Keywords are even more important than content, Learn how to use Googles keyword selector tool - Unknown Secrets of SEO E-Webstyle Number 13

Hi, and welcome to the Unknown Secrets of SEO eWebStyle podcast. Yes, thanks for joining in another fun-filled edition of our SEO podcast. My name is Chris Burris. I'm owner of eWebStyle. And this is Paul Hanson, sales manager of eWebStyle. Just a reminder, we should have another podcast. This is our killer web design and development podcast. This is our killer web design and development podcast. Taking them out, shooting them down, moaning them down. That should be available on iTunes soon. We're working on getting those out. We have a bunch of episodes already prepared, so go ahead and check that out. Today is our killer Komodo. Why are we having a killer Komodo podcast today? Apparently it took the Komodo dragon, the really big dragon. Apparently there was some movie with Marlon Brando. Oh yeah, The Freshman. Him and Matthew Broderick about that Komodo. It was a good movie. I like that premise. Maybe we should sell plates. Yeah, $5,000 plates of Komodo dragon coming up. And then we just kind of parade the dragon by and serve them. Serve them, pop-pies. This was kind of spicy. Fried Komodo dragon. No, apparently a Komodo dragon, a guy in Indonesia, was on a foreboden island. Well, it's foreboden because... There's probably a good reason. Yeah, it's full of Komodo dragons. Some of the nastiest creatures on the planet and so beautiful. And tasty. And tasty, yes. Tastes like pop-pies. I don't know if you know this, but the Komodo dragon, it's not like an aggressive killer. It doesn't just take you out and, you know... That's what I would think because I think dragon, like, okay, this sucker's going to spit fire and eat me. Immediately, right? No, no, no. They have a much more engaging and long-term... A subtle, long-term... Death approach. Their mouths are filled with, like, the cesspool of bacteria, all kinds of bacteria. And they just kind of nibble on your calf a little bit and then you die a couple days later from bacterial infection. That's got to suck. And, you know, they

must have really strong stomachs because then they eat you. Like, if I found... Oh, yeah. We won't go there. We won't go there. All right. On our last podcast, we covered what it is we do. We're kind of in a little bit of a tools phase of SEO. We covered what is it that we look at on Google Analytics. You know, what are the things that we find that are important? You know, and I really covered a lot of stuff that I don't necessarily check every day. But the key thing that I do check, and this also maybe not every day, but every other day, is pulling up websites on, you know, kind of newer clients, clients that we're working on, getting great placement. And I'll really just do a beeline straight to, you know, what are the search terms that have actually generated traffic to that website. And I'll break it down within the last, you know, three days, what are the search terms. Because I'm looking for something new, something that wasn't there, you know, the last time I looked. And seeing, you know, how our progression is going. We're going to cover a couple of other tools today. I think we mentioned, you know, one of the most valuable things when you're doing website and... Are keywords. Oh, keywords. That's right, you know. And then the number two is keywords. Keywords. And number three is... Keywords again. Keywords again, exactly. It's kind of like real estate, location, location, location. Search engine optimization and web in general is keyword, keyword, keyword. So we're going to look at a keyword tool put out by... Google. Google, yes. Google. Of course. It's free. Of course, they have the most valuable information. This tool really will go in. You can put in a couple of terms. It'll spit out a whole bunch of potential terms for you. And with those potential terms, it tells you, like, the frequency that those are used and, you know, so you can start keying on what are the key things.

