Transcript
Hi guys, and welcome to another edition of Zupo SEO Talk & Tea.
In today's conversation, when picking keywords it's always good to look at them in different localities. What that means is that when you're picking keywords it's always good to test and search for them, not in just your geographic area, but try them in different areas. I'll go into more detail in a second, but I want to introduce the tea we have today.
Today we have a gaoshan cha. That's a really poor Chinese pronunciation. But this is the gaoshan oolong, which is a tall-mountain oolong. It's a very popular tea. I've known about it for a while, and so I'm going to have it again today on the show to kind of enjoy with you guys. But let's go ahead and get chat.
It's always good to test and search for keywords not in your geographic locality. What that means is Google will essentially, depending on your location, change your search results but only for certain types of keywords. Obvious ones are like pizza. If you typed in pizza, you're going to get your local area because they're going to return local businesses, and that's kind of obvious. But when you're doing keyword research, ensure that you're doing it for your keywords even if you're not sure or you think that it might not be the case.
A great example, SEO services. My company does SEO services, and SEO is pretty universal in that you don't need to be in that physical area to work with a local business, do SEO. A lot of companies, they work with SEO firms across the country, even across the globe, so there is really no need to have a physical location nearby in the geographic area. But if you type in SEO services, a lot of the search results you'll get back are local businesses, right?
And so what you got to do with your keywords is, you have to ensure that when you're looking them up, do they change from place to place? If you're in the West coast, do a search; and then simulate a search from the East coast. Do the search results change? Because if they do, something that's very important is that when you're doing keyword research, you'll often get to the search volume of the keyword and it's usually of the USA. But if the search results are different in the West coast and then there are different in the East coast, and some sites are showing up on the West coast but they don't show up on the East coast, and your site gets there, even though you might rank, the search volume that you thought you were going to get won't be there because it's changing in the geographic area.
For example, if the keyword has logged in a thousand and you think you're going to get a thousand searches because you're going to rank for it, but you didn't realize that only in the West coast is where you'll be seeing, you're probably not going to get all a thousand. It'll probably be much less. The reason why this is important is because when you're picking keywords, ensure that you're looking in different areas. Because if you're looking in different areas and you can confirm that even if on the West, East, South and the Midwest those search results are the same, you can have more confidence that the keyword will have all the volume you're thinking of and that you can rank across the country.
And so the reason why this is important is because there are some keywords where it's obvious and there are some keywords where it's not so obvious, and the ones you really want to vet are the not so obvious. You want to go for keywords where you can... It depends on your business at the end of the day. Some businesses really go for the nationals, so they're not concerned about keywords that change in the local area. They just want to rank for one keyword that goes across the country. And some businesses do care about locality. They only want to rank for certain areas, and that might be the case as well.
When you're doing your keyword research, you have to balance these things and ensure that you are checking. And I guess a natural thing that you might be thinking is, how? There's lots of tools out there, and the number one tool I'd recommend is Google Keyword Planner. Google Keyword Planner has a tool called Ad Preview, and Ad Preview will give you a good simulation where you can change the location of where you're searching down to the zip code so that you can verify how the search results look depending on where you're at.
Now, there are other ways around this, but to me, the Google Keyword Planner or Ad Preview tool has been the most consistent over the years. I've used other softwares, but I feel like they've gone out of commission or things. I'm not really sure what's going on there. Sometimes I just use Ad Preview just as kind of a research tool.
Hopefully that will help you in ensuring that you will not pick keywords that just don't make sense in the long run. Because there's nothing like ranking for a keyword only to figure out that you thought it was national, but you're only ranking for in the local area. But I'm going to go ahead and leave it at that. If you guys found that video valuable, please like and subscribe, and I hope to see you guys again soon. Thanks everybody.