Know your Customer, Know their Keywords - #seopodcast 120

Hi, and welcome to the Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing Podcast. That was wrong. Yeah, you left the word SEO out. Oh, there's SEO. We do SEO, and we also do websites. My name is Chris Burris, owner of E-WebStyle. Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. I don't know if we're ever going to get, like, that. We should, like, keep track. We should write it down. Yeah. I do write this down. We are your friendly, local, neighborhood, top position snatchers, where our mantra is do not be a douche. Yeah, that's not good. You guys may have noticed an improved quality of sound today. Yeah, we can see her. Hopefully. We've actually got lapel mics, so we're going to learn how to use them. Apparently, you're not supposed to sneeze in them, and coughing in them is bad. We'll probably do all of that. All of that, yeah. That's true. Right. Yeah, so check it out, man. If you're watching, if you're watching live, or if you're watching it later, hit us up on Facebook. Tell us what you thought. Yeah. Was it too loud? Was it too low? Did it sound better? I just got a thumbs up from our sound engineer, so if you disagree with him, let us know. Yeah, shout out to Aaron. Appreciate you helping out, man. Oh, yeah. Thanks, Aaron. He's watching right now, so we appreciate that. You are listening to the most popular SEO podcast on iTunes. That is because of you guys, and we really appreciate that you guys follow us, like us. And literally, we got these mics because of Feedback Product Place. Yeah, last time it was Coke. It's Sprite this time, man. Could you grab my, I think I set my coffee down over there. Could you grab, thanks. So, remember, every podcast we talk about what we did last time, the tip from last time. Yeah. Tip from last time is, if you build it, they will come, does not work with social media. You must implement a plan to be social. Yeah. I think

we've done that one before. Yeah. That sounds really familiar. It might even be word for word from a previous tip. This is podcast number 120, and you guys can stalk us, facebook.com slash eWebStyle, twitter.com slash eWebStyle, youtube.com slash eWebStyle. You can email us at podcast at e-webStyle.com. You almost got it. I almost got you. We've changed our product placement. Now we're in another Coke product. Another Coke product. Vitamin water. I think it's kind of nasty. I love it. Yeah. It's all right. I really just wanted the bottle because I'm going to start drinking water more because, you know, we talked about. Why'd you just buy a water bottle? Because this is bigger. You're right. I could have bought a big water bottle. Yeah. Because this is a water bottle. This is a vitamin water bottle. It's crazy. Somebody called it the new snake oil. Who called it that? Somebody was like, you know, in the old days, they used to sell snake oil out of the back of a wagon so that you could, you know, it would cure everything. Usually it was grain alcohol. Yeah. Anyway, let's see. News for today. Lowe's buys 42,000 iPhones. Yeah. Lowe's was they supplying employees? Yeah, they're going to give them to their employees. They're going to start creating kind of the, a lot of the experience that you get at the Mac store. I mean, if they, well, that'll probably help with locating stuff because Lowe's is a hard store to shop in if you don't frequent it. Yeah. I was there the other day looking for a timer for my water thing. You probably had to ask two people. I actually got away with one. Okay. And frankly, she was like, yeah, that's all we got. I'm like, look, this is a unit that attaches to another unit. Either there should be an empty space where the other unit is missing or the other unit has to be somewhere else. I don't see it. And I literally, it took about three minutes for her to like,

