{"id":144253,"date":"2022-11-01T16:07:50","date_gmt":"2022-11-01T16:07:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.searchenginewatch.com\/?p=144253"},"modified":"2022-11-01T16:07:50","modified_gmt":"2022-11-01T16:07:50","slug":"in-a-sea-of-signals-is-your-on-page-on-point","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/2022\/11\/01\/in-a-sea-of-signals-is-your-on-page-on-point\/","title":{"rendered":"In a sea of signals, is your on-page on-point?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"well\">\n<h3><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-144258\" src=\"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/In-a-sea-of-signals-is-your-on-page-on-point-1024x273.png\" alt=\"In a sea of signals, is your on-page on-point\" width=\"640\" height=\"171\" srcset=\"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/In-a-sea-of-signals-is-your-on-page-on-point-1024x273.png 1024w, https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/In-a-sea-of-signals-is-your-on-page-on-point-300x80.png 300w, https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/In-a-sea-of-signals-is-your-on-page-on-point-768x205.png 768w, https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/In-a-sea-of-signals-is-your-on-page-on-point.png 728w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/><\/h3>\n<h3>30-second summary:<\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li>Content managers who want to assess their on-page performance can feel lost at sea due to numerous SEO signals and their perceptions<\/li>\n<li>This problem gets bigger and highly complex for industries with niche semantics<\/li>\n<li>The scenarios they present to the content planning process are highly specific, with unique lexicons and semantic relationships<\/li>\n<li>Sr. SEO Strategist at Brainlabs, Zach Wales, uses findings from a rigorous competitive analysis to shed light on how to evaluate your on-page game<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Industries with niche terminology, like scientific or medical ecommerce brands, present a layer of complexity to SEO. The scenarios they present to the content planning process are highly specific, with unique lexicons and semantic relationships.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">SEO has many layers to begin with, from technical to content. They all aim to optimize for numerous search engine ranking signals, some of which are moving targets.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">So how does one approach on-page SEO in this challenging space? We recently had the privilege of conducting a lengthy competitive analysis for a client in one of these industries.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What we walked away with was a repeatable process for on-page analysis in a complicated semantic space.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>The challenge: Turning findings into action<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">At the outset of any analysis, it\u2019s important to define the challenge. In the most general sense, ours was to turn findings into meaningful on-page actions \u2014 with priorities.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And we would do this by comparing the keyword ranking performance of our client\u2019s domain to that of its five chosen competitors.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Specifically, we needed to identify areas of the client\u2019s website content that were losing to competitors in keyword rankings. And to prioritize things, we needed to show where those losses were having the greatest impact on our client\u2019s potential for search traffic.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Adding to the complexity were two additional sub-challenges:<\/span><\/p>\n<ol>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Volume of keyword data.<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> When people think of \u201cniche markets,\u201d the implication is usually a small number of keywords with low monthly search volumes (MSV). Scientific industries are not so. They are \u201cniche\u201d in the sense that their semantics are not accessible to all\u2014including keyword research tools\u2014but their depth &amp; breadth of keyword potential is vast.<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Our client already dominated the market. <\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">At first glance, using keyword gap analysis tools, there were no product categories where our client wasn\u2019t dominating the market. Yet they were incurring traffic losses from these five competitors from a seemingly random, spread-out number of cases. Taken together incrementally, these losses had significant impacts on their web traffic.\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ol>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If the needle-in-a-haystack analogy comes to mind, you see where this is going.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p>To put the details to our challenge, we had to:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Identify where those incremental effects of keyword rank loss were being felt the most \u2014 knowing this would guide our prioritization;<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Map those keyword trends to their respective stage of the marketing funnel (from informational top-of-funnel to the transactional bottom-of-funnel)\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Rule out off-page factors like backlink equity, Core Web Vitals &amp; page speed metrics, in order to\u2026<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Isolate cases where competitor pages ranked higher than our client\u2019s on the merits of their on-page techniques, and finally<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Identify what those successful on-page techniques were, in hopes that our client could adapt its content to a winning on-page formula.