 the last 18 months, we started to see some really good content programs have their growth stall. And I'm talking about the kind of programs that are everything you want in a content program, right? They have expert writers, a ton of links, and yet they've grown year after year after year, and suddenly they were flat or a little bit down. And when that happened, it was really easy to wonder, is this the new normal? Is the opportunity for SEO eroding, right? That's what everybody tells us. But when we dug in, we found what was happening was that they simply hadn't adapted to changes in the market. And so what I want to talk about today are ways that we can look to the market to figure out not only what to write, but how to write it. And one of the best places to start is with a competitive analysis. So this is a really basic market view. It shows keywords by traffic. So a brand will move up as it ranks for more keywords and to the right as it gets more traffic, usually from ranking better. Bubble size is CPC. And this is a really great place to start. But it hides a lot of really important data. And so what we like to do is make it a time series. This is that same chart over time. And what you'll see if you watch it through at a loop is brands like Value Penguin and Wallet Hub just come out of nowhere and are growing like crazy. Meanwhile, Nerd Wallet, which is a really great content brand to watch, triples in size in this time. And if we're working with a brand, we'll watch it a few times. Maybe you'd look at a longer period and make callouts. For now, I'll switch to this trails view. But what we're seeing is that some brands are able to identify market needs and fulfill them at scale. And one of the things that I really love about this view is that it's really easy to think of SEO as a mature market, right? Like SEO has been around for 20 years. And so when we often think about our goals, we think of wherever we're at, plus maybe 5%, 15%, 20%, 30% if we're being really optimistic. But if you like this, we'll show you that there are some brands that are able to double or triple their size in the last two years. And so if you want to make something like this, it's pretty simple. You're going to use the SEMrush History API, but you absolutely do not need to know how to program. All you have to do is swap out the data in this URL with your API key from your subscription and the domain that you want to look at. Then you're going to paste that into your browser and get all the data back that you need. You can throw this in a spreadsheet, repeat for each domain you want to look at, and you're good to go. You can visualize it in Tableau. You used to be able to do this in Google Sheets, but Google Sheets very tragically has stopped sporting motion charts. So you can do Tableau. It's pretty intuitive. The main thing that's easy to get hung up on is how you actually make it a motion chart. And for that, you just put your date metric in the Pages tab in the upper left. And as you're watching it through, you might notice that there's periods of time where everybody grows. And that happens because SEMrush updates its database of keywords, which I think is now up to like 800 million, once or twice a year. And when that happens, like I said, everybody looks like they grow, but they don't, that's just a database update. And so you can look for that in the SEMrush app. They mark the database updates, and so you can just communicate when that's happening. And so we come back to here. And one of the really awesome things about SEO is that we can not only see who's growing, we can talk about how and why they're growing. And so one of the first places I'll start is with the Top Pages report. And here I'm not just looking at what are the top five, 10, 15 pages. I'm looking for things that scale. I'm looking for keyword types, template type, page types that are driving a lot of their growth. I'm also using this to figure out how big a domain is. And so often when we're looking at site size, we'll do one of two things. We'll either crawl it, which can be very resource intensive, or we'll do a site colon search in Google. But when you do that site colon search, one of the things that can happen is that a duplicate content problem or a crazy subdomain or some sort of weird hacking from five years ago can make that number much bigger than the actual site size. And so to end up in this Top Pages report, a page has to be in the top 100 for one of 800 million keywords. So it's a lot closer to true site size and less resource intensive than a crawl. So not only am I looking at how big is a site, I'm also using that history menu to see how many pages have they added in the last year. I might drill down to a blog, for example, and look at that difference over time. And this is a really great signal to me of are they writing five articles a year? They're writing 150 articles a year. Another great place to look is a link tool. And so oftentimes you'll find that periods of growth are lined with link growth. And so you can use link reports in Moz or A-Trust to see do you think they're investing in outreach? Which of their pages are getting links? And this can be a really great way to show leadership and get investment in outreach. And then we'll step away from SEO tools. And so if we see a period of growth, we'll use the way back machine to figure out was there a new site feature that was released at this time? Or maybe there was a redesign. Another thing that can happen is that questions will be raised, right? Leadership will look to a brand and say, I wanna be just like them. How big is