SEO

6 Easy Steps to Choose the Right Ones

Published

2 years ago

August 19, 2022

The success of your influencer marketing campaigns is tied to whom you collaborate with. And finding the right influencer is far from easy.

To help you, we’ve mapped out six steps you can follow to find the right influencers.

But before that, let’s understand whom you’d describe as the “right” one for your brand and why it’s so important.

Simply put, the right influencer is one whose followers are:

Authentic.
Relevant to your brand and consistently resonate with the content produced (including sponsored posts).

While it’s easy to get carried away with an influencer’s audience size, it’s important to analyze followers further to check whether they’re a right fit for your brand or not.

Failing to collaborate with the right influencer can end up burning money and hurting your brand’s reputation. Remember, today’s influencers are considered brand ambassadors.

Whether you’re looking for influencers for your very first campaign or have been through the process multiple times, it’s recommended that you don’t avoid any step. Below are six easy steps you can follow to find the right influencers.

1. Define the campaign objective and goals

The objective behind your influencer marketing campaigns and the goals you want to achieve determine which influencers and channels you should go after. Hence, it’s important to define them before starting your research.

Today, brands run influencer marketing campaigns for new product launches, promoting a sale, brand-building, and more. The goals also vary—from getting more app installs, to website visits, to impressions, to lead generation.

For example, for promoting a Christmas sale, you’ll look for Instagram influencers who promote different products on their stories, hence driving instant traffic. Remember, these goals will also help you evaluate the performance of your marketing campaign after you run it.

2. Figure out your budget

The next step is to allocate a budget for your campaign. Your budget depends on various factors, including the:

Type of influencer (mega, micro, macro, etc.) you’re collaborating with.
Number of influencers.
Niche.
Platforms you’re targeting.
Etc.

While there’s no one way to figure out the budget, you can calculate potential conversions from your campaign and accordingly allocate the budget. But this solely depends on your goal. Sometimes, brands run influencer marketing campaigns solely for brand awareness; for this, calculating ROI can be difficult.

In some cases, brands run influencer marketing campaigns to get a better ROI (when compared to paid advertisements). So you can keep that as a benchmark when calculating the budget too.

Type of influencers

The easiest way to group influencers is on the basis of their audience size. Knowing the different groups will help you plan your strategy better. Here’s the breakdown:

3. Look for influencers

A. Look for people who’ve written about your topic

A quick way to find influencers is by creating a list of people who actively produce good content in your niche. Just a few searches on Google and YouTube can help you discover popular content pieces and their authors.

However, a simpler way of finding authors is by using Ahrefs’ Content Explorer, a searchable database of ~11 billion pages. Here are steps you can follow:

1. Open the tool and search for your topic

2. Switch the search mode from “Everywhere” to “In title” for the most relevant results and then hit “search”

Switching mode in Ahrefs' Content Explorer

3. Click the “Authors” tab to see a list of top authors and the number of content pieces they authored

You can also export the list and further filter the list to find relevant influencers according to your criterion. For example, you can filter authors who have more than 10K Twitter followers.

B. Search through popular platforms

If you’re looking for influencers in a particular niche, there’s no better way than to go through the platform itself and search for relevant topics and hashtags. In addition, you can also try the below tools and strategies.

Social Blade (for YouTube)

Social Blade is a platform that tracks statistics and analytics for YouTube channels. You can easily use it to find the top YouTubers in your niche and across different regions. It also helps you narrow your search by searching your topic as a tag.

The lists of channels can be further sorted by Social Blade rank (its own influencer score), subscriber count, and video views. Social Blade’s paid tier starts at $40/per year.

List of channels and corresponding data on uploads, subs, etc., in Social Blade

Followerwonk (for Twitter)

Followerwonk is a lightweight search engine for Twitter accounts. Just drop a keyword into the search bar to find profiles matching your desired follower count, tweet frequency, account age, and “Social Authority,” which is Followerwonk’s own influencer clout score.

Followerwonk’s free tier covers 50 searches daily, which should be enough for most people. For unlimited results, upgrades go for $29–$79/month.

List of Twitter users with "CMO" in their bios found by Followerwonk

Search for sponsored hashtags (for Instagram)

One quick way to find Instagram influencers is by searching for sponsored hashtags of successful sponsored campaigns in your niche. Oftentimes, brands use a unique hashtag for all posts as part of a campaign.

trendHERO (for Instagram)

If you’re looking for a platform that helps you find, analyze, and outreach Instagram followers, then you need to try trendHERO.

List of Instagram accounts with corresponding data on account followers, engagement rate, etc., in trendHERO

Apart from the above features, there’s a fake follower and competitor analysis tool. trendHERO provides a 14-day free trial with the option to analyze one Instagram account (up to 10K followers) for free. Its paid plan starts from $10/month.

Social Blade (for TikTok)

List of TikTok accounts with corresponding data on uploads, no. of followers, etc., in Social Blade

Apart from YouTube, Social Blade also allows you to search for specific TikTok accounts and analyze their audience growth. You can look at metrics like monthly gained followers, daily follower growth, and more.

C. Leverage tools

Apart from the above list of tools that help you discover influencers, there are a few tools that can help you manage your influencer campaigns end to end, right from analyzing followers to outreach.

SparkToro

It’s one of the best tools to find influencers in your niche. You can get started by just entering what your audience frequently talks about. For every search, it lists down popular social accounts, podcasts, and websites the audience follows.