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h2>How to spot trends in a sea of data<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When the data sets you\u2019re working with are large and no apparent trends stand out, it\u2019s not because they don\u2019t exist. It only means you have to adjust the way you look at the data.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">As a disclaimer, we\u2019re not purporting that our approach is the only approach. It was one that made sense in response to another challenge at hand, which, again, is one that\u2019s common to this industry: The intent measures of SEO tools like Semrush and Ahrefs \u2014 \u201cInformational,\u201d \u201cNavigational,\u201d \u201cCommercial\u201d and \u201cTransactional,\u201d or some combination thereof \u2014 are not very reliable.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Our approach to spotting these trends in a sea of data went like this:<\/span><\/p>\n<h3>Step 1. Break it down to short-tail vs. long tail<\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Numbers don\u2019t lie. Absent reliable intent data, we cut the dataset in half based on MSV ranges: Keywords with MSVs above 200 and those equal to\/below 200. We even graphed these out, and indeed, it returned a classic short\/long-tail curve.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-large wp-image-144254\" src=\"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/on-page-SEO-signals-Short-tail-vs-long-tail-keyword-performance-1024x506.png\" alt=\"on-page SEO signals - Short tail vs long tail keyword performance\" width=\"640\" height=\"316\" srcset=\"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/on-page-SEO-signals-Short-tail-vs-long-tail-keyword-performance-1024x506.png 1024w, https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/on-page-SEO-signals-Short-tail-vs-long-tail-keyword-performance-300x148.png 300w, https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/on-page-SEO-signals-Short-tail-vs-long-tail-keyword-performance-768x380.png 768w, https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/on-page-SEO-signals-Short-tail-vs-long-tail-keyword-performance.png 728w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 640px) 100vw, 640px\" \/>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This gave us a proxy for funnel mapping: Short-tail keywords, defined as high-MSV &amp; broad focus, could be mostly associated with the upper funnel. This made long-tail keywords, being less searched but more specifically focused, a proxy for the lower funnel.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Doing this also helped us manage the million-plus keyword dataset our tools generated for the client and its five competitor websites. Even if you perform the export hack of downloading data in batches, neither Google Drive nor your device\u2019s RAM want anything to do with that much data.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3>Step 2. Establish a list of keyword-operative root words<\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The \u201ckeyword-operative root word\u201d is the term we gave to root words that are common to many or all of the keywords under a certain topic or content type. For example, \u201cdna\u201d is a common root word to most of the keywords about DNA lab products, which our client and its competitors sell. And \u201cprotocols\u201d is a root word for many keywords that exist in upper-funnel, informational content.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">We established this list by placing our short- and long-tail data (exported from Semrush\u2019s Keyword Gap analysis tool) into two spreadsheets, where we were able to view the shared keyword rankings of our client and the five competitors. We equipped these spreadsheets with data filters and formulas that scored each keyword with a competitive value, relative to the six web domains analyzed.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Separately, we took a list of our client\u2019s product categories and brainstormed all possibilities for keyword-operative root words. Finally, we filtered the data for each root word and noted trends, such as the number of keywords that a website ranked for on Google page 1, and the sum of their MSVs.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Finally, we applied a calculation that incorporated average position, MSV, and industry click-through rates to quantify the significance of a trend. So if a competitor appeared to have a keyword ranking edge over our client in a certain subset of keywords, we could place a numerical value on that edge.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h3>Step 3. Identify content templates<\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">If one of your objectives is to map keyword trends to the marketing funnel, then it&#8217;s critical to understand the role of page templates. Why?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Page speed performance is a known ranking signal that should be considered. And ecommerce websites often have content templates that reflect each stage of the funnel.