their SEO team? And a little LinkedIn stocking will go a long way. And this works really well as a great place to start. And it works the best in markets that are super similar. So in the example that I showed earlier, the personal finance market, all of those brands are really similar. They're content first. They have similar business models. Where this gets harder is where you either compete in multiple verticals or maybe your content competitors are different than your e-commerce competitors. And for that we wanna look to individual markets. And a really good example of that is a site like Wayfair. Wayfair is a very successful SEO program in the United States. They're a furniture store. And because they're so big and so successful, they compete against some of the biggest brands on the internet like Target. And when you look at this overall view, you think of course Target gets more traffic, right? Wayfair sells furniture and home goods, but Target sells clothes and shoes and electronics and video games. And so a better question might be when it comes to just furniture terms who wins and the answer is Wayfair. But the other thing that you can easily miss when you look at a chart like this is what's happening on the bottom left with house. So most of these brands, if you're familiar with kind of the U.S. market, are big stores, furniture goods, but house is a little different. House is a content site first and foremost, right? They have a lot of interior design ideas, photos, inspiration. They do have an e-commerce component that's not really their core competency. And so this is a really good sign that you need to drill in deeper. And so for that we'll build a sample set of keywords and I'll usually like to choose a thousand. And so we might go to Wayfair's site and we might look at their living room idea section which is a newer content site section and we'll build our sample set and then we'll upload them as a custom ranked tracking project in SEM rush. And the brilliant thing about this is that it will give you traffic estimates and keyword performance for just the keywords that you entered. And now we can end up with a view like this, right? Our competitors have totally changed. We're now looking at mostly content sites and we can see that even though Wayfair was winning overall when it comes to this particular market, house is winning by far. This is really useful if you're competing against big sites, right? Like the Amazons, the TripAdvisor, Wikipedia. And you wanna know just kind of in the places you overlap who's winning, you can use this method. And if you look at a lot of these charts, you'll start to notice something. And that's if you imagine a bisecting line sort of from the bottom left to the top right, most of the blunt brands follow along it. But it turns out that sort of where you are in this chart can help drive your strategy for growth. So if you end up like Pinterest here in the upper left, it means you have more keyword coverage than you do traffic. And this usually happens when you can get to page one but maybe not rank in the top three or the top five. So your goal here is to improve rankings. And as you dig in, that might mean you need to improve your keyword targeting, improve your intent matching, which we'll get into in a little bit. Or if you're getting both of those things right and you still can't make it, it might be an authority gap, whether that's a link authority or a topical authority. If you end up sort of over here in the bottom right, that means you usually rank for just a handful of head terms and you rank really well. And so the goal here is to broaden your coverage. In some cases that might mean you need to create new pages. Other times that can mean you need to solve the technical problems that are preventing your really great pages from getting found. But oftentimes what we'll find in brands over here is that they've traditionally invested in other channels, right? So in this case it was El Decor, which is more of a magazine. In the personal finance example it was Credit Karma. And when this happens, a lot of times the first step is to get the organization to care about SEO so that you can go and do these other things like make new pages and improve your architecture. When you end up in the top right, it's both a beautiful and terrifying place to be. It means you're the market leader. And so if you're here, pretty much anything you create is going to rank. So you wanna double down in the short term, right? Build out that mid-tail, build out those long-tail content. But in the long term you may need to set expectations that maybe it's time to move into new markets. And every time we start to do this, we'll do this for maybe five to 15 markets depending on the site setup. And as I mentioned, I like to use a thousand keywords in my sample sets. So that is 15,000 keywords that I'm looking for, which is a very difficult task to do. And one of the best ways that I've found to do it is to leverage Google's expertise, right? Google knows that if I have a page about couches, it should probably also rank for sofas. So we'll go to SEM Rush and we'll download the top keywords for our domain. And depending on the site setup, we might drill into a certain site section and we'll also filter out keywords that are branded for our domain and keywords that are branded for other people's domain. We'll end up with something like this, which is an export of the keyword, the search volume and the landing page URL. This is for the HubSpotLog, which is a broad inbound marketing site. And if I wanted to look at just their SEO