Semantic cocoon that boost the SEO on UX Design topics
As a SaaS editor, we are faced with the problem of creating content that eventually elevate our brand toward a good level of SEO. If the Grail — Google naturally sending our blog pages onto first ranked pages and positions — we present in this article the advices to build an SEO strategy within the UX Research field.
Vincent Hégo, SEO optimizer at Waalaxy (formerly Prospectin) smartly advocates in this video to combine a bunch of well targeted keywords within articles or guides.
Articles are small blog posts of 500-1,000 words, easy to read and very good at leveraging appeal and conversion on your website. Guides are 3000-10,000 word long blog posts and are less frequently read entirely but contribute to motivate Google to bring your site to an upper rank upon search queries (keywords) that are very competitive. He tells how articles should be built on keywords favoring long tail, i.e. keywords that are less common in the search query space and tend to capture fewer people but specialists instead. This current blog post presume to feature such ability by mixing terms like UX Design and SEO, which are rarely put together.
“User Experience SEO”: 
“SEO and UX Design” :
If half of a year traffic goes onto this page, it makes it 60 people finding this article. This is a nice result and confirms how long tail make the edition work worthy and profitable.
On the other hand, Vincent Hégo explains that guides should feature keywords favoring short tail, i.e. keywords overly used across the web by main players who lead the market: they appear in the first position as users query on these very competitive keywords. He mentions how important it is to earn notoriety on these keywords and how they reached a x10 visibility and leads acquisition on Waalaxy by editing guides, all this within a 10 months timeframe.
Keyword stuffing
Mind Keyword stuffing, especially in guides: Google Rank Brain (ranking algorithm activated in 2015) penalizes pages featuring a suspiciously high amount of same keywords, Vincent says. Indeed, they may reveal the deliberate act of over-optimizing content by forcing a keyword to appear. The natural way to outsmart this control consists in sprinkling across the post various terms from the lexical field of a same keyword.
It would deserve another post to talk about how to get organized among the team to write as many posts per week. Many recipes exist, those who bring the all team together and take 3 days just to write. Those who shape their post along the week, one hour per day. Those who outsource the writing and to freelance copywriter or even mix their automatization with some GPT but let’s get back on our topic: UX Research semantic cocoon construction!
Keywords pool
The way to build your pool of keywords, or semantic cocoon, as Vincent says, is to make research with tools like SEMrush, ahrefs (I would add Moz and UberSuggest). Starting from the obvious most competitive keywords (like ‘user experience’, worth over 1,000 queries per month and very expensive $5 per click if you pay for them). Those you should use into long guides to start getting more visibility, then extracting suggestions (like ‘user experience definition’, ‘user experience design’, ‘user experience researcher’, ‘user experience interface’, ‘user experience insight’). To build articles with keywords combinations that will bring you traffic in the long tail strategy.
When to build an SEO strategy and how active has it to be ?
The release frequency to focus on is of 2-3 blog posts per week, even mostly in the early stage as Google initially doesn’t know you. This is what it takes to reap the rewards a bunch of months later and get qualified traffic for free.
Please note that to build your SEO strategy within the UX Research field is strictly uncorrelated with the existence of your product, the way it evolves, and whether you have reached your PMF (Product Market Fit) or not yet.
Saying ‘strictly uncorrelated’ may seem a bit strong ; your product defines your target audience (and vice versa), some features worth to be described in posts. Ok, but remember this: at the beginning, the audience you must convince is Google, essentially. If Google doesn’t push you on the first ranked page, the probability for you to be found out and read fall to 20%, as Vincent says. Caricaturing, no one finds you. And if no one finds you when your product is ready, well you know what? It will take 6 more months to be visible on Google. I hope your treasury can handle this… so you may rather find out what your keywords are on a coarse initial basis on what your business is today and will look like tomorrow, and start building some posts around them.
Then, assuming the SEO work is over and 6 months after you get audience on your site, well, your product and targeted audience have been able to refine over time for sure. But believe me, 6 months go away in the blink of an eye when it comes to product lifetime and market fit search. And your initial communication strategy and build of a keywords semantic cocoon will have not been a loss of time.
Of course, your most recent posts will promote refined keywords for refined target, and that’s great. But your ancient posts will still contribute to the foundations of your notoriety and organic visibility. So start writing and publishing now!
