat About Search [Podcast]](https://articles.entireweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/SEO-Experts-Gather-for-a-Candid-Chat-About-Search-Podcast-80x80.png "SEO Experts Gather for a Candid Chat About Search [Podcast]")
SEO Experts Gather for a Candid Chat About Search [Podcast]
Stop Overcomplicating Things. Entity SEO is Just SEO
-
SEARCHENGINES7 days ago
Daily Search Forum Recap: September 11, 2024
-
WORDPRESS7 days ago14 Tools for Creating and Selling Digital Products (Expert Pick)
-
SEARCHENGINES6 days ago
Daily Search Forum Recap: September 12, 2024
-
WORDPRESS5 days agoHow to Connect Your WordPress Site to the Fediverse – WordPress.com News
-
GOOGLE6 days agoGoogle Warns About Misuse of Its Indexing API
-
SEARCHENGINES5 days ago
Daily Search Forum Recap: September 13, 2024
-
SEO6 days agoOpenAI Claims New “o1” Model Can Reason Like A Human
-
SEO6 days agoHow to Build a Fandom by Talent-Scouting Great Content
You must be logged in to post a comment Login