Assessing User Intent for SEO at Scale with Suganthan Mohanadasan and Andy Chadwick

Whatever you do, don't call Snippet Digital an agency.Suganthan and Andy will be the first to tell you they are SEO Consultants, not an SEO agency – and that many SEO agencies are among their client base.Right now, though, it's not their consultancy that's getting all the buzz and attention. It's their new SaaS product: Keyword Insights.While Keyword Insights is still in beta and actively courting testers, this product can supercharge your SEO strategy by helping you research over 100,000 keywords at a time. You can then group them by intent and rank them, allowing you to create a more efficient, modern approach to SEO and content creation.Want to learn more about this awesome tool and all the problems it solves? Tune in! The highlights:[1:32] Why Suganthan and Andy are so adamant that Snippet Digital is no agency.[5:15] Why they built Keyword Insights.[10:26] Solving the problems of keyword intent.[16:16] Using the tool to generate a content strategy.[19:06] Beta test feedback.[25:41] Keyword Insights: the main value prop.[27:52] Andy's cause.[30:01] Suganthan's cause. The insights: Snippet Digital: We're No AgencyWhy are Andy and Suganthan so adamant that Snippet Digital is not an agency, and never will be?Andy says that in part it's because they do a lot of work with agencies. "We'll work with agencies just as much as we'll work with our own clients."Andy also ran a 17 to 20 employee business in the past and didn’t like being responsible for so many people. Now Snippet Digital uses freelancers, but Suganthan and Andy remain hands-on.Suganthan adds: "We like to stay small. I personally feel we can add a lot more value to customers. When customers come to us personally, we work on the project. It's not like we onboard a client and have ten other people deal with the client. We deal with the client. We actually look at the nitty-gritty of that client's SEO." They get in there and do most of the work themselves. This has resulted in them having to spend zero dollars on marketing, as they've been bringing in clients through word-of-mouth and referrals only. Cracking the Code to Categorizing Queries for Search Intent with Keyword DecipherAndy explains how he had begun to approach the problem of taking a large number of search queries and using machine learning to filter them into different buckets. Suganthan was excited to work with Andy to build on some of those initial strategies."I came from a global agency. We were doing keyword research on 50K to 60K keywords at a time. Keyword categorization would be done manually by someone with some clever Excel logic. It still took weeks, 50-60 hours maybe."While he was still at this agency, Andy programmed a PHP tool to do the job a lot quicker, cutting the time down to about 20-30 hours. "When Suganthan and I got together I showed him what I was doing he got excited and we started bringing machine learning into it, which was the next stage."Andy admits currently the tool still is not as automated as he might like, but 60 hours of work have now been cut down to 7 or 8 hours.  This collaboration resulted in Suganthan and Andy creating a tool that hasn't been released to the public yet called Keyword Decipher (and might not necessarily go public). "We categorize and load all that data in. It's built on Panda's framework. It's a really nice UI. It's not Google Sheets. It allows us to do keyword research that's massive and works a lot better than Google Sheets, and you can pivot the data any way you want."Suganthan notes that they also practice over time."For our Keyword Decipher platform clients can choose their keywords, and can go back 6 months. 6 months ago, this intent was fragmented, but now after 6 months, Google has changed the Top 10 results. It's widely considered that they use behavior analysis to figure out how people use the search results. It seems like after 6 months Google has decided to show the product page over the blog post. They find more users engaging with that better. That's an actionable insight for the client."  Leveling Up Keyword Intent Categorization and Actionable SEO Strategy at Scale with Keyword InsightsSuganthan explained how they could take the power of Keyword Decipher and add a complementary layer of actionable context with Keyword Insights."We realized when we looked online at the way everyone is trying to solve the intent problem, everyone is pretty much using the same sort of formula. A basic formula to say: hey, if the keyword asks why or how it's informational. This is a very rudimentary way at looking at intent."Suganthan says they realized quickly that what they thought the term implied would often generate unexpected results when one actually plugged those terms into Google."Often Google's understanding of a keyword is very different from what we think it is. Most people are doing guesswork. We went and said: we're going to just look at what Google is thinking, and we're going to literally copy that idea,...