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In this case, all six competitors conveniently had distinct templates for top-, middle- and bottom-funnel content:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><b>Top-funnel templates: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Text-heavy, informational content in what was commonly called \u201cLearning Resources\u201d or something similar;<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><b>Middle-funnel templates: <\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Also text-heavy, informational content about a product category, with links to products and visual content like diagrams and videos \u2014 the Product Landing Page (PLP), essentially;<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><b>Bottom-funnel templates:<\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Transactional, Product Detail Pages (PDP) with concise, conversion-oriented text and purchasing calls-to-action.<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<h3>Step 4. Map keyword trends to the funnel<\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">After cross-examining the root terms (Step 2), keyword ranking trends began to emerge. Now we just had to map them to their respective funnel stage.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Having identified content templates, and having the data divided by short- &amp; long-tail made this a quicker process. Our primary focus was on trends where competitor webpages were outranking our client\u2019s site.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<div id='gallery-1' class='gallery galleryid-144253 gallery-columns-1 gallery-size-full'><figure class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<div class='gallery-icon portrait'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/2022\/11\/01\/in-a-sea-of-signals-is-your-on-page-on-point\/on-page-seo-signals-page-speed-insight-scores\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"495\" height=\"728\" src=\"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/on-page-SEO-signals-Page-Speed-Insight-Scores.png\" class=\"attachment-full size-full\" alt=\"on-page SEO signals - Page Speed Insight Scores\" srcset=\"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/on-page-SEO-signals-Page-Speed-Insight-Scores.png 495w, https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/on-page-SEO-signals-Page-Speed-Insight-Scores-204x300.png 204w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 495px) 100vw, 495px\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure><figure class='gallery-item'>\n\t\t\t<div class='gallery-icon landscape'>\n\t\t\t\t<a href='https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/2022\/11\/01\/in-a-sea-of-signals-is-your-on-page-on-point\/on-page-seo-signals-page-speed-insight-scores-by-device-and-competitor-comparison\/'><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"728\" height=\"364\" src=\"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/on-page-SEO-signals-Page-Speed-Insight-Scores-by-device-and-competitor-comparison.png\" class=\"attachment-full size-full\" alt=\"on-page SEO signals - Page Speed Insight Scores by device and competitor comparison\" srcset=\"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/on-page-SEO-signals-Page-Speed-Insight-Scores-by-device-and-competitor-comparison.png 728w, https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/on-page-SEO-signals-Page-Speed-Insight-Scores-by-device-and-competitor-comparison-300x150.png 300w, https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/on-page-SEO-signals-Page-Speed-Insight-Scores-by-device-and-competitor-comparison-1024x512.png 1024w, https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/on-page-SEO-signals-Page-Speed-Insight-Scores-by-device-and-competitor-comparison-768x384.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 728px) 100vw, 728px\" \/><\/a>\n\t\t\t<\/div><\/figure>\n\t\t<\/div>\n\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Identifying content templates brought the added value of seeing where competitors, for example, outranked our client on a certain keyword because their winning webpage was built in a content-rich, optimized PLP, while our client\u2019s lower-ranking page was a PDP.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3>Step 5. Rule out the off-page ranking factors<\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Since our goal was to identify &amp; analyze on-page techniques, we had to rule out off-page factors like link equity and page speed. We sought cases where one page outranked another on a shared keyword, <\/span><b><i>in spite of<\/i><\/b><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> having inferior link equity, page speed scores, etc.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">For all of Google\u2019s developments in processing semantics (e.g., BERT, the Helpful Content Update) there are still cases where a page with thin text content outranks another page that has lengthier, optimized text content \u2014 by virtue of link equity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">To rule these factors out, we assigned an \u201cSEO scorecard\u201d to each webpage under investigation. The scorecard tallied the number of rank-signal-worthy attributes the page had in its SEO favor. This included things like Semrush\u2019s page authority score, the number of internal vs. external inlinks, the presence and types of Schema markup, and Core Web Vitals stats.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-144257\" src=\"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/on-page-SEO-signals-SEO-Scorecard.png\" alt=\"on-page SEO signals - SEO Scorecard\" width=\"786\" height=\"964\" srcset=\"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/on-page-SEO-signals-SEO-Scorecard.png 786w, https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/on-page-SEO-signals-SEO-Scorecard-245x300.png 245w, https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/on-page-SEO-signals-SEO-Scorecard-768x942.png 768w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 786px) 100vw, 786px\" \/><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The scorecards also included on-page factors, like the number of headers &amp; subheaders (H1, H2, H3\u2026), use of keywords in alt-tags, meta titles &amp; their character counts, and even page word count. This helped give a high-level sense of on-page performance before diving into the content itself.