Because, you know, you may have a business and the first and most obvious keyword is the one you go after. And then you realize a slight adjustment to that keyword gets you, you know, ten times more traffic. Exactly. And we had one the other day where we were talking about copier repair. Well, actually, just copier Houston. And this is, you know, we... This is, again, a situation where we recommended that they don't do SEO because when you do copier Houston, there's, you know, 20 searches a week. I mean, a month. And so if you make that effort, you know, what's going to be the return on investment? And then immediately Paul pointed out, you know, what about copier repair Houston? And I actually went back this morning and was looking at that. And it looks pretty good. So we can probably put a case not for any one term because if all we were to do as an SEO company was to get him on the first page for one term, it's not worth it. But when you start doing, you know, copier repair Houston, cannon repair Houston, copier Houston, cannon Houston, and when you start summing all of those up, then all of a sudden we're probably going to be driving enough traffic to justify the cost. You know, back to ROI. That's really what it's all about. And I can think of another example where, you know, using a keyword selector tool has actually really come in handy for me. I'm talking with a plumbing, a plumber or a plumbing company. Was it Joe? It was Joe. Joe the plumber? Yeah. I saw Joe on the news last night. You got to look at this. But he said something just completely inappropriate at a conference. I thought that's what Obama was doing now. You know, he's sending a train. Yeah, it was just about as inappropriate as what Obama said. But the plumbing company, you know, just getting to learn them. I would personally, if I was searching for a plumber, type in

plumber, plumbing company, plumbing contractor. But just playing with the keyword research tool, I found that mechanical contractor is something, mechanical contractors, plumbers can also be known as mechanical contractors. Plumbers and heating, ventilation and air conditioning kind of all go together. And so playing with the keyword selector tool, I was able to find similar keywords that kind of go with plumbing, mechanical contractors, HVAC contractors, because he did all of this stuff. And the keyword, Google's keyword selector tool really opened my eyes to the other synonyms and keywords that were related to that particular industry. So that's just one thing that I learned by playing with that keyword selector tool. That's great. That's another, because we always talk about here at eWebStyle, we don't want to, you know, just throw up information that you provide us. We actually want to understand your business. And here's a tool that you ended up using so that you could better understand his business. Because he understands that plumbing means HVAC and everything else. And probably everyone in his industry understands that HVAC and, you know, plumbing means all of that. And I had no idea they're related. I had no idea. Well, and I can almost guarantee you that the remaining people, people who don't work in that industry on a regular basis, don't realize that plumbers do HVAC. You know, that's air conditioning and heating systems. And I had no idea about that. So that's great. So that's exactly what we do here at eWebStyle. We research. We understand your business. And then we take that understanding and turn it into a high-quality web product that can help you. And then we follow that up by taking that high-quality web product and putting it on the first page of Google. So that's a great example. So what we want to talk about, what we want to get into first is the Google tool. I have never actually gotten around to making a favorite for this Google tool. You know, neither have I. I always type in Google's keyword selector

tool or just keyword selector tool. And in my case, it's keyword Google keyword usage. So you can just go to your Google browser and pull up Google and type in Google keyword usage. And the first thing that comes up is Google's AdWords tool. And this tool is actually good for SEO and PPC and just about anything. Well, I think they designed it initially to support their PPC clients because, you know, of course, they want you to use as many keywords as possible because when you're using as many keywords as possible, you're spending as much money as possible. Of course, and they're making money. And they're making money. So, you know, hey, let's put a tool out there to increase the spend that people have. Having said that, it is a great tool. It does have some really powerful things. And it's pretty simple. And it has some neat features. So you can actually click. There's two selections on the far left. One of them is, you know, descriptive words or phrases. And this is where you might type in keywords that you already have. Or if you're really novice and don't really know how to break down your keywords, you might type in find a plumber, which is not how most people would actually, not the words that most people would put into Google to find a plumber, but it might be what you put in there. So, you know, put in find a plumber and it will come up with some interesting phrases. Additionally, on the left, there's a website content. So if you already have your website up, maybe you put it up and you're happy with the content. And now you're like, okay, well, I don't really understand how do I convert my content into keywords and understand what keywords are of any value. So you can click that and then put it in your website. And it will actually parse your website and look for relevant keywords. So that's a pretty nifty tool. Then, of course, it's got, you know, what's

