AI-Powered Keyword Research Can Optimize Your Pillar Post for SERP Rankings
The Fast & Easy Way To Optimize Your Pillar Post for SERP Rankings (Part 2)
Keywords are the crux of search engine optimization when it comes to getting your content ranked highly. You can certainly use your own keyword tools to do some research on high-volume, low-competition keywords and phrases, but don’t discount AI’s ability to help you with this strategy, too.
You can also use your keyword research or tool as a base for the AI to work from. For example, even if you just go to Google and let it auto-fill the results for you, you can give those words and phrases to AI and ask it to build a keyword strategy around what you’ve found.
If you look on Google for “list building tips for beginners,” you can scroll down to related searches and find keywords like this:
While these processes are great — they can be time-consuming, so to save time, I often turn to other tools such as RankIQ. This is a very slick tool that gives you access to data on the top niches and sub-niches, and tells you which keywords or phrases are good candidates for relatively easy ranking!
Once you have a few keywords to start with, you can prompt your AI tool like this: “I’m writing a pillar blog post called List Building Tips for Beginners: How to Build Your Email List from Scratch. I want to target the keyword phrases in the title, but also these (insert list from above). Create a keyword strategy for me including whatever main keyword phrase I should create the post around, as well as semantic keywords I should use in the post, too.
AI will come back with instructions that we should target “list building tips for beginners” as our main keyword phrase to rank for. Then it gives a list of 15 semantic keyword phrases we need to utilize in our content.
Besides the ones we listed above, it also gives us answers like:
Some of them will be geared more toward email marketing, so we can eliminate those from our strategy. In fact, we can even tell AI: “I don’t want to focus on email marketing keywords — only list building.”
When you do that, it comes back with more items as substitutions, like:
Finalize the list of keyword phrases you want to use and set it aside for later use whenever you get AI to optimize your content and make sure you’re targeting these words in your pillar post.
Effortlessly Outline Your Pillar Posts Using AI for Ideas and Structure
We now have our main topic and some keywords we want to use. If you want to, you can create your own outline for the pillar post — or even use a hybrid approach where you tell AI what topics you know you want included, and ask it to come up with more.
AI can help with this task because your pillar post needs to be comprehensive, meaning it covers everything the reader may want to know. So we’re going to prompt AI like this: “I need you to outline the pillar blog post called: List Building Tips for Beginners: How to Build Your Email List from Scratch. I don’t want anything about email marketing, only list building. So I know I want things like information about choosing an autoresponder and getting it set up and creating a lead magnet and landing page with opt-in form, but add anything else that would cover list building in a comprehensive manner for the reader. Be detailed and lengthy with your response.”
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The way we have worded this allows our AI tool to dig deep into the topic. We want to make sure that it is comprehensive so that we can eliminate anything that comes back that is not relevant to our needs.
Even after we get the response, we want to prompt AI by saying: “Is there anything else we should add?” Usually, the AI tool will come back with additional topics that might be included in this pillar blog post, and you can pick and choose what you want to include.
You can continue using that same prompt until the AI tool begins to deliver all options that you would not want to include. Then, you want to select which items it has provided you with that you want to be included in your pillar blog post, then paste that back into your AI tool so that the information can be organized logically for both readers and search bots.
With some topics, this won’t be a concern. However, when it comes to list- building in particular, you wouldn’t want to have topics like segmenting your list coming before a section about choosing your autoresponder, for example.
You also want to take the time to make sure nothing has been duplicated within the outline. Sometimes AI will deliver results where the topics are too similar, even if they are worded a bit differently.
Once AI has organized and fleshed out your outline, you can have it tweak the subheading titles for you if it needs to. In fact, you might want to have it weave some of the keyword phrases in there, too.
We now have our final topics (in addition to the introduction and conclusion), which are:
Make sure everything is in a logical order. You can rearrange them if you want to because you’ll know more than a machine what makes sense in terms of an order to do things.
The next thing you want to do is have AI outline your subtopics. Your outline should be fully drilled down. So for instance, in one subsection, it says: “Tips for understanding your audience’s pain points and how this helps with list building.”
You can ask AI to outline that section for you so that you can pick and choose what you want to go in it. It will give you an outline just for that portion of your main outline that looks like this:
Now we’ll see that the last bullet point might be better off going into the next section about creating a lead magnet, so we can eliminate that from this particular section. AI has a tendency to either not go into enough detail or to go far beyond what we want it to focus on, and yes, sometimes even in another direction altogether.
Again, you can prompt it to ask if there’s anything else that should be added to that section and see if it can give you more information. This is sometimes where some wonderful nuggets will appear that will work in your favor in getting your pillar post ranked high in the SERPs.
Once I have gone through the steps above to create my core content, I then take the content back to RankIQ to polish and finish the article.
The final step is uploading the content to my WordPress blog, where one my favorite tools, SEO plugin RankMath will walk me through the perfect keyword optimization process inside my WordPress. This will include writing the perfect snippet for the Search Engines, making sure the title is the right length and includes the right words, H1 & H2 tags are all in place and much more. Sound like too much work? RankMath gets it all done in 5 minutes or less?;-)
Tomorrow, we continue the journey, diving deeper into the final step mentioned above, using our AI-Assisted writing tools to finish the post creation process?;-)