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>Our findings<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When comparing the SEO scorecards of our client\u2019s pages to its competitors, we only chose cases where the losing scorecard (in off-page factors) was the keyword ranking winner. Here are a few of the standout findings.<\/span><\/p>\n<h3>Adding H3 tags to products names really works<\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This month, <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/orangevalley.nl\/eng\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">OrangeValley<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u2019s Koen Leemans published a Semrush article, titled, <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.semrush.com\/blog\/adding-h3-tags-to-products-names-on-ecommerce-category-pages\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">SEO Split Test Result: Adding H3 Tags to Products Names on Ecommerce Category Pages<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. We found this study especially well-timed, as it validated what we saw in this competitive analysis.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">To those versed in on-page SEO, placing keywords in &lt;h3&gt; HTML format (or any level of &lt;h\u2026&gt; for that matter) is a wise move. Google crawls this text before it gets to the paragraph copy. It\u2019s a known ranking signal.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">When it comes to SEO-informed content planning, ecommerce clients have a tendency \u2014 coming from the best of intentions \u2014 to forsake the product name in pursuit of the perfect on-page recipe for a specific non-brand keyword. The value of the product name becomes a blind spot because the brand assumes it will outrank others on its own product names.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">It\u2019s somewhere in this thought process that an editor may, for example, decide to list product names on a PLP as bolded &lt;p&gt; copy, rather than as a &lt;h3&gt; or &lt;h4&gt;. This, apparently, is a missed opportunity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">More to this point, we found that this on-page tactic performed even better when the &lt;h&gt;-tagged product name was linked (index, follow) to its corresponding PDP, AND accompanied with a sentence description beneath the product name.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This is in contrast to the product landing page (PLP) which has ample supporting page copy, and only lists its products as hyperlinked names with no descriptive text.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h3>Word count probably matters, &lt;h&gt; count very likely matters<\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In the ecommerce space, it\u2019s not uncommon to find PLPs that have not been visited by the content fairy. A storyless grid of images and product names.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Yet, in every case where two PLPs of this variety went toe-to-toe over the same keyword, the sheer number of &lt;h&gt; tags seemed to be the only on-page factor that ranked one PLP above its competitors\u2019 PLPs, which themselves had higher link equity.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The takeaway here is that if you know you won\u2019t have time to touch up your PLPs with landing copy, you should at least set all product names to &lt;h&gt; tags that are hyperlinked, and increase the number of them (e.g., set the page to load 6 rows of products instead of 4).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">And word count? Although Google\u2019s John Mueller <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/www.searchenginejournal.com\/word-count-not-a-quality-factor\/397288\/\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">confirmed that word count is not a ranking factor<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> for the search algorithm, this topic is debated. We cannot venture anything conclusive about word count from our competitive analyses. What we can say is that it&#8217;s a component of our finding that\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n<h3>Defining the entire topic with your content wins<\/h3>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Backlinko\u2019s Brian Dean ventured and proved the <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/backlinko.com\/hub\/seo\/semantic-seo\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">radical notion<\/span><\/a><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> that you can optimize a single webpage to rank for not the usual 2 or 3 target keywords, but hundreds of them. That is if your copy encompasses everything about the topic that unites those hundreds of keywords.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">That practice may work in long-form content marketing but is a little less applicable in ecommerce settings. The alternative to this is to create a body of pages that are all interlinked deliberately and logically (from a UX standpoint) and that cover every aspect of the topic at hand.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">This content should address the questions that people have at each stage of the awareness-to-purchase cycle (i.e., the funnel). It should define niche terminology and spell out acronyms. It should be accessible.