Doug: what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug show. My name is Doug Cunnington. And today we’re going to talk about topical maps. I don’t actually know much about topical maps. So I brought on an expert, Yao Yao, and he’s an SEO and content strategist. He’s well versed in SEO and content planning specifically.
He has a portfolio of niche and authority sites that he manages. and provide services to various clients. And he’s kind of the expert in this area. And my friend Jason introduced us. It turns out Yao Yao and I have crossed paths kind of maybe 20 plus years ago. So Yao Yao, how’s it going today?
Yoyao: It’s great. thank you for having me on. It’s definitely an honor.
Doug: Yeah. And we were swapping stories a little bit and we’ll, we’ll get into all the nitty gritty details, but it turns out that you went to Georgia Tech at the same time I did. So yeah. What’s the story with that? Are you from the Southeast, , of the U S or yeah.
What’s your story? How’d you end up at Georgia Tech?
Yoyao: So I grew up in New York for the first half of my life. As a kid and then high school in Virginia Beach and then, yeah, I originally actually went to a school up in Albany, New York, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. I went there for a year and then it got way too cold for me.
And so I, I had a friend that was actually going to Georgia tech at the time. And, I visited him, checked it out and I really liked it. And they had an it program, information technology within their management school, right? It was a concentration at RPI. It was an actual major. But at Tech it was You know a concentration in the management school.
So I was able to transfer in I had to take like a summer course back in Virginia Like a English 2 I think because tech required it for freshmen. And then yeah, I just went to Georgia Tech I didn’t get I didn’t get to live in the dorms because I guess transfers couldn’t live there, so I had to get off campus housing.
But it was fun. I, I had a great time there. I mean, we graduated the exact same year. How crazy is that? Yeah, that’s
Doug: nuts. And it turns out, yeah, like, I mean, Georgia Tech had a good reputation, but someone was telling me, I don’t pay attention to like the college rankings or whatever, but someone was like, yeah, they’re like a top, top five, like engineering school, or someone maybe said that they were the top engineering school, which I was like, Really?
They let me in, but it was a long time ago.
Yoyao: Yeah, it had, I remember back then when I got to tech, I was looking for co op jobs and everything. And I remember people were telling me that, just going to tech will get you in a lot of doors. And I was kind of surprised. I didn’t realize because of, the rankings also.
I wasn’t aware of how big a name tech was in the South, so. It was, it was really cool to see that. I guess I just kind of lucked into that.
Doug: Where did you live? So you were off campus. Were you like in the home park area or like a little further?
Yoyao: Oh. What was it called? It was, it was a new development of apartments and it was pretty much right off campus.
It wasn’t too far. It was, it was right across the freeway. Okay. Gotcha. Interesting. It was renaissance now that I think about it, renaissance apartments. Maybe I lived there for like the first year because that was the only thing I could find. And then I was able to get a a roommate for the next year and, We were within walking distance of campus.
Doug: Got it. All right. So now that I’ve like alienated 99. 9 percent of the audience, I know specific details from 25 years ago. It was a crazy time and it was really hard for me. So I actually. struggled a little bit and then by the end I, I like lightened my course load. I did co op and that was, that was great.
And like you said, the name recognition, like the caliber of students that come through tech is pretty high. So if you’re somewhat social and you can have a conversation, cause that, that’s like the big, the big issue, some of the engineering people, they’re a little. They can’t hold a conversation, unfortunately, especially those years.
But anyway, tech was crazy. Somehow, , we went off. We did a bunch of stuff. So how’d you get into SEO and stuff?
Yoyao: I’d always loved creating websites since high school, right? Back in the days of AOL, remember? And I was one of the AOL CD hoarders, getting 50 free hours. And I buy magazines just for like the AOL CDs, and so I’ve always loved creating websites , and had a lot of fun and, , , was kind of geeky back in high school a little bit and just love the tech side of things. And, , obviously that’s why I was studying it, went to tech when I was co oping, I was programming. And then I had this 20 year gap, I guess, in the entertainment industry.
And I fell into acting back at tech actually, cause they were shooting the movie road trip. Remember with, , Tom Green and Breckenmeyer. So I was an extra and. For a few days I was, and I just had a lot of fun on set and I fell into acting and I moved out to LA, but I still always loved like the tech side of things, right?
And building websites. And so I had part time gigs doing that. , but it wasn’t until little before COVID hit that I was living in China. I was working and I was, producing Animated stuff in China, and I just finally just got tired of entertainment and wanted to do, looked into online opportunities to make money and get back to just making websites, because I always look for opportunities to do that, and then I eventually just fell into, listening to , , podcasts like yours and, and Spencer Hawes and creating websites and blogging and everything.
