Chris Burres·00:13

Hi and welcome to the SEO podcast. I known secrets of internet marketing. My name is Chris Burke, one of the owners of EWI digital. 

Matt Bertram·00:20

And my name is Matt Bertram, the lead strategists at DWR digital. And I’m sorry, I have like light hitting me right in the eyes at this time of the day. I just can’t help it somewhere. And a hat. 

Chris Burres·00:32

Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. This is podcast number 524. Are we, should we do some sort of celebration at lumber? 525. 

Matt Bertram·00:45

Why do people do celebrations on like round numbers? What’s that about? 

Chris Burres·00:49

I, I feel like, I don’t know. I think we’re wired. We’re like hardwired because of our numeric system to, to actually celebrate when we hit those numeric intervals. I think that’s just all it is. 

Matt Bertram·01:05

Well, you know, a five though is like a prime number, right? It’s like a, it’s like an odd prime number, so that’s not really round, but if you divided into fours, it is like so 25%. It’s just interesting, Chris. 

Chris Burres·01:22

No, I, I agree like, and there have been societies that use different number systems and you have to suppose that their like focus of celebrations was on, you know, those intervals instead of our intervals. That’s just. 

Matt Bertram·01:36

Becoming a history podcast. It’s. 

Chris Burres·01:37

Kind of, kind of interesting, Matt and I, we are broadcasting live from Houston, Texas, and we’re excited because we have a sponsor. 

Matt Bertram·01:50

Yeah. 

Chris Burres·01:51

It’s an actual sponsor. Who’s sponsoring a podcast and it’s not even just a sponsor. It’s H refs. So first off, if you guys haven’t used the tool, a H refs go use it. Let me read this little section and then that’ll kind of convince you more to use it. A H refs webmaster tools is a powerful and free tool. H w a H refs created a WT again, age reps, webmaster tools for website owners who can’t yet afford a marketing budget for a professional sh SEO tool, but need organic traffic to their websites. Almost 300,000 people signed up, oh, look, Matt showing it for a WT. The last year that since it was a, the product was released, all of them use almost half of H refs product functionality for free seriously at $0. Not even a credit card is required to sign up. 

Chris Burres·02:49

That’s always a biggie, right? That can be a hangup. Tech radar said that AWT makes SEO more accessible to others. Go check out the tool. Matt uses this tool regularly. And, and as we’ve actually kind of got a story to tell over the next bunch of podcasts, and we’ll be telling more of that story. In the meantime, you should go to ahefs. And so that’s the letter, a, the letter H and then refs, R E F s.com forward slash A W T . And again, check out that free tool. We have a sponsor. How cool is that? 

Matt Bertram·03:26

Very cool. 

Chris Burres·03:27

Started at podcast 524. We’ve got an article that we’re going to talk about, and it’s a keyword research. You know, if you didn’t know, SEO, keyword research kind of important, right? We’re really kind of delivering value in to a lot of enterprise level clients. And we thought it would be good to go back and touch on keyword research. So that’s the order goal, recovering positive to Brad Smith who wrote the article. We do have, you know, w it’s a lot, it’s been a bunch of podcasts so far that we’ve been saying there’s no review. And I’m kind of sad to say that there is a review now because it’s only one John, one star it’s from John . Its title is misleading. These are steps to the heart. Sorry. 

Chris Burres·04:21

I’m very sketchy to title and episode after Lily Ray, and then read her tips from a third party blog. So I guess this person, John, maybe dating Millie Ray, I don’t know, is, is very fondant following her and is upset. She’s got. 

Matt Bertram·04:37

Chris, like, I I’ve listened to some of her stuff. I think she’s, she’s on point with a lot of things. 

Chris Burres·04:43

Well, you know, one way you know that she’s good. Okay. 

Matt Bertram·04:47

Where you listened to her and she puts out articles and people are talking about, or were promoting her stuff. 