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">In one stand-out case from our analysis, a competitor page held position 1 for a lucrative keyword, while our client\u2019s site and that of the other competitors couldn\u2019t even muster a page 1 ranking. All six websites were addressing the keyword head-on, arguably, in all the right ways. And they had superior link equity.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">What did the winner have that the rest did not? It happened that in this lone instance, its product was being marketed to a high-school teacher\/administrator audience, rather than a PhD-level, corporate, governmental or university scientist. By this virtue alone, their marketing copy was far more layman-accessible, and, apparently, Google approved too.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The takeaway is not to dumb-down the necessary jargon of a technical industry. But it highlights the need to tell every part of the story within a topic vertical.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<h2>Conclusion: Findings-to-action<\/h2>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">There is a common emphasis among SEO bloggers who specialize in biotech &amp; scientific industries on taking a top-down, topical takeover approach to content planning.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">I came across these posts after completing this competitive analysis for our client. This topic-takeover emphasis was validating because the \u201cFindings-To-Action\u201d section of our study prescribed something similar:<\/span><\/p>\n<p><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Map topics to the funnel<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">. Prior to keyword research, map broad topics &amp; subtopics to their respective places in the informational &amp; consumer funnel. Within each topic vertical, identify:<\/span><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Questions-to-ask &amp; problems-to-solve at each funnel stage<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Keyword opportunities that roll up to those respective stages<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">How many pages should be planned to rank for those keywords<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The website templates that best accommodate this content<\/span><\/li>\n<li style=\"font-weight: 400;\" aria-level=\"1\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The header &amp; internal linking strategy between those pages<\/span><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Unlike more common-language industries, the need to appeal to two audiences is especially pronounced in scientific industries. One is the AI-driven audience of search engine bots that scour this complex semantic terrain for symmetry of clues and meaning. The other is human, of course, but with a mind that has already mastered this symmetry and is highly capable of discerning it.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">To make the most efficient use of time and user experience, content planning and delivery need to be highly organized. The age-old marketing funnel concept works especially well as an organizing model. The rest is the rigor of applying this full-topic-coverage, content approach.<\/span><\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><em><a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/in\/zachwales\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Zach Wales<\/a> is Sr. SEO Strategist at Brainlabs.<\/em><\/p>\n<p><strong>Subscribe to the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/#newsletter-modal\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Search Engine Watch newsletter<\/a>\u00a0for insights on SEO, the search landscape, search marketing, digital marketing, leadership, podcasts, and more.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Join the conversation with us on\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.linkedin.com\/groups\/61126\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">LinkedIn<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/sewatch\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Twitter<\/a>.<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Findings from a rigorous competitive analysis that sheds light on how to turn findings into action for niche industries<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1092,"featured_media":144258,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,8,7,5],"tags":[27752,1148,27440,27253],"content_type":[],"class_list":["post-144253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-analytics","category-content","category-industry","category-seo","tag-actionable-insights","tag-competitor-analysis","tag-content-performance","tag-seo-analysis"],"acf":{"tad_independentcommercial":"Independent","tad_content_format":"Expert commentary"},"post_info":{"name":"idris.nagri@blenheimchalcot.com idris.nagri@blenheimchalcot.com","title":"","thumbnail_url":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/11\/In-a-sea-of-signals-is-your-on-page-on-point.png","category":"Analytics","timeago":"3y"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144253","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1092"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=144253"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/144253\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/144258"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=144253"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=144253"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=144253"},{"taxonomy":"content_type","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/searchenginewatch.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/content_type?post=144253"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}