How to Do Keyword Research for SEO Ep. 582

Gordon. Howdy, howdy, howdy. Welcome to another fun-filled episode of the best SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Matt Bertram. I'm going to be your host for today. I haven't done a podcast in a minute. It's Friday afternoon. We've got kids running around. I feel a little sick. We'll see. It's just been crazy. So we'll see if we can get this done. I have a client meeting in about 30 minutes. So just to let you know, that's about how long this podcast will be, if not less. First, before we jump into it, a little bit of potatoes before the meet is, one is my mic, upgraded the mic. I know when I kind of come away from the mic or something like that, the sound quality is bad. I know people are telling me that. Appreciate all of you doing that. Also, I've gotten a lot of requests for some different topics. So I want to start to get those covered. People are starting to ask me some pretty advanced stuff. Probably a better format to do that is like an insider's group or something like that, where we can really go through some mathematical formulas, some layouts, some things, training that we've done with my team. I have started to do some coaching. So if anybody else is interested in coaching, please hit me up. I've been hit up by some people looking to do referral partners and also people that are sending me business and appreciate it all. So thank you all. We've been really busy and just trying to get back into the swing of things. So let's jump into it. So this is a topic that I actually just did another podcast about this morning on OGGN Network, Warren Gas Global Network Marketing and Sales, really trying to change executives' minds on how they feel about marketing. A lot of these sales directors and stuff like that, we've really started to get into the, I guess, the meat over there as far as keyword research. And I really

liked that topic and I had to pull myself back quite a bit because I was going pretty advanced on some of the strategies. And my co-host was like, hey, let's bring it back. We actually just did it on keyword research, not competitive research. But I think that there's a ton of value that's really been on my mind that I want to share with you. Also, if you have any topics, let me know. I'm going to do something on local. I'm going to do something on really technical SEO and crawl and bots and what is crawl budget and that sort of thing. And there's not really a crawl budget, really, a little tidbit. There's just crawl. And you can't really manage that. But you know, OK, we'll go into it in another podcast. But all right. So I'm going to try to keep on top of the mic here. So all the value gets right into the microphone and into your ears. So the topic today, let me pull it over, is an article by HubSpot. HubSpot, you know, really the term inbound marketing. They coined that term. They own that term. And they're one of the top authoritative sites online as it relates to SEO. They have an article on how do you do keyword research for SEO? And they say it's a beginner's guide. I wanted to go through it and kind of highlight some things that I think are really important on top of what's in this article. OK. And also, I had a call right before this. Another agency, we do a lot of audits. They work with a number of CMOs. They reached out to us and want to send us some audits pretty consistently, it sounded like. So really excited about potentially that new partnership. But why keyword research? Why is it important? Also, misnomer, keyword research, it really should be topic research. OK. When you think about ranking for keywords, you're not ranking for keywords anymore. You're ranking for intent. So you need to understand what people are searching

for. And typically what people are searching for is based on the intent of what they're doing. And it's usually to get an answer, especially with voice search, et cetera. But it's about a topic. So what is the best free source to use, I guess, for topic research before you even get into, let's say, quote unquote, keyword research? I would use Google Trends. Google Trends is fantastic. If you work with a big enough company, you can even see the trends for search terms for that. Or if you're doing some PR campaigns, you can see some stuff like that. If not, you can even break it down to per region. This is really good for seasonal work to compare against what your traffic is and your lead volume. You can export it to Excel and you can do some fancy stuff. But I would tell you, you want to understand what the topic is first, not just the keyword. Also, a pro tip, I guess, Wikipedia. You can go see how Wikipedia associates words. So we're looking for themes or word associations. Certainly, everybody wants to rank for that seed keyword. Here's what I'll tell you. You do want to rank for that seed keyword, but that seed keyword is top of the funnel. And that's what's not going to drive you the leads. It's going to be the long tail key phrases. So you want to rank for that word, but that word's probably not the most important thing. Again, depending on what your search is. Hold on one second. Hopefully you didn't hear me coughing. Sorry about that, but I'm trying not to cough in the mic. All right. So this talks about why is keyword research important? Which keywords are best to target? There's a lot of tips. So Ahrefs, HubSpot, they have a little video here. It looks like Ahrefs on that. Ahrefs has, well, there's keyword difficulty, KD, right? You can figure out from an SEO standpoint, how difficult it is. You can figure out how many searches. You know, you like

