Transcript
Hi everybody. And welcome to another edition of Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation is how to do an exhaustive keyword research campaign. I feel like this is really important because I feel like most people know how to do keyword research, but I feel like when people do it, they really only scratch the surface and they almost shoot themselves in the foot because they don't do an extensive amount of research to really understand what's going on. Therefore, I wanted to go ahead and spend time on this video today to talk about how I would recommend if you're going to do keyword research, how to make sure it's very thorough and exhaustive.
But before we jump in, of course, this is Zupo SEO Talk & Tea, so I want to introduce the tea today. It's of my favorite Pu'Er teas that my grandma gifted to me. It's a really dark tea and if you've watched any of the YouTube series for a while now I have Pu'Er probably the most on this channel, but it's probably different Pu'Ers at a time. But anyways, let's go ahead and get brewing, and I'm going to go ahead and get talking about keyword research. Exciting stuff, right?
So when it comes to keyword research, you'll find a lot of free tools out there. The most popular ones were Google keyword planner powered by Google Ads. There's other ones like Ubersuggest's Neil Patel, then there's even more that are paid like HREF, SEMrush, Moz I believe has a keyword explorer. So keyword research is integral to an SEO campaign. And if you ever done an SEO campaign, you start out with keyword research. So if you're watching this video, you most likely have done it before, if you have done any SEO in the past.
But what I have found is that a lot of people do keyword research too quickly before they move on to other things. And so I'm all for being agile and moving quickly, but what the problem is when it comes to the keyword research, keyword research is literally the goalpost for your SEO campaigns. What you decide in your keyword research will dictate what your eventual campaigns and your ultimate goals look like. So I can tell you from firsthand experience, if you pick the wrong key words, you will waste a lot of time and ultimately it will just be bad because if you pick the wrong keywords that somehow you may never rank for, you may waste a lot of time and resources.
So jumping into keyword research, I think the easiest way for me to explain this is, let me talk about the main metrics that I would look at, and my team does look at when we do keyword research. Number one, this is kind of obvious, but I have to say it. Keywords have to be relevant to your business. I think it's pretty obvious. But for example, if you're a pizza store, pizza is relevant, burgers are not. Unless you sell burgers, but we'll be simple. You're a pizza shop. You probably don't sell burgers. So make sure that the keywords are relevant.
Two, there's an iteration of relevance. There's a second, which is search relevance. And this is where it's the most important. Pizza is probably relevant to your business because if someone searches it, they'll see local pizza houses. Great. But if someone types in pizza recipe, though it may be relevant to your business because pizza recipe has the word pizza in it, if you type in pizza recipe into Google, the Google will return recipes to you. They will not return businesses that are selling pizzas, which you might be. That's a second layer that I feel like a lot of people overlook, is search relevance. Ensure the keywords you have chosen are relevant to your business, in terms of search results.
So how you check for that is just do a Google search of the keywords you have decided. Once you do a Google search with the keywords, you have decided, you can make sure that the search results that are appearing are relevant to your business. So the best way to kind of make sure of that, if you're a publication you most likely want to be found on Google searches for articles and information. If you're a business that sells things, you probably don't care much about being seen for articles and information, you want your service pages and your product pages to appear. Make sure the keywords you pick, they have product pages or service pages appear if that's what your business is, or the other way around. So number one, relevance, that's obvious, two is search relevance. That's the one I think a lot of people forget. This is the one that will dictate if you're ultimately successful, based on the keywords that you pick. Again, so no matter what keyword tool you are using, please, I would always recommend, Google the keywords you have chosen to ensure that they will return results that you're interested in.
Third, average monthly searches. That's not too complicated to understand. You just want to make the volume of searches is high enough for your business. You don't want to pick too many keywords that are too low on the rung in terms of searches and you don't want to pick too many keywords that are way too high, therefore being a high volume, because that might mean it's too competitive. So when it comes to average monthly searches, there is two caveats that I want to recommend.
One, if you're in local SEO, your average monthly searches must be adjusted to your local area. Because, let's say they use the pizza example again. You don't care if hundreds of thousands of people in the nation are Googling pizza, and you only deliver to your local area, you really only need to care about what your local county or city searches for. So if you're doing local SEO, ensure that you are adjusting your keyword volume, I mean average monthly volume with the local area. If you're doing a national campaign, that's fine, but just ensure that you have those figured out.