Unlike other tools that rank influencers on the basis of followers, SparkToro provides you an estimation of the percentage of audience in a particular niche following a certain account. See what Rand Fishkin, co-founder and CEO of SparkToro, had to say about the same.

Rand's post on LinkedIn explaining audience metrics

To further analyze, you can explore the social, websites, podcasts, and YouTube tabs on the left side. When searching for social media influencers, you can remove business accounts by setting the account type to individuals only.

To help you further understand the engagement and relevance of the account, the tool gives a SparkScore to each influencer.

If you’re looking for B2B influencers, you cannot go wrong with LinkedIn. It provides multiple parameters to filter your search. For example, you can filter the influencers on the basis of their industry, language, and more.

However, you may need an additional layer of filtering after exporting data from LinkedIn.

Heepsy

Heepsy is a platform that allows you to find, analyze, and organize Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch influencers. It has a database of over 11 million influencers.

It’s one of the few tools in the market that can help analyze your audience and aid in outreach too. If you’re looking to scale up your influencer marketing, you should definitely explore Heepsy.

Klear

Klear allows you to manage your influencer marketing campaigns under one roof. It not only helps you discover, analyze, and manage influencers but also communicate with and measure the impact of your influencer marketing campaigns.

4. Reverse competitor backlink research

Most influencers link back to a common URL when promoting the product/brand from their content.

For example, Skillshare, which is a popular sponsor among YouTubers, has 3,000 backlinks to its sign-up page. Just by analyzing these backlinks, you can discover potential influencers.

You can easily accomplish this using Ahrefs’ Site Explorer. Here are the steps you can follow:

Go to Site Explorer and enter the common URL on the search box with “Exact URL” selected
Click on “Backlinks” to look at all the backlinks
You can choose additional filters like DR and type of backlink (nofollow or dofollow) to further narrow your search

Backlinks report results, via Ahrefs' Site Explorer

Most of the time, influencers link to the sign-up page or the homepage. You can also set up alerts on new backlinks using Ahrefs Alerts.

5. Look for brand ambassadors proactively

A lot of the time, collaborating with brand ambassadors can have a larger impact than influencers. Unlike influencers who’ve never used your product/service before, brand ambassadors already understand the value of your product/service. Hence, they can go above and beyond when promoting it.

While discovering brand ambassadors may not be hard, as they’ll eventually reach you through email or social media, we recommend finding them proactively through the following popular methods:

1. Monitor social media for people who’ve given a shout-out to your product/service or sent you a message – To automate this process, you can leverage social media monitoring tools such as Mention.

2. Keep an eye out for reviews or mentions in the form of an article or a YouTube video – To automate the process, you can set up an alert for web mentions on Ahrefs. Just set up a new alert for mentions by adding relevant keywords and choosing how often you want to receive these updates.

3. Keep an eye on newsletter mentions in your niche – The most effective way to do this is to subscribe to all the popular newsletters.

Generally, a good practice is to keep a record of your brand ambassadors so you can reach out to them when you plan to run a new campaign.

6. Get recommendations from your audience

Sometimes, finding influencers can be as easy as putting out a social media post or email to your subscribers and asking them which influencers you should partner with.

I know this sounds too good to be true, but Ahrefs did exactly that on Twitter and was overwhelmed with responses.

Not only did it find influencers quickly, but its tweet also went viral and got hundreds of responses.

We’ll be reallocating our paid traffic budget (~$200k💰) for December away from the Google/Facebook—and into sponsoring the industry’s best creators and thought leaders.

— Ahrefs (@ahrefs) November 24, 2021

Remember, when writing the post, you need to provide enough information to your readers so that you only get relevant suggestions. For example, Ahrefs mentioned the following in the post:

Budget
Type of influencers
Channels

Also, remember to ask your readers to amplify your tweet to increase your reach.

After building your influencer list, don’t start your outreach instantly. I recommend going through an extensive vetting process. This is because the last thing you want your campaigns to reach is fake followers.

During the vetting process, you should look at metrics like:

Engagement rate – This number denotes the level of engagement generated from a piece of content. You can calculate this at a post level or an account level. For example, the average engagement rate on Instagram is 0.98% (Sprout Social).

Engagement quality – This is the percentage of real/active followers among the total engaged followers. While finding this manually is difficult, multiple tools can help you find the engagement quality for a certain account.
Growth rate – This shows the number of subscribers added by an influencer in a certain period of time. Social Blade, for example, shows the growth rate for an influencer both daily and monthly.

A lot of the tools we’ve covered above can easily help you find the above metrics. However, you can also find these metrics manually by going through the profiles. Sometimes, just a glance is enough to differentiate an authentic influencer from a fake one.

Also, remember the niche also has an impact on the engagement rate and growth. Hence, compare influencers and their engagement rate/quality only within the same niche.

Before reaching out to influencers, you should also look at the sponsorships they’ve done before and if your brand values align with theirs. If they don’t, you’re better off not collaborating with those influencers.

In a digital world, everything you publish online is reflective of your brand. One small mistake is enough to create outrage and tarnish your brand. This holds true for whom you collaborate with too. Hence, it’s important to take enough time to analyze influencers before collaborating with them.

Final thoughts

If you want to run successful influencer marketing campaigns, you need to look beyond relevancy and follower count.

Even when you have the budget to collaborate with a mega influencer, you can get a better result by collaborating with multiple micro influencers.

Hope our guide helps you find the right influencers and that it answered a few questions you had before reading this article.

Got more questions? Ping me on Twitter.

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SEO

Holistic Marketing Strategies That Drive Revenue [SaaS Case Study]

Published

11 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

14 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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