to look at maybe a PPC. What does it cost? What are people bidding on? But the big thing, even Google keyword planner, which I think is fantastic. And that's probably most accurate data. I would tell you, Ahrefs, been a sponsor of the podcast, SEM Ruts, sponsored for the podcast. So full visit, like, you know, full like transparency here. All these tools, SE ranking, SpyFu, all of them use their own algorithm, right? Unless you hook it up to search console that gets actual Google data. There's estimates on traffic, like, and they don't, they're not always accurate, and they don't show anything. So you want to kind of use them to triangulate what potentially you should be doing. But I wouldn't take any of them as like, for sure. You know, I've seen just the estimates like wildly off. You know, there's a lot of good data in some of these tools. But really, what you want to do, in my opinion, is really just look at your website, look at other websites that are similar to yours, maybe your competitors, understand what they're doing, understand why those websites are popular. Data is not going to give you all the answers, they're going to miss stuff. It's really much better to manually look at the sites and understand why is this blog popular? Why is this brand popular? Why is the customer experience so good? And then compare it to your own. I think a lot of people, again, when we're talking about topics versus keyword research, a lot of people put the cart before the horse, and or they're trying to do a bunch of work before they do the strategy, and they really think it think through it. I can tell you, we've run into some problems with some of our developers. Hey, everything's mobile first. I know you're building on desktop, you know, web developer. But guess what, we have to look at mobile first. How is that experience? A lot of times some images get hit. Some text is shown, different things happen

dynamically. It could load different, really the bots, you got to remember the Google bots are mobile bots. So really, mobile is all that matters. And, you know, there's been even some blogs that I've been reading. And I'll tell you, gosh, blogs today, like new blogs are just like rehashed, whatever. Excuse me. I'm not really impressed with very many new blogs that are coming out. You know, even like, dare I say, like Forbes and stuff like that, those articles are not helpful. They're watered down. You know, there was some really good blogs that have been bought up and hidden as far as like, how the execution works and what to do. You know, or people are just repurposing the same stuff over and over and over again. So I'm not loving blogs. And I'm not saying also, you need to write these huge, masterful skyscraper blogs, right? I think you just need to say what you need to say. And however much information that takes, I would also tell you even, you know, there's been two new updates. There's the, it was the eat update, the trust authority expertise, I'm dyslexic. So I said it backwards, but, um, that update happened. A lot of that has to do with authorship. If you're using AI, you need to say that or Google will unindex you. And that's what I'm seeing a lot. Um, that was followed by a helpful, uh, content update again, targeting, I think AI. So, um, you know, anything that AI does is run in the mill. It's what, uh, the standard deviation, just, you know, the, the median is, I think I'm using those terms, right. And, uh, you need to add your expert thought, your expert opinion to that. Um, you need to break those tokens. Uh, if you're, if you're going to use it, I think it's better for research. I think it's better for foundational stuff, but you really want to spend quality time. What, what it's encouraging everybody to do is really create, uh, even better content. Um, and