keywords, for example, my first instinct might be just to filter this list for keywords that include SEO. But that would exclude a lot of important ones like meta description, canonical tags, site map. So a better solution is to look to the HubSpotLog and realize that they have the category listed on every page. And we're gonna use this to classify our keywords. So all you have to do is right click, inspect element and copy the X path. It's basically a selector that when we crawl is gonna say, hey crawler, go pull out this category for each page. It also works really well for breadcrumbs on e-commerce sites, publish dates, tags, anything like that. So you crawl a screaming frog doing a custom extraction and you basically get a list of all the URLs and all the categories from their own blog. You can match that up with your keyword spreadsheet and now you have a much better way to classify keywords, right? I've cleaned this up for the SEO categories and it does include those words like meta description, XML, site map. And now one of your hesitations might be, well yes, but this will really bias our keyword set to our domain. It's not a scientific sample, but I've actually found that to be a really effective tool in presentations. Inevitably there will be a moment where another brand is beating us and someone will politely raise their hand and tell me, of course this domain is beating us, they target a different market, they have a different strategy. And at that point I can say, you know, I totally get that, but I've biased this set towards our keywords. They're beating us on our keywords and when that happens, even the non-SEOs in the room get very upset and very motivated to solve it, right? They don't like this idea that the other brand is beating us on our keywords. So it works really well. And once you do identify those brands who are beating you, you can use this on their domains to get that list of keywords and topics that you need to go after. It's a really great idea for figuring out what to write. But what you'll often find is that having a great list of keywords just isn't enough anymore. This idea of the perfectly optimized page, just it's nine years old and it's not enough to rank right now and that's because of intent. And I'm not talking about the simple intent that we've all been talking about for years, right? We know that you can't get an e-commerce page to rank when people want articles. And we're also not just talking about search features, right? Robert Stat was showing us today how local intent goes beyond just search features into organic results. So we really need to be thinking about this one keyword at a time. Because when people want information, they might be wanting an answer, a discussion, a list, a process. Sometimes they want a specific answer, other times they want long form discussion. The order of the list might matter, the format. Sometimes they want a list and they want a list of places. Other times they want an editorial review of a product. And so Google's gotten really good at giving people what they want because to Google, it's all about user goals. If they can give users the content they want, those users will keep searching, keep coming back to Google. And if you've been working on featured snippets in the last year, that intent list might kind of look familiar to you in terms of the work that you're doing. And that's because writing for featured snippets is a piece of writing for intent. Because they're both about natural language processing. Google can understand our content better than it ever has before. They recently published a paper that shows how they could go to a forum and understand which response people gave the answer in and which one was somebody making a joke, which one was someone giving actually more details, and which one was somebody saying thank you, right? It can go way beyond just finding entities, right? Like it can read an article and sure it can identify that you've mentioned American Shop or the TV show, but it can figure out whether you're talking about the TV show or some 2018's best meme formats. And the word for this is salience. And it gets at what is the main idea of this article? It's a new way to think about keyword relevancy and you can try it with the NLP API. So you might type in a sentence like Queer Eye is the best show on television and it will tell you that Queer Eye is the primary entity in this list. They're sorted by their salience score. It links to the entities, which is good because Google will use your words to identify entities so you can see if they match. And it also understands context so it knows that show is a reference to Queer Eye. And this works really well if you're looking at one or two sentences. The second you wanna look at a heading or at a paragraph break, you need to use the API. This one does cost money, but again, you don't need to know how to code. You can use these settings in the API Explorer and you can literally paste the entire HTML source code of a page and get the sorts of the entities by salience. And the one thing to keep in mind is that the sort order is much more important than the salience score itself, right? As you start to look at really long posts, your salience scores, which are on a score of zero to one, are gonna drop and that's okay. You're mostly looking for kind of what are the one, two, three main ideas. And the next question might be, well, how do we make sure that Google understands what the main idea is? And it can be really helpful to know how Google's thinking about it. It turns out for us as SEOs, it's pretty familiar. So