I’d always tried my hand at blogging a little bit and it was just like, well, I’ll just blog and. And write stories and write whatever, write blog posts about life. And of course they never got any traffic. And eventually I just, I looked more and more into it, watched more and more videos. And that’s when I learned more about SEO and what I needed to do.
I know it’s a bit of a long winded story and a little all over the place.
Doug: So one thing we could say is it’s 9am here. I’ve had a cup of coffee. It’s midnight where you’re at. So, so I asked a big question.
So I’ll pull you back in. Cause I want to just jump right in. Number one, you could write a book on this story of like your acting career. Cause I’m like. What, where did that come from? This didn’t fit in the story. We started off in the same place, but now we’re talking about SEO, but there was a 20 year gap where you did acting internationally, and then you were in the entertainment industry in general.
So a little bit before COVID, you started to connect the dots and what happened then? So you, you, you were aware of blogging and then you were like, all right, I’m gonna get my shit together.
Yoyao: Yeah, exactly. So I wanted to, I wanted to start seeing what opportunities there were to make money online. So I got into a little bit of drop shipping.
I looked at blogging and building niche websites, right? Cause I knew how to, I knew how to use WordPress. I knew how to just the technical side of things and setting up my own, server to put up a site and. And then I, , started just building sites and, and hiring writers to write blog posts because I was still working at the time.
These posts just weren’t getting much traffic. And that’s when I started looking more and more into SEO, right. And building what you need to do for SEO. , I even looked into and did some KGR, the keyword golden ratio. I did a lot of, internal linking and just, hiring quality writers and just putting it up there.
Right. And it didn’t really hit until finally I said, all right, I’ve started these sites. There’s the whole sandbox period and everything. , I’m going to buy a site. I’m going to buy a site. That’s like a year old, at least past the sandbox period. And when Motion Invest, I think, started. That’s when I bought my first site.
I paid, a couple thousand for it. It was making 20 bucks a month and I was able to build that up and ramp that up pretty quickly and It only, I forget how many Posts it had maybe 20 or 30 and I just blasted a bunch of posts out there I think I got it up to like 60, 70 posts and It was perfect timing because it was, , coming up for black Friday too, in the holidays and everything.
So I was able to go from like those 20 and within six months hit little over. Almost 7, 000 on that one site, and at the same time, I was also able to get another, I bought, I purchased another site for five 50, 550 and this one was newer, but it was still. , I think it was like eight or 10 months old.
It’s been a while. I, I don’t remember the exact numbers, but I remember it was 550 because we were haggling a little bit over it and he threw in some crappy site. And I was just like, okay, I haven’t touched that site since. It had 10 posts, they were poorly written. I was like, all right, well, this niche is really niche.
was a micro niche and let’s see what I can do with it. It was a niche. I really didn’t know anything about and just Revamped all ten posts and created a whole lot more. I think I had 20 I made about 20 posts on it for so, total about 30 posts and it was making no money and I Got it to a few thousand also for Black Friday, you know Because the two sites combined made over 10, 000.
So, within those six months. And that’s when I thought, okay, something’s working and I know it’s not just, , making a bunch of posts and Internal linking was a big part of it as well. And I was being conscious about the way I was doing the content planning and keyword research. And without realizing what I was really doing was coming to, full circle to the topical map stuff is I was focusing more on just topics and not focused and not kind of throwing a bunch of low competition keywords against the wall to see what sticks.
I was focused on, okay, if I was a person who wanted to learn about, this niche and this topic, what do I need to know? Right. And my, my favorite analogy is, , the college courses, when you go to a college court, when you study anything in college, , it’s, you start with a one on one course, right.
And then you start going deeper. The following semester, you take a 102 and then the next year you take a 201, 202, and there’s 300s, 400s, , and you get into the special specialties. Right? So I followed that same thought process and. Was doing it topically and just said, and that’s where I fell into doing topical maps because I got, after I did a couple of podcasts, people started reaching out to me.
They wanted help as well. Right. And I’m sure you get a lot of these emails too, as , at the time I never got them. And so I was like, Oh, okay, cool. And people wanted to, people were willing to hire, pay me to do it. I said, all right, well, let’s talk and they would hire me and, and I helped them create content plans.
I fine tuned it a lot more, , the whole process, right. And that’s when I came around to topical maps.
Doug: So let’s go back a little bit. So you mentioned the First couple of sites that you purchased and you were able to turn them around, they were pretty much starter sites. Maybe the first one making 20 a month.
