Transcript
Hi, guys, and welcome to another edition of Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation. When picking keywords, ensure that you're Googling them. This is a really important conversation because I have my own teams do this all the time. When you're picking keywords for your keyword strategy and your SEO strategy, it is imperative that you Google the keywords. I have talked about this briefly in other videos but I wanted to commit an entire video to this topic just to reinforce how important it is. But before we begin, I want to introduce the tea we have today. I've hidden it because it's a golden bag, and it's pretty sunny today so it's probably glaring into the screen. But we have a chrysanthemum tea today. And again, chrysanthemum teas are common guests for our channel. But it's actually a tisane. So what a tisane is, is just it's not really a tea, but it can be brewed like a tea. It has no caffeine. It's just chrysanthemum flowers dried, and you can kind of put some hot water on and drink the tea.
So let's go ahead and jump on. The reason why this conversation is so important is because, a lot of times, when people are doing keyword research, they will always use keyword research tools, as you should. So you're going to use Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or SEMrush, Ubersuggest. There's a lot of different ones. I think Moz has one too. So there's a lot of keyword research tools out there. Now, the reason why I want to talk about Googling is because there's an inherent issue with only using keyword research tools, and it's by no fault of the software's themselves. It's just like the reality of the situation.
Keyword research tools are meant to be able to give you the opportunity to look at lots of data, lots of keywords at one time, and sift through like millions of data points to find keywords that match what you're looking for. So for them, it's really important to provide you keywords, keyword difficulty, and the search volume, which is great. That's what you really need to start out with. And I've talked about keyword difficulty scores before. But what I really want to talk about today is that when you're looking at keyword research through these tools, what you have to be very mindful of is that you need to understand that keyword research tools take you out of the field. Meaning that you're not looking at Google search results anymore. You're purely looking at data points, pretty much on a user interface. And you're looking at different rows of data.
The reason why I'm talking about this is because you need to do the Google searches of these keywords to see what it actually looks like live. And the reason why I say that is because I have worked with many clients and many projects where keywords, it looked like they had to make so much sense to a business, but in actuality, it doesn't. So let me give you a good example. I have a client who is in the security space, and I have a client that is in the engineering space. In the engineering space, a current term for them is CAD. Computer-aided design. So for them, they want to rank for keywords like CAD. In the security space, CAD is also a term they use, but it's called computer-aided defense. So for the two industries, they use the same acronym, and of course, to both industries, they think that the acronym is only kind of used by their own industry. You don't typically know how people use jargon in other industries because you have to be in that industry to know.
So saying all that, if I looked at the keyword research and I didn't understand that CAD was kind of multiple things, I might tell a client like, "Oh, hey, look how much search volume there is. This is a great keyword to go for." But if I never Google searched it, I wouldn't see if it truly was. So it is important to actually do the Google search to see how those search results come out. So where I'm kind of leading this, and what I want you to walk away with, is keyword research tools inherently cannot tell you relevance. Only you, the consultant, or the business itself will know the relevance yourself.
So therefore, if you're looking at a keyword, it might have a good, low difficulty score. It might have a high search volume. But you need to Google it. Once you Google the keyword, does the term and the search results come out match what you thought would come out? Does it come up with the search results that match the business and your industry? That's number one. If it doesn't, automatically it's not a good keyword, because it's not even matching your industry and your business.
And then second, like I talked a lot about before, is intent. Is the intent of the search result something you're willing to match. For example, if a keyword you're looking at, when you Google it, all the search results that come out are all informational, is your business okay with trying to rank for that keyword, even though it's all informational? Or is your business more concerned about ranking for business terms and commercial terms where service pages are coming up on the rankings, and therefore your business can be seen on a more transactional situation rather than informational? So when you're doing keyword research, you really have to Google the keywords to make sure that you really know what the search results look like. And then you can truly tell if it's a good fit for your business. Otherwise, on paper or on the screen, when you're looking at the keyword research tools, they make it look like they make a lot of sense, but ultimately you'll figure out later on that they're not, and you can waste a lot of time and resources doing so.
So again, what I'd recommend is you need to include quality assurance, a layer to your keyword research, and Google them. I have all my teams, when we're doing keyword research, Google every keyword to make sure it makes sense. So hopefully that will help reinforce and reaffirm your keyword research capabilities in-house, or when you're doing your own strategy. And if you guys found the video valuable, please like and subscribe. And I hope to see you guys again soon.
Thanks, everybody.
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