"Google only loves you when everyone else loves you first." - Wendy Piersall

In the wake of Google's recent Core Update, focusing on quality content has never been more critical.

AI-powered keyword research can help you identify new ideas and create content that both search engines and users will value.

It's no longer sufficient to simply target high volume search terms, but instead shift the focus of your content stratey to create content your audience genuinely finds useful.

• Decoding Google's Priorities: The latest Core Update reinforces Google's focus on rewarding helpful, user-centric content. AI tools help you align with this by analyzing search intent and prioritizing keywords with real value behind them.

• Understanding Your Audience: Keyword research isn't about guesswork. AI tools (in addition to stalwarts like Ahrefs and SEMrush) provide detailed insights into what your target audience actively seeks online. This allows you to tailor content to their exact questions and pain points.

• Content with Purpose: AI-powered insights reveal which keywords and ideas align with your brand's expertise and offerings. This empowers you to create content that not only ranks well but also establishes your authority and drives conversions.

In short, AI tools can add some new creative twists and ideas to your content strategy. Let’s see how 👇️ 

💡 Strategy: AI-Powered Keyword Research: Your Secret Weapon

Keyword research is your roadmap to audience needs. 

Think of it as next-generation market intelligence.

It's no longer about guessing what your audience wants; you tune into the exact phrases they already use to find solutions.

Here are some of the most important numbers to quantify with each keyword you can potentially target:

• Search volume: What gets heavy traffic vs. niche interests. This helps calibrate content volume and depth.

• Keyword Difficulty: Where it's realistic to compete, and where you might need to build authority.

• Search Intent: Are people looking for information? Ready to buy? This aligns content with the sales funnel.

The March 2024 Core Update emphasizes content helpfulness above all else. 

So ultimately with each piece of content you create, you have to ask yourself, “is this really what my audience would want to learn?”

Keyword research becomes a compass for that value proposition:

• Tailored Content: Address specific pain points and questions with precision, making your brand the go-to authority.

• Staying Agile: Keyword trends evolve. Research keeps content fresh as needs and language shift, which Google rewards.

• Strategic Investment: Instead of content for content's sake, your budgets target topics with the highest ROI potential.

Keyword research helps you identify not just individual keywords, but also related topics your audience cares about.

By building topic clusters, you create a central "hub page" packed with valuable information on a broad topic.

This hub page then links out to subpages that delve deeper into specific aspects of that topic.

This structure, supported by strategic internal linking, shows search engines your expertise and improves your ranking potential for the entire topic area.

Here’s a visual for easy understanding how this all ties together around your pillar content:

🔍 Use Case: Leveraging AI for SaaS Keyword Research Mastery

While understanding the strategic importance of keyword research is important, some cool magic happens when you let AI tools do the heavy lifting.

Here's how you can put them to work in some different use cases

💡 Idea Generation

• Start broad: Give ChatGPT a general topic like "CRM Tools" The AI will suggest a wide range of subtopics and long-tail keywords. More on this in the Prompts section.

• Ask for variations: Prompt the tools with "What are some related keywords to [your keyword]?" This will reveal similar phrases that searchers might use.

🥊 Competitor Insights

• URL analysis: Feed a competitor's website or blog post into AI tools designed for this. You'll get a breakdown of their top-ranking keywords, revealing where they excel (and where there's room for you to shine).

• Reverse engineering: Ask ChatGPT "What keywords might this article be targeting?" This works on your own content too, ensuring alignment between the copy and its intended search terms.

🔈️ Semantic Understanding

• "Similar concepts" prompting: Ask the AI: "What are some keywords and concepts related to [your keyword]?" This expands your net beyond synonyms to find topically relevant keywords for in-depth content.

🤖 Prompt: Expand Your Content Strategy with ChatGPT

Below is a universal prompt template designed for SaaS marketers to identify seed keywords, clusters, topics, and sub-topics related to their product or service. This template can be adapted and used with AI tools like ChatGPT to generate comprehensive keyword and content strategies.

You are an SEO expert with deep experience in keyword research to find content ideas. 

You are to do keyword research for [Insert Your Industry] industry. 

You are to come up with ideas to create educational, interesting, and helpful content for [Describe Target Audience’s Main Goal or Problem]. 

we are seeking to optimize our content strategy to better address our target audience's needs. Our product/service, [Insert Product/Service Name], offers unique benefits such as [List Key Features/Benefits], setting us apart in the market. 