Chris Burres·04:52

Covered in our podcast. That’s one way that you know, that she creates great content and that’s actually been what we’ve been doing from the beginning. This is a resource to SEOs who don’t have time to go out. I mean, we typically read five to 10 articles before we decide which article we’re going to cover for the podcast. So we’re curating that information and sharing with it. You, and if you listened to the podcast, you should have realized that we didn’t just say, Hey, Lily, Ray says this. And, and that’s it. We actually add our comments and our experience to that. So it is a curated, 

Matt Bertram·05:28

You know, and on YouTube, our podcast comes up like after, like actually it comes up right with a number of hers and Lauren Baker. Who’s the editor and founder, I guess search engine journal did an article with her. And we did a article with Lauren a year or so ago. We should really have a Willie Ray on. I, I think that’s a great idea. I’m glad someone pointed that out. So. 

Chris Burres·05:55

That makes me happier. Yeah. Let’s, we’ll reach out to her and see if she’s interested in joining us on the show. That’d be awesome. Yeah. If you’re interested in leaving a review and we’re hoping that review is. 

Speaker 4·06:07

Five, 

Chris Burres·06:09

I feel like we timed that. Right, but who knows then all you need to do is go to E wr digital.com forward slash review. Or you can go to our Facebook page, facebook.com forward slash best SEO podcast. And you will find a place to leave a review and we will appreciate you very much. Let’s ju it’s always funny because the live thing starts turning on now. Like we’ve been live six seconds and I know on your side, we’ve been lying this whole time. It’s an interesting artifact of stream yard. Let’s jump into this article, timeless keyword tip research tips. There’s 10. We’re only going to cover five today because they’re good. And we’re going to dig in deep. And again, most of our audiences kind of well-versed in SEO. If you’re not well-versed in SEO. I like what Brad Smith has to say. 

Chris Burres·06:59

So listen up keyword research. Isn’t a blog post thing. It isn’t a website redesign thing either. Instead it should be an every day thing, a continual harvesting of data. So you can make better marketing decisions. So yes, keyword research today, keywords research tomorrow, keyword research the next week, like ongoing. It never, it’s kind of like your website. It’s never done this. Isn’t about tools. This particular article, it’s about principles, simple strategies that work now and will continue to work into the future. Let’s jump into these keyword research tips. The first one is the funnel stage. So keyword research should start really with a spreadsheet. And on the left side of the spreadsheet you drop. I mean, there’s more sophisticated ways, but this is what Brad Smith is walking us through. 

Chris Burres·07:51

On the left side, you start with the URL of the pages that you’re going to do some work on and on the right. You’ll put the keyword phrase for that page. And then you’ll tick off the usual Boxes like volume and competition. How much search volume is there and how much competition is there for those keywords. And he makes the point. You want more visitors? That’s easy. Just talk about celebrity gossip, right? You’ll get lots of visitors. The problem is that none of those will stick around. None of those will convert. And at the end of the day, we’re not just doing SEO for traffic. We’re doing SEO for conversions or to get results. 

Chris Burres·08:28

So instead that volume number needs to have some context, some long tail variations, some stuff in the middle and bottom of the funnel that would bring in people who are already primed to convert because we want those conversions. And he gives a walks us through an example. Let’s take Las Vegas. If you want to talk about the city, generally, you’re gonna get tons of visits, right? People are searching for Las Vegas. They want to know stuff. If you want to talk about Vegas odds, that would particularly bring you a particular type of audience, a segmented audience. That’s obviously thinking about, Hey, I’m on my way to Vegas. I’m going to do some gambling. That’s make sure that I can pay for my trip while I’m there. 

Chris Burres·09:07

And then finally, if you focused in on Vegas hotels, this is going to bring you a smaller subset of people who aren’t just planning on it. They’re ready to pull out their credit card and actually get to the hotel. So we break this down into there’s awareness, you know, 10 shortest Las Vegas, celebrity marriages, that would be Las Vegas awareness consideration, Vegas odds for black Jack. It’s an ebook 10 insider secrets to beat the house. By the way, I feel like you should download that book. Right. And then finally, decision phase Vegas hotels pricing, right? So this is all good, but just understand, not all businesses are similar. This means search intent might shift up or down the funnel dependent. 

Matt Bertram·09:54

So I think it’s really important. Like in what he’s talking about is laying it out on a spreadsheet. He’s really talking about the customer journey, right. And he’s talking about, depending on what people are searching for, where they’re at, can you all hear me? All right. I’m just gonna hold it right here. All right. So, so basically the customer journey you have to map out like, where, what touch points are they going to find as they move through the decision-making process, Google calls it micro-moments. And it’s really something we do in a workshop where we figure out who the target persona is. And then what does that customer journey? And then map out what are the pieces of content that they may run across at each decision-making phase. Right. 

