Mastering Google's Search Rankings | How to Use AI SEO Tools for Topical Authority

Full video transcript

Hey everyone, my name is Tom Mayer Saron. Our brand is called Sable Flow. It’s about helping you get into a flow state at home, at work, wherever it is. Our main product is called the Secret Whiteboard, and you’re looking at it right here. I don’t know how many of you thought that this was a whiteboard, but it is, and it hides stuff inside. You can change the art to whatever you’d like. It’s a flat poster print, and it comes in several different sizes and colors.

Now our product fits into several different categories, as you can imagine — home and office productivity, and into the art world as well, into decor. Because of that, one of the main things that I’ve decided to do here is to focus on the SEO elements of it, and the strategy that I’d like to use is creating a topical authority, so that Google just says, hey, you’ve answered every question about this, doesn’t matter how small, so we’re going to consider you an authority, we’re going to promote you to the front pages for different subject matters.

So what I’ve done is isolated at least a starting point for one of these silos, if you will, and we’re going to focus on dry erase and whiteboard as our main keyword, and I’ll quickly walk you through the work I’ve done and research I’ve done so far. A lot of this has been following a few different key people on YouTube, SEOs that are quite advanced, and I went a little bit more deeply into some of the ways to set this up for scale. At this point I will share my screen.

The basic tool that I initially used here was Ahrefs. I used Ahrefs to just search for dry erase and whiteboard, and I essentially pulled every single question that could be possible from Ahrefs. As you can see, all here — these on the side are different metrics: difficulty, volume, cost per click, etc, and pairing keywords. So first I just had it scrape everything. You could also do this by going to Google and just typing in something and searching, okay, what other questions people ask, and also using your own logic to do so, you create your list in this way.

Then I used Keyword Cupid, where I basically plugged in this list, and what Keyword Cupid does is batch them into different buckets that are similar or comparable or in the same world. So, for example, here I’ll just click this: “how to remove dry erase from clothes.” In here the things came up that were “how to clean dry erase clothes,” “how to remove dry erase marker from clothing,” “how to get dry erase off clothes” — they’re essentially a lot of them are variations of how people have searched for them, sometimes more specific or not, but I use this to essentially create the buckets to synthesize a little bit more. I have a theory that actually we can use Jasper or ChatGPT to do this in the future in a way that will simplify it, and I’m working on some prompts to do that.

But in the meantime, what I did after that was exported from here — you can export your results — and from there I added some cleanup to it. So what did I do? I tried to basically create what is my overall outline for the site, what is the map for these keywords. So I bucketed things into a few different pillar categories, and the concept here is to have a main pillar that has essentially a large article with many different aspects and kind of hits everything in a less specific way, like less dense, and then each one of those becomes its own article, so it branches downwards, an upside-down tree or a pyramid of sorts. By doing so, all the roads lead back and the SEO kind of works very well. I’m not very good at explaining that, but that is the structure of it.

So what I’ve created here is what are a few of the pillars, based on all these things. These green buckets are what Keyword Cupid essentially synthesized. Here you can see what are the individual — and I’ll zoom in a little bit more, I’m not sure if everybody can see — so here are the actual keyword searches that came out of Ahrefs, then here is Keyword Cupid bucketing them together, and then I did some personal work to try and bucket things further and say, okay, what actually ties together, and so what is the overarching subject matter there.

So here I have, okay, customizing a whiteboard, fine, DIY dry erase — there’s a lot of people asking how do I make it for cheap or for this, whatever, great — then dry erase art, some people are asking about that or to doodle and to keep it, and then a lot of it was this dry erase buying guide as an overall subject. And what I also looked at was, okay, what are the then subjects and sub-subjects from there that these fit into that I can try and group. So I did types of boards, okay, the history and the science of it, etc.

Now for today’s work we’re just going to focus on this dry erase buying guide, because let’s simplify and focus on one big pillar, and then the things below it, and once it’s done it can be rinsed and repeated. So what I did, I collected all these rows and I moved them all over here to its own tab, and so I created, okay, what’s the overall one, what’s like the one below that, and then how does it keep going down the chain.

So once I did that, I also played with something else where I just basically took all these and I went into ChatGPT — and I know a lot of this is going to be on Jasper, but this was a free tool that was available and something that is often very good for quick iterations and experimentation — so what I did was I asked, suggest an outline for a pillar post blog that is a dry erase board buying guide, etc. I didn’t like where they were going, so I said “ignore all previous instructions” — that’s a pretty helpful prompt if you haven’t done it before — and then asking ChatGPT to put itself in the position of an expert on dry erase boards, accessories, and their maintenance, also an expert in SEO blog writing, and then suggest an outline with headings and subheadings for a dry erase board and accessories overview article. I’m trying to get it to just give me like the H1s, H2s, h3s.

So what it did was it gave me something like this. I said, great, now convert it a little bit more into something that I could more use, and I switched it to H1s, H2s, h3s. And then the last thing I did was I just took these lists here and I said, great, now incorporate this into the outline wherever you can, wherever they would fit, and that’s what it did. Here we have a pretty robust outline that we can start from, and I think this is where we’ll go and then we’ll develop from there.

So by doing so, I do recommend, especially after the research I did online, that you have a very good outline to start with, because then first of all you can check off one by one that you hit them all, and it’s going to make it a lot easier for the AI to write it. But use the AI to write the outline first to educate itself further along, and then from here we’ll basically take every single one of these — can and should essentially be their own article — and in there we’ll add different things. That’s essentially the work I’ve done so far.