SEO Keyword Prioritization - #seopodcast 222

And welcome to the SEO Podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, owner of eWebStyle. Charles Lewis, your internet marketing specialist. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our podcast. This is podcast number 222. That's three twos, two cubed is not the right answer. As always, we have a tip for our podcast, and that tip is test ads and landing pages frequently to ensure the best chances for conversions. Yeah, you want to make sure that you are always taking advantage of the opportunity to test. If you're testing ads and you're testing landing pages, frequently, frequently meaning all the time, right? Because if one page is working, great, test it against another page. And if that page works better, guess what? Switch, right? And then rinse and repeat. Maybe change your ad, change the verbiage, change the style of your landing pages, move your form higher, move it to the left, move it to the right, those sort of deals. Change the verbiage in your call to actions. And those sorts of changes, when testing over and over again, you constantly make your campaign perform better. We call it pruning, like to prune it and trim it, just like plants. The more you till the ground, the more you prune the leaves, the better they grow and the bigger they get. And so you have to do that with your campaigns as well. I was actually watching a discovery special about pistachios and they actually trim the trees way back so that they end up being thicker and stronger so they can actually support the load of the traffic that is coming your direction. I mean, of the pistachios. All right. Please remember, we are your friendly local neighborhood top position snatchers where our mantra is. Don't be a deuce. It's not a good look. It's not a good look. If you could right now, can you or will you please do tweet? Yeah, tweet us. And what you should tweet is? Tweet us at eWebStyle. This is hashtag SEO podcast 222. Like

I said, tag us at eWebStyle at bestSEOPodcast. That way we can follow you back, link up, and do all of our social stuff. All that good stuff. If you were so inclined, we would appreciate you doing us a favor. And you can do that favor three separate ways. The first way to do that favor has three simple steps. Go onto iTunes, create an account, write a review. We'll appreciate that. If you choose to, you can send us an email, podcast at e-webStyle.com. And we'll give you a punch in the face. Next, you could go on to our G Plus account and write a review there. The easiest way to get to our G Plus account is go to e-webStyle.com slash G Plus. Or you can go to slash G Plus. Or slash Google Plus. Or slash Google Plus. All of those will take you to our G Plus local page where you can write a review. Please write a review. We love reviews. And the other last final thing that you could do is go to our Facebook page. There's actually currently two places. There will only be one right there on that first wall when you get to our Facebook page, which is Facebook.com slash e-webStyle. Right there you'll see in the right column about two sections down there's a place to write a reviews. If you gave us five stars, we would really appreciate it. Again, we would give you a punch in the face. A punch in the face. That's a good thing. Two, three more. Do we have any algo? No algo category. We do not have any algo cataclysm this time. There are two more notes. We do have a referral program. If you have an SEO client, they come to us. They pay their bill. We pay you. Pretty simple. Finally, free website analysis. If you've submitted for a free website analysis, it might have gotten lost. So hit us up again. Just send us an email. Podcast at e-webStyle.com. Let us know that you submitted it. Give us

the domain name that you submitted it for. And we'll get back to you. We've been getting some feedback that we've lost a few. So we want to make sure that we get those done. And if you want a free website analysis, all you need to do is go to our website, e-webStyle.com, and choose any random page, including the homepage that you just landed on, and you will find a free website analysis form on the new homepage. It will be kind of hidden. Well, it's not really hidden. It'll be different from... You just won't see the form until you click on, you know, get a free website analysis. So that was cool. New site's coming soon, by the way. I know we've been talking about it for a while. It was just, we've got a lot of content, a lot of posts. This is Podcast 222, right? Yeah. And all that has to get moved over and categorized. And so it's been a daunting task, but it's coming soon. We are almost there. All right. Let's do some reviews first. I'm going to do one review. Then we're going to do some news, and then we'll come back to reviews. First review has a title of Funny and Informative. Five stars! This is from Arbel Martin from the United States. All right, guys. I'm finally writing a review. Thank you. Appreciate it. At first, I was a little taken aback by the jibber-jabber that goes on before the meat part of the podcast. But after listening to a couple of other boring podcasts, I realized that this is truly the best and most entertaining one. Thanks, guys, for keeping my drive to work informative and hilarious punch in the face. Now, you know, you can't say jibber-jabber unless you say it in the Mr. T voice. Oh, yeah. All that jibber-jabber. All that jibber-jabber. Yeah. So, and if Finn ends it with, thanks, guys, keep it fun, that we can promise you. Appreciate it. We may lose informative. Probably not. If we're going to lose fun

or informative, I promise you it'll be informative first. I don't know if we have our priorities straight, and I don't even care. I'd much rather have fun than be informative. Unfortunately, we can't be fun without being informative. We have that informative, fun jibber-jabber. Jibber-jabber. Nature. Nature-jabber. That doesn't work. Google. What? So, I was trying to do it with an N, and it just didn't work, right? Okay. Yeah, that's not working. All right. So, in the news, