Candour

Keywordinsights, topic clusters and search intent with Andy Chadwick

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What's in this episode?

In this week's episode, Jack is joined by Andy Chadwick from Snippet Consulting/Digital and Keywordinsights.

Jack and Andy discuss:

  • How Keywordinsights create keyword clusters
  • How Keywordinsights understands keyword context & intent
  • What came first: The content hub or the indented search results
  • What's new with Keywordinsights V2 And more.

Show notes and links

Transcript

Jack: Welcome to episode 19 of season two of the Search With Candour podcast. My name is Jack Chambers and I am your host for this week. I am joined by a fantastic special guest, Mr Andy Chadwick, who is co-founder of Snippet Digital, a very well-regarded SEO consultancy and Keywordinsights, one of the hottest keyword tools on the market today.

Jack: Search With Candour is supported by SISTRIX, the SEO's toolbox. Go to sistrix.com/swc if you want to check out some of their fantastic free tools, such as their Instagram hashtag generator, Google update tracker, page B comparison, and tracking of your site's visibility index. That's sistrix.com/swc for free SEO tools, sistrix.com/trends to sign up for the trend watch newsletter, and I'll actually be talking about the latest SectorWatch later on in the show.

So without further ado, here is my conversation with Andy Chadwick. And welcome to the show, my special guest for this week, Andy Chadwick. How are you, sir?

Andy: Hello. Yeah. Good, thank you. Good. How are you doing?

Jack: All right. Thank you. Yeah, we're let behind the curtain here, listeners. We're recording this late on a Monday, so apologies if the energy levels aren't quite at my usual levels, but we will do our best on a Monday afternoon for you fine listeners. So Andy, for those of you out there in listener world who don't know who you are, first of all, shame on them. Second of all, tell us a little bit about yourself.

Andy: Yeah. So I'm Andy. I co-own, that's the word, isn't it? Co-own, co-have a small agency with my business partner, Suganthan. So that's an SEO agency called Snippet. Well it's called Snippet Digital Consulting now. It used to be just called Snippet Digital, but there's a reason, if you're interested we can get into it. And we also own a company that is called Snippet Digital, so there's Snippet Consulting and Snippet Digital, which now are two separate companies.

Snippet Digital owns a suite of SEO tools, of which the main one that we're known for is Keywordinsights, which is our SaaS SEO tool, where you can sign up and use it there. So yeah, co-own that with Suganthan, agency and SEO tools to summarize all that.

Jack: Fantastic. So I guess is that the legal distinction there of Consulting being the agency and Digital being the tool side of things. I know Mark working with AlsoAsked has a similar kind of thing of differentiating between us as Candour the agency and also us, the tool and that kind of thing as well. So I think that's not unusual in the industry, for sure.

Andy: Yeah. Well, I mean people know us for Keywordinsights. That's the only public-facing tool, but we've actually got quite a few SEO tools and before, they were all owned by the agency and we realized we wanted to separate the two, because a lot of them are licensed actually now by other agencies as well. So, Snippet Digital is the overarching company that owns all the tools. So yeah, that's where that comes in.

Jack: Well, we've touched on Keywordinsights there. Let's dive in a little bit in more detail. For the listeners who don't know what Keywordinsights is, what is Keywordinsights? So let's start the top level and then we'll start drilling down into more details about Keywordinsights and how it works.

Andy: Yeah. So you've got these tools like Ahrefs and Semrush, which exist to pull loads and loads of data, loads of keywords at once. And then at the other end of the scale, you've got these tools like Clear Scope and can't remember the other one, Content Harmony, Use Topic, and these help you basically make really detailed articles and blogs. And what we struggled with as an agency or a consultancy was actually turning that list of hundreds of thousands or thousands of keywords into those articles. It was a big process in between that. We found things, there's loads of problems.

So say I've got a list, let's say, of 10,000 keywords. First of all, I didn't know when to break something up. What could we focus on one article and what did we need to break into two? And conversely the other way around actually, sometimes because Keywordinsights also allows you to pull in your existing ranks, sometimes you're thinking, "Oh, I've got two articles. Should I merge them? Or should I even break it up even further?" So what Keywordinsights allowed us to do was, yeah, plug loads of keywords into a huge data dump into it and it would, what we call, cluster the keywords is its first main task. So what that means is we analyze the search results and we look at how many keywords should be targeted on one page. So, do all these keywords have enough ranking URLs in common that we can group them together and target them all in one? Or should we separate them?