called a CAPTCHA or character recognition or whatever because they don't want, they're called bots, but really they don't want programs continually hitting this page and stealing information from it, et cetera. So we can actually type in find the plumber. And we can actually type in something else. We'll just do HVAC. No, no, let's just do find the plumber because that's going to get a little too complicated. Let me put in my CAPTCHA symbol here. If I can understand it, sometimes, you know, those CAPTCHAs, you're like, what is that letter? Yeah, a lot of times. Yeah, and then you're like, apparently I got it wrong. Let me try again. So I just put in find the plumber and put up relevant terms. And what it does on the top, it's the most relevant to it. Government computers use to find information on Joe the plumber. That's an interesting selection of keywords. That's actually a keyword phrase? Wow. Yeah, so yeah, you know, everyone, they think of Joe the plumber and they go, let me go over and type government computers used to find information on Joe the plumber. Wow. Yeah. I mean, who? I don't, I give up. Remember it's software. Remember it's software. So no one's actually looking at this going, yeah, no, I never typed that. The scary part is probably somebody did type it. We were, in the last, in the last podcast, we were looking at terms that people searched and found. Oh, yeah. So there's some pretty wacky terms out there. You're right. You're definitely right about it. And in this particular case, find the plumber, find Joe the plumber, there's about five on the top. And this is kind of the most relevant, what Google considers the most relevant to exactly what you typed in. It says not enough data. And what that really means is that not that many people searched those particular keywords. So I'm happy to find out that I was right. Most people don't type in find, well, I put the plumber. That's kind of weird.

So maybe a plumber would be more relevant. In fact, let's go ahead and change that the to a. In fact, Google might even skip those small letters anyway, so it probably won't matter. The nice thing is, is once you've done that captcha image recognition thing once, you don't have to keep doing it over and over again. Okay, so this is a little more relevant. We got rid of our really long, long term. The plumber was keying in on, you know, the phrase Joe the plumber, which is, of course, in the press a lot after the, after the election. Now we can see, you know, find a plumber, there's about 29,000 searches, excuse me, 2,900 searches for that in the month of February. This is a term that we would probably not, well, a typical regional plumber, we would not recommend that they even try and get that term, specifically because, you know, they'd be wasting a lot of effort on getting, find a plumber. Because they'd be fined plumbers in California, Florida, New York, when they're in Kansas. Schenectady. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So it's just, it's just not relevant for a particular location. Now, if you're, if you're, I think the company was like a, Roto-Rooter, exactly, that's a great example. If they, if they approached us or we approached them and we would suggest, you know, you need to be having, you need to have good search engine placement for find a plumber, because that literally is anywhere across the country. And they would also want, you know, things like plumber or licensed plumber. And that's one thing I liked about the tool is that it, that little check box that says use, find synonyms. Yeah. You know, we put in, find a plumber, but it searched for other things related to finding a plumber. Or like I see, plumber, plumbing contractor, plumber, you know, plumbing company, other things, because people will search in, you know, the billions of billions of people out there will search in different ways with different terms. So I

like that they included that. Because it's, and this is one way to get other ideas about keywords that you may not have thought about that could be very relevant to your company. Like commercial plumbers is an example. Commercial plumber, residential plumber, yeah. Yeah. So somebody may come approach us and they're, we understand they're a plumber. We now, from our experience, understand that that means that they do HVAC, so we have already expanded the amount of keywords that we can work. Now, we, you know, we start asking, okay, do you only do residential or do you do commercial? And we, of course, ask this question, which one's more valuable and which one do you sell the most? Do you do more residential? Do you make more money on commercial? That's probably what I would estimate, that they probably do more residential and they make more money on commercial. So we would really want to focus a couple of terms on the commercial side and then a couple, you know, lesser quantity of terms for the residential just because there's more value. Again, that really boils down to the ROI. If we're going to be spending your money and our effort on getting some search terms for you on the first page, then let's make them the most valuable. Let's get the most bang for your buck. You're going to be happy and you always are when you're with us and we're going to be happy, you know, gives us a lot of joy to, you know, really to help our clients, to help them make some money. Why not? We're looking for people who are not participating in the recession and we want to help you not participate in the recession. Exactly, because we refuse to participate. Well, call us the next one. Yeah, yeah. We leave a message. So the really top section, again, is keywords really related to the terms you've typed in and then the bottom section is additional keywords. There are a couple of nice things. You can actually download the keywords

