August 4, 2023

SEO Recipe | Use label groups to discover new keywords & topics

Robin Allenson

In our previous article, we introduced you to our competitive keyword ingredients. They refer to getting the keywords for which your organic competitors’ sites rank, giving you a comprehensive topic overview for you to create new pages. By identifying your rivals and inputting their domains manually on the Similar AI platform, you can access this data.

While organic competitors can be a potent shortcut to building a topic list for your SEO strategy, uncertainty may arise when you’re unsure about who these rivals are. But fear not! If you have a broad idea of the keywords you aim to rank for, there are still effective ways to forge ahead. In this article, we will provide you with an alternative pathway to find the right keywords, and building topic pages becomes essential – label keyword ingredients.

What are labels and label groups?

Label groups are groups of categories. They could be the main categories on the site. They could be faceted navigation. They could also be categories that a site doesn’t have yet but is considering.

What are label keyword ingredients?

Label keyword ingredients find all the keywords which mention a certain label or combination of labels.

If you build a label keyword ingredient with a single label group, Similar AI will go through all of the labels in the group and execute a broad match on SEMrush to find all the keywords that mention those words.

If you build a label keyword ingredient with two or more labels, Similar AI will work out all the possible combinations of labels from each of the groups. Then it will look for keywords in the local market on SEMrush that mention that combination of labels. This builds a comprehensive collection of keywords that mention the label combinations you’ve added.

Label keyword ingredients for programmatic SEO

Label keyword ingredients offer significant advantages, particularly in programmatic SEO. Imagine you’re responsible for SEO on a site to choose between different universities in the UK. You might want to publish pages about the different courses a university offers. You have a broad idea of these target keywords like “UK universities”, “Courses”, or “Computer science programs”. But how can you identify the specific pages you should launch?

The common way is to create all possible combinations of a “Courses” label group and a “UK Universities” label group, but this approach could lead to spammy Doorway Pages defined by Google, affecting user experience.

…sites or pages created to rank for specific, similar search queries. They lead users to intermediate pages that are not as useful as the final destination.

Instead, you can find all the combinations of labels with keywords and search volume, eliminating those with no demand and focusing on creating valuable content for topics that align with user needs. There are combinations that will have a lot of keywords that fit into one or more topics. In this case, you have a good guide rule of some of the things these new pages could cover.

Label keyword ingredients versus Competitive keyword ingredients

Label keyword ingredients have different advantages and disadvantages compared to using the keywords for which competitors rank.

Running label keyword ingredients is often slower, taking a few hours or even days to run a large set. Additionally, label keyword ingredients may not cover latent intent, which can result in missing implicit content compared to competitive keywords.

What exactly is implicit or explicit intent?

  • Latent or implicit intent: refers to the underlying or future desires or needs that a user may have, but have not yet explicitly expressed through their search queries.
    • Example: The user might not mention “UK universities” in the query but use a different phrasing for it such as “higher education in the UK”
  • Explicit intent: refers to the direct and clearly stated user needs or intentions expressed in search queries.
    • Example: the user explicitly mentions “UK universities” or “University of Edinburgh” in the query which matches the label keyword ingredients.

Taking the example above, how can you identify the specific pages you should launch? Below is the step-by-step approach using the Similar.ai toolbox. You can also watch our video guide at the end.

Step-by-step Instructions

Step 1: In the Setup view:

  1. Access Taxonomy and click on Add ChatGPT Label Group to generate your desired Label Group.

A pop-up page will appear. Type in the group you want, like “UK universities,” and include specific examples in the description for higher accuracy.

Click on Generate Labels, and Generate More for additional results. When satisfied, click on Save.

Go back to the previous view under Taxonomy to see the label group you generated, along with the list of universities in the UK. (You could repeat steps 1-4 for the “Courses” label group if you haven’t already).

Switch from Taxonomy to Keyword Ingredient view.

Click on Add New ⇒ Create Keyword Ingredient, then choose Labels as the source.

Notes: You can choose and combine more than one label group, allowing you to look for all keywords that contain both of those things.

Click on Fetch. The system automatically pulls the data for SEMRush

With your keyword ingredients ready, access the Workbench. Then you can take the normal flow to generate topics from these keywords. Discover one of the recipes to execute the next steps in our previous blog: SEO Recipe: Topic Classification Made Easy with AI Label Groups

Watch the video guide by our CEO and Co-Founder, Robin Allenson, here: https://youtu.be/2wuLw2z9Bt8