How to Use StoryBase to Create Traffic Driving SEO Content
How to Use Storybase to create traffic driving SEO content
Emily Fedorowycz – Bright Design
First of all, let me say thank you to Craig for letting me contribute to this awesome blog. As an avid reader, I thought it would be a great idea to share with you a tool I’ve fallen in love with…
Around the start of this year I was recommended a tool called Storybase. Like many of the tools us SEO’s are recommended it stayed as one of those tools that I would “get round to”, but after a couple of weeks, I finally did.
And boy, was it worth it.
Let me show you the amazing features I discovered that will help you create your own amazing content, and most importantly, that will start drawing in customers and earning you money.
SEO and content are a match made in heaven
We all know what content plays a big part in SEO, and always will do, but Storybase makes creating SEO content that actually drives traffic something you can do in your sleep.
There are some cracking features that I’m going to give you the low down on, so that you too can boss the SERPs with your content.
First off, is Storybase Questions, which (you guessed it) list only specific questions which feature your searched keywords.
Questions: Provide answers for your customers in text or video
Storybase provides the most common questions on your topic asked by users, listed in order of popularity which you can see on the right hand side. You can toggle between popularity and searches per month – I prefer the latter as the traffic is more measurable and therefore makes results more quantifiable.
Click the dropdown and switch to ‘Searches’:
In the above example, the company or client sells clothing for cyclists so by searching the topic of “biking“ and see questions like:
Storybase now displays the 193 most frequently asked questions, which, if we click into the Questions section, we can see under the search button they have been searched for more than 27 thousand times in one year.
Now sorting down the list in order of popularity we can ascertain which question is most relevant to our customers, that might help others in our niche or that shows us as a knowledgeable industry leader.
For instance:
Pro tip I: When choosing your question to go after, check out who’s already ranking in Google and note down how competitive the search is alongside your content idea so that you can prioritise all your ideas later.
Save these Storybase questions in a new list (more on lists below). Alternatively, if you are just looking for one topic, you can opt for one question that would be easiest to rank for, whilst maintaining a good level of traffic for a nice quick win.
Also, doing an additional Google search using the search operator “allintitile:QUESTION” ensures that the only results that Google produces are titles that include your question, so that you can evaluate the pages that specifically answer this query. There may be none, which in that case, is great! The fewer results, the easier it will be to rank for this term.
Pro tip II: Look to see if there are any videos on the topic. If not, this is a prime target for making an answer in video form which will get you ranked higher, faster. IF there is a featured snippet available, mark up your answer with schema in bullets or a number list and make your answer better, more detailed and more technical (use more technical terminology) to steal it.
Phrases: Finding longtail keyword phrases
The keywords section is better at giving keyword phrases and great for identifying common themes or subtopics within your topic. For instance, searching for “bathroom” if I was a bathroom fitting company, I find that “bathroom tiles” and “bathroom mirrors” are common searches, fetching 33,100 and 22,200 monthly searches respectively.
Search these two terms to find a further list of longtail keyword phrases all based around that one topic and you’ll have a topic that is highly searched for, with a list of LSI’s to include.
Now take some of the topics you have chosen and run them through a Google search to see the other articles have been written and try to understand more about what you user is looking for when they search this term. Are they looking to buy “bathroom mirrors with lights” or get some ideas and inspiration for their new bathroom redesign? Provide content tailored to them to add value, build trust and improve conversion rates – this is how your content starts to make you big bucks!
Improve upon what’s already out there and include as many of your traffic-driving keyword phrases as possible.
Pro Tip III: Search your topic in Storybase questions to see if there are any queries on the topic you are writing about. Including a little Q and A section is a great way to beef up your content, add value, and add those money-earning keywords.
Pro Tip IIII: Install the Chrome add on, Keywords Everywhere. When researching around your chosen topic, look at the bottom of the search results when you search at the Related Search section. Your Keywords Everywhere tool will now show the monthly searches of these other related searches so that you can see if there are any other high-traffic related terms that you could include in your content.
You can also look at the Words and Related Storybase sections to find further inspiration and LSI’s (synonyms) to further build your relevancy.
