Summary
This transcript contains a comprehensive presentation about keyword research for SEO, covering the following key concepts:
This transcript appears to be from an educational course or presentation about keyword research. The recording is quite detailed and comprehensive. With a longer session, I could provide more specific action items and decisions made, but this summary captures the essential educational content presented.
Notes
This is called the short tail of terms and results. When we graph the most popular terms, you would see that they are usually very general with one, two, maybe three words that are popular, but it drops off quickly. The problem is that while these short tail keywords show a lot of search volume, which distracts decision makers because it's a big number, we don't know the intent of the search. Now, why did a user search for a cell phone? What was their reason, their need? Once they refine their search, such as cell phone repair, they have now added context and intent. We now know the real need. This is called the long tail. Once people add intent, the main search phrase branches out into thousands of variations. They are not searched on as much as the primary term, but they provide a specific need. And those needs add up to being searched on millions of times more than the primary short tail phrase. Here's the gold you'll find when people add their intent through descriptive phrases, they'll see more relevant results and explore those websites where they will have a higher propensity to convert by or register. This is why I love keywords. Ever since the launch of search engines, the ability to see what people search for the words they use, the descriptions they add, and the needs that people pursue has driven a completely new way to understand people and to target them based on those needs. Before we move on, let's define keyword terms and concepts. The words that people use in the search box are called the keyword or the query. The search volume is the amount of average searches that keyword received every month. Search intent is categorized five ways. The first informational. This is used when people are seeking to learn, such as finding an answer to a question. The second is navigational. We use this method when we're searching for a specific brand, website, or page. Third, transactional. When you know exactly what you want, such as features, color, size, or other factors, and you have the intent to purchase or any other specific action. Fourth is commercial. And this should be very familiar to us as it is the research we do before we make a purchase or a decision. And last, local. Many times we only want results from businesses or locations that are close by. So we specify the location or proximity or our need. Here's an activity that will help you understand the many ways that you search and use keywords. If you use Google, you can go to myactivity.google.com slash my activity, and you will see all of your past searches, both on Google and YouTube. Look at how you structure your searches to find what you want and how you use that information throughout the day. Make a note of your searches and see how they line up with the intent categories. It might be a bit more revealing than you suspect. A new business was selling landscaping equipment, a stump grinder. However, when I looked at their sales and marketing content, they called it a stump cutter. The problem was that's not how their searchers, their customers described it. Thousands of potential buyers were looking for a stump grinder, but no one was searching for a stump cutter. As a result, their website never appeared in the search results for their products. A research project can get overwhelming very quickly, especially if you end up dealing with thousands of products. In this first phase, we start simple by building a seed list. Start by thinking about your customers' needs and how they would search for them. How would they describe their preference or need? What words would they use? Regardless of business-to-consumer, business-to-business, lead generation, or other types of businesses, this is where it starts. Now, you can even go to chat GBT, describe your business and industry, and ask it to produce a seed list. Ask it to describe your audience and their needs. While not 100%, it can still provide a great starting point. For example, a local bakery may have customers that need an organic bakery, gluten-free bread, or vegan pastries. A B2B software company may be positioning themselves for workflow automation, but find that their customers are looking for more customizable or cloud-based features. I recommend starting with a seed list of 10 to 15 non-branded keywords that describe your business or the problems that your customers are searching to solve. Download the worksheet in the materials section of this course, and you'll have the step-by-step worksheets and examples for each stage. For large e-commerce sites, you may find that this stage can be an overwhelming place to start. I recommend starting with high-demand and high-profit-margin products first, and then break it into subsequent stages. The goal of this activity is to start small, with a dozen or so keywords that will grow your keyword list into the hundreds or thousands. Everyone's business is different, so just start by thinking of the problems you solve and what your customers need. To uncover keyword gold, you'll need great tools. There are a number of amazing tools on the market for keyword research, such as Ahrefs, SEMrush, SERanking, Moz, WordTracker, and many others. For this course, we are providing extended free trials for you of WordTracker and SERanking. As a demonstration of the core functions, start with one of your seed list keywords. I'm using SERanking and starting with the keyword solar panel. As you can see, I start with the general word, the short tail, and I use this to find the relevant long tail keywords. I really like this feature in SERanking as it provides three different lists of related keywords, similar keywords with over 58,000 relevant suggestions, related keywords with over 13,000 suggestions, and then what I think is the best section, questions, and over 4,000 of