oh, he's right. Because this is a unit that goes with the other one. There's no empty slot. It turns out it was, you know. Right. Yeah, probably. It was in plumbing. The timer for my water hose. So you go, where would you go? It should be in the hoses, the water hoses. The hoses weren't in plumbing? No, they're in the lawn and garden, right? So why is that timer over? And I kind of get it because they sell, you know, like the whole lawn and gardening water, you know, a whole sprinkler system. Anyway. Yeah. So Lowe's is an iPhone. I could have used that iPhone. She might have been able to look it up. Yes. Probably does Bam and Bam or it's on aisle such and such. Yeah. You know. Here's another news. I thought this was cool. Windows 8. They're working on it. And it's going to start 30 to 70% faster than Windows 7. Have you noticed that is Windows 7 that much faster than XP? Operating, yes. Startup time, it's about the same. It feels the same, right? You still go through the same, just in your settings, doing everything else. But operating itself, it's a lot faster. Faster. It's got nice features. Yeah. They say, so the range, they tried a bunch of different CPUs. It's going to be from 15 seconds to 30 seconds. Doesn't it feel more like two minutes now? That's just what it feels. Like when I turn on, when I reboot, it's a five-minute process. I don't even know because I'd turn on and go get coffee. Yeah. And then I'd come back. Maybe it's instantaneous now. We don't even know because we're off getting coffee because we're used to it. It may be fast. Yeah. I don't know. If Amazon stops their ballot referendum, they were trying to put a ballot referendum through in California, California is going to start forcing online stores to charge sales tax. They don't do that already? No. I mean, I know in Texas, if the store is in Texas

and the purchaser is in Texas, then they automatically get charged the sales tax. Yes. Absolutely. So Amazon doesn't have a storefront in California. Ooh. Right. And I know some of the argument was Amazon does have 25,000 small affiliates in California, so maybe that's the argument that they're using. If it's not the argument that they're using, then they're just saying, look, all these tax dollars are going out, all these sales are occurring, and we're not collecting state taxes. And honestly, from a very small, if you're starting up a new small e-commerce business and you're responsible for collecting, knowing the tax codes of all 50 states and collecting taxes from all 50 states and sending those taxes in to all 50 states, that's bad. That's really bad for small business. So I think it's a mistake that California is even going after that money. That needs to, I think there should be sales tax on online sales. If it's in California, keep it simple. Or there should be a federal law which says, okay, it's just a flat percentage. Across the board. Yeah. So now you don't have to know it's 8.25 in Texas, and there's an extra small percent if it's Houston, and in California, it's whatever, 10 percent. Probably. You don't have to know that. It's just one flat tax, and you pay it to each of those states. Yeah, 18 percent in New York. Yeah, so, which is crazy, because right at New Jersey, no sales tax. I know. So, I think it's a bad decision, and I think they're ultimately going to drive business out of California. I'd love to see Amazon stop selling in California. That would be cool. I know. It would be cool, but... If it were Minnesota, I think they would stop selling. Yeah. There's 2 percent of our sales. All of our tractor sales, but... So, I posted this. I haven't posted it on our Facebook page yet. There was a TED Talk. In fact, this last weekend, I was on vacation over in Austin, actually stayed at

a place called Steiner Ranch that got evacuated because of fires, so that was all exciting. As we're leaving, I'm taking pictures, not just of the smoke, actually seeing flames, so we were a lot closer than I wanted to be. And the guy I was staying with, he showed me a TED Talk. If you're not familiar with TED Talks, go to TEDs.com. I think it's with an S. Maybe just TED. I think it's TED. It's TED.com, and it's great, amazing eight-and-a-half-minute talks about latest, greatest, cutting-edge stuff. Yeah. Yeah. This one, and it's ironic because I watched it this last weekend, and then this week, Danny Sullivan tweeted it or posted it on his G Plus account. Yeah, he plussed it. Yeah. And tweeted it. Yeah. And you told him not to do that. He's doing it anyway. But it was okay. It wasn't too much. Something like that. It was just a link. You know. So the talk is really interesting. Basically, the guy giving the speech, and I don't know his name. We will post it on our Facebook page. He sent out to like a hundred or a thousand of his friends, hey, I want all of you to log out of your Google account, search Egypt, take a screenshot, and send it to me. And then he was going to compile all the results. And there was, you know, there was variation. Even though they're logged out, and it should, you know, not have that dependence on, you know, the fact that you're logged in, adjust your results significantly. There was one, two examples, extreme examples that he gave. One was Egypt, and this was right around the time of all the riots in Egypt. And it showed, you know, all this political stuff, and riots, and what's going on. And the other one was like, you know, come visit the beautiful pyramids of Egypt, and, you know, all of this vacation stuff. Yeah, and so here it is. Here's a situation where you're looking at two different, totally different results for the

