Mark Osborne's talk at Brighton SEO April 2019 The Seedy Underbelly of Keyword Research And Search Intent

2. Who The Hell Am I?
SEO Manager
@MarkSEOsborne
Real creative twitter handle right?

3. What Wonderful Agency Do I Work For?

4. What Dodgy Looking People Do I Have To Work With?

5. Why is this talk all about
the “seedy underbelly”?

6. 1. Why am I still looking in the
same unreliable sources for
keyword data?
2. There must be ways to be
better aligned to how users
are actually searching and
how the main man Mr
Google ranks websites?

9. Probably More Like This Though

10. On A Dark Journey
SAFETY
FIRST!

11. Starting With Places Where I
Can Find More Keyword
Inspiration

12. I managed to
find some
sources that
weren’t just
other
keyword tools!

17. NEXT

18. Advanced Search

23. Also found loads of
questions and topics here

25. Loads of questions,
unsurprisingly!

26. Blogs as
well

27. Topic
Spaces

28. These little guys
can help as well

30. Wade passed all the
“dank” memes

31. And there is a subreddit for
everything full of interesting
keyword opportunities

32. From This

33. /r/CrappyDesign

34. To more useful ones
like this

35. /r/PersonalFinance

36. Honorable Mentions!

37. What is the search
intent behind the
keywords?

38. SEARCH INTENT
SEO BUZZ WORD OF 2019

39. But there is a problem

40. The old search intent
model is broken. As its
to narrow for modern
searches!

41. Old model
looks
something
like this

42. So what does the best
version of search intent
stages look like for
today's searches?

43. The perfect article came
out of the our amazing
Blue Array newsletter
Suttle plug for newsletter sign ups

44. Content Harmony had
broken this down into
9 stages

45. Link Link

46. 1. Research
2. Answer
3. Transactional
4. Local
5. Visual
6. Video
7. Fresh/News
8. Branded
9. Split

47. So now we there are
more relevant stages to
intent, wonderful!

48. Kind of wonderful...

49. When deep in
the rabbit hole
of keyword
research you
can end up with
thousands of
keywords

50. And i’m way
too lazy to
assign 9
search intent
stages to
thousands of
keywords

51. Content Harmony are
working on this so keep
an eye out, but not
going to be anything for
a while :(

52. So I had to resort to
going further on this
seedy journey

53. I started looking beyond
the usual tool sets of
SEM Rush, Ahrefs, etc

54. For a tool which could
assign the intent
stages for me

55. I stumbled upon the
recently updated
Twinword Ideas tool

58. Twinword covers intent
but just not in depth
enough detail

59. It only gets
us about half
way on there!

60. So I went back
to Mr Google

61. To see how what I could
find on how Google is
deciding what ranks where
based on intent factors

62. After a bit of
digging I
found out
Google was
sharing the
information!

63. On the Google
Cloud natural
language section &
it’s FREE!
LINK

64. The magic
all
happens in
the try API
section

65. You can put any text in here and
it will give you details on how
Google is seeing the content

66. Entities is
initially quite
ugly looking and
rather unhelpful

67. Keep
scrolling
and you
get to the
good stuff

68. You can use
the sentiment
section for full
page reviews
to go in depth,
although the
best way to use
it is...

69. For featured snippets
As it shines a light on
why Google has
chosen one
You can use it to
compare your
suggestions against
the competing one

71. Syntax is also great for featured snippets, as
it shows how Google is understanding the
relationships between words

72. Sentiment is useful for
analysing important on pages
elements to compare against
competing articles
-H1,H2, H3 etc etc
-Opening paragraph
-Synopsis

73. Example:
Ranking
position 1
“Best ways
to do SEO?”

74. H1

75. Synopsis

76. H2

77. Use categories to find new
ways to group keywords

78. This is all great, but is
there a way to actually
see in practice how
intent can effect what
actually shows up in
Google’s SERPs?

79. Although i'm
fairly tired of
keywords and
intent at this
points it seems
worth exploring
more

80. Deciding there must be a
way to scrape Google’s
SERP results pages and pull
out the intent from there.
Off we go to everyone's
favorite frog...

82. Ok, second favorite

84. While searching to
see if there was a
way Screaming Frog,
could do it. I came
across an article that
explained exactly
what was needed

85. So a gold star goes to
Rory Truesdale from
Conductor for the main
steps on this -
Awesome article that
needed sharing!

86. LINK

87. These are the main steps
Ross gives

88. Generate Google search urls
EXAMPLE

89. Here is the link
to a template
that will
generate them
for you

90. You can get fancy with
the Google urls by
adding in the amount of
result you want to
scrape and different
countries, there is
more details in Ross’s
article

91. Once you have the urls for
the search terms that you
want to scrape, go to
Screaming Frog and change
the crawl mode to list

92. CHANGE SETTINGS TO:
● Configuration > Spider > Basic > Uncheck all boxes
● Configuration > Spider > Rendering > JavaScript
(from the dropdown – this is generally required to
scrape elements of a page that Google uses JS to
inject into the SERPs)
● Configuration > Speed > Max Threads = 1 (because
you don’t want Google to block your IP)
● Configuration > Speed > Limit URI/s = 1.2

93. Put in custom XPATH extractions for:
meta titles
//div/h3
meta descriptions
//ol/div/div/span
That extract TEXT

94. And Crawl Away...

95. Screaming Frog will then crawl
Google’s SERPs and pull out
the meta descriptions and
meta titles for the websites
that are rankings from position
1 and so on as specified

96. Don’t worry, you
won’t have the
same regrets as
pub crawl cat

97. Then go to
extraction all
the way down
at the bottom
of the side nav
and export the
results

98. This is where we add the
intent to all of this and
get an idea of how
Google is using intent

99. Time for
spreadsheet
number 2 link
where you
upload the
data you just
exported to

100. Ross provided a spreadsheet
which is similar to this one but
only covered 2 intent variable.
With some Regex help I’ve
expanded the sheet out to
cover up to 7 of the 9 Content
Harmony stages

101. Once data added will looks something like this

102. Automatically puts in the intent stages for the
meta descriptions and meta titles screaming frog
pulled out

103. 3 similar themed search terms Business Loans, P2P lending & Crowdfunding
Business Loans - Is more divided between Research and Transactional
Stages

104. 3 similar themed search terms Business Loans, P2P lending & Crowdfunding
Crowdfunding - Mostly Research stage

105. 3 similar themed search terms Business Loans, P2P lending & Crowdfunding
P2P lending - More Transactional on broad term but longer tail term goes more
research based

106. But how does this show how Google
interprets similar keywords
differently?

107. Well in this example...
Mainly Google classes intent as:
Business loans= Research/Transactional
Crowdfunding terms = Research
P2P lending terms = Transactional

108. Spreadsheet 2 tips:
- You can adjust Regex code with the different
modifiers depending on what you looking at
- If get stuck annoy me on twitter @MarkSEOsborne and
will help out

109. This is the end of my
“seedy” seo journey to
date :(
I’m still working on a way
to get all 9 stages into the
spreadsheet - follow me
on twitter for updates
@MarkSEOsborne

110. Sorry if it wasn’t that
seedy so here is some
tits to make up for it

112. OH! We are hiring for lots of
SEO roles if interested and
live around Reading area
www.bluearray.co.uk/jobs/

113. Will share full deck after
on Twitter

114. Thanks for listening to
me Waffle on