in text format, CSV format. Actually, CSV format is text, but CSV stands for, well, I don't know what CSV stands for, but it usually is a comma delimited file that Excel is really comfortable working with. So we use those a lot on the programming side. And there's actually a really long list. You know, you wouldn't, you know, it's not necessarily intuitive that I type in find the plumber and it starts making, you know, intelligent suggestions such as toilet repair, faucet repair. Okay, good, good. Right? Sewer cleaning. All of these things are things that you might be looking for if you're looking for a plumber. And, you know, this would give us a good idea. So somebody in the Houston area comes in and our first inclination is going to be to send them towards Houston plumber, Baytown plumber, you know, depending on if they handle Baytown, Galveston plumber, whatever their region is, and we'd look for, you know, local stuff. And then we could also start getting into, you know, this is where, you know, finding enough keywords is never a problem for us. Never a problem. So then you can get into blue one-armed widgets. Yes. Oh, did we mention that last time? We're on the first page. I don't think we did. It was about three or four podcasts ago. I told you how easy it would be to get first page placement for something not everyone talks about. And I mentioned blue one-armed widgets. I threw up a page. It was actually, you know, within a week that is on the first page. So if you go type in Google blue one-armed widgets. I think we're the first. Yeah. We're position one. If we're not position one. So we can start selling blue one-armed widgets. Exactly. So that's just to show you that, yeah, actually search engine optimization is very easy. If you're finding a challenge with it, just understand it's very easy for us. So come let us show you how. So then with all of these extra options that we

see here, we would do, you know, leak detection, Houston, toilet repair, Houston, toilet repair, Baytown, depending on what kind of budget they wanted to spend on it. And, you know, if it was maybe a local Roto-Rooter chain, they're going to have a significant budget and we're going to go after all of those things. Because what's going to happen on all of these terms, none of these terms are regionalized in here. So it's water heater, bathroom plumbing, sewer cleaning, leak detection. When they're not regionalized, we know what's going to happen. They're going to come up and it's going to be a bunch of people who maybe don't service their area. So they're going to immediately go back and then type in one of their area terms. That's just what's going to happen. So that's very, very powerful. And that's pretty much that tool. You can get on there and play around with it. I'll actually put an app, I'll put a link to this on our blog if you want to check this out. And when we get this podcast up, we'll actually have the link on this podcast. One thing that I like to play around with is whenever someone is looking at PPC, you can kind of adjust what information that the Keyword Selector tool shows you under that drop-down bar. It says, choose columns to display. Excuse me, choose columns to display. Or columns. I just made that word up. You can look at advertiser's competition, your estimated ad position. That's where it'll tell you, hey, if you bid this amount, you could be within first to third position, fourth to sixth position, or whatever it is. I usually do the show all, and then it'll tell you everything. It'll tell you how much. We'll do that. We'll click show all here. It'll tell you how much people are bidding on this particular keyword. So you can find out, hey, what's going on with this word? You know, this plumber might be worth five bucks a hit, or plumbing contractor might be worth

50 cents. You know, so this is a great tool that we'll use to kind of figure out, hey, what words can we go after to get, you know, the most bang for the buck? There you go. Do we want to go after a $5 keyword, or could we get, you know, good hits and awesome placement faster with a five-cent keyword? Yeah. Just throwing out random numbers. But that's one reason I really like using this tool, it just helps give information about those, the particular, more detailed information about that particular keyword, you know, what's happening with it, what kind of position can I get? If I'm bidding this amount, what kind of position can I get? How much traffic that particular keyword is getting this month? How much it gets on average? All kinds of stuff. It'll even tell you, it'll even go in and tell you the traffic per month for the last 12 months. That's, yeah, that's what I was just looking at right here. You can, so let's, we can look at this, I don't know, let's look for something that has like an interesting trend to it. One second plumber. I don't even know what a one second plumber is. Yeah, really? I would assume that's just the cleaner you pour down. That's called Drano. Drano, yeah. Here's a general contractor and it's got, it's got an interesting trend and of course trends, watching trends is what we like to do on a regular basis because with trends we can understand, okay, maybe we need to actually change our campaigns from one month to next or one season to the next. So if you look up in here, general contractor, well that's pretty generic and not associated necessarily with plumbing. I'm just thinking there's probably, I can think of one that would really play into this would be a roofer. Yeah. Because it's becoming, it's end of March. Roofers are about to see a spike. If they haven't begun to see it already, they're about to see a spike in their searches