To ensure our content effectively reaches and resonates with [Insert Target Audience], we aim to refine our keyword strategy. 

Your task is to do keyword research. 

Start by identifying a robust set of seed keywords, keyword clusters, relevant topics, and sub-topics that align with our value proposition and the search behavior of our potential users.

1. Seed Keywords Identification:

   - Begin by identifying broad seed keywords that encompass the core functionalities and benefits of [Insert Product/Service Name]. Consider how our target audience might describe their challenges or solutions they are seeking in [Insert Your Industry].

The start of the output to get keyword ideas is here:

You can continue elaborating, here are more ideas for the specific tasks of creating keyword clusters, expanding on topics and sub-topics, and more:

2. Keyword Clusters Creation:

   - Based on the identified seed keywords, develop clusters that categorize more specific aspects of our product/service, including features, use cases, and industry-specific jargon. This should also account for variations in how our target audience might search for solutions within [Insert Your Industry].

3. Topics and Sub-Topics Exploration:

   - For each keyword cluster, generate a list of topics and sub-topics that our content could address. These should speak directly to the questions, concerns, and interests of [Insert Target Audience], and reflect the stages of their decision-making process when considering products/services like ours.

4. Competitive Angle:

   - Highlight any opportunities to differentiate our content through unique keywords or topics not extensively covered by our competitors but highly relevant to our target audience.

5. User Intent Mapping:

   - Lastly, map the identified keywords, topics, and sub-topics to specific user intents (informational, navigational, transactional, etc.) to tailor our content strategy more effectively toward leading [Insert Target Audience] through the sales funnel.

Ensure the recommendations are actionable, aligned with our goal of [Insert Goal, e.g., increasing organic traffic, establishing thought leadership, driving product signups], and cater to the nuances of the [Insert Your Industry] industry. 

After using the prompts here, you can start to generate a lot of creative ideas, and ways to tie in those ideas with different stages of the funnel that you are creating content for.

Here’s the ChatGPT output as an example, continuing with the “CRM tools” example:

🔬Expand: Get Thousands More Content Ideas in 5 Min

Here are some tools to get more ideas for content and keywords. Get more ideas here, and then you can bring them back to ChatGPT or your keyword research tool to expand even more.

1. "People Also Ask" Goldmine

Tool: AnswerSocrates

Enter your main keyword. AnswerSocrates visualizes a network of the questions people are actively asking Google in relation to it. This uncovers long-tail phrases with real search intent and niche topics to address.

2. Mine Your Competitors' Success

• Tool: SEMrush, Ahrefs, or similar

  In the Keyword section, filter for search terms that have above a certain search volume, and below a certain Keyword Difficulty. These can be good keyword opportunities. Here’s an example with “CRM Tools”:

3. The Power of Autocomplete

• Tool: Keywordtool.io

  Find additional keywords in Keywordtool.io. You can search for specific search engines, and filter by keyword suggestions, prepositions, questions, etc. You can’t get the search volume on the free plan, but you can at least copy the keywords on the free plan!

4. Forum and Community Insights

• Tools: Reddit, or GummySearch

  Don't just search – observe discussions. Note the exact language people use to describe problems and desires. This uncovers keywords in their most organic form, unfiltered by SEO tools. GummySearch aggregates Sub-Reddits, and makes this easy to get a quick glimpse with their AI tool (a paid feature).

📖 Resources: How to Avoid AI-Content Detection

This week I spoke with Jon Gillham, CEO of Originality.ai, the best content detector on the market.

Relevant and timely conversation, given the Google update.

This is how Jon Gillham, Founder and CEO of Originality.AI, is thinking about his marketing and content.

It's now more important than ever to provide helpful and valuable content to users, it's clear that simply relying on words alone is not enough.

Here are 5 ways that Jon continues to stand out in a competitive space of AI detection:

1️⃣ Conduct unique studies and research

2️⃣ Incorporate data, graphs, and leading-edge analysis

3️⃣ Provide actionable insights that AI-generated content can't replicate

4️⃣ Leverage digital PR efforts to gain links and traffic

5️⃣ Offer free tools that help users achieve their goals

By combining words with these value-adding components, you can create a content strategy that truly stands out and engages your audience.

You can listen to the full episode here.

Jon also put together a great study evaluating the sites impacted by the Google Update. Some sites that he looked at that get over a million visits per month are deindexed from Google immediately 🤕 

Check out his article here.

That’s it for the week….until next week, stay Super, Marketers!

Gen