exact same search based on computer usage, right? Based on probably not necessarily being logged in, but browser history, you know, or something like that. Mm-hmm. It's interesting. Cookies. And then probably a whole ball of things that's influencing those searches. Yeah, and so really the kind of gist of it was that eventually he started this process because he was on Facebook. He's kind of a left-leaning guy. He likes to keep in contact with right-leaning people on his Facebook page, you know, so that he has some sort of balanced input of information. By the way, probably a good idea. Yeah, yeah. And what he noticed is that eventually his entire news feed on Facebook was only left-leaning people. All the right-leaning people were removed. As much as he's trying to be balanced, he does probably tend to click on left-leaning articles more. Facebook tracked that, understood it, and then stopped actually showing the right-leaning articles. And, you know, it's a challenge, right? Because Google wants to provide that experience to users that's kind of customized. So we know that you're interested in left-leaning things, so we're going to show you left-leaning things. It's also important, though, that people have different opinions. And an example of Egypt and showing vacation stuff was, you know, that's... Weird, because it could potentially create a problem. Yeah. Right? You know, if you happen to be looking for a vacation spot, you would definitely need to see the fact that there are riots and all sorts of what's going on. Exactly. So you would know. I think I might have just laughed in the mic, so we'll see how that one does. But then I'm thinking about it, though. I'm thinking about my Facebook experience. And what I notice is that most people who show up on my wall, when I'm on the homepage, are people who I interact with the most. Right. So when I click, you know, show everybody, you're like, wow. Yeah, I didn't realize this much was going on. Yeah. And, you know, it's strange how they select

the few people who I may comment on or I may like the most. So, you know, it's... And that probably works for some people, probably doesn't work for some other people. Yeah, because after I expand it and I see all of it, I quickly connect it. Yeah. I kind of know that I didn't really want to see all of that anyway. Whoa, too much information. Don't need that. So that TED Talk is great. We'll put it on our Facebook page. Speaking of Facebook, we only have 163 Facebook followers. By the way, this is so search relevant, we're not even considering this part of the Gino time limit. So we're just going to keep going. 163 Facebook followers. We get like between 2,000 and 4,000, depending on the week, downloads per week. Come on, like us on Facebook, please. Yeah, like us. And G plus us, or plus one us, or something. Yeah, plus one. Hey, we got some cool interactions on Facebook. Speaking of Facebook. Yeah, continuing in the Facebook theme. Palm Flare, that is P-O-M, love, love, love your podcast. I can't wait to utilize some of the information you have offered. Thank you. This was actually only 10 hours ago. Oh, I appreciate it. You are welcome. Welcome, welcome. Yeah, go to our website. Go to Palm Flare and check that out. I didn't have a chance to check it out before I printed it out. This one is awesome from John Bradley. The image that he has associated with his post is the Breakout Podcast. And it says, one of my favorite podcasts. You guys are the S-E-O-G's. There's a punch in the face for you on that one. That was awesome. I left you a review on iTunes. Where's my punch in the face? You know what? Yeah, here's a couple, a little left, a little uppercut. I don't even know what that's called. That's called, good. Watch out. The flailing, inexperienced over the head, into the hardest part of the head, the forehead punch, breaking the hand. Unexpected knockout. Because

no one expects that. You know, that's how some amateurs can beat prize fighters. Because they just start doing stuff that no one's supposed to do. And they're like, really? What's he doing now? On top of the head. And he also said, his latest website is DJFETT.com. As in DJFETT.com. I've never heard that name before, man. If you're tuning in, hit me, John. I think I know you. All right. Let's see. We're going to do keywords. There's one other thing. I did post this article. Google eats their organic search results. I'm just going to cover it briefly. It's kind of interesting. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, it's two things to that. I mean, because I read the article, and yes, they do. Right. Yeah. But at the same time. What do you expect? Yeah, well, not just that, but there was also, like, the most relevant. Right. And so, you know, in a nutshell, let's. Well, one of the searches that he had that I thought was interesting was where it showed two with the exact same content, right? It was two Google pages. Basically, it was, you know, there's Google books online that have all been scanned and entered into their unbelievably huge database. And it was, arrived at the same book, kind of like you would maybe arrive at a smoking cessation product by going to the category smoking and going to the category cessation. And they both show the same page. Those, imagine those two pages showing up with a different link path on a Google result. That will never happen for us. Oh. Right. Like, that's just. As much cross-linking as we have, you won't ever get. You'll never get that lucky, right? Well, Google does allow themselves to happen with themselves. Maybe they did it exactly the right way. Yeah. Maybe we should investigate that specific example and repeat it. They did it the way you're supposed to be done. In order to get, you know, the same page listed back to back. Yeah. With two different link structures. Yeah.