I know people have asked me my opinion, AI and this, that, and really Google accepts it. Okay. It's not against Google guidelines, but it's gotta be useful. And I think people are just, you know, there's a bunch of content factories out there that are just throwing stuff up there. And that what it's doing is, is making the bar getting raised. And if you're using it and everybody else using it, like you're not a differentiator. So, okay. I haven't even gotten into keyword research yet, but well, keywords are one of the main things that Google looks for to rank. So it's, it's really, really quite important. And you know, again, we have audits, we have workshops. You want to put in that strategy. So, uh, this blog going back to it says, uh, keyword research, important keyword research helps you find which keywords are best to target and provides valuable insights in the queries that your target audience is actually searching for in Google. So again, competitive research, really helpful looking at your own website to see, uh, if you're just ranking for your name, you're probably getting most of your traffic from your G and B depending on like your type of business. Um, so you might want to even optimize for that more. If you are getting leads, if you're not at the top of the first page, okay, you're probably not getting any traffic. If you're on the first page and you're getting a bunch of spam, okay, you're not probably in the first position. Um, you're, you're just on the radar of everybody that, uh, wants to do outbound marketing and they're hitting you up, um, in a lot of different ways, right? So, okay, look, they use a inbound methodology. Certainly, um, content marketing is a way to do that. Uh, marketing trend insights, traffic growth, customer acquisition, keywords versus topics. I'm glad they hit on that. Um, you know, that this is where semantic SEO semantic search comes in. Uh, I'm not saying LSI is end all be all, uh,

but word association is important. We're ranking for a lot of terms that, well, we don't even have anything on the website about. Uh, and I have a number of clients that are ranking for terms that they don't have anything on the website about, um, Google understands the associations. Um, you know, so, so that, that, that's pretty important to, to know that you're trying to answer that question. Again, going back to voice search, how people are asking questions is different. 75% of all searches are still new and Google has to kind of categorize and figure those out. And that's where they're using a lot of this machine learning to, to figure it out. Um, and I would tell you all these tools are fantastic and AI is fantastic to help you with stuff. Um, but all these audits really miss true eyeballs on the page, uh, experience in it. Right. Um, okay. Elements of keyword research, relevance, authority, volume, right? Relevance, like where are they in the sales funnel? I think that's really important. Again, those, uh, broad keywords, those seed keywords, very top of the funnel. Maybe when you're starting your search, you're just searching for X, Y, Z. But then after that, you start adding the modifiers, best X, Y, Z, right? Best widget or whatever. And then you might search for buy or pay or, um, uh, shop or something like that. Right. Uh, where, where there's purchase intent. And, and, and I think, um, you need to understand that where are they at in the cycle and what is that page built for? What I have seen work really effectively is you build different bodies of content on the page that hit all those different kind of sections, right? Really sorry, but I wanted to get this podcast out to you because, um, people have been, been asking me for it and, um, you know, appreciate, uh, uh, appreciate everybody. So, um, all right. So authority, right? Like how good is this content? Uh, really links are still important. Um, but I

will tell you your own links on your own page, send better signals or much more trustworthy signals than, than anything outbound. Okay. Uh, and, and any backlinks coming to you. Um, most sites on the internet don't have any links, right? So if you have thousands and thousands of links and your competitors don't, why is that right? Like, are you appreciably better? Um, what, what they're going to look at, uh, interaction data, what's going on on page? Um, you know, how are people searching for your brand? If tons of people are searching for your brand, all kinds of different, uh, ways and facets like that verifies that, okay, they should have all these backlinks or whatever, and where those backlinks come from. So, you know, a race and backlinks is not, um, my recommendation. So, uh, control what you can control, uh, be thoughtful in your link building. And I got a, I got a client, uh, talk to today. Actually, I had a pretty busy day. Um, and, uh, he's starting a new business and it's like a crowdsourcing platform. I'm not going to totally go into it, but there's another competitor that just went bankrupt. He told me, and they spent a ton of money and this, that, and other thing. Um, there is a strategy to reach out to all the roundups and, uh, some of the blogs that they have linked to and say, Hey, this, this business, this company is out of business. This business is not offering the services and, and, you know, we can offer, uh, a similar service and you write in the same format that they can swap out the content. There's a high likelihood, um, you're going to be able to do it. That's like, uh, uh, advanced, advanced link building technique where you can harvest really high quality links. Um, I would tell you if your agency out there, or if you're working with an agency and they're embarrassed to show you the links they built, it's probably not valuable to Google either. So it's

