How do you use Moz to research related topics?

[brettmandoes]

Like most of the folks here I'm a pretty big fan of the content that comes out through Whiteboard Fridays, and I try to apply the things I learn, but one of the WBF videos that I'm following along with does not do a stellar job of detailing execution using Moz KW Explorer.

https://moz.com/blog/related-topics-in-seo-whiteboard-friday

Now granted, this came out in 2016, but I still feel the core principle and strategy results in a higher quality piece of content and is still relevant to discovering and understanding searcher task completion requirements, and drafting content that fulfills those requirements. Towards the end Rand sort of mentions that you'll be able to do this with KW explorer, but I'm not really seeing the functionality.

The steps I followed were to enter in the keyword in kw explorer, went to keyword suggestions, and selected "based on closely related topics" and ran it, but received no suggestions - came up blank. I then selected "based on broadly related topics" and the same thing happened. I tried this out with the keyword r22, keeping it very broad to start but that didn't seem to work.

So what do you all do to perform this sort of research within Moz? Or do you even feel it's relevant in today's Rank Brain driven world?

[dave.kudera]

Hey Brett, Dave here from the Help Team.

I think the issue here is that we don't have results that specific for the keyword "r22" based on broadly related topics or synonyms so I don't think that feature will be ideal for that keyword unless you stick to including a mix of sources for suggestions.  Hope that helps, let me know if you have any other questions

[brettmandoes]

Hey Dave, thanks for the response! I should have updated my question earlier today, but I was able to find a better way to do this type of research using Moz Pro's page optimization tab. The section in there that was previously labeled "related topics" was renamed "content suggestions", but it worked great. I was able to double content length and put in some genuinely useful information (I hope) that should help it rank better (I hope).

It's a darn sight faster than what I was doing before, which was manually copy/pasting all body copy from the top ten sites for high volume keywords into an ngram analyzer and looking for patterns. The results were actually pretty similar, but good gravy, was it boring.