Words: Finding common keywords paired with your topic from an average of longtail phrases
As you continue to use Storybase or whilst doing other keyword research, you may notice that topics begin to emerge from the longtail keyword phrases.
For instance, if I had a counselling blog I may examine the keyword ‘stress’. You’ll notice that straight away a couple of the highest searches are ‘stress symptoms’ and ‘symptoms of stress’.
We could go through and manually find topics like this, but Words makes this simple.
Find the Words section by clicking on the Words tab below the search bar here:
By taking an average of the longtail phrases, Words pulls the most common and puts them all in one place, so we can immediately see that ‘symptoms’, ‘traumatic’ and ‘disorder’ are the words most commonly paired with our keyword – an easy way to find key topics, right?
Listed to the right are the frequency in % that these words come up. For instance, below we can see that ‘symptoms’ appears with ‘stress’ in around 11% of searches making this a prime topic to target.
However, Words is ideal as an overview tool, since Words can’t take into account LSI’s and context, so similar topics that are worded differently won’t get picked up. If we navigate back to All Phrases we can see the topic of ‘coping with stress’ and ‘stress management’ could easily come together for a well-rounded topic, but we couldn’t have found this using Words.
Using Words is great for a quick idea generation, which you can then expand back into the Phrases and Questions sections to uncover further longtails to help shape your content.
Taking our ‘symptoms’ word and pairing it back with ‘stress’ we find interesting questions like:
- Can stress cause flu like symptoms?
- What are the symptoms of anxiety and stress?
- What are the physical symptoms of stress?
And phrases like:
- stress and anxiety symptoms
- work related stress symptoms
- stress symptoms in women/men
These longer tail, less competitive phrases will be easier to rank for, and can help our counselling blog drive more new traffic. Linking back into the site’s internal ‘stress management’ or ‘stress counselling’ page is key though, to help drive the authority back into the main site, as well as driving that money-earning traffic.
To Sum Up
These kinds of supporting pages are invaluable for driving new traffic to your website, which helps bring in the cash twofold:
The original traffic itself.
Getting people on your website is the real point of all of this, so keeping them on your site with interesting and useful information means they’re more likely to navigate around your site for more handy info. Plus, providing valuable content that your readers want to find (or are specifically looking for) builds trust like nobody’s business and it’s this that drives conversions.
Get your audience to love you! Then, when they get to the end of your article and they want more, a link to your contact page (or a contact form or a direct email mailto: link) will be conveniently there ready for them. Also, people also love to spread good content, so although you may not get the initial reader’s custom, you may acquire someone from their feed.
SEO to improve rankings and drive other profitable traffic.
Getting new people to your website and then linking through to your related internal pages drives the authority you’ve earned from your great content back into your site. Better authority means Google will promote your pages in the search results.
Getting users to engage with your content – therefore reducing your site’s bounce rate – shows to Google that you are have good content and that people are finding what they are looking for on your site. For this, once again, they will promote you in the SERPs.
Multimedia content such as videos or downloadable documents get promoted in search for being “rich content”. Content with titles, headers (H1’s) and subheaders (H2’s, H3’s…) that include the searched keyword get promoted (don’t get spammy though). Plus, this content driving traffic through to your inner pages will improve your average pages per session and once again show Google that you are a useful site to promote in this search.
All of these things come together to improve your rankings in Google, which means that if none of the original traffic is interested in your services, you’re more likely to get found by people who are.
Plus, with really good, evergreen content, that juicy money-driving traffic will continue to flow just as your rankings will continue to climb.
So, go start finding out what the people want – and give it to them! Reap the rewards and thank us later.
If you enjoyed this guide to Storybase, tweet me @EmilyFedorowycz – I’d love to hear what you thought: what you loved, what you hated, what you can’t wait to try or what you’d love to learn more about! Tell me your wishes and they shall come true. #SEOGenie @BrightDesignUK
Need help with your SEO campaign? Feel free to get in touch to find out how we might be able to be of assistance!
Craig Campbell
I am a Glasgow based SEO expert who has been doing SEO for 22 years.
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