because everyone gets their roof done spring, summer. Yeah. Well, that and also we should see at least in the Houston area after the hurricane, right? It was a huge spike in the late fall. Yeah. August, fall. When did that sucker come? September? I don't remember. August? I'm not good with dates. I don't know. I wasn't in San Antonio drinking a margarita. I wasn't here in Houston worrying about it. I was and I won't do that again. Well, here we go. I would guess that it was September, October. Wow. Or at least that it was until September that the internet was up so people could start searching to get their roof fixed. But you can look at this. The volume is just low, like barely on the chart. And this is for Roofers Houston. I typed in Roofers Houston and said get keyword ideas. And then in September and October, it spiked. It's a huge spike. And it's actually still significantly higher than it was before. But that's, people are still, you know, my neighbor still has plastic on his roof. The blue tarps. Yeah, yeah. He's a little, I think he's a little lazy. But he does have a. That was, what, eight months ago? Exactly. But he does still have a tarp on it. So, you know, people are still doing more roofing now than they were prior to the hurricane. So those are kind of trends that are neat to see. And then with the plumber, I just went backwards out of that. Now, here's a random question somebody might be, if you're kind of new to SEO, you're probably thinking, is this the only way to find keywords? Is this the only keyword selector tool out there? And the answer is no. You can come call us. We'll help you find them. We'll use this tool for you. Yeah. No, there are other keyword tools. I just like this one the most. I've played with the other ones. I just personally like Google's keywords. And I think I sent you towards one

called Good Keywords, right? And they use the Overture. There used to be an Overture website, and then that was kind of taken down. You could still sometimes find it, or if you had a bookmark, you could get to it. And the Good Keywords software was actually tied into it. That's kind of why Google AdWords has the CAPTCHA, so that somebody can't write a piece of software that just ties into their data. And then you start spreading all that software everywhere. Everyone's using it, and Google's getting slammed and really not getting any of the benefits. So, but yeah, so there's other tools out there. So, you can see, yeah, one of the things I was really thinking, what I was trying to find, and would probably be more of a trend on AC or HVAC specific terms, which is we'll see a spike in the summer. Of course. In Houston. In the south, you will. Well, actually, anywhere, right? For HVAC. Oh, I guess, yeah. Well, HVAC might be heating. So, if it's air conditioner repair guy, no matter where you are in the country, if it's out in the winter, you don't really care. Exactly. Okay. And you may even don't know. And then if it's out in the summer, you know, those calls will spike. They'll spike. And you're going to go to your computer, and you're going to type in air AC repair guy. So, you can see some trends like that on this. So, that is pretty cool. Lots of information. It also has a nice column, highest volume occurred, so you can actually know when people did the most searches in the year for a particular term. And I'm not seeing anything here of any particular interest, but they all seem to have a low spot right there, don't they? I don't even know. I wonder what month is that. I wonder what month that is, because it all just kind of... November. It dropped off the map. Interesting. I wonder if it had... Maybe Google was experiencing some sort of

data problem, because that... That's consistent for every single keyword. Yeah. Google must have had some. Yeah, there had to have been, because that's... Some data issue. And then, interesting, sewer line cleaning. Apparently, the month of October was a big poop month. Everybody was having issues. Issues. Everybody had to go. So, October. That's after all the candy, I guess. I don't know. Thanks, Google. We appreciate the free keyword selector tool. And then, there's a button right down the bottom. Make sure you don't miss that, which is add all 181 in this case. So, those are the search terms, and it's just going to put them all on... Yeah, I like it. It's convenient, because it says, hey, you can go ahead and add all of these to your keyword... Paper click. Yeah. Campaign. Yeah. They would love you to add all 200 keywords to your PPC campaign. They make it so easy to spend money. Now, Google's doing great. Let's hope they stay benevolent. Because there's... You know, they say that there's no better leader than a benevolent dictator. We get the feeling that Google's the dictator, and thus far, they've been benevolent, fairly benevolent. Whatever they say. Is exactly what happens. I'll tell you something that I read this morning on the internet that really kind of threw me off. Google... I don't know if anyone has seen this. Google is laying off. It blew me away. I was like, what? What does that mean? Like, they're retiring servers or something? They let some people go. And I was like, yeah, I can't believe this. Google is... It was an article about, hey, how bad is the economy when Google has to lay some people off? And I was like, wow, that's a really good point. That's the biggest and the baddest at what they do when they have to lay somebody off. Wow. Things have slowed down. Things have slowed down. I wonder... Everywhere else except for... I don't even know the employee count. Did that article mention the employee count? It did. I

