SEOZoom Case Study: Elisa Malisan and her travel blog
Not only large editorial portals or e-commerce sites: SEOZoom tools can also help personal projects, maybe born in our free time, and make them profitable or at least more performing. A new testimony in this sense comes from Elisa Malisan, who submits a case study on her travel blog, elimeli.it, to tell us how she uses the suite making it “a study tool (and work, of course) very useful for me”. As in the other case studies, we leave the mic directly to her, who explains with some direct and practical examples what tools she uses and how she puts into practice the information she finds in SEOZoom.
Practical uses of SEOZoom: the case of elimeli.it
Elisa Malisan became interested in SEO “almost as a complete neophyte less than three years ago”. Today the blog Elimeli has a rather stable position on issues related to travel and also to “bureaucratic” issues, and is described as “a window on books and travel stories seasoned with curiosity from the world”, following the philosophy that “no journey ends with a return ticket, writing is traveling again“.
It is precisely on the writing and the production of content that the story of Elisa focuses, which from here we will write directly in first person.
First activities: keyword research and search intent
Before I start writing on a topic, I usually spend time on a keyword research activity and think about what problems the reader wants to solve by searching on Google.
For example, here I want to write an article about “Eastern Sicily”, so I try to understand if it is a main keyword and what are the sub-topics that concern it.
I see that the keywords linked to “Eastern Sicily” are mainly about the concept of itinerary, travel, tour, what to see. I guess people are thinking or planning (in the early stages) a trip to that area.
From the keywords and the FAQs I can assume that at this time of the search they have not yet decided exactly what they want to see, indeed they do not know yet perhaps, and are looking for general information, not too thorough.
Second step: analysis of the SERP and competitor info
The next step for me is to study the SERP: who are the websites on the first page?
Identifying the competition helps me to assess whether I can compete on this topic, or whether it is better to focus on another.
Then I focus on:
- Meta title and meta description, to understand what cut they have.
- How long is the article.
- How information is organized within the pages in the top 10.
Based on this information I try to think about what the reader might be like:
- Why do you need this information?
- Travelling alone or with a travel agency?
- Do you also want cost information at this stage?
After reading the contents of the sites on the front page, I often deepen the analysis on the most interesting ones and on the pages of my direct competitors (the other blogs).
I try to locate:
- What is the information that everyone enters (and that therefore you can not omit completely).
- If I can add different or unique information.
- What kind of stylistic cut the articles have.
- If I want to conform to that style, or if I want to try to diversify in another way.
The identification of secondary topics
Secondary topics are another aspect I focus on before I start writing, so to:
- not taking the risk of going off topic by mixing too much information, not relevant for that keyword;
- have some first suggestions on other insights to write;
- understand the depth of the information that the reader expects to find on the page.
The analysis of competitors with SEOZoom
If instead I want to identify which are the organic competitors that are closest to me, I use the Organic Competitors section of SEOZoom to make me suggest websites more similar to mine.
This serves as a starting point especially for analyzing their content strategy.
Recently, in fact, I analyzed one of the organic competitors and I noticed that this site has a very strong positioning on destinations in Sicily, on many of which I have already written articles.
Thanks to this tool I continued the analysis studying the content published online (reading articles) and through the SEOZoom analysis of the domain: I found that it is a very vertical blog on content and adopts an SEO strategy studied in detail, and for each topic, in fact, there are very specific articles, which respond to very targeted research.
On the other hand I noticed that this blog has a rather commercial approach and aimed at monetizing. From the analysis of the outbound links from the competitor site emerges a large number of links to affiliated sites and a low number of medium-high quality incoming links.
On the basis of this data I then made a reflection on how I want to develop my blog in the future and how to think about making it at least partly profitable.
Elisa Malisan’s conclusions
I approached SEOZoom because, when I started studying SEO (with a classroom course in 2019), it seemed to me one of the most intuitive and “human” tools on the market. Moreover, the fact that it is an all-Italian platform, based on the Italian web, made it perfect for my reference market.
Today the platform has become an indispensable working tool both for my blog and for my partner’s website, which I deal with in parallel.
Being able to dedicate myself to these projects only in my free time, unfortunately I realize that I can achieve only a small part of the work that I would like to do on the blog, and to exploit also SEOZoom only partially (Menomale that there is the Academy and there are a lot of super interesting webinars!).
However, the thing that most excites me about using this tool is how much it can help me to understand people’s needs, because – beyond numbers and tables – they are the ones that can contribute to the success or not of a project.