A good example, actually, I'll use an example here, is we recently did this for a vape client and most vape clients, most vape sites, vaping sites have two different, they've got a page called the vaporizer parts and accessories. They're trying to target both of those on the same page because vape parts and accessories surely mean the same thing, right? Well, if you put through all the keywords to do with vape accessories and all the keywords to do with vape parts through Keywordinsights, it would show you actually, these are in two different, what we call clusters. That means if you wanted to target both those terms, you really need two different pages, you can't target them both on one page.

And you see some really interesting results. Sometimes you get keywords that you wouldn't have thought you could target on one page that you now can. And sometimes you get completely the opposite where you think, "Oh, surely these two must have been on the same page and now they shouldn't be. So vape parts and accessories was an example of one. We've seen sometimes simple pluralization separated into two clusters. So we had one the other day, it was ‘skate wheel’ and ‘skate wheels’ and they were in two very different clusters. The client actually thought the tool was just not being accurate and we were like, "Well, no, search for skate wheel and search for skate wheels because our tool is literally looking at the results." And you'll see two very different sets of results there, so if you want to target both, you need to split it out into both.

Jack: Yeah. So from what I understand, it literally looks at the top results in Google and literally looks at that set and gets an idea of whether it's a product page or whether it's an article, right? It's kind of getting literally from that set data.

Andy: So that's the other thing it does. So the first thing it does is tells you which keywords can be targeted on the page. It clusters them together. Which group of keywords can we target on one page? And so, does it need to be, can I target vape parts and vape accessories on the same page or do I need two pages? The other thing it does is overlay, as you said, it's the search intent. So then it tells you, okay, of these pages, does it need to be a product page or does it need to be informational? Or is it fragmented? It also shows you that, got a bit of a lisp then, so it will analyze the top 10 results and say for CBD oil, four of the top 10 are product base and six of the top 10 are informational.

So therefore it's pretty fragmented. You could rank twice, you could rank it informational and a product page, but generally speaking, it's leaning more towards the informational. So its first job is clustering, pushing all the keywords, grouping keywords together that can be targeted on one page and showing you where you need to split pages out or not. The second task it does is search intent. So it'll tell you, for that cluster of keywords, what type of content you should be creating, should it be a product? Should it be informational or actually can you do both?

And then the other task it does, or we allow you to do, is it lets you pull through your existing ranking URLs as well. So what you can do there is you can start filtering by keywords that you don't... Because it spits out a pre-pivoted pivot table. So you can whack on a filter and search for any cluster, which you rank an average position 100 for, which have an average of more informational ideas and product-based ideas. And then all of a sudden, what you've got is a really solid content candidate, you've got 30 or 40 clusters of keywords that you don't rank for that are definitely informational and intent. So you can really quickly spot these ideas.

Or you could do the opposite. You could go, show me the product pages that I should have that I don't. And so you put a filter on your pivot table to show all the clusters that are product based and that you're ranking in positions 11 to 24, and then what you've got is you've got these clusters, which when you unroll, when you unexpand them in the spreadsheet, you start to see three or four ranking URLs for one cluster. And if you remember what I said earlier, a cluster, you should target these on one page. So if you're seeing three or four ranking URLs come through in a cluster, you know that you're probably cannibalizing yourself and you should group those pages together.

Or as we saw with the vape accessory and vape parts, you might see two different clusters and you'll see a load of ranking URLs on one cluster and no ranking URLs on the other cluster and you know, "Ah, I shouldn't be targeting vape parts and accessories on one page. I should be breaking them into two." So that's essentially what Keywordinsights does. So I guess to summarize all that, it clusters keyword, shows you what pages you need to create, but it also pulls through the intent to tell you what type of content it needs to be and the ranking just so that you can see whether that content exists, what is ranking, whether you're cannibalizing yourself, or whether you're missing that content together.

There are increasingly more features. We've just added Title AI as well. So we actually analyze your clusters and then start suggesting blog titles for you using GPT3 three Open AI. We've also got keyword discovery, which allows you to put in one keyword in there, we will come up with loads of keywords for you, and then you can push that to the clustering so that you don't actually have to leave our platform to do your keyword research. And there's a lot more features coming, which I can't talk too much about, but designed basically to make that whole process of content development so much easier.

