Transcript
Hi guys, Welcome to another edition of Zupo's SEO Talk & Tea.
Today's conversation: should you go for high-volume keywords or low-difficulty keywords? The reason why this is important is because when you're doing keyword research, it's often much more nuanced than people make it out to be. There's a lot of research to be done, a lot of understanding of your own business, of your customers, and then a lot of decisions to be made, and a lot of hard decisions. That's what I want to talk about today.
But before we begin, I want to introduce the tea we have today. Today we have a Pu'Er tea that is the most common guest in this channel. I drink this tea pretty much 80% of the time in my day-to-day, and it's a very dark tea. It's a fermented tea, and it comes out, like I said, like a dark liquor, and it definitely has a kick. I use it as a ... essentially the same reason why someone would use black coffee.
Now, let's go ahead and dive on into this conversation. I do a lot of keyword research on behalf of the clients or potential clients, and what we're always trying to do is to understand what keywords we should be going for. Now, the issue when it comes to keyword research and SEO is that as you know, SEO is something that takes a while. It can take anywhere from six months to two years to rank for keywords, right? And so therefore not only do you want to pick the right keywords, but if you're going to engage in a six-month to a two-year campaign, you want to make sure you set the right goalposts, because there's nothing like trying to go for something for six months, and then you realize you're going for the wrong keyword. So therefore keyword research is really important.
What I really want to focus on today is going for high-volume or low-difficulty keywords. Oftentimes, when I am doing SEO research for clients, many of them are engaging in SEO for the first time, or they've been dabbling in it as an amateur, but they want to ratchet it up.
Now, I want to make everyone believe that they can go for every target that's out there, but something that's the reality is the higher the volume of the keyword, the more likely it is the higher difficulty it has. That's not always the case, but generally it's the case. So again, let me say it: the higher volume the keyword, generally the higher difficulty. And the higher the difficulty of the keyword, the longer and more arduous task it will be to rank for it. So generally, if a keyword has a really high volume but a high difficulty, I don't always recommend clients go for those because though the high volume keyword is sexy, it makes it look like they can scale quickly, they can really grow their business, it will take a very long time to rank for that keyword.
What I like to recommend, and this is just my philosophy, I like to recommend to clients, "Why don't you go for lower-difficulty keywords?" And though usually lower-difficulty keywords have a lower volume, the point of SEO is to get you returns. I don't want to go for a high-difficulty keyword that might take two years for you to rank if we do everything right, because in those two years, you've invested money in SEO and SEO resources, but you're not going to be able to get returns.
However, if we go for lower-difficulty keywords, and we start winning in the six-month to the nine-month or the one-year mark, you will start seeing returns in the one-year mark. And then once you see those returns, you can then reinvest them into the SEO to go for a little bit more difficult keywords and a little bit more difficult keywords, and then therefore your business is incrementally improving over time, where after a certain point, you're getting returns, you're incrementally growing your SEO profile. And then at some point, you will be able to start going for the very high difficulty, because your site is already strong enough, right?
I don't encourage sites who are just engaging in SEO for the first time to go for extremely difficult keywords. Every tool has their own kind of metrics. Google Keyword Planner has low, medium, high. SEMrush and Ahrefs have a scale from zero to 100. I generally don't want clients to go on the scale of Ahrefs to SEMrush ... I don't like anything ... Oh, let's talk about Ahrefs, actually. Let me slow down. We use Ahrefs at our firms ... We're going to use the keyword difficulty score from Ahrefs. I generally don't like clients going for anything 40 and above, especially if they're starting SEO for the first time. If you're truly starting SEO, I really try to recommend clients 20 and under for difficulty.
If it's 20 to 30, we can somehow get around it if you really want to double down on it. But like I said, it might be very enticing or cool to try to ... The opportunity might look so big and so enticing essentially to go for a high-volume keyword, because if you've got it, you can get all this traffic, but there is nothing like dying a slow death wish to try to go for this high keyword, but you're not making much ground, it's taking way too long, and all of a sudden you'll abandon your SEO research and then you have nothing to show.
So again, I do recommend to people, go for low difficulty. Even though there's low volume, we can always grow on top of that. But if we only go for the high volume, it's an all or nothing. A lot of businesses, though they want to go big or go home, I feel like the investment to go big or go home and have nothing to show for it, that is not always what you want to see.
I like to show clients that SEO is a long-term game, but as a long-term game, let's incrementally grow with each new keyword group that we can find that we can reasonably rank for in an understandable amount of time. And then therefore over the years, we will grow a very strong SEO profile that will allow us to really see returns while we're doing SEO. Then at some point in the future, as we've grown our site more, we can then go for those high-difficulty keywords.
So again, I guess maybe this is my strategic recommendations. I was saying it out loud. Sometimes I feel like that might be me editorializing. I don't know. That's kind of the way that I believe that's most clients take it. I've done many SEO strategies, and this is ... Going for something that's too difficult, I just don't want to see no results after a year, and all that money you spend on SEO is not going anywhere. That's kind of the way I feel, why I have the position I have today about this kind of conversation.
If you have any questions or any strategic counterpoints or anything, please feel free to reach out. I'm very curious if you have a differing opinion or if you have any thoughts about it. Always interested to hear from other smart individuals about their perspectives to widen my own. But I'm going to go ahead and pour out my tea, guys. If you guys found the video valuable, please like and subscribe, and I hope to see you guys again soon. Thanks everybody. That's hot, hot, hot.