Search engines are entering a new, mature phase. If you want to keep up with the flow, you will have to change tack your SEO strategy. How, what and why is this good news? Read to yourself in 4 minutes.
Nowadays, if you want to know how to stick a tire, you will first have to wrestle through 20 pages of adhesive kits on Google. Over the past ten years, the internet has been completely full of Seo'et. Every site with a bit of commercial interest filled its texts with relevant keywords and filled its website with landing pages. The result: an internet where commerce sometimes gets in the way of information.
Google and co are not keen on that, never have been. In the background, there has always been a conflict between the search engine's desire to provide relevant information and the desire of commercial parties to top the search results. We participated happily in that. Still doing that. The game is only changing rapidly and radically. And that is good news! For all parties.
Google and other search engines are reinventing themselves. Partly under the influence of ChatGPT and Artificial Intelligence in a broad sense, the algorithms increasingly rely on natural language processing. The systems are getting smarter: they really learn to read what is written. A connection is made between information, on and between pages. Instead of focusing on single keywords, content is interpreted organically.
It should be clear: this system is not going to fool you with a few smart keywords. Those who want to stand out will also have to play with the right organic content themselves. This strategy goes by the name keyword clustering. Much more than classic SEO, this is also really a strategic approach, and let that be our trademark! Keyword clustering, crystal clear market analyses and strategic roadmaps do you say? We are full of them.
So switch things up: thinking in terms of single keywords is a bad idea. Those who want to be found will also have to play with the right organic content themselves. At Yellowgrape, we are already full on the new course. That's what this blog is about. We're going to update you very soon. The good news is that SEO is more relevant than ever. If played well, of course. Here we go...
In classic SEO, you look for relevant keywords with a high search volume. Suppose you are a webshop selling clothing and you sell pants, among other things.
Then you already know that the search term “pants” has mega search volume and is in the top 20 anyway. Nice and nice, but you bet that the competition for 'pants' is fierce and, in any case, the new algorithm finds such a loose search term less and less interesting.
Keyword clustering therefore has a completely different starting point. Step 1 is that we will work with the customer to see where the commercial interest lies. What kind of pants do they have? Who do they mainly buy? What specific needs do customers fly in with? In which areas does the customer mainly offer added value? And also: where is the competition and how is it found now?
With this information in mind, we will look for variations of the search term “pants”. Blue pants, jeans, pants for tall people, etc. etc. We are also going to look at long tail keywords. These are organic sentence structures that people use in their search, such as “what types of pants are there?” or “are there any organic cotton pants?” This is how we create clusters of search terms — short and long — that all belong together.
With keyword clusters, you no longer take a very small part of one large population, but many large parts of all populations. The profit is huge.
The idea of keyword clustering is that you don't shoot at the crowd with hail, but focus on a wide range of specific market shares. The key question here is: which market shares are relevant to the customer and also offer a chance of success. This is what gives the new SEO a much more strategic character. First, together with the customer, we determine which clusters have commercially interesting interests. After that, we — as Yellowgrape — will investigate to what extent these clusters are also promising.
Who are the organic competitors? For example, we map out where the best opportunities lie for each keyword cluster. We translate this into roadmaps with crystal clear objectives. For example, a goal may be to go from position 7 to 3 in the “pants” market segment within 1 year.
Skyhigh
That's just the beginning. It only becomes interesting when you create clusters that are relevant to the customer. There are several criteria for this. The clusters must be in line with the customer's commercial interests. The clusters must match the search intentions of potential buyers. And we are looking at how promising the clusters are compared to the competition. The latter is what we call market and segmentation analysis.
We are helped in this analysis by search engine data tool SEMRush. It requires much more than the classic Top 20 SEO keywords. Hundreds, if not thousands, of keywords are reviewed. Content analyses based on relevance, search intent and market position are on top of that. But then you also have something! Do it well and your position will rise skyhigh.