Jack: Amazing. So, what is the process for that clustering specifically then? What goes into the AI and the algorithm that actually builds those clusters for specific fields? What made ‘skate wheel’ and ‘skate wheels’ end up in different clusters from the technology behind it?

Andy: Yeah, so the clustering is simple. The clustering is literally, we analyze the search results and if there's an overlap in URLs between X amount of keywords, we'll cluster them together. So there are free versions of our tool. We get asked this a lot. There are free versions of our tool that use NLP to cluster (Natural Language Processing). The problem with those tools are it groups them together based on the algorithm's linguistic understandings of the word. So it will group words together that do mean the same thing fundamentally to you and I, but ultimately we are playing in Google's universe and so we want to optimise to what Google's doing. So we don't use NLP to do the clustering. We scrape the results and show you that these keywords should be together or not based on what Google's doing.

So there are free versions out there and they're decent for making your keyword list smaller, but they're not accurate. In that example I gave you with vape parts and accessories, I'm 99% sure they would've been in the same cluster, same with skateboard wheel and skateboard wheels, that would've been clustered the same had you used an NLP version.

Jack: Right, yeah.

Andy: So we don't use NLP to do the clustering. We use live SERP data and we adjust how hard it is we look at depending on what that niche is. So, do they have four URLs in common? Do they have six URLs in common? So, that part of it's quite simple. We do use machine learning for the intent. That's where we... Yeah. We've got a secret there about how we do it because some enterprise tools, not naming any names, have tried to copy it. In fact, yeah, they released it a few weeks ago or months ago I think-

Jack: You don't want to start an internet war? Send out some sub-Tweets, Elon Musk style?

Andy: I did send one and they liked it. So they tweeted about their new intent. They tweeted the new intent model out and I put a silver medal number two under it, like Elon Musk did when... And they did like it. I think they laughed, but yeah, so they're trying to see how we're doing it because it's not quite the same. I'm stopping short of saying it's not as accurate, because it's different, but it's just different.

So we do use machine learning for the intent, or context as we call it. We call it keyword context rather than keyword intent. And we do use NLP, there's another part of the report we give out called the Hub and Spoke Report. It's all part of the clustering, but what we do in it, it comes in another tab in a spreadsheet. So if you've got a list of 100,000 keywords, clustering them into your... Your 100,000 keywords when clustered might cluster into maybe 20,000 clusters, so it's a lot more manageable.

But then actually you want to know how your clusters are interrelated, right? So we do use NLP to then spit out another tab, which is we use NLP to basically tell you how closely the clusters are related to each other so that you can start planning your hubs and spokes in your content plan. You can start working out how all your clusters should be linked together. So we do use NLP there, but not at the actual clustering stage.

Jack: As I mentioned at the start of the show, we're going to be talking about SectorWatch from SISTRIX's blog this week and we're diving into the latest article on SectorWatch written, as always, by the fantastic Charlie Williams. It is all about sustainable travel and I've recently gotten married, so I'm looking into my honeymoon options at the moment with my wife and sustainable travel is something we've been thinking about. So it's an interesting topic to dive into because it's become such a key thing, especially with people wanting to travel now things are opening up, post pandemic and all that kind of stuff. I think it is something that is very much in the forefront of a lot of travelers' minds when thinking about traveling abroad or even traveling domestically as well.

So this article in SectorWatch discusses some of the leading brands and domains about sustainable travel and around those kinds of topics using keywords, such as sustainable holidays, sustainable tourism, and a lot of associated stuff around that. What Charlie does here is really great, because it really dives into some of the domains that are ranking for those kinds of things, why they're ranking, why they've seen such growth in recent months, and particularly good, I think, Charlie highlights a piece of content from the New York Times, which I really, really like, which is titled Be a More Sustainable Traveler. It's a full travel guide that ranks for 143 keywords here in the UK with over a quarter of those ranking on page one and more than half of them ranking on page two. And it essentially has steadily grown with its visibility index since it was published about a year ago in the summer of 2021.

This article, in particular, is really well written, it satisfies a lot of the classic formatting structure you like to see in this kind of guide, it's broken down into really fantastic sections with clear headings, it's fantastically structured, and it also conveys a lot of expertise and authoritativeness as well because the journalist who wrote it, Livia Albeck-Ripka, writes on a lot of these issues. She's typically focusing on a lot of the topics like environmental issues and things like that, so she is someone who has demonstrated expertise. Again, something we always talk about with EAT and SEO. And just looking at the headings on the page, they really lay out everything really nicely and it's a fantastic example of a guide article that can really pull its weight and do some fantastic things in the rankings.

