I hope you've had a great weekend - I spent mine playing PJ Masks with my younger daughter, working on
a new spoon carving woodworking project, and organizing our agency's upcoming "SEO week" here at SEOLeverage™️. It's Sunday evening here, and I'm already looking forward to see 18 well-rested team members tomorrow again on the Monday call 😉
Last Friday, I had the pleasure to speak to Dan Wardrope from Flexxable on his Facebook group's webinar about how to use SEO to create a brand website in the pay per lead space.
The audience was great, we got great questions, and one of the topics that came up in the webinar was research.
I honestly believe that, what sets successful SEO campaigns apart, is the ongoing focus on research: content, keywords, competitors, technical on-site SEO, target group, etc.
Research is so important that we even created a completely separate product that just covers research, which we call Target Research.
Now, when it comes to SEO or SEM, everybody knows about keyword research, where you try to find the keywords a lot of potential clients use to search online.
Target Research, however, for me goes a lot further:
Rather than finding lists of keywords using some tools like ahrefs, semrush, keyword.io, answerthepubic or keywordshitter.com and more, Target Research for us means touching base with our client's potential future clients directly where they are:
Quora.com, reddit, twitter, youtube, facebook groups, niche forums - we manually harvest them all, in order to find EXACTLY HOW people talk about our client's industry there.
While keyword research stays on a keyword level, we want to identify which topics are important to them, and how do they enquire about those topics, what angles do they address, and what are the usual responses they get.
This enables us then to have enough "seed material" for both, a keyword research and a topic list for a projected content map, where we line up the next 25-50 topics we suggest a client should be creating, including their structure with internal linking and more.