I mean, still pretty brand new site. Overall, what year was that? What, what retail season? You mentioned the Christmas holidays and retail season.
Yoyao: It was 20, 2020.
Doug: Okay. So it really was like right, right in the middle of the.
Yoyao: Yeah, it was right in the middle of pandemic because I was living in Taiwan at the time where I’m based right now.
And so we had, I was living in Xiamen, China. I came back to Taiwan for Chinese New Year’s. So it was January. Then the there were, there was little spread back in December and within China about how people were getting sick and everything. And so I, I came to Taiwan for the holidays with the family and that’s where we just basically said, okay, stuff was hitting the fan.
Let’s stay here in Taiwan where it’s actually been safe. Quote safe, people weren’t really getting sick. P Taiwan had really good policies in place with, not locking people indoors or anything like that. Like, like, China was doing, but in terms of tracing and everything, they were really good about that and they were able to find people.
So it was relatively safe in terms of put a face mask on, go out, they had sanitizers. All already prepped in all the places. Because they, they go through it a lot, right? With SARS and HN, whatever, bird flus. So we just stayed in, in Taiwan and that was about the same time I, I purchased the sites.
Okay. So that was 2020, I think.
Doug: All right. So you had some firsthand experience. You saw the turnaround, you approached it in, a very logical way. And I’ve thought about this. I mean, it’s not, it’s not like super unique, right? It’s how you would write a book or a series of books, right. Or like you said, college courses.
So it’s just organizing it in a logical way and approaching the content in a logical way versus like you said, just throwing every low competition keyword at the wall. And of course we’ve seen people even do that where. There’s not even a niche. It’s just like random keywords, random topics. So it’s really tough for Google to figure out what your site’s about.
So we’ve talked about topical maps. Can you just define topical map and I’ll ask some follow up questions, how it compares to clustering, but we’ll just keep it kind of discreet. So what is a topical map? Like if, if someone is getting a deliverable from a service, what does that deliverable look like?
Yoyao: It is a. Visual representation of your site structure with organized hierarchically into main topics and subtopics up to four levels. And that’s what it is in a nutshell, right?
Doug: Okay. that’s great. So it provides you some visual structure instead of just like a list of URLs where potentially you might be able to see a hierarchy if someone sets up a child, a parent child relationship.
But this is kind of like a mind map, if you will. So it gives you the kind of the architecture, the hierarchy, and it makes it much easier to organize the content. Is that right?
Yoyao: Yeah, exactly. It’s I offer, I give them a spread. There’s a spreadsheet component. And then a mind map component for the more visually minded, right?
They and they’re both in sync. And the spreadsheet is perfect for a content plan, right? Make using as your content management spreadsheet. And the. Internal linking structure is there. Everything is there according to the way the topics are organized hierarchically
Doug: Now, how does it compare to a content cluster?
What do people mean when they say content cluster? Maybe they use a clustering tool. What’s the difference?
Yoyao: So a content cluster basically is, the way people use it is they have one pillar article. Say best, best dog food, right? Dog food guide, guide to dog food. Okay. That’s your pillar article around it.
You have every single iteration article about dog food, right? Best dog food, best dog food for old dogs. Best dog food for puppies. You have. Can cats eat dog food? Can birds eat dog food? Those are the, you have those long tail keywords and it’s just all one level, right? And it just all surrounds the one pillar article of guide to dog food guide.
The way. I like to structure it more is you break it down even more, right? So you have dog food, then next level, you have best types of dog food type, different types of dog food, and then horizontally you, you have Other topics about dog food and you break those down even more, right? You best dog food.
Overall best brands for dog food, best dog food for senior dogs, best dog food for puppies. Right? So there’s three levels from that dog food guide. Yeah.
Doug: And. as You describe it, I’m like, a topical map could be considered a cluster, but it’s a very specific kind of cluster with a hierarchy, with four levels.
And you mentioned four levels. That seems arbitrary to me. Why four levels?
Yoyao: It’s in my experience When I did, when I went down to five levels, I had a much harder time getting those pages to index, getting those pages to rank four levels was as far as I saw just in the articles I had that were ranking still pretty well.
Three levels and then two levels. And the fourth levels are where you’re really long tail keywords are, you can usually make. Well, lots of topical maps down to three levels and occasionally some fours, you don’t always have to go down to the fourth level.
Doug: Sounds like, typical diminishing returns where you could put in more effort, but it doesn’t really pay off and it might actually hurt you.