probably just spammy and I wouldn't do it. Right. And if anybody's offering you a really, really cheap SEO, they're probably doing backlinks mainly, and they're probably like really horrible backlinks. So, uh, I would stay away from that. That's my personal opinion. Um, okay, let's keep going volume volume is a misnomer too. Okay. Um, if you're ranking for a very long tail keyword, that's right at the bottom of the purchase intent, then it could convert. And if there's only 30 people searching for a month and depending on your ticket price of your item, it could be worth it to rank for that one keyword, right? It's not always about volume volumes, maybe where you start the process, but you iterate and you want to really understand what keywords is your site converting for and what kind of keywords are people searching for in your space. And, and that starts with topic research and finding maybe other people in your area, uh, or other people outside your area and figuring out like, what are they ranking for? How are they doing things? There's a lot of footprints online that you can see through these tools, really, really powerful stuff. Um, you know, there's also defensive things that you can do to prevent people from seeing stuff and strategies that you have, because maybe you don't want everybody copying you. Right. I, I, I had that conversation, uh, earlier this week that, um, people keep copying the ads. People keep copying my ads. People keep bidding on my name. Like how, how do I, how do I deal with that? And that's certainly an issue in itself. All right. How much time do I have here? Running out of time. All right. Uh, how keyword research and SEO strategy make, I'm just reading my headers guys. Um, uh, step one, make a list of important relevant topics based on what you know about your business. There's a lot of that goes into that, right? Target persona, buyer persona, or whatever you want to call it, customer journey. Um,

figure out what those topics are and then stick with those topics. That's actually what, what I've also heard is like picking like 20 random keywords and saying, we're going to improve them all a little bit. Again, if you don't get to the top of the first page, you're not getting any traffic. So focus on one kind of area, uh, for extended period of time. I think that that's a really, uh, effective strategy that we've been implementing for, I don't know, five plus years and it works really, really well. Um, you know, okay. Fill in those topics buckets with keywords. Here's the thing, every page and Yoast and, you know, rank math and all this help you do this sort of thing. You need to know each page. What is the keyword or phrase or whatever? What, what is the intent of that, of what we're trying to do? Right. Um, there should be an intent. There should be a focus and it should be apparent, especially when you look at the headers should be apparent. What are you trying to rank for now? You don't have to keyword stuff, right? If you have it in the H one, you don't really need it in H two, H three, H four, H five, whatever. Right. Um, because if you lay it out on the page, right, you're saying this topic, and then this is a subtopic and this is a subtopic and this subject, right. Um, and Hey, other people are saying, you know, Google doesn't look past like, um, three, four. I've seen, you know, it's really hard to tell. And, and I, I, I don't know the code, so I can't tell you, but what I can tell you is the more clear you are about what the page is about. I like to do this thing with my team where we look at the, uh, headers and you know, you go into the five and six, it helps describe what you're talking about really clearly. And now if you use a bunch of

filler words and stuff like that, it's going to confuse the signals. But if you look at the headers and you, you should be able to know what the page is about and it should read naturally. Right. Um, that, that's something that man, we, we do a lot of, and it really helps. Why isn't this page ranking? What is it not ranking for? Well, look at the headers, um, without looking at all the content on the page, is it laid out properly? Does it make sense? Does it flow? You know, these are kind of questions you need to ask yourself. Um, all right. Uh, step three, understand what, understand how, excuse me, understand how intent affects keyword research and analyze quarterly. Right. And they talk about user intent. I think we cover that, uh, research related search terms. Again, research gives you a lot of ideas, like certainly in Google, right. Auto suggests really good. Um, you know, dividing things into different topics, looking at Wikipedia, understanding how these things are associated and, and, and Google, um, you know, if you hit a keyword too much, you're going to be outside the standard deviation of normal sites. And Google is going to say, Hey, I'm going to penalize you a little bit for trying to manipulate it. And you're, you're, you're kind of, uh, depending on how far you're outside of the standard deviation, I'm not saying it's like a spam score, but your, your spam score, or I guess I am calling a spam score, but your manipulation score, like there's not really a manipulation score. It's just like a bunch of algorithms, but is basically going up and up to the point where it will alert somebody for a manual review. So it's algorithmic penalty, penalty gets stronger, penalty gets stronger, manual review. That's kind of what, what I think or what I've seen, uh, happen. I could be a hundred percent wrong. Um, but you want to be inside that standard deviation. Well, if you're trying to rank for a particular keyword, one