Having a look at more travel keywords, there is one particular domain, funnily enough, called Responsible Travel, which makes sense with this sustainable/responsible kind of thing. And it's doing well, particularly because it matches its brand so closely. After that, you're looking in the top 25 or so, there's a lot of publishers in there like the article I just mentioned from New York Times. There's a lot of major travel brands that I would expect to see in there that are being left out a little bit, which I found interesting. So there's a fair amount of the specialist bloggers in there and the kind of things where we see more general travel agents being left behind and being left further down in the rankings there. Talking of the top three domains in general, I think this says it all straight away with a clear branding here for these domains, you've got responsibletravel.com, you have sustainabletravel.org, and of course, theguardian.com. Guardian is targeted, pretty clearly knows its audience and targets them well, so that makes a lot of sense for the Guardian's audience for looking into sustainable travel and holidays and things like that.

Charlie also delves into the intent of these searches. So this is very much clearly informational-driven, so a ‘know’ search intent, K-N-O-W obviously. So people are learning more about it rather than looking to actually purchase a sustainable holiday package, people are in the research stages, they're in the earlier stages here. So they're in that information gathering and knowledge gathering kind of stage here for search intent, rather than going straight to the booking stage. They're not a ‘doing’, this is on a purchasing stage. The vast majority of the searches around sustainable travel and those associated keywords seem to be from information gathering from the know intent I just mentioned.

So, that means then these people are then moving onto the next stages, you'll start looking at locations and stuff. Like I said, I've just been doing this with my wife, we've just been talking about where we're going to travel to on our honeymoon, which is hopefully happening next year. And I think it's interesting because holidays are such a big investment in time and money, right? That makes sense that you would have this prolonged research stage of the buying process of the customer journey because you're investing so much time, you're investing so much money, they're often booked way in advance as well. Like I said, we're already looking at September 2023 for our honeymoon and we've just gotten married in May 2022. So, I think having that intent ahead of time really makes sense and drives home the clear intent if you are looking to target something like this for your clients or for your website in particular, it's a very clear know intent across the board for this stage for looking at keywords like sustainable travel and sustainable tourism and all that kind of stuff.

As I said, things are now opening up and people are going to be traveling and sustainability and traveling responsibly are becoming more and more important to lots of people traveling now. So, I highly recommend you go and check out the latest episode of SectorWatch. Like I said, I'll put links for that in the show notes at search.withcandour.co.uk, or you can go to sistrix.com/blog and it will be the SectorWatch that was published on the 12th of May 2022.

Jack: So, let's dive into a little bit of the hub and spoke side of things. I know you wrote a brilliant blog post recently delving into that in more detail, doing a bit of a case study there yourself on your own site as well. As always, links for that are in the share notes at search.withcandour.co.uk. So, yeah. Are there any sort of golden rules for hub and spoke? I think you're more of a spoke before the hub kind of guy, am I right in thinking that that would be your general kind of advice?

Andy: Yeah. So I think the reason hub and spoke works well isn't because it's a hub and spoke, it's because it's a method that ensures that you've comprehensively covered a topic. So just being a hub and spoke model, that's not why it's good for SEOs because if you're planning... I think that's what a lot of people think though, "Oh, this is why," but it's because when you plan it in that sort of way, you comprehensively cover a topic and you ensure that the internal linking between them is good from the start.

Jack: I guess it's going into it with a plan rather than just writing a bunch of stuff and then trying to bring it all together at the end and being like, "Oh, it should have been a content hub originally and it's now paginated blog post over the last five years," or whatever it is.

Andy: Yeah. And you'd be surprised at how many people would get in our chat going, "Oh, I'm really stuck. Your report spits out this hub and spoke, which one should be the hub?" And there shouldn't be a, which one's the hub? It's just like...

So my approach to it is, as we said, we spit out all these different clusters and there'll be a load of clusters related to, let's say, repairing furniture. And those clusters might be how to repair furniture, how to wax furniture, how to get stains out of furniture, and they'll all be in different clusters according to our tool, because we've analyzed the results. So we've got five or six clusters, and when I say clusters, I literally mean it's a topic, right? A dedicated blog should be on that cluster. So we've got six or seven clusters on repairing furniture, doing up furniture, making it better, repurposing secondhand furniture, and these are all loosely related to each other and that's where I said earlier that we use NLP to group the clusters together.

