Case Study - Using a Blog to Build an Expert Image

Websites can serve various purposes. They can be informational, sales-oriented, instructional, hobby-focused, etc. Let's focus specifically on sales. Nowadays, we have the ability to sell across multiple channels. It does not necessarily have to take place on our website. Often, using intermediaries who already have well-established visibility can be a better solution. At the same time, sales can happen in brick-and-mortar stores and completely satisfy our needs. How can you use your brand's domain online in such a case?

Take care of your image

If you run a business, you know that having a business card is an absolute fundamental. A website is our business card on the web. It is therefore worth presenting yourself in the best possible way. Today, we want to show how to build an expert image in your industry by ranking for informational phrases for your product, based on an SEO campaign for our client.

Keyword research and competitor analysis

The client does not sell directly on their website. Their products are available in large online stores. We should add that the case study concerns the baby stroller sales industry.The first step and the foundation of every SEO campaign is solid keyword research. Thanks to it, we are able to properly plan the entire strategy and internal linking within the planned topical clusters. Rushing is not advisable in this case - the better we select the keywords, the better and more impactful our strategy will be.

How to start keyword research?

We started our research by finding keywords closely related to the main phrase, which is "baby strollers". These phrases should show blog articles in the search results. Finding the right user intent is crucial here because our goal is to promote the brand as an expert - so we discard any product-related sales phrases, as this goal is already achieved on other sales channels. For our needs, we used the Ahrefs application, specifically its built-in Keyword Explorer tool:

For a phrase with such high search volume, it is worth using the tabs below that suggest phrases related to a given topic. In this case, we will be looking for potential questions that arise when purchasing a stroller, as well as those you might have while using one.

For most phrases in the Ahrefs tool, we can check search results right away. This helps us verify whether a given phrase matches our user intent. This was the first stage of our research.

How to conduct competitor analysis?

After expanding the SERP view for the phrases we are interested in, we can see the competitors appearing for them on the first page of search results. Of course, we can also check these results manually by typing the phrase into Google search. It is worth making a list of such competitors and analyzing their visibility. The batch analysis tool helped us with this by providing a view of the estimated number of keywords and traffic generated by competitors through blog articles. It is also part of the Ahrefs application.

Such data will provide us with additional insights into which competitors to select for our analysis. We can also discard websites that do not quite match our expectations. Based on this, thanks to relevant competitors, we were able to gather a large database of keywords for further action.

Additional actions worth exploring

Every Google search generates suggestions from the search engine. If we want to find out what users are searching for, all we need to do is scroll down the search results to the "People also ask" section:

We can later check these questions and verify their search volume. They can potentially serve as new topics for blog articles, or they can be used within already planned content to enrich our articles.At the very bottom of the search results, Google will also suggest related searches - this represents potential for additional keywords related to the topic we are interested in:

Additionally, there are free tools that can further assist us in this analysis. Using alsoasked.com, we can find thematically related questions that we can also use on the website:

Content Planning

After such extensive keyword research and competitor analysis, we can proceed to planning content that will answer users' questions. The selection of keywords should primarily be based on the user intent of interest and meeting our business goals. In this case, we wanted to build visibility by promoting our client as an expert in their industry. To this end, we selected a set of queries based on which we could start creating an expert blog. We grouped these phrases into appropriate clusters, because we were able to answer some of the queries within a single blog article, which increases its attractiveness and reduces the risk of keyword cannibalization, as well as guides us on which anchors to use for internal linking between articles. To prepare solid guidelines needed to create the content, we used the Surfer SEO application and its Content Editor tool. This tool allows us to select the specific competitors we are interested in for a given query. In this way, guidelines are generated regarding content length, keyword density, the number of headings, images, etc. We are able to edit these guidelines and tailor them to our needs.

After creating and implementing the content, we submitted the newly created article URLs in Google Search Console to speed up their indexing. Our client's visibility increased as expected. As can be seen in the attached screenshot, the rollout of the articles brought a significant increase in traffic. Data comes from the Google Search Console tool:

In the Ahrefs tool, you can see how our client's keyword visibility grew during the same time:

The screenshot shows that currently about 100 phrases are in positions 1-3, over 260 phrases appear in positions 1-10, and all phrases in positions 1-20 total about 540. Over the course of a year, this is a doubling of the number of phrases that generate traffic to the client's website.

Summary

As can be seen from the above example, building visibility can have different goals. Increasing brand awareness and establishing yourself as an online expert is one of them. The key element is selecting the right keywords at the strategy planning stage. This allows us to precisely target our intentions. If you want to know more about SEO activities - check out our blog. If you are interested in improving your online visibility - contact us.