of the things you might want to do is try to check the box of all the other things that are associated with this keyword, not just that keyword over and over and over again. Like it becomes pretty clear that your keyword stuffing, right? That, that keyword. Um, certainly even in anchor texts, like I've seen a lot of really bad blogs, it's the same word over and over again as the anchor texts, like do not do that. Um, it is very easy to see. Um, and Google is going after, you know, doorway pages and like, you know, you, you make the content useful, right. And, and show that you're expert in the space and, and you're not going to just talk about one thing. You're going to talk about all these other things in association. Google is going to see that you're going to kind of think about like checking those boxes in a simplistic term and, and you're going to, you're going to rank, right? But you want to talk about holistically those topics. Um, five HubSpot suggesting a bunch of different tools, SE ranking. Okay. I mentioned them. Ahrefs, SEMrush, Ubersuggest, uh, Neil Patel bought that, uh, free keyword research to Google keyword planner, keywords everywhere, Moz keyword tool.io, uh, uh, WF finder, uh, SE cockpit. Um, I haven't used every one of these, but I've used most of them. Um, they're all really good. Again, you want to triangulate them. Uh, how do you find and choose keywords? It talks about good talks about Google trends. It talks about keyword planner, prioritize, low hanging fruit, check monthly search volume for keywords. I've been chosen factor insert features. Yeah. For chosen keywords. I've seen that, that really build credibility. Um, uh, you know, ranking in SERPs, uh, their strategies to, uh, rank in the maps. Um, that, that works really well. We're going to talk about local SEO, uh, in the future, but those list snippets are great. Like, you know, the more of these, you can get in the positions there, there's debate

on like, Oh, well, you know, someone's not going to click through your website. They're just going to see it on Google. I would say you still want to be in position zero, uh, over being in position 10. Right. Um, I can tell you that there is less traffic going to the sites because Google is getting better at putting those ads and making them like look organic and, uh, things are changing. I mean, SEO is always a moving target. Uh, but man, you know, SEO is still crushing it. Right. I haven't found a better channel. Um, text message marketing is pretty good. Um, but you want to use all these things in combination, but when you're looking at low hanging fruit, right, there's kind of a process of building your strategy of what you want to go after and how, um, and maybe we can get into that in a later podcast. I'm just bumping up against time here. Uh, yeah. Video snippets, add a video to your page. We've been talking about this for years. Like again, the fundamentals of SEO haven't changed. Maybe some tweaks here and there, maybe some new things have added, but if you follow the tried and true principles of, you know, how to rank in Google, Google is going to find good content and take care of you. Um, long tail key phrases, that is where it is at. Okay. Um, you might not be able to compete against an enterprise level company for certain keywords if you're selling a competitive product, but guess what? On the long tail, they're not focused on that. You can compete there. Um, there, there is opportunity. Uh, you just got to look for it and, and having visibility and analytics to look for that is where you want to start. Uh, and blogs, right? Blogs. And, um, you know, if you do guest posts properly and, um, press releases and, and, and, you know, creating content, creating words is really the start of this. Um, and, and figuring out what you should