Like many things, if you, whatever you, you eat too much healthy food, like you’re still eating too much food and you’re not getting a benefit from that or you work out too much or something. Yeah. All right. Now, and you mentioned like long tail keywords, low competition keywords. And I have heard some people mention that topical authority strategies are kind of like, I mean, isn’t that the same as like going after low competition keywords?
Can you compare and contrast and talk about how those relate to each other?
Yoyao: Well, low competition keyword strategy is really just getting just hitting low competition keywords, right? And you’re just you’re not really in doing any internal linking or if you are it’s very haphazard There’s no planning to it, right?
You just happen to see a word that’s similar you have a cat article here. You have a dog article here and you’re like, okay. Well, they’re pets So I’ll link to them somehow, right? Topical authority is you hit everything, right? You go after these high volume keywords and and the, really competitive ones.
And it’s not that. It’s not that you’re trying to rank for it right off the bat, right? Cause you’re, you’re not going to on a new site. So it’s more about showing Google, showing your users, especially that you, you have the. Expertise, the authority that, what you are talking about, it’s not, it’s not trying to rank those top ones right away.
You’re going to, you’re still going to write your long tail keywords, but they are, all tied together topically and, and, search engines know that your users know that, and it’s. I’ve seen higher stickiness as well in terms of users with engagement because they know I’m actually tying them.
I’m actually giving them a roadmap if they want it to study more about a certain topic because my related articles, my internal links the breadcrumbs, they make a lot more sense.
Doug: It sounds like there’s a common theme here where it’s intentionality about. What you’re doing versus just going after things without planning.
So it does require, thinking a little bit farther ahead, not just the next thing you have to do, but maybe like four or five steps ahead, just so, I mean, things could change, right? You don’t have to plan that far ahead. But it, at least it gets you moving in the right direction versus like random activity based on a list of keywords that have like no priority, no relationships.
So with that intentionality, it sounds like internal linking plays a pretty big role in the whole thing. And you mentioned Spencer Hawsey has a great tool link whisper. But can you just talk about the internal linking and how you approach it? And It’s hard to visualize this, but as well as you could describe it, we’re thinking of a topical map.
How does one internally link to give the best signals to Google?
Yoyao: So. I don’t do my internal linking process isn’t that different from anything others like Kyle Roof or Matt Diggity have said, right? It’s, you have your top article, say fruits, right? This is, this is easier than, than dog food. The, the fruits, then you have apples below it on level two and oranges.
And apples and oranges would link back up to fruits, right? And then within the apple silo, you have articles like what are apples, nutritional value of apples how to make apple juice. How to make applesauce and all those articles right on the same level you would link you can they can link to each other horizontally and back up to the higher level and then the Apple article the higher Apple article would link Down to at least one of the articles and multiple articles usually, because your apple article is your pillar article, right?
So you still treat it the same. It’s, it’s basically a topical map, which is basically a map of all your, all your topic clusters and mini topic clusters, I guess, right. I like to call them silos and sub silos.
Doug: And really, like you said, there’s a silo concept where, people can look back.
There’s some, some articles. I think Bruce Clay wrote an article a very long time ago about silos. And I think I. I wrote an article a while back, but essentially, like you said, it’s a parent child relationship. It’s intentional linking. How important, or let me rephrase that. How is it an issue if you deviate from that?
So let’s say, for example, there’s a really good reason for you to link the Apple. article, some sub silo over to another one over here in the orange silo, but they’re both talking about the sugar content of juices, right? So there’s, there’s something very relevant. Is it a big deal if you deviate, even if it makes sense for the, okay.
Yoyao: So, no, yeah, it’s not, it’s not hard and fast. You must do this, right? You can. link to other articles that are really related, really relevant that you want to prioritize as well. Right. And I think the, what I usually tell students is, stay within the silo as much as you can and only link out of the silo if you really think it’s relevant.
Okay. Because what I find is if you don’t tell them Tell people that they will just they start going back to the bat their old habits of linking haphazardly, right? According to one one word I use links whisper, but I use the reporting Part of it a lot more than I used for actual linking because the auto linking on it your your Automatically linking to one word or a phrase, right?
And it’s looking through multiple articles, no matter where it is. And I think you can limit it to certain categories and tags or something like that, but still you’re not counting. You’re not making sure That you’re over optimizing anchors, for example, right? It’s just going to make link. Whisper may suggest 10 links 10, 10 different pages for the word Apple.
And you click okay. And then now you have. Now you’re sending 10 Apple signals to 10 different pages and you’re going to confuse your readers, you’re going to confuse Google, right? And all the different search engines, what those pages are about, because 10 different pages can’t just be about apples.