need to... Well, I didn't actually read the entire article. I just read, like, the first paragraph, and that was about it. Thank you for the confession. Sorry, I didn't actually read it. So, yeah, they laid off, like, three janitors or something. The world's coming to an end. Because they bought robots. I don't know. You know, it's just their business model is so good because it's so automated. Everything, you know, almost everything they do is automated. Most of their staff is R&D for, you know, what's the next wave that we're going to catch. You know, do they really need to write an AdWords? Do they ever really need to write? Well, it makes good business sense. Gmail. Was there ever... Is there any real reason to do Gmail? Well, only because they can spit ads at you, you know. Oh, okay. Because that'll make money, I guess. Except for the ads. Except for the ads, yeah. So they didn't need to do that, but, you know, there was profit there. Don't worry, I'm going to get to something that doesn't actually make the profit here eventually. They're Google apps. You know, you've got a Word version of... A kind of version of Word equivalent, an Excel equivalent. What's the value there? You know, I don't see any ads. I use it for a couple of things. Some of our interfaces with third-party vendors, we share documents on there. And there's no ads, so there's no benefit to doing that. It's just kind of made to the future. It keeps me coming back. Yeah. It keeps me coming back to Google. It does keep me coming back and keeps Google fresh on our mind. Well, we're right at the end of this podcast. Hopefully, you learned a whole lot about Google AdWords and how to find new keywords. Because, again, the three most important things when you're doing search engine optimization or pay-per-click are... Keywords, keywords, and keywords. And keywords. All three. Keyword, keyword, keyword. Next time, we're actually going to go over... We're doing a couple

in a row now. Actually, we're about four podcasts in a row about tools. And the next one is going to be one of the tools that we use here. We use advanced web ranking. And what we use that for is for tracking and reporting to our clients the keyword results. You know, what are the keyword positions in a particular search engine. And we'll be discussing one of our clients and discussing... Of course, we'll be discussing how good they are doing on all of their search engine placement. Obviously. Yes. So... They wouldn't be with us. They weren't... Yeah. You know, one of our mantras is give us six months and you'll never leave. And this would be one of those clients who we really don't have much concern. In fact, we tried to do with her and with all of our customers, either on a quarterly or at least a bi-annually basis. We'll sit down with them and kind of go over their website. And we tried to set that appointment with her and she was just not... Oh, yeah. I don't have time. We're good. You guys are doing great. I'm on the first page. I don't need to meet with you. So that worked out. She's very happy and we'll kind of discuss some of the results of that and a little bit about advanced web ranking. Again, it's a tool. I don't use all of the tools that it has because it has a ton of information. But, again, I'll kind of approach it from the perspective of what do I use it for on a regular basis and then touch on the fringes of some of the stuff that I do know about the capabilities of that tool. It's great. And I'll have pricing and everything just so that you guys can know what that is. Until then, make sure you do check back with us next time. Until then, send us an email at podcast at e-webstyle.com. We'd love to hear you. We'd love to hear your comments about Komodo dragons.

Maybe somebody knows something. Anybody owns a Komodo dragon? Yeah. Sell us one. Sell us one. Actually, we just want to rent it. Yeah. Because we're going to parade it past the diners and then we're going to feed them Popeyes. We're going to feed them Popeyes. So, yeah, feel free to send us a message. Make sure you check out our other podcast, which is Killer Web Design and Development. Until next time, I'm Chris Burres. And this is Paul Hanson. And we'll see you next time.