Matt Bertram·10:46

And I think that is really what you need to talk about or understand and understand what keywords are associated with those things. Okay. 

Chris Burres·10:57

Yeah. And he does give an example, like actually there’s a tool that he references, which unfortunately is no longer available. It’s actually kind of a neat tool, a customer journey to online purchase, but he gives the example that organic search plays a huge role when people are evaluating products. Like when you’re trying to compare one product to the other, like, oh, when you hear or understand that this is another product and it’s a competitor to the one you’re considering, then you want to start doing research on those particular products. And that’s typically done with an organic search. Cool stuff. Number two. All right. So this is Tam 10 timeless keyword research tips, number two, it’s just labeled PPC performance. He could probably work on his titles a little bit, cause I’m like, okay, well, how is that at time? 

Chris Burres·11:46

This keyword search and really what he is saying is this, start with the product or service name, you know, the super commercial one that nobody that nobody searches for, then look up related keywords to balance the relevance, something pretty close, but hopefully a little more popular, right? So you’re starting from super long tail and honing in on what might actually have search volume. Then load those keywords into ad words and use their tool. Right. Marketing after all isn’t okay. This, I actually disagree on a highlighted this marketing after all is no science. It’s a guessing game. How do you feel about that sentence, Matt? Those times? 

Matt Bertram·12:28

I feel like when I talk to people that do traditional marketing, that is an accurate statement because, cause I’ve seen many times, they’re like, we think you should spend a bunch of money on this print article or this radio article or this TV article. And it’s like, there’s no data to support. It’s just what they believe, what they think. Right. And there’s no way to measure it. And so PPC, I think it’s phenomenal as you’re tying back to keyword research, you can test out a lot of keywords. You can also see what the market is of what people are bidding on. I mean, really long tail keywords are going to convert better from an SEO standpoint. That’s maybe where you want to start, but the more targeted you are, the higher likelihood they’re going to convert, which will show better data to Google. 

Matt Bertram·13:20

It’s all kind of like a chain reaction. But as far as a guessing game, maybe there’s some art to it, but it’s more and more a science and more data-driven than anything else. That’s why I love it. It’s like we don’t trust our gut. Right. Or we have some best practices of what we think, but we ultimately let data tell us what the right thing to do is from keyword research to conversion rate optimization. It’s all data-driven. So yeah, I, I could disagree with that statement as well. Okay. 

Chris Burres·13:54

Well, and I think you can break it into like two phrases kind of the way I look at it is even science starts with like a guess, right? Like the, the thought process is a hypothesis, right? Like, and then you go out and you prove it or you disprove it. And so, yeah, and, and this is something that we have, what I love about our team when we’re in team meetings and we’re talking about marketing for somebody, everyone will defend their idea with a lot of passion, and then you get a little bit of data and you’re like, oh, I guess that didn’t work. Like you go onto the next thing or more likely, I guess, options worked better than option B. They both worked. Cause we have enough experience. 

Chris Burres·14:36

Spend more time on option a because the data shows that option a is the right thing to go on. 

Matt Bertram·14:41

W well, that’s one of the really great things that you can do with Edward, certainly in, before you commit to something with maybe a SEO strategy is you AB test, right? You AB keywords, you AB test ads for meta descriptions for titles there, you know, there’s a lot that you can do and let data tell you what it is. And so, yeah, in our team meetings, people defend different points and they bring data to the fold. And what I love too, is that it’s really a best in breed. It’s the best suggestion wins, right? Or the best idea wins. It’s not someone’s idea because of X, Y, Z. And, and so really just data tells the story. You can always see in the data what’s happening. And then that’s the key is trying to understand that data. 

Matt Bertram·15:35

And that is what we help enterprise level companies do a lot, is help them understand and track their data better to understand where their marketing dollars are going and how they should be dividing up that marketing mix. And in a lot of cases, the traditional agencies, if from partnering with them and we’re kind of the digital player at the table, they don’t always like everything that I have to say. And, and it’s not, you know, it’s not me saying it I’m just the messenger, right? Like it’s the data. So. 

