Transcript
Hi guys, and welcome to another edition of Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation is not just about looking at keyword difficulty when doing keyword research. You need to really analyze the search results before you pick the keyword. So that's a really long title, but I will explain what I mean very soon, but before we begin, this is Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea. I want to introduce the tea we have today. Unfortunately, this is a juke. This is not actually from Teavana. I'm just using the case. This is a green tea that was actually ... My father went to China and he bought a big, big brick of green tea and we're storing it in this Teavana casing. I particularly like this green tea a lot. I've had it a couple of times and I actually pretty much save it pretty much only for the weekend, but I just decided to bring it out for the Zupo Talk & Tea because I felt like it.
Right? So let's go ahead and get brewing, get talking. So again, let me just re-summarize the title. When you're doing keyword research, don't only rely on keyword difficulty. Ensure that you actually look at the search results of those keywords. The reason why that is important is because keyword difficulty, every keyword research tool generally have this kind of metrics. So I use Ahrefs for a lot of my keyword research, but there's SCM Rush. There's Moz and there's Google Keyword Planner. Now I have done years of keyword research and I have learned a lot of the nuances and blind spots that can happen when doing keyword research. And one of them is an over-reliance on the actual keyword research tool. Now, that isn't to say that you shouldn't use a tool. I still believe it's about 80/20, 80% of the research should still be done on the tool of your choice, but there should be still a 20% of what you're doing quality assurance or quality checking.
What I mean by that is there are many times when a keyword looks perfect. It has a good sizeable volume. It has a low keyword difficulty and you're like, "That keyword's perfect for us." But what often did happen is if you did not Google it, you may not be aware that it's not a good keyword for you guys to rank for. So a good example is dumplings. So I had a lead come to me one time. They wanted to sell frozen dumplings in the US and they were ready to make some deals with some big retailers. So what they were wanting to do is working with my team to just figure out can they rank dumplings in the United States.
And they had done some research and looking at, okay, there's a really strong volume and the keyword difficultly isn't out of this world. So they were saying maybe we can rank for it. But in this conversation, I said, "You have to make sure that you actually Googled the keyword." Once we Googled the keyword, we found that actually it was not a good key for them to rank for, because if you typed in dumplings, and this was about a year ago so it might be different now, but I wouldn't think so. If you Googled dumpling now, all the searches that appear on the first page are recipes, not buying dumplings. Therefore, Google is treating that search result as an informational recipe result. That means then if you are not talking about recipes, they're not going to rank you on the first page.
So for a frozen dumpling company, if they wanted to sell dumplings, that's actually not a good keyword. Even though the relevance is there, the keyword difficulty wasn't too high and the volume was perfect for them. The search intent wasn't there. So ensure that you have to look at the keywords in the search results. If you see nothing on the first page as relevant to your business, and when I mean relevant, I mean relevant to the bottom line for conversions. So if it's all blog posts but you were hoping to have a service page appear, it may not be a good one. Or on the flip side, if all of the research results are services, pop up on the first page, and you were hoping to rank informationally, that may not be the case either. So when you're doing keyword research, really ensure that you are knowing keywords, looking at the keyword difficulty volume, and of course as it's relevant to your business, but really do that last little bit, which you are Googling the keyword, looking at the search results.
Does the search results make sense with your business and the goals you have? If it doesn't, you don't want to pick that keyword because nothing you can do can change the way that Google thinks the intent of that search result. So your SEO is not going to be so strong that you're going to force the dumplings page to be non-recipe. You know what I mean? So you need to understand that when you're doing keyword research and picking the targets, the targets need to be in alignment with your ultimate goals for your SEO. If they are not, you will do SEO as much as you can, three to six, nine months, and all you'll have to show for it is you can't get on the first page because Google's intent isn't there for someone like you. That's the worst thing that can happen.
You don't want to spend that much time trying to rank for a keyword. That doesn't make much sense, all right? So hopefully that's helpful in your own keyword research. It's something that I have found that many people still get wrong, and I want to help those out there who are doing it because SEO takes a while. I feel like a lot of people rush the beginning process, which is the keyword research, and if you pick the wrong keywords, you're going to be unsuccessful. But hopefully that will help you in your own day to day. If you guys found that video valuable, please like and subscribe. I poured out my green tea now. I'm can go ahead and enjoy this, but I hope to see you guys again soon, and thanks for tuning in everybody. That's good.