Doug: And I think like, I haven’t been in the weeds with. Link Whisperer in a little while, but you would essentially just have to take a more manual approach and go step by step, one by one, make sure you look at the anchor text and make sure, if it’s in a particular silo that you don’t want to link to, just don’t link to that one and the ones that are.
relevant. So, okay, so this all sounds great, especially if you’re starting a site fresh, right? It’s easy. You’re planning ahead. You got your list of keywords. Maybe you’re even prioritizing specific. Topic topic areas. We’ll, we’ll say like silos so that you could cover those, get that one done, move on to the next one.
Right. But let’s say you already have a site and it has 200 posts. So what do you do then? How do you approach this beast?
Yoyao: So I still do the same thing. Approach it just like what is the central topic of your site, right? What do you want your site to be seen as in terms of what topic are you the expert at?
What topic are you the, authority on? Then from there, you start creating your topical map. I say to start at Create it Fresh. While keeping in mind, the, the, some of the things you already have, but if you are trying to create it around your 200 posts, you’re going to have a lot tougher time trying to organize it because especially if you did a low competition, keyword.
Right from the start because those are, they’re so spread out and it is the spaghetti against the wall, right? You don’t know how they’re connected. They may not even connect. So what you do is what is your central topic? Use that as your seed keyword and work from there to create a topical map.
Then you use that topical map to see where your 200 posts fit in. Right. And then you’re going to start realizing, Oh, maybe these two posts kind of are tied to this one unique article. Right. So I have, I should, what I should do is combine these two articles into one. Right. So you’re also, fixing your keyword cannibalization and you’re, optimizing everything overall.
Doug: So it would be like a gap analysis. So instead of trying to look at your mess of a website where you weren’t thinking in these terms, you just ignore that for now. You create the ideal topical map of where you want to be, and then you fit it in from there and it’ll guide you like, Hey, do I need to write some more articles in this area that I have missed?
And you see this opportunity, or like you said, combine some articles that are, they’re actually the same topic or search intent. You put those together and then you’re in good shape. So with that. I mentioned parent child relationship. There is an approach, especially within WordPress where you can have pages with a parent and child and you actually have like a silo structure within the URL and the hierarchy is right there.
Do you have to do that or can you just keep things as post or how do you implement it?
Yoyao: I prefer, I generally prefer pages and the parent child because it is a lot easier to organize, right? And, and stay organized. Now, You can do it with categories and subcategories, but I found that to be a lot of a bigger pain to, to manage.
And so. I always do pages and I haven’t found any sort of, you know, um, SEO hits or anything like that in terms of pages versus posts. I know it’s a big topic and people love to talk about it. So for me personally, I haven’t had any issues with pages and indexing and rankings I’ve had. I have sites with posts and pages.
Where pages are for more statics and, and posts are for more just random articles with it that are still, topically relevant, but it’s, and those still rank fine. And, but I just having posts and pages is harder to manage as well. Oh, I have to often refer back to the topical maps I have and to see how they’re all connected, but.
In terms of just using pages, I’m able to see it very clearly, and I think it’s also offers a better user experience as well. If you’re going to a website and you hit your, this fourth level keyword, you’re able to Reverse engineer, the next level up and the next level up by just removing the the keywords from the URL.
Right.
Doug: And I agree. It’s, it’s definitely easier. And you can see, a lot of sites will have like the breadcrumbs listed so people can imagine it like that, where you can see you’ve navigated down to a specific type of apple. And if you go back up, you see very clearly where you can hop back over to fruit in general.
Yoyao: Now, That’s where some of the, higher user engagement comes in as well, right? Because if you, you said, you have the Fiji apples, right? This Fiji type of apple. Well, what other types of apples are there, right? I just have to go to the breadcrumb and click the button that says, click the link that says types.
of apples, right? As the higher level article. And now I’m connected to that article. And then I could go down, the rabbit hole even more.
Doug: So the big issue, right? With a site that already has 200 posts, most of them are posts and you want to convert them to pages. So you end up with, it’s a problem, but it’s a, it’s an easily solvable problem.
Not necessarily Logistically simple to execute, but I think you would have to do 301s for the post over to the new page. And you have to be very organized, but again, just in the spreadsheet. So is that what you would recommend?
Yoyao: If it’s, if it’s a site that’s not doing well? Yeah. Why not, give it a shot.