in this paper, they talk about using the PageRank model on their entities in Freebase, which is their proprietary database. So in the same way that a link from nasa.gov passes more link value than a link that's maybe two, three hops away, that's how they're thinking about entity relationships. And so we need to stop thinking about related keywords and we need to start thinking about indicators. Now, a lot of tools give us related keywords. These are usually things that people might also search for, maybe this post also ranks for, and they're really great for topic ideas. But what we need to think about when we're writing one article at a time are indicators, what keywords build up to tell Google what the main idea is. And I find that nothing beats subject matter expertise when it comes to this. Specifically, if you can send your subject matter experts to the search results, get an idea of what topics Google's looking for and working that into their writing, that's working really well. So if you think about how you might write about MozCon, you would maybe mention that it's an event that happens in Seattle in July. And you wouldn't care about the search volume for Seattle or July, because you would never wanna rank for those terms, but you would need to use them to help Google understand that you're writing about MozCon. And we can see this in the tool as well. So if I type in a string of unrelated terms like Queer Eye, Hotel, Books, you'll see that salience is split. However, I use related terms like Queer Eye, Avocado, Makeover, I get an absolutely perfect salience score, even better than if I were to repeat Queer Eye three times. So going back to intent, we see that Google understands what users are looking for, and it can also read what we're writing. And what I found over the last year of my life, analyzing hundreds of posts working on intent, is that there's certain formats right now that Google's using to match to different intents. And there can be these moments where you know what the intent is, you write for it, and Google just can't read your content. So I just wanna share some really practical things I found that are working really well right now in terms of intent. One of the most common types of intent is lists, like Oregon Coast Road Trip. And to figure this out, we need to look to the search results, we need to open the top three, the top five results. And what we'll find is that they're all lists of places with pictures. And what this means is that the most 10x epic, long form post won't rank here unless it's a list. So to do this right, you need to get your entity and your entity only as your heading. A heading can be a proper noun, like a person, place, or thing, or it can be a concept or idea. It doesn't really have to be a proper noun. And as we start to think about salience, you can see how these actual places on the Oregon Coast would build up to more salience than just me repeating Oregon Coast in variations of that phrase five times. One of the most common mistakes people make is putting too much information in their headings when there's list intent. So this is a list of credit score factors, and what's included in the version on the left is the percentage that has on your credit score, the impact. So all you need to do to make this post perform better is move that secondary information into a subheading. The actual H number doesn't matter. It just needs to be lower or a greater number than what your primary heading is. It could be bold text as well. You need to separate that out. The exception to this is you can number them. You can do one, period, two, period, that works, but you wouldn't want to put like most important or any information outside of the entity. The other thing that's important is the hierarchy. So we know that headings communicate meaning, right? And that's why when we target featured snippets, we'll put them right at the top underneath the title or if it's a secondary intent under a secondary heading. So if I wanted to write about the best dog toys and include a dog toy in every category, right? The best for heavy chewers, the best for small dogs, it'd be really easy to organize my posts like this one on the left leading with the categories. But if we put ourselves in the mind of Google for a second, we have to think about what they're looking for. They know that people want best dog toys. So they go to this list on the left and they see a list of categories with the toys below. The title's a good sign, that's good, they know they're in the right place. But they would have to decide that all of those subheadings, all of those toys, actually build up into one major list. And those categories are all types of dog toys and it's one big list, right? You see how that gets hard, it gets confusing, they can't be confident. The little trick for this is just swapping the order, right? When they look at the right, they see best dog toys and then they see the toys right below that, right? Really easy, you can see how that builds up. This is a really simple change you can make that will help your page usually rank a lot better and get more traffic. Process intent is also a really common one, like how to develop film. Here the featured snippet gives us a clue that people want to process. We look to the search results and sure enough, people want to learn how to do this themselves. Right, sending your film to a place to have someone develop it for you, that's a secondary intent. You're probably not going to rank in the top five if you're a service here. And so writing for process intent is like the closest thing I have