them. The interface contains generally the same information in each tool, a difficulty rating for the keyword, monthly search volume, cost information for bidding on the keyword, and global distribution. Next, I click on the similar keyword list, and you'll see that you can add individual keywords to your project. You can either add all of the keywords you want into one project, or in the case of larger sites, you can create different projects for each content focus of your business. Go through these lists and add keywords to your project by clicking on the plus sign. One thing you may notice is that many similar keywords have the same number of monthly searches. This is very important to note. These keyword tools only have the data that Google provides, and Google does not share much data. These are estimates extrapolated from Google's shared data combined with other search data sources. The second reason for this is that Google sees many keyword combinations as a single concept rather than individual words. For example, solar panels on a house and home solar power panel are the same to Google, and so the numbers will be the same. You also have access to a free trial from WordTracker where you can compare how each product works. WordTracker is primarily a keyword research tool, while SE Ranking is a full suite SEO management tool. To get an even deeper view of keywords, SpyFu offers incredible insights into competitors that are paying for keyword-based ads in search results. Alongside similar keywords, it provides a breakdown of audience, such as desktop versus mobile searchers, click rates, average cost, successful advertising campaigns, budgets, along with account and campaign history. Each tool has tool tips and instructional videos that explain each feature when you hover over any question mark on the page, along with helpful guides. Make use of them, but the best thing you can do is use the tool. You won't break anything, so spend the time learning, creating projects, and developing lists of keywords for your business. Your next assignment is to use these tools to develop a list of at least 500 keywords that are relevant to your business. Use your seed list for the keyword and evaluate all of the related words that are generated. Screen out irrelevant words, find new words, and build your keyword list. If you're feeling really confident, try for more than a thousand. Search reveals intricate thinking processes that just don't show up in any other type of consumer research. In keyword research, you see actual stream of consciousness thinking as people search immediately, often, and for specific ideas. In this stage, take a casual browse through the results of your seed list keywords. I love going through the hundreds or thousands of keywords listed, produced by the keyword research tools, as they show ideas, concerns, or factors that you may have never considered before. Keyword tools enable you to create lists, and you can add keywords to those lists. I always make a list to cover these surprises. These could be searches for the brand name that have word associations that might be amazing or uncomfortable. I also use this list to record new or surprising concepts, descriptions, or features that the organization hasn't addressed. If you have a large website or a large e-commerce catalog, you'll want to make use of the list features. This way, you can create lists of product groups or content groups and segment them at the research level, rather than making a single list of 10,000 keywords or more. At this stage, I browse through the pages of results, adding keywords into my plan. As you do this, you'll move to the lower search bar, as you do this, you'll move to the lower search volume keywords. But that doesn't mean that they are irrelevant or unimportant, because this is where you get the real thinking behind the search. Go beyond the first few pages or first few hundred keywords and dive into the nuances of the industry you are exploring. In this case, for the solar power project, I am seeing searches for specific locations, such as states and cities. I can also see store names such as Costco for buying solar panels. I can also see people searching for very specific types of solar panels, such as monocrystalline, and also comparing monocrystalline to polycrystalline solar panels. If you are working for a company or as a specialist, this is also where you can find words that you may not understand and get them defined by your client. This is where you learn your client's business. If you are an in-house SEO specialist, you might find these words and realize that people may be searching for technical terms and factors that you may not have available in your marketing. Here are five insights you'll gain from this overview of the keywords. The first are outliers and uniques. You'll find words, features, places, and other factors that don't fit neatly into the hundreds of other keywords. These could indicate opportunities or be related to other industries. Second are technical or industry-specific terms. If they show up in searches, then people are looking for them. You can help their research by defining and explaining some of those terms. Third, brand associations. What do people think of your brand? What words do they use when searching for it? This analysis may indicate a PR problem or show you how well people like your company. Fourth are consistent themes. I love looking for themes and then digging in to each theme to find the details. By evaluating the themes, their popularity, and associated words, you can evaluate your content to see if it follows the same demand. This will help you as you start to group and organize your keywords. Finally, and I love this, are you using the right words? Years ago, the furniture industry only used colors such as chocolate, ivory, moth, or fern to describe their colors. However, searchers were using words like black, white, red, and green to find their furniture. By using the colors that searchers used, I helped a client gain rankings for the best words that massively increased their business while the rest of the industry did what they always did, and they missed out on how the customers searched for their products.