Chris Burres·16:10

Yeah. It’s gotta be uncomfortable going from a position of having little or no data to having a lot of data that doesn’t necessarily agree with what you know, your initial hypothesis. 

Matt Bertram·16:25

Well, we’ll also, I think that sometimes when you’re looking at a lot of raw data, it’s hard to understand what it all means. Right. And sometimes data can be overwhelming, right. And so you need to create different kinds of filters or different metrics or goals to be able to understand what is happening. So, yeah, I think data is certainly a science as well as an art, but I have tried to move away as much as possible from a guessing game or best guests. There are certainly best practices where we start, but that’s certainly not where we end up. So. 

Chris Burres·17:07

Yeah, it’s, you know, I, I love a company called action. Coach teaches marketing is math. Like it’s math, like it’s math. I feel like I’ve said that enough. Number, number three times 10 timeless keyword research tips. Number three is existing page topics. And in this particular piece, Brad was talking about how categories can group your page. And, and you can look at categories that you have in your system. And he gives the example of choose a popular page. In his case, he chose whiskey sours, by the way, I like whiskey sours, very delicious. You’ve taken it. And then let’s build from that whiskey sours page. The first thing to keep in mind is, Hey, you know, in a whiskey sour, there is whiskey. So let’s kind of look up, let’s do some keyword research and understand whiskey, right? 

Chris Burres·17:59

And this isn’t, this is how do we narrow down into like the kinds of keywords that we should be targeting. So you start researching that say whiskey cocktails. And it gives a list of 2, 4, 6, 7 keyword results. That’s got some search volume, any notices that there are three related to season. So there’s whiskey cocktails for summer whiskey cocktails, summer and whiskey cocktails fall. So maybe it’s a good idea to like seasonal whiskey cocktails. And, and that is a way that you can do research from starting on a page that’s popular, starting on a page that you know, would is broad-based and then narrowing down into something that has some volume. And you have an opportunity to take advantage of. 

Matt Bertram·18:48

I feel like I need to go do some research on the seasonal whiskey sours. I didn’t know that seasonally there’s different ones to drink. And I certainly know. 

Chris Burres·18:57

To be fair, to be fair it’s whiskey cocktails for summer now it’s whiskey. And he brought in, well, this goes into seasonality. So number four, again, this is top 10 timeless keyword research tips. Number four is seasonality, right? And this is not that hard to think about, right? There’s different seasons and different seasons for different topics. You’ve got, you know, he makes the point that flat screen TVs become a very high searched item during a black Friday. 

Matt Bertram·19:30

Interesting fact, do you know when the best time besides black Friday or cyber Monday to buy a big screen TVA? 

Chris Burres·19:39

It was right before the super bowl. 

Matt Bertram·19:40

Yeah, 

Chris Burres·19:41

No, that was a guess. Well, especially if you’re here in Houston, there’s a guy, who’s, his name is mattress Mack, and he typically will make a bet on the Superbowl. And certainly if Houston’s in it, if the Texans are in it, if the Texans win the super bowl, any furniture you bought for the previous three months, including TVs is free. So that would make it a really good deal If you can’t do the math. All right. So we talked about a hub pesky talker cocktails. So we’re back on, this might be too tough, right? It’s you’re going after the big brands, like blown up petite, all recipes.com Buzzfeed, but there’s long tail variations that you could do, like whiskey drinks for summer, maybe crisp and refreshing, and those and fall, which are warm and full bodied. 

Chris Burres·20:34

Now you, now you want both of those drinks, right? The summer ones, right. 

Matt Bertram·20:38

Chris, next time we get together, we’re going to have to, you know, make some whiskey sour drinks. 

Chris Burres·20:43

I make a mean whiskey sour. So think seasonality in terms of affinity or what your customers are into. So what is it in that season that your whiskey drinker, gin drinker, vodka drink, or whatever might be looking for? What are the signatures of that sentiment and go after those key phrases and actually do the research on those and make sure there’s enough volume to be worth it because you don’t want to just come up with and say, maybe there aren’t any warm, full bodied vodka drinks, right? Like, I don’t think warm when I think vodka, I think more like, cool. So make sure you do the keyword research and understand if those are good targets. 