On the same books.google.com, on the same domain. So, it's an interesting article. It's out there. I think it's a lot of complaining. I think there's some validity to it. I think it's interesting. Those are the things that we need this guy. And I didn't get his name. His name is on here somewhere. Such as. Aaron Wall. And the title of the article is from SEO book. Google eats their organic search results. It's important that guys like that are out, you know, policing Google. So, we appreciate that. We'll post that one, too. I think I already did. I think I did before we got on air. Okay, cool. So, that was cool. All right. So, one of the things we talk about is what's the most important thing when it comes to SEO? Content. Right. Well, content's king. Yeah. I mean, so, but, I mean, we talk keyword research, right? Here's what I always relate, and long-time listeners know. In real estate, it's location, location, location. In SEO, it's keyword, keyword, keyword. Because you're right. Content's king. And if you're writing content about the wrong keywords. Yeah, yeah. They go hand in hand. And so, you know, keyword research is definitely one of those things that it's tedious, time-consuming, sometimes a headache to do, but entirely necessary and just must be done. Paramount. I mean, again, if you're putting great effort and intelligence into the wrong keywords, you're totally wasting your time. And money and effort and really killing your marketing campaign. By the way, if you think you're doing that, you should just go ahead and give us a call because we can help you with that. Yeah, I'm great at keyword research. I mean, I got a lot of tools I'll be doing. And usually, I mean, to get into the article, I'll print this off. Know your customer, know their keywords. It's a pretty good article. Got some research in the journal. And it talks about, you know, things you should really focus on prior to doing keyword research, like understanding what your

searcher's needs are, what they're looking for. One of the things we keyed in, I see you highlighted as well, two types of consumer intent, you know, and usually it's, you know, the consumer or the person who's searching or your potential visitor to your site, they're either looking for to be entertained, right, or they're trying to solve a problem. Right. Either now or in the future. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And so I think you have to understand what your person is looking for when they're searching. That way you can figure out which keywords are most applicable to that user. Well, it's really important. What we tend to do is interview the client. And we do ask this one question. I think it's a great question. What makes you the most money and what do you sell the most, right? A lot of clients know it. A lot of clients don't know the answer to that question. And then it's really about, you know, what kind of terms would you use? And we used an example before where we're working with an air conditioning, heating, plumbing guy, and they actually brought up the term MEP. And it's a term we had never used before. And apparently in industry, not in kind of the retail side, not in home residential, in commercial, they use the term MEP. And they may even use it more on the engineering side for the drawings, not even on the street, you know, mechanical, electrical, plumbing work. But when they're doing a drawing, the drawing is called an MEP. So it's from that interview with the client that we were able to determine a keyword we would have never found, ever. So it's really important. And I know there's a lot of listeners out there who are actually doing SEO for themselves, so you don't really have the opportunity to interview a client. And just be careful that you're not bogged down in your own industry jargon and things of that nature that the person who you're servicing may never know. Yeah. Exactly. So