Right. And. You know, disrupt, disrupt the algo a little bit, right? Because it’s already not seeing it’s sub it’s seeing something on your site that it’s not liking. So you’re not ranking as well, but if you’re already ranking. Well for you getting traffic. I I say you continue on with your posts and just you know You just have to figure a way to manage it a little bit more right minute manage your process your I would still do some of the 301s and and look at your canonization, look at your how your article articles are interlinked, but I would not just go from post to pages.
I wouldn’t just completely disrupt whatever is already working on your site. I make incremental changes for sure. It’s not something, you must do and have to change on your site, right? So it’s. If it’s, if your site just keeps getting hit update after update, after update, why not disrupt it?
Doug: Okay. That makes perfect sense. Also. Yeah. If there’s a a machine that’s operating well, you don’t want to go in and start changing, changing parts and stuff for no, no good reason. All right. So where does like the input data come from for creating? The topical map. So we, we talked about it. Is it just like keyword research tools and then you place them in the right spot?
Or how does that work?
Yoyao: Yeah. So the process first is to do topical research find out what your topics are about the related you’re essentially. To go back to the college college course analogy, you’re creating your curriculum, you’re creating your topical outline of the main topics and subtopics, and so you’re doing all that, you’re going to, you can go to Google, you go to the, your top competitors to read their articles and learn more about the, the niche and the topic overall, but if you already know about it, then, it makes it a lot easier.
Right. So you don’t, there are no keyword tools at this time. You’re just going to find out more information. You’re using Google, you’re using Wikipedia, you’re using trends, you’re using whatever’s out there. Especially competitors. I love going to competitor sites, right? Because especially the big ones, because they have.
Then after once you create your topical outline of your main topics and, and, and subtopics and the general, hierarchy of them, then you go put these topics into keyword tools. I use low fruits because. One, it uses like, it uses real time data from, Google’s API. So I’m able to get the latest.
I’m able to find related keywords maybe that are trending with not a lot of traffic, but just new things on different topics and then go through the keywords, filter out the irrelevant ones cluster the relevant ones, and then. You go and you do your topical hierarchy, you organize it hierarchically, and there’s your topical map, in a nutshell.
Doug: Okay, that’s great. So it doesn’t have to be overly complicated, you don’t actually have to go and get like, expensive No, essentially marketing tools like Semrush or Ahrefs, where like they have a ton of data. So you don’t, you don’t need that stuff really.
Yoyao: Some people prefer using Ahrefs and Semrush because they’re used to it.
I used to be like that. I used to love all that data from Ahrefs. I used to love all the data from Semrush the keyword, tools and stuff like that. But it got to be that it was so overwhelming. That a lot of those keywords were just duplicates of each other, right? You know you you have Apple a Apple Apples right and Apple, you know You have four keywords that mean the exact same thing and it’s not as helpful And you’re just filtering a lot more.
So instead of putting the word Apple into Google, into Ahrefs and SEMrush, getting back 10, 000 keywords. You are doing the, doing the work first on Trying to figure out what the important topics are taking those specific topics and throwing them into lowfruits to get the You know the related the Google the Google autocompletes the PAAs You know the related keywords down at the bottom of that first page you’re getting those specific keywords that are Really, that are highly relevant rather than all the duplicates and yeah, and who know, they go very off topic.
With those other tools.
Doug: And they’re expensive. And just quickly, PAA is people also ask. So, yeah, I mean, really, you could do this almost exclusively without any paid tools. I’m sure something like low fruits, or even if you use something like. I don’t know, like keywords everywhere or something to give you a little more data.
It can be a little helpful, but you really can just, get a notebook, like write a bunch of stuff out, go to the library, like pick up a book, like look through stuff like that and get a ton of ideas. Books are
Yoyao: great. Yeah. Books are great. Yeah. And one, one thing on the clustering is I would use a clustering tool that is, that uses the SERPs.
So, Obviously, the SERPs are always in Flux, but you want to use one that uses SERPs rather than AI clustering. There are lots of like, whether it’s you’re using, keyword distance or ngram or you want to use what’s, if you want to rank organically, right, in searches, then why not use SERPs to cluster and find similarities there.
Doug: Okay, cool. Time is flowing by. So, we’re going to start wrapping up here all good. Yeah, you could go to bed and everything, but let’s see. There’s a couple other things that I want to get into. So, there have been several Google updates in this fall of 2023. What have you seen on your sites? Other sites that you’ve worked with where The topical maps have been implemented well versus maybe sites that don’t have that competitors, perhaps.
You know, it’s interesting because you can cover, I’ve, I’ve seen both right sites that have been, that have implemented topical maps well and covered, they have good topical coverage and then sites without top, good topical coverage do well, right? I think there are. Both, both sides of the story for me personally.