The other thing about creating the hub and spoke model, if you go in with that mindset, it allows you to cover a topic comprehensively, which is even more important now that you're seeing all these indents come in to Google, it used to be six months ago up to one indent, I think I've seen three or four in some cases now.

Jack: Yeah. We're seeing a lot more recently, for sure.

Andy: Yeah. And if you look at them, they're always, of course they are, they're just slight variations of the original query. So if you type in, I don't know, how to buy a gold watch, the top article might be, what I would normally call, the hub page. So it might be the ultimate guide to buying gold watches, don't use the ultimate guide, but it might be the ultimate guide to buying gold watches, sorry, watches, and then you might see two or three indented ones under that; how to buy gold watches, how to buy silver watches, how to buy bronze watches.

And our tool would show you these should be three or four different topics. And so, it's really useful for understanding, "Actually, yeah, I'm not going to write just one massive guide that tries to cover all this. I am going to break these into these smaller articles because I know that's what can be targeted and then I can even potentially win these little indents as well," which pushes everyone down and gives you even more real estate there.

Jack: And we've seen a lot of that with even tabbed meta descriptions recently and things like that. Do you think that's something, I don't necessarily... Google's becoming less strict on cannibalism. That's maybe not the right word, but they seem to be offering a lot more, like you said, similar intended things on the SERP at one time from one site. I think it's an interesting direction they seem to be going in.

Andy: I genuinely find it more useful though, because if you look at it, if they kept it to 10 differing results, so user journey, we all know, it's not linear, is it? So we call it cherry picking. So you might start by, say you want a car, you might start your search with, I want to buy a car. And then as you're reading the articles’ ‘how to buy a car’, you might suddenly start realizing that electric cars are the way forward, they're better for the planet, so then your search changes, best electric car. And you're scrolling through and then you might never have thought about it, but you're now suddenly realizing they take a while to charge, so your search is now going to change to best electric... It jumps around everywhere.

Andy: If Google's trying to show 10 differing results, they might all be trying to answer the same question. By doing this little indent thing, and you'll often see it, it's trying to satisfy slightly different intent related to the first original query. So it's almost preempting that cherry-picking thing before it happens. It's the same when the people also ask things, I guess, it's just more useful because it's indenting right under the original question. So it is interesting. It sucks if you don't have it because it's pushing everyone else down, but I genuinely find it useful. I came across it the other day and I did a query and as I was scanning, I didn't even click on the headline one, it's the indented one actually answered what I was going to ask next first anyway.

Jack: Yeah. Do you think that's Google kind of reacting to more people using this kind of hub and spoke method where, like you said, you have the top-level thing might be the main thing that actually ranks, but something that answers the query more specifically might actually be one of those indented things which essentially is the spoke coming off of that hub page, which might be the primary URL in the SERP there? Do you think that's an active reaction to that, or I don't know, is it chicken and egg-

Andy: Chicken and egg, isn't it? Yeah. It is chicken and egg. I've got no idea. Chicken and egg and I have no idea. And sometimes the indent is just satisfying a different intent. One is a guide and one is a buying page. So that's the other way it's working well. Again, and you see this a lot with fragmented queries, in our tool we show you the fragmented ones. We'll say like, "This is really fragmented and you'll see a lot more with them." So CBD oil's a great example. If you type CBD oil in, I think five or six are informational and five or six are transactional and the top result is a big informational one. Is it safe? What are the drawbacks? What are the benefits? And then indented into that, it's like buy it. It's really good, I think so anyway. I find it really useful.

Jack: Yeah, definitely. Like I said, I've seen some interesting stuff. And when we're covering people noticing new features when we do our usual news shows rather than the interview episodes, it's really interesting seeing all things that are being tested by Google and even stuff being tested by Bing as well, seeing more indented stuff, weird stuff on the meta descriptions.

I don't know, Mark was talking about it when we talked about the tab meta descriptions a few weeks ago, he'd kind of written off meta descriptions so much because they get rewritten so much and all this kind of stuff, yeah, is it worth actually putting all your SEO effort into a meta description when you can be doing something more useful? But they seem to making them more valuable and making them more versatile, which I think is interesting. And maybe things will swing back around and more people will then, again like you said, the cart leading the horse or the horse leading the cart, the chicken and the egg, are we chasing what Google's doing? Are they reacting to what we are doing as SEOs? It's an interesting kind of, I don't know, snake eating its own... I'm using a lot of metaphors, snake eating its own tail.