And then second, also, the first one was locality. And the second thing for average monthly searches that's really important is that I would always make sure that when you're looking at the keywords and you're looking at the average monthly searches, don't worry too much about if the volume is too low or too high, sometimes, because it also depends on the business. There are many times where there are keywords that you find that have 10 or less monthly searches a month, but sometimes the search itself is a high ticket item.
So a good example I have is, there's this engineering company I work with, and they were interested in ranking for software. And the software when I found it on Google and the average monthly searches, the volume was really low. So I told them, "Hey, the average monthly searches is pretty low. I don't know if it's worth going for it", but they told me, "well, actually it's so worth it for us because even if the volume is low, it makes sense. This software is really expensive, and if you're going to buy this software, you're probably going to shell out tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars in one purchase. So for us, it makes sense because not many people look for it, and then second, it makes sense because if we are to appear, even if it's a small amount of people, if they buy it's a big deal".
So it shouldn't be just a straight quantity of volume game, also related to your business, right? Ensure that you understand that even if you just look at the volume, but you will know best buy your business if it makes sense to go for a small volume keyword, especially if it means big ticket sales. There are also keywords sometimes when they're high volume, but the per sale ticket price of the high volume searches is really low. And that can happen a lot, too. So what I would make sure yes, look at the average monthly searches, but parallel with it and match it to your own business.
Third is keyword difficulty. So a lot of different tools have different measurements, and I would say whichever keyword tool you want to use, use theirs, but ensure that you're measuring how difficult the keyword is to break for.
So HRS has, what they call keyword difficulty. SEMrush, I don't know what they call their metric, but I know it's something similar. I believe Moz probably has the same thing and Google... Google keyword planner, I think they have competition and they score a low, medium and high. So ensure that depending on your strength of SEO, ensure that you know the difficulty. You don't want to pick all keywords that are highly difficult, especially if your resources are spread out too thin. Sometimes it is worth it to have mostly low difficulty, and then have a couple of high difficulties so you can focus on different things. So I'd ensure that you measure the keyword difficulty.
The conversation can be a little bit convoluted because different softwares and different tools have different measurements. But what I would say is just ensure that if you're starting out with SEO, don't go for high competition ones, try to go for lower ones, because especially if you're starting from scratch, you don't want to be going for things are too difficult. And so the best way to always measure difficulty is to do manual research yourself, but these tools will tend to tip you off.
So generally what I do is I jot them all down, but then I do a double check of the high, low, and medium to ensure that what we're seeing for the competition makes sense and then we'll then make the decision later. But the keyword difficulty scoring tends to give you a really good top level overview of what you're looking at. So if everything in a keyword group you're looking at is very high competition, it can probably signal for you to probably go more niche or go to a different direction.
Next is content, and this is a step above the keyword difficulty. When you're looking at keywords, what I would also look at is, for keywords that you're interested in, the companies that are ranking for it on Google, do a quick search of their content on their site. I've talked about this before in other videos, but go ahead and look at the competing websites that are ranking. How many pages on their website do they have, and how many pages on their website talk about the topic you are hoping to rank for?
So how I usually do that is I just look at how many pages in a competing website, in the title, have the keyword that we're trying to rank for. That will give you a better idea of also understanding the content library that the competitors have, so you kind of have a general idea of how much content you need to put in, right? So those are the metrics that I really use for keyword research.
So one is relevance, two, search relevance. Three, again, is average monthly searches. Fourth is keyword difficulty and fifth is content. Those are the five metrics I would really kind of walk through keyword research through. You shouldn't be able to finish keyword research in one sitting. Keyword research really should be first looked at, get a list, then start shortlisting. Research the ones you've shortlisted, then you'll be able to filter out the ones that are too competitive, the ones that don't make sense, the ones that actually look good to you guys, that's kind of what I would do. It's usually a process, right? So when you're doing keyword research, I think most people only do it by relevance and average monthly searches. Those two will not guide you in the right direction. You need to add those three other layers that I've mentioned, which again is search relevance, keyword difficulty, and content.
So hopefully when you're doing keyword research, you can keep that in mind. And the next time you're doing your own version of keyword research, try to take those factors into consideration. Hopefully you guys found that valuable though. I'm going to go ahead and start closing the video out. So if you guys enjoyed and liked what you saw, please like, and subscribe. I'm going to have my cup of tea now, and I hope to see you guys again soon. Thanks everybody.