if you were, you know, started as an engineer and MEP was the term you always used and then opened up, you know, just your air conditioning company and started servicing air conditioning, you may think, oh, I need to serve, you know, I need to, my search term is MEP. And, you know, I got the number one spot and I'm not getting calls. Well, you know, take a step back. Nobody's searching for MEP. Or kind of like a commercial. I'll give you a better example. Gondola. Yeah. Excellent. Right? I mean, we have a new client and he sells shelving. Gondola shelving is a type of shelving. Sites are optimized for a gondola shelving. Search volume is not that great for a gondola shelving. More people are searching for it. What is a gondola? Store shelving. Store shelving, yeah. Display shelving. So when you go into your grocery store, all of that shelving apparently is called gondola shelving. If you're opening a small little store, do you know that? And the answer is apparently no. You know, that's when keyword research comes in. And then another thing with keyword research is using the right tools. There are plenty of tools out there to help you, you know, generate the right amount of key phrases and the right type of key phrases. One of the tools I use, and I'm debating on if I'll share this or not, if I'm going to post the link or not. But, you know, what I do to kind of systematically approach keyword research is generate a base. For example, AC, air conditioner, heater, heating. So there's a base. And then now with that base, I kind of attach a service. Right. Repair, replacement, service. Right. Maintenance. Right. So I got a base and a service. Right. And so then I have one tool that can combine them and mix them up. And then I'll get exactly. Yeah, the sum total of all of those. Then I add another column, if I'm geo-targeting, Houston, Pearland, and then. It'll put all three of

those together. Yeah, so. So you take four, four, and four, and you end up with like 64 or something like that. Yeah, a ton of key phrases. Saves you a lot of time, and that way you make sure you don't leave out any. Right. When you kind of do it manually, you may forget to do one. Yeah. And so, yeah, that's one of the techniques I do. And that goes for both pay-per-click and for SEO. So if we're going to target a set of keywords, and we want to define those 64, if that's the right number, then we're going to target those in pay-per-click. Normally, we target smaller, tighter ranges in SEO. And we can go after those 64, and we'll know that we need to target those and at least be testing them weekly so that we know if we're improving positions or whatever for those particular keywords. Well, and then I always end up with two lists. I end up with one list that's geo-targeted that I can immediately import into any pay-per-click ads. And then I end up with a list that doesn't have the cities and towns tagged to it that I may want to submit to our content writer and use that for writing content. Exactly. One of the things that I put in my notes as we were talking about doing the podcast on keywords was what's the goal? Know what the goal is because that can have an impact on your keywords. If it's a newsletter, then some people may be searching for, you know, you don't need buy if you're trying to push a newsletter. You don't need to include, you know, if it's AC tools. If you just want to get people on a newsletter so that you can market to them continuously or maybe you're a blog that talks about the latest and greatest AC tools, you don't really need to go after buy AC tools. Yeah. Whereas somebody who is actually selling AC tools needs to go after buy. So understand what the final

intent. Now, in some of those cases, you might want to go after buy AC tools because you want to educate people and maybe you're a review site about AC tools. So it is kind of your target market. That's where you've got to look into metrics and see, you know, how many people who use the term buy actually signed up for a newsletter versus how many people who didn't, who actually just typed AC tools, didn't get signed up for the newsletter so that you can know, you know what, I shouldn't spend any money or effort on buy AC tools. I really should be spending time and effort on just AC tools or the specific brand. I mean, really covering the basics. If you're offering something free, then, you know, free should probably be included in your search terms. Right. Because I search for free all the time. Right. Or if I'm looking for instrumentals to download, I'll tag my search query with download. Right. Matter of fact, free download. They usually kind of go automatically. So, you know, definitely tag your search phrases with the action that you want that visitor to take when they get to your site. If it's signed up, you know, it may be worth using sign up as part of that key phrase. Just depends on what you want them to do when they get there. Yep. And by the way, that's it all, you know, be in sync with your CTA. So if they search free download, blah, blah, blah, they get to your site, if there's CTA that says free download, blah, blah, blah. It should be on your ad text, free download, or in your title meta description, so that that's what Google displays on your search and result page. Do we have anything else? Let's see. Don't overlook consumer intent. Yeah, we got that. And make sure you're solving current problems. So I think we've done a reasonable job of talking about keywords again. Again, hit us up on Facebook, facebook.com slash eWebStyle. Let us know if

there's any perspectives on keywords that we may have missed. Yeah, because keywords, this is a topic we could really dig deep into. We didn't even talk about tools. We didn't talk tools. We didn't talk long tail. We didn't, you know, it's a lot we can do with keywords. So maybe we'll follow up next week. That's a good idea. All right. Well, until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. I'm Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now. Bye-bye for now. Bye-bye for now. Bye-bye for now. Bye-bye for now. Bye-bye for now.