Andy: So my partner, well she's originally from Vietnam, but she's grown up in London and I use all these sayings and she doesn't have a clue. So I've had to buy a book on idioms.

Jack: Nice. I used to work in the English language industry and that was always one of the books that was most requested by our students. Like, "Where can I get a book of English idioms?" And there's some brilliant ones where they go through translations. You hear a German or a Vietnamese, as an example, a language that has its own idioms, but they do not translate into English-

Andy: Oh, yeah.

Jack: ... like, "That doesn't make any sense at all."

Andy: But she's grown up in London as in she was born here, it's just her parents, but because she was brought up by her parents who are Vietnamese, it's just like... Yeah, chicken and egg. She'd go, "What do you mean chicken and egg?" And it's like, "How do you not know what that means?" It's really funny.

Jack: So let's get back to-

Andy: Sorry. I went off-topic.

Jack: No, no, please. I'm always happy to go off-topic on this show, as much as I'm sure the listeners would like us to talk about Keywordinsights a bit more. I know you guys have talked about the pretty huge, you mentioned a few tens of thousands of keywords there, turning into tens of thousands and even thousands of clusters. How far can you push Keywordinsights? Is there a limit? I know we have limits on our Google Sheets and stuff like that when you're hitting a million rows and stuff like that. How far can you put, for the bigger agencies, for the listeners out there who are really dealing with some big sites and some big numbers?

Andy: Yeah. So, slight correction I think, maybe just said it wrong. It's hundreds of thousands of keywords ends up being just thousands of clusters or-

Jack: Sorry. Yes, yes.

Andy: ... thousands of... Yeah. Yeah, because it makes it smaller obviously. But yeah, no, so there are competitors of ours out there. There are other really good alternatives, but one of the USPs we have is we've done a lot of work on our back end, it's the stuff that people don't see that actually stands out amongst investors. So, it's also really boring to sell, but-

Jack: Isn't that always the case?

Andy: It is. And so we were frustrated, the reason we created our one and like I said, there are competitors out there, the reason we created another version of our competitor's one is firstly, no one had the intent with it, which we found useful for working out actually what content we wanted. But second of all, it's the scaling. So yeah, we deliver the reports back to you a lot quicker than anyone else can. I think we did a test with 25,000 keywords and our next nearest competitor did it in, I think it was 16 hours and we did it in two or three hours.

Jack: Wow.

Andy: So yeah, the speed is what we've done a lot of work on. And the second part is the fact that we don't have a limit you can upload. So, I hate Excel.

Jack: So do I. So do I.

Andy: Yeah, I can't stand it, especially the pivot tables in it are terrible. So there isn't a limit you can upload to Keywordinsights, but depending on how many you put through, and I think from me just spitballing, it might be about 25,000 keywords, I think any more than that, the Google Sheets report won't work because Google Sheets doesn't have that many rows, but we still give you the CSV, the Excel sheet. It just means then you have to work with it in Excel. We are working on a solution to that because the amount of people who also hate Excel, we're building a basic version of Google Sheets within the tool itself.

Jack: Oh, wow.

Andy: Yeah. Just, I can't stand it, but yeah. So to answer your question, there is no limit. I think the most I've put in is 150,000 and I've got the report within 24 hours, which is really good, and it just meant I had to work in Excel. The other way we're maybe going to look at it is we'll analyze the clusters for you and when we know it's not going to break across a cluster, we'll maybe separate it into two or three sheets, just being careful not to break it across where a cluster would be. So that's our potential other solution. But yeah, no, to answer your question, there's no limit, it's just the Google Sheets will break after a certain amount.

Jack: As long as you don't mind breaking Google Sheets, you can do what you like.

Andy: No. Yeah. But you'll still have your Excel.

Jack: Exactly. Exactly. I know you guys do offer an API for the agency level subscriptions as well. Could you tell us a little bit more about that? What kind of things that can plug into and what the main uses you've seen from people using the API?