to click bait, like this one simple trick will change everything, but once you see it, you're gonna start seeing it everywhere. And that is the tense here. So you'll see everything is written as a command by a development take, by a changing bag, remove your film from the canister and that's how Google wants us to write when people want processes. So here on the left we have a popular post from B&H Photo and Video, a really great authoritative site. It's a process, it's just not written so Google can read it. It would likely perform better if we changed loading to load the film. From developing preparation to prepare the developer, these simple changes can be huge in terms of traffic. Specific answer is another really good one, safe temperature for chicken. And here we're not talking about simple language that's important, but this search was for temperature. So Google will want the answer in degrees, right? If someone searches for title tag length, they want a unit in characters. One of our clients had the instance where they were answering a weight question in terms of percentage of your body weight and they got to page one, but once we gave that into pounds and we changed the weight question to pounds, they ranked number one and they got the featured snippet. So you need to be writing directly entity is answer but you also need to be thinking about the type of answer that Google will look for. And at this point someone usually pushes back and says there is no simple answer, right? That's what a writer will often tell me and I totally get that. It's very rarely can you summarize your life's work in one sentence. So the guidance there is usually to give the simple answer first and use the next couple of sentences to elaborate and give context. Answers don't usually need epic posts. This one from the kitchen is 138 words and they have 30 of them because when users want specific answers, they don't want to read long form content, right? Gone are the days when you could just write 2,000 words and ranked in the top five. So you can give people what they want, especially in areas where you have topical authority and expertise. Don't be afraid to do short form content. Don't be afraid to repeat some information across posts. When users want specific content, you will be rewarded for giving it to them, not penalized, especially in areas where you have expertise. And of course, sometimes long form is the answer. When you look to the search results, you see in-depth posts. That's usually a good sign that users want long form. So for this, you can consider the intent and the goals of each subtopic. This is the visual that I use in training and it talks about building intent piece by piece. So we'll literally send our writers to the search results, have them brainstorm a list of topics and questions that people have, and then write for intent. Now, you want to be doing this every time you have a new post to create, but some of the best opportunities, like the examples at the beginning, are on your existing content. And so for that, a really good place to look is, where have you lost ranking since 2015, 2016? If you have an old ranked tracker, you can look there. If you don't, you can look to SEM rush and figure out where did you rank and if that sort of decayed over time, that's a really great place to go optimize intent. Sometimes you need to make a new post, other times you can change the one you have. Another great place to look are places where you don't have the featured snippet. I mean, obviously you can write for intent and still not get the featured snippet, but this is a good place to start. So you download your top thousand unbranded keywords in GSC, upload them to a custom ranked tracking project in SEM rush, and look at places where there is a snippet, which gives us a sign of informational intent, but you don't have it. And then there are those moments where a less good site is beating you, right? Like WikiHow probably shouldn't be the expert on how to hack, but they're getting the intent right. They know that people want a process. So if you're a small site and you don't have link equity and you don't have a ton of resources, double down on intent, you can beat some of your bigger competitors. And if you're a big site and you notice that there's brands beating you at scale, whether that's WikiHow for process intent or Pinterest or YouTube for visual intent, look for overlap, those may be good places to go write for intent. And it might seem like a lot has changed, but something I like to keep in mind is that Google's goals haven't changed. They've always just wanted to give the right content that users want. In the old days, it was really simple keyword matching and links. Then Google got smarter and it was about related keywords and only the good links counted and they looked at basic usage signals. Now it's about salience and topical authority. Google knows what your article is about and what your domain is about. And deciding what users want isn't just about links, it's about the intent when they search and more advanced usage signals. So what we can do is we can look to the market, we can identify those unmet needs and we can figure out what users want. Then we can write for natural language processing and write for intent and hopefully see growth like we haven't had before. And at this point, I just wanna say thank you to Moz. I got my start on this stage as a community speaker four years ago. And five years ago, I met my best friend at MozCon and we will be celebrating our one-year marriage anniversary this month. So thank you, Moz. Thank you.