... keywords. Anyone who tells you that SEO is all about finding a single popular keyword and putting it all over your webpage is living in 1999. Today's search engines use context, language cues, and nuance to find the overall relevance of content, a page, and an entire website. This means that your content must address answers using a natural language pattern. For example, if you explained a business concept to a friend of yours, you wouldn't say the word business over and over and over. Instead, you would many times refer to business as it while describing the associated concepts of finance, management, marketing, and production. Through this, you would communicate specific concepts using pronouns, descriptions, and explanations. In fact, someone could probably figure out what you were talking about just from the description while never hearing the word business, and that's how search engines assess the context of information. From your keyword research, you should now have hundreds or maybe thousands of keywords. What I really like about the keyword tools is that I can export my keyword lists into Excel, which gives you a great method of working with the keywords. But as you can see, you get a lot of data in the export, but this will help you later. For now, leave your export in a tab, then simply copy and paste the keywords and their search counts or demand counts into another tab. Your next step will be to organize these keywords into multiple topics. Come up with five to 10 main topics, add more if needed, and move the keywords into those topical groups. In this example, I've created topic lists of searches for solar panels for our example company. I can now easily see how people search based on costs, type of usage, installation and maintenance, pools, storage, and environmental benefits. Here are the top three things you'll learn from doing this activity. First, priority. You'll learn from the high level visual overview of the most important search topics within your category. Do you address those individual topics? Second, you'll learn the language. You'll learn what particular words that searchers use to describe features, concepts, places, or timelines that are important to them based on the words that they use. Do you address those concerns in your-
... utilize some AI tools to go deeper into our keyword research. I'm going to use ChatGPT. The first way that you could use it is to simply prompt with your industry, what you do, and ask for 100 to 200 relevant keywords or more. And that's what you'll get. It won't be able to give you search counts or competitive information. And this is great. So, now we have primary keywords, long tail keywords, and related keywords as examples of what your audience would search for. Now, we can take the next step. We can ask it to group and organize the keyword list by topic. Now we have our general solar power keywords, types of solar panels, solar panel installation, solar power systems, and the cost and financing of solar panels, benefits of solar power, solar power technology, and energy storage and batteries. Environmental keywords, government and policy. Isn't this great? We are getting a ton of keywords all grouped and organized for our use. Now, if that isn't enough, you can also take your export from your keyword research and upload that as either a text file or a spreadsheet file. I'm going to ask it to group and organize by topics, and this can save me a tremendous amount of time from doing it manually. While it can save you time, sometimes things do get lost, and you might have to make sure all of your original keywords are being used. Another instruction that can be helpful with subjects that have multiple words, such as three or five keywords or more, I call it a matrix. And I ask ChatGPT to list all of the words that come before the main keyword and a list of words that come after the primary keyword. This is helpful in learning how people create and structure longer keyword phrases. You can also ask ChatGPT to create a word cloud that highlights prominent terms, which will look great on a report. Now, are you ready for some really cool stuff? I'm gonna start a new chat in order to dig into some of these keywords, and also to find out what other websites or competitors might be doing. I'm going to ask ChatGPT to look at the top five websites that rank for our term. I'm going to look at solar power for homes, and I'm gonna ask for page titles, H1s, H2s, and highlighted keywords in those results. Now, you can do this for the top five or top 10 sites and immediately get competitive insights into how the top-ranking sites are approaching the keyword. Now, we can take another step and get more competitive information. Now, if you really want to get aggressive, try asking for the top 25 websites and their page titles. Then, ask for a summary of the information from the websites grouped by topic. I'm absolutely blown away by these generative AI tools as this type of work would take us hours, maybe days to do back in the early days of keyword research. And now it's done in moments. Now, there are two options that you can take here based on your comfort with AI and how far you're willing to push the boundaries. The first option is to ask for an article outline based on the websites you've seen within a specific topic, outlining the H1 headings, H2 subtopics, and H3 subheadings. You'll get an amazing outline to help you put together a great article for your website. And now, based on your research, you've got a great article outline to start developing an article for your website or blog, or other content that you want to develop. Now, that's one option. The next option pushes things a little further, depending upon your comfort level. We can ask ChatGPT to actually write the article. Now, as you can see, ChatGPT does exactly what you've asked it to do. We've got our article here, but there are a couple other things we can do to even make it better. So, for example, you can copy and paste this article directly into your website, or you can have ChatGPT develop a version of this article with markup. Don't neglect using these amazing tools to enhance your content development and use of keywords. But there is a word of caution. You had better be knowledgeable about the topic. Otherwise, you may be responsible for uploading wrong, incorrect, or misleading information. This does not work 100% all of the time, and these generated articles must be proofed and edited. I find that these get you to about 75% to 80% of the way to a completed article. You'll have to assess the risk based on Google's aggressive treatment of websites that use AI-generated articles. Many websites that saw an early boost lost their traffic just as quickly after a recent update. Before I start, if you want to investigate the full transcript of interaction between me and ChatGPT, download the PDF and that will give you the full session of everything that we do.
Transcript