do first and maybe put together a plan and a strategy. And of course, okay, let's go after low hanging fruit first, but what is low hanging fruit? Well, I think low hanging fruit is producing leads, right? So if you're on the second page, push them to the first, if you're on the first, first page, push them up, right? If they're not ranking to get them ranking and then push them up to the first position, they're going to, you know, if you have a client, uh, or, or you're in house, um, and, and someone's looking for results, that's a long-term game, right? So I think you want to look for the quick wins first to, uh, build the value and, and get people to understand that this is an investment, right? It's not just a cost of doing business, but it's an investment and it can really produce really powerful, um, results for you. Uh, you know, I would say if you're not doing SEO, like it's a mistake, you know, I think everybody listening to this podcast knows that, um, certainly we can all do it better. Uh, and that's what we're here for. And, and, you know, there's, there's a lot of stuff that I've been reading about recently, like no follow links, right? Like, should you be crafting, um, you know, the, the link equity and link juice, uh, where it goes, is Google following it or ignoring it? Or how do you, you know, how do you go about doing it properly? Um, and everybody has just guesses and opinions, like no one really knows. Um, now, you know, if you do a study and you say, Hey, I did this and this happened and there, there's gotta be a, uh, one thing that you haven't changed, like, right. When you're able to test and like a, a static variable. And then you go, so I think there's association of this and I'm going to be doing a lot more of that. There's a lot of data that we see that I,

I, I think that there's some associations and that's where some of my opinions come from. And I want to better, better share those and be, be a resource, uh, for, for the community. Um, all right. Best keywords for SEO level competition you're up against. Okay. You're just trying to outrank everybody else. You're trying to be better than everybody else. And if someone does something better and their content's better than you, you're going to drop. So it's Google changes, but it's really like, are you better for everyone else for that keyword out of all the people searching for it? And if you see bad content rank, it means that there's probably not a lot of inventory for Google to show. And that's what it's showing, right? Uh, level of competition up against your ability to produce content that exceeds the quality of what's currently ranking. Okay. So we're going to go into crawl budget. You do want to produce content consistently. You don't want the crawlers to totally forget about you. My alarm, I'm going to turn it off here, but it's about to, it's about to go off because I have another call. Um, all right, let's try. Where's the alarm? All right. Well, let's try to wrap this up. Uh, you've got the right keywords for the right SEO strategy. Oh, that's the whole article. Now that you have a list of keywords that help you focus on the right topics for the business and you get short-term and long-term gains. Be sure to reevaluate the keywords every few months, once a quarter. That's how we do everything quarterly set a good benchmark for some businesses. Also, I would look at seasonal stuff, like I said before, and you can gain more authority in the SERPs. Uh, you'll find that you can add more and more keywords to your list to tackle. Um, even we're doing some language stuff, really exciting. Um, can share that, uh, actually, uh, some really other national experts were saying some things. I kind of wanted to test that

and kind of, uh, I'm not saying I gamed it, but, um, like I found some programs that helped do some things that were saying that you had to do it static and Google wouldn't rank you, but Google's ranking it. So, uh, there's the alarm. Um, again, again, that's probably more insider group stuff. Um, there's, I'm just having a lot of fun guys. Um, been really busy. Sorry. I haven't been producing, uh, content consistently again. Uh, OGGN. I have that, uh, sales and marketing podcast. So if you're wanting to know how to sell products better, uh, if you're wanting to talk to more CMOs, um, that might be a sales manager. That might be a really good, um, podcast for you. I'm going to continue to produce content here. I'm going to do some training, uh, going to put together a training course, do have my book about to finish that up. Uh, just got to get time. Uh, kids were sick. Everything was crazy. Um, but, uh, thank you all for listening. Uh, just want to get this out to you. Hope you're well, please send me your questions. Please leave me a review. Uh, I really appreciate it. Uh, if you want anything, uh, reach out to me and let me know, and, uh, we'll try to get some of that content together. Uh, again, I am going to have guests, uh, on the podcast. So if you have an interest in getting on the podcast, you have something really interesting to share. Uh, let's, let's have a meeting. Let's talk about it. Uh, and, uh, if it makes sense, we'll, we'll get you on. All right. Thank you all. Bye for now. Use the internet, use SEO. It's awesome. All right. Peace.