Yoyao: I, the interesting thing is the new sites with my newer sites, I guess, that are less than a year old, got bumps recently from the. Where the November core update. So it’s interesting because they have, I haven’t built any backlinks to them and they’re just zero Drs. If you go by, the age dress domain rating.
So they’ve gotten bumps, whereas my older sites. tHere are a couple older sites, two that got knocked about 10 to, one is about 10 to 15%, another is about 25% but then another one got a nice little bump of 20%, so it’s a little all over the place. It’s, I’m, I’m, I haven’t dug enough through the data to say for sure, confidently one way or the other, what to do about it.
Doug: Yep, and it seems like a lot of the people that I talked to yeah, it’s all over the place Seems like AI contents doing better than you would think especially if they’re publishing at some Very high velocity with a couple thousand posts, which is somewhat troubling because I know at least the people that I’m chatting with, the content is not that good.
They’re just testing it out to see if it’ll work, but sort of one of the final questions. Yeah. Any, any changes with topical maps with AI content or any impact at all?
Yoyao: No. I mean, for me, I’m still. I’m still doing what I do. It’s, the first, what I, what I like to tell people is basically, it’s all about building a brand, right?
And, and showing that your site is a place that is an authority and whatever you’re talking about, right? It’s trustworthy. It’s a trustworthy site. It used to be, just sites and, The internet was full of niche sites, and still is, of homepages where they’re just blog rolls, and, down at the very bottom, you have 50, you have those links that pagination links, pagination links that go up to like 50, and, I mean, that’s just a bad user experience, right? You want to offer a good user experience. And that’s what I mean by branding. And I, I think that’s the focus for, for me and everything I’m doing it.
And so, it’s as well as the topical map and structuring your site, just structuring everything for a good user experience when it comes to AI content, I’m implementing. AI content on my sites as well, but it’s a very human process still. So what I do is I still, the keyword research part is done by the topical map.
So the content plan is out the. Each of those topics, the articles that we need to write a writer, one of my guys will go to, we’ll create the content brief for it and an outline based off of the page one and the top competitors, and then they will. write the instructions for the whole brief, for each section, then that goes into AI and that’s how I use AI that goes into AI.
The output is edited by a human and then. Then it just gets published, right? Images are usually stock and some AI generated images as well. Depend. It depends on what type of article, but so it’s, it’s just more of a tool rather than the actual right, the whole. Kit and caboodle, I guess.
Doug: Right. And the important part, I think, the content brief is written by a person, like there’s research behind it. So the inputs are very good when you send it in there. One, one thing I’ll mention, I. Interviewed my friend Tony Meritato, and he talked about providing, he’s a physical therapist, right?
So he put in medical journal articles as inputs using WebPilot and ChatGPT. So it’s good, accurate information. And then he tells ChatGPT to interview him as an expert physical therapist, which he is. And then he’ll get a list of questions. He’ll answer those questions with voice typing. Google docs or whatever, and then he’ll feed it in and that is part of the input as well.
So you end up with like actual quotes, you, the source information, as long as chat GPT didn’t fuck up and make something up. As long as they use the sources that you provided, it’s going to be an accurate article. human voice behind it, which is a really smart way. I’ve heard other people talk a little bit about a couple pieces of that, but like using it like that, you end up with like a pretty damn good article.
He goes and edits it afterwards, but that’s something else to throw in there. If it makes sense for you.
Yoyao: So, yeah, I mean, obviously coming from the tech side of things you and I, I, I, I have a built, in how I have in house apps for a bunch of little things, right? So when open AI came out with their fine tune 3.5 model, I took advantage of that I created and. You know use they everyone uses my the the fine tune model now, right? So I’m getting Exactly what I want and expect in my articles and the formatting but from the writers and I’m getting it You know GPT for level at 3. 5 prices, right? Because of the fine tune model.
Yeah, it takes a long time to create that spreadsheet to give to the fine tuning. But it works, right? You’re saving a lot of money in the long run and you’re getting what you wanted right off the bat and it saves your editors a lot more time. So it increases efficiency as well. And. To what your friend Tony does I do similar things as well.
I You know, you can why I love books is you can download and find PDFs of books and you know The legality that of that aside but you can also find a lot of papers as well Right, and if you are in a medical niche as your friend is, then you can find a lot of stuff like that. You can find a lot of PDFs and you can train your models on that information.
There are lots of chat apps out there now, right? And you can upload PDFs, upload websites, chat, GPT. You could create your own GPT. There’s a limited to those GPTs, but other. Other sites don’t have those limits. So you can upload like a hundred mags of stuff, or if you are able to, you can program your own and your own local on your own local machine, right?