Andy: Yeah. So it's not public-facing yet and there's still a bit more work to do in it, but there are a few people using it, mostly in-house companies already actually, who already have a keyword research process. They plug in their keywords into their tools and they basically just want it to be clustered within their own tools. So it basically will just do the clustering and the intent for you within whatever process you already have. We're actually talking about somehow integrating it with obviously Mark's tool so that you can pull in all the people also ask questions and then have them clustered in one place.

Andy: We also are in talks with, I can't name any names, but a few content writing tools and content writing agencies, which can use the API to start, yeah, doing some clever things there. But yeah, essentially whatever application you've got, it'll allow you to do the clustering and the intent classification within that application.

Jack: Cool. So you touched on Title AI earlier as well. That's one of the new features for version two, which you launched recently. Congratulations. By the way for the recent launch.

Andy: Yes. Oh, thank you very much.

Jack: What else came along with version two? We dive into title AI and a few of the other new updates and features.

Andy: Yeah. So there's keyword discovery, which is a new feature. That's in beta, just means though you can start your keyword research in the platform and not have to use a third party tool.

Jack: I like the way you kind of gloss over that. That's huge, by the way, and especially keeping your, you from a business perspective, keeping your users in your platform, all in one place kind of thing, but also from a user perspective, not having to get something from Ahrefs or Semrush or whatever it is, and then having to work out their formats and plug that into yours and da, da, da, and all that kind of stuff. That's huge. That's amazing.

Andy: Yeah. So people use the Keywordinsights in two ways. They either upload a massive list of loads of different keywords, from a whole site into it to separate them. You wouldn't be able to use keyword discovery for that because what keyword discovery does is you just plug in one keyword and we'll pull off all the other ideas. So how I sometimes use Keywordinsights is I plug a domain into Ahrefs or Semrush, pull all the keywords they rank for, plug that into Keywordinsights, and then have all the different things.

Jack: Yeah.

Andy: But the other way people use it is if you just want to zone in on a specific topic, and this is what keyword discovery, the keyword part in Keywordinsights is good for, say if I just wanted to cover Tesla in as much detail as possible, I just plug Tesla into keyword discovery, which is a feature within Keywordinsights, rip off all the 500 keywords, then press a button to have them all clustered and have that report and then start planning it from there.

So it is good if you want to zone in on a specific topic. It's not useful yet, which is why it's in beta, if you want to do your keyword research for the whole site. So there's that, and then there's title AI, which it analyzes your clusters and uses open AI to come up with, well, your blog titles. It gives you, I think, up to four blog titles. Hopefully, it's going to go further, which is what actually is in process now. And you'll start-

Jack: We've talked about the power of GPT3 in open AI a few times on the show already. It never ceases to impress me.

Andy: Yeah, no, it's incredible. And we're tweaking it in a way where hopefully it can start helping you with just more than the titles of the blogs. I can't say any more than that at the moment, but yeah, hopefully, be released-

Jack: There's a little tease for you, listeners.

Andy: So we're really excited about that. What other new features? Dumb ones, Jack. So a lot around, our first one, first of all, looked ugly. The new one looks better. So there's that.

Jack: Again, the UX designs that people coming in now don't appreciate the growth that it's been through. All the kind of stuff that if it isn't there, you don't know it's not there and once it's there, you don't notice it is there, things that go underappreciated, right?

Andy: Oh no, so loads of stuff, like customers not being able to change their password, print off invoices, update their password. Add user, our user seats is our latest one. We had a lot of agencies ask them to add other email addresses, so we just released that. So other than the few new features, it was mainly a design and we realized there was a lot of things lacking in terms of simple things. Honestly, and having this conversation with Mark recently, anyone who thinks they've got an internal tool which works really well that they can make into a SaaS tool, if they think it's easy to do, it's just not. I mean-

Jack: Yeah. I see the conversations happening between Mark and our development.

Andy: It's mad.

Jack: They're all working on it and it's absolutely crazy seeing all the simple stuff of like, "Yeah, this payment thing doesn't work." Like, "What do you mean the payment thing doesn't work?" Like, "Yeah, the whole system just doesn't work." "Oh, okay." Like you said, little invoicing things and stuff like that. It's crazy.

Andy: I mean if it didn't work, I'd have been happy. It's the fact we hadn't even thought about some of them, dumb things in version one, like the amount customers going, "How do I change my credit card details?" We're like, "Ah, yeah, we haven't got that." "How do I change my password?" "Oh, just log in with our Google." "Oh, we don't have a Google account. I've logged in with my password." Like, "Yeah, you can't do that." Just dumb things that we just never thought about.