Matt Bertram·21:22

Well, I think, you know, just kinda expounding upon seasonality, right? Black forties, right around the corner, Christmas, right around the corner. I’ve seen a lot of advertisers start advertising early in earlier, there’s going to be supply chain issues. People are running different kind of specials, trying to get their message out sooner before it gets really noisy, seasonality, plays big into retail businesses or even seasonality businesses. And I think that you should be thinking about and planning out a content calendar ad calendar in advance, right. It shouldn’t be, oh, we need to run an ad. It should be okay. What are we, what are we running? What are we trying to achieve? Who are we trying to reach? When does that search volume start to peak? Because a lot of retailers, that’s why I think it’s called black Friday because right. 

Matt Bertram·22:17

They, in all their money, they get out of the red and into the black, the last quarter of the year, you know? So yeah. 

Chris Burres·22:26

Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. All right. Let’s, let’s talk about number five, 10 times, keyword research tips, trending topics. So sometimes we think our campaigns and strategies and content pieces need to be so creative or breathtaking or interesting. Again, that goes kind of goes to maybe the mindset of it being an art versus a science. I think you gotta have some of those pieces. And at the end of the day, the science of it will tell you what to do. He mentioned the guy, Jesse Clay helped him simplify his thought process, which is it’s a mix of doing good work and talking about an Uber trendy topic. 

Matt Bertram·23:07

I got an idea. 

Chris Burres·23:08

You got an idea. 

Matt Bertram·23:09

Yeah. So I can share a topic for any of those out there that are into crypto. I used Uber. I literally used Google trends on how many people were searching the Bitcoin to figure out when the top was last time. Like basically based on how many people were searching, like Bitcoin price, Bitcoin, all these types of words. When it, when it got up to a certain level, like it had peaked we’re at about 25% of where it was when it peaked last time. Right. In 2017. Right. And so that’s where I believe we’re at, in the cycle for all of those into crypto. 

Chris Burres·23:55

Twenty-five percent of the way. Now, when you, 

Matt Bertram·23:58

So the searches are happening in 2017, it was kind of like fever pitch on how many people were searching for it. And so I’m kind of using that to time the market right now. Kind of, I don’t know. Interesting for those of those that in character, 

Chris Burres·24:14

We’ll talk about that offline. Cause that’s very interesting. I’d like to look at that data as well. I love looking at that type of data. So he’s talking about again, trending topics, maybe it’s breaking news stories, sporting events, major indecisions, or whatever we want some, we should probably do it again. We once did an Astro’s post just to be, you know, the Astro’s are actually there. 

Matt Bertram·24:37

They won that year. It was amazing. 

Chris Burres·24:39

Yeah. Yeah. And they’ve got, they’re gonna, you know, beat the red Sox tomorrow. I don’t know if there’s any red Sox fans out there. I’m sure there’s one or two, but yeah. You know, we’d beat them and we’d go on to the world series. It’s going to be exciting times for Houston. We should all get on our Astro’s hat and take a picture and do some posts and maybe talk about, I don’t know how the Astros impact SEO. 

Matt Bertram·25:04

Two things go hand in hand. 

Chris Burres·25:06

It’s like a glove. It fits perfectly. All right. So those are five of the 10 tips. We’re going to cover five tips today. We’ll cover the next five tips in our next podcast. I want to thank our sponsor again, age reps, make sure you go out and check out that tool. That’s a H refs.com forward slash a WT as an H refs webmaster tools go out there and check out that tool out like over half of the tool is free. So, you know, you can afford it, go check it out. It’s got some good stuff in it. We would also ask that if you enjoyed this content or any of our content, make sure if you’re on YouTube, make sure you subscribe to us. Make sure you click that notification bell. And also please leave a review. 

Chris Burres·25:56

You can leave some comments, maybe in a YouTube video. If you’re watching it two places to leave a review right now, EWI digital.com forward slash review and facebook.com forward slash best SEO podcast. You have any wrap up comments, man, 

Matt Bertram·26:13

Go SEO tips. 

Chris Burres·26:15

Go Astros. Well until the next podcast. My name is Chris Burres

Matt Bertram·26:23

My name is Matt Bertram. 

Chris Burres·26:25

Bye-bye for. 

Matt Bertram·26:26

Now.