And throw in whatever PDFs you want and just ask questions and it’ll sort through all that, all that data and give you the answers. So there’s so much you can do with it. It’s just a matter of can you think of it? All right. Can you think of what you want to do?
Doug: It’s crazy. Yeah. Yeah, I was gonna say my mind’s when you mentioned the You know the fine tuning models.
I thought about all the many hours of Podcasts and different things that I’ve talked about. So I have like, yeah, a library full of really nonsense of transcripts. Right. But I could feed it in and I’ve heard, other podcasters that are, that are smart, where they fine tune, they created a chat bot and people, maybe their students or whatever can go in.
And ask questions and they get like pretty damn good answers. Like you said, there’s a decent amount of overhead. And I know there are some services out there that like, we’ll do it for you. But yeah, interesting business model, interesting way to use it. And I never implemented any of the, you, you actually did it.
I was like, ah, I don’t know if I want to learn how to do this. I never learned Python before, but I was like. It’s pretty approachable. You could use ChatGPT to like program itself and that kind of stuff. But anyway. Yeah,
Yoyao: I’m still, I’m still not a big programmer. But ChatGPT 4 is, the ChatGPT is, using the GPT 4.
It’s great. It’s very, very easy to create these little apps and stuff. Very
Doug: Very cool. All right. Yow Yow, this has been super fun. Very insightful. I know we. We gave people essentially the process of how they could do this on their own. But I want to give you the opportunity to talk about number one, your course, and then number two, you actually have a service.
So people can obviously do this on their own, but if they want a little bit more help. You have a couple resources, so please tell us about what you have going on. Yeah,
Yoyao: so I have the Topical Maps on Lot course. It is in, a lot of over the shoulder shots. One of the cool things I did, I thought, was I had the early bird students pick a topic.
Okay. They picked a central topic, which came out to home gym equipment. And I, I did a real time recording of me creating a topical map for it. So it was like, it’s like a five plus hour just video of how I. Did all the research and everything But then of course you have all the other you know videos and lessons up there and it’s a step by step process Takes time to create topical maps and but it’s well worth it in the end, right?
But I also have a you know done for you service Where I will take your central topic you see keyword and just create a full topical map, you know for it and Then yeah, just those two topical maps. Okay, nice and simple.
Doug: Cool. And who is the right person for maybe the service? Like what what is the ideal client that gets the most out of it?
Yoyao: Any anyone who is looking to create a site? I get lots of people with I get lots of agencies Actually for their clients because it saves them a lot of time and a lot of headache as well. And Anyone who just doesn’t want to be making their own topical maps and having trouble with keyword tools and figuring out where to start.
Doug: Okay, perfect. And so an agency, again, perfect use case, they can white label your report and turn it over to the client. And that’s totally cool with you
Yoyao: Yeah, it’s totally fine. Yeah, what I give them, everything is not, everything is white labeled. There’s no, there’s nothing that can’t be removed.
Doug: Okay, right on. Okay. We’ll link up to that stuff. I’m an affiliate for the product. So I get a commission if you sign up, but I greatly appreciate it. And the last thing we’ll point out, you have an awesome newsletter. We were just chatting about it before. It’s pretty epic. And I want, I want you to tell people about it.
I’m a subscriber and yeah, it’s pretty cool. So go ahead, go ahead and talk about it.
Yoyao: Yeah. So, you helped me realize that I actually passed the three year mark on it. It’s something I actually don’t, i, I, it’s a, it’s a weekly newsletter that goes out every Saturday morning and it’s basically curates the most important news SEO news, niche site news, anything, related to online businesses and things like that and The best of the best that I find every week.
Doug: It’s perfect. And the reason why I like it so much is it curates the stuff. And people know I talk often about how I don’t like social media. That’s where a lot of stuff is shared. There’s a vibrant community over at Twitter. I’m told, but I just, I can’t go through all the stuff. I just don’t read the news in any capacity.
that includes any SEO or industry news. So it’s great to have it curated. So I know what I could check out. It’s already gone through your filter and then I, I can rest assured that it’s, it’s good, high quality content. So thanks. Yep. So everyone check that out. We’ll link up to the stuff and yeah, yeah.
This has been a really enlightening. We, I didn’t realize we’re going to get deep into the AI stuff, but hopefully we can catch up soon and hear about what’s going on. So thanks a lot, man.
Yoyao: Definitely. Thank you. Appreciate it, Doug.