Jack: But they're there now.

Andy: Mostly. The credit card change one, we still need to roll that one out. You can put in a credit card, but then you have to unsubscribe and resubscribe, which just isn't good, but that'll be coming out next week. But oh, so the problem was on V1, the way it was built, and this is boring for everyone I guess, but the way it was built is if we needed to change something like adding credit card details or something, it was a lot of work whereas now the way it's been built, it's very modular. So any changes we need, any new features customers come to us with, we can spin up really quickly. So V2, also again the boring stuff no one sees, was built in a way where we can make changes a lot quicker than we could before.

Jack: How about rank tracking? Talk a bit about rank tracking and one of the features there we haven't really touched on so far.

Andy: Yeah. I mean we only added there, it's been used for two ways. So the first way is just to add additional insights to your insights, so it's like-

Jack: Insights on insights on insights.

Andy: Yeah. Sounds ridiculous. It's so that, as I said earlier, when you pull a report off, you can really quickly see what clusters are or are not ranking and the ranking URLs for those clusters. So it allows you to see if you're cannibalizing yourself really quickly, or it allows you to see if there's a whole cluster you just don't rank for at all. So it's really there just so you don't have to V look up your rankings or the keywords into the report already.

Jack: The dreaded V lookup.

Andy: Oh, yeah. It's there to basically allow you to scan that really easily. The other way it's sometimes used, not many people use it, but a lot of agencies when they're pitching, I came from an agency myself before, if they're pitching to a client, they want the ranks pulled really quickly and they just want it one off so as they're pitching, they can say, "Here's the opportunity." So we're seeing a few agencies just use the rank just so they don't have to load it all into a keyword. Because it's not a rank tracker and it's not designed to be, so there's no setting up, you just plug your URL in and stick the keywords in and click go. It's designed literally to aid your reports in terms of the clustering. But yeah, a lot of people are using it just really quickly and cheaply spin-off, get the rankings for a load of keywords if they're doing a pitch.

Jack: So Andy, if people do want to check out Keywordinsights, do want to check out Snippet Digital Consulting, or yourself directly, how can they do that? How can they find you on the internet in various places?

Andy: So you can find me, Andy Chadwick, on my personal blog, which is andy-chadwick.com, or you can find me on Twitter, which is @digitalquokka. If you don't know what a quokka is, it's a weird Australian animal, but I shouldn't have ever chosen that name because no one ever finds it. So, that's Q-U-O-K-K-A. But you can also find, if you search for Keywordinsights, I mean visit the site anyway, but on Twitter you'll find Suganthan, my business partner, and I constantly retweeting that obviously. It's called self ingratiating, self Tweeting our own Tweets, but-

Jack: If that's not what Twitter's for, then I don't know what it is for.

Andy: Exactly. So yeah, no Keywordinsights on Twitter, @digitalquokka on Twitter, or my business partner is Suganthan, if you find that hard to spell, if you just start to type that in, it'll come up I imagine. But yeah, his Twitter handle's pretty obvious and you'll see his website as well.

We also have two new websites, so it's going to be Snippet Consulting, which isn't live yet, and Snippet Digital, which is going to be the gateway to see all our tools and what we're doing, because we actually are going to start building, one of the services we offer is building SEO tools for other businesses who have unique fringe cases.

Jack: Oh, fantastic.

Andy: Yeah. We have done one or two little projects in the past, which, yeah, we've built them tools to deal with them. So one company, for example, wanted like thousands and thousands of products SKUs built, well, reworded because they sell their products across loads of websites. So we built them a little tool where they can upload a CSV with product descriptions that'll be rewritten in 10 different ways, so we build little tools like that, so that'll be Snippet Digital. So yeah, find us on Twitter, on our websites, on LinkedIn. That would be amazing.

Jack: Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for giving me some more details about Keywordinsights and what you guys do over there. And listeners, like I said, links for everything Andy has just mentioned and everything we've talked about in the last half hour or so will be in the show notes. If you go to search.withcandour.co.uk, you can find the full transcript, the full show notes, and all the links there for you.

Jack: And that's all we have time for on this episode. Thank you so much, once again, to Andy for joining me this week and thank you very much for listening. I'll be back next week, probably with Mark again, to discuss the latest SEO and PPC news, but until then, I hope you have a lovely week.