Roll up our sleeves and do the manual work

Kerstin says: “As SEOs, we all love working with tools, especially when there are new features available in our favourite tool. We love exploring new tools because they make things fast and efficient. They’re great at helping us to do things at scale. However, there are risks to consider if you purely rely on what you get from tools. For example, you might get overly obsessed with a certain score, like a health or speed score. You might then spend all of your time, effort, and budget on doing that one thing very well.

Another risk is that you might see a drop in rankings. The tool could tell you there was a Google update and encourage you to take a counterintuitive action. Also, you could end up not working on content around certain topics just because the tool says there isn’t much search volume around it. Imagine not covering something just because a tool says it’s not a good idea! It’s great to start with your tools, but then really make an effort and do manual research to look into the things that will move the needle.

Everyone uses very similar tools. If you purely stick with these it’ll be difficult to get the upper hand. You need to do the extra work. Yes, it might be time-consuming, but there’s no way around it. The same applies to link building. If you just look at everything the tools suggest you would only build links because your competitors have links there. Alternatively, you could proceed with something a bit more creative, find different opportunities and get some traction there. It’s very important to use your tools as the foundation and then really go in and do the manual work as well.”

What things are best done manually? Are you sometimes better off targeting your market rather than a particular keyword from tools?

“It’s not necessarily better to do things manually, but it is a necessary step that logically follows. When it comes to technical SEO we need to rely on tools. However, it’ll still be on you to focus on the right things and understand what the tools are telling you. For example, a tool might flag X% of your pages as not being indexed. You could assume you need to change that but they might actually turn out to be PPC landing pages that are not meant to be indexed.

Don’t just take what the tool says and implement something that might harm what you’re doing. In terms of the technical side, some tools have the classification of what’s a high priority, what’s medium, and what’s low. That’s generally a good indicator, but it might be different for your website. It might be that there’s something else that should be a priority. Use the tools for the audit, but then use your brain to look at the resources that you can work with. You can then prioritise the items on your list manually.

If you look at content, there’s also a lot you can do manually. You can use your tools to come up with initial ideas, topics, and topic clusters that can be broken down into subtopics. From there, you should take it further and think about what other content ideas are relevant. Place priority on looking at what your customers are asking. What are the questions that come up frequently? You should have a rule where, if someone asks something three times, you write an article about it.

It all depends on how many resources you have and how much time. You will see lists of competitors for your content in most of the tools, but you should spend time evaluating whether those are really your competitors and then go into search results and look at what type of content they’re producing. What formats are they using? Is it written? Do they have images, infographics, illustrations, videos, etc.? What can you do to deserve those top positions in search results? What can you do to become the best search result?

A big part of the process is looking at what is ranking, how you can make it better, and using this insight to interview your internal experts. You can also get stats from them and write the content before sending it back to your subject matter experts. They might then leave a comment you can integrate within the article or video. When advice comes from experts, it’s even more valuable. Put the time and effort into making sure you highlight people as your own internal experts. You should also create real estate around the website to highlight them as experts, show their profiles, and find opportunities to feature them on third-party platforms, news sites, and partner sites. You can spread their expertise and build their profile so that it’s more authoritative when they contribute to your content.

It starts with keyword research and looking at what topics are relevant, but it goes much further than the initial research. This applies to any part of SEO that you want to focus on.”

Regarding being the best thing on the internet for your space, what does that mean in practice?

“Manual research is all about seeing what others are doing. You have to be deserving of ranking in those top positions. You can do this by seeing what you can offer that’s unique and whether there is something you can do that’s not just a repetition of the same topic coverage that’s already out there. That’s where you can do the manual work and determine how you can make something better and more comprehensive.

There might be lots of topics already covered, perhaps with complex wording that isn’t very accessible. That’s where you can be unique: take these topics and make them more accessible to a wider audience. You can incorporate feedback from social, or from your CEO directly, to be the best thing on the internet for that given topic.”

From your experience of working with lawyers and compliance officers on getting a piece of content published, if they push back on the first piece do you push back yourself?

“It depends. If something is just misleading or factually incorrect then there’s no point in convincing anyone - because you shouldn’t do it. If you work with a tool like Slack, communication can be really fast, so things don’t take several weeks or months. If you form a good relationship with your colleagues they’ll be aware, check things, and ultimately come to you.

Sometimes there might be differences in preferences. You might want to be less out there in your marketing message or push it from a different angle, for example. Then your colleagues could say, ‘hold your horses. That might be misleading.’ It’ll require a bit of give and take, where compromise is important. You should establish a very good way of working together where there’s trust and where things aren’t flagged unnecessarily. They’ll know it’s meant to be for readers and for marketing purposes, so they should understand that, and stick to flagging the things that really need it. Luckily that won’t be too often.

If there’s no direct communication between the person reviewing and the person writing, you may or may not get a review back. This can be avoided by building really good relationships, which is easier when you have direct contact with the legal team or you’re not part of a huge corporation.”

How do you decide who your competitors actually are and then how do you go about benchmarking your performance against your competitors?

“It can be tricky if you have a wide range of products with different sets of competitors. What you need to do is look at it from different angles. You can start by going around the business and asking your sales team who they see as the biggest competitors. You can ask your product team as well. You can then perform your manual research online by looking through the internet and seeing what else is out there.

Look at tools and see if you have a topic cluster competing with you on that. Sometimes that’ll work and other times it won’t. Some tools will have difficulty picking these up because there might be only so many keywords they’re tracking. It’ll be a combination of looking at the tools, asking around the business and then doing your manual work.

You can then take a closer look at the competition - whether they’re product-related or content competitors, for example. They might not have the same offering but they might actually compete in the same content space. You can take that away and look manually at who is getting your traffic and how much of a competitor they are in terms of product and content. Then you can prioritise and benchmark them so that’s set up within your tool of choice for each area. This is great if your categories are quite different and segmented.”

What shouldn’t SEOs be doing in 2023? What’s seductive in terms of time, but ultimately counterproductive?

“We shouldn’t be following a checklist approach. We all have very good checklists and everyone loves a good checklist - they’re shared everywhere. There are so many checklists out there. We should step away from this approach, as we should with tools. Use these as the foundation, but always explore further. Always set your own goals and priorities and start working from there.”

Kerstin Reichert is the SEO and Content Lead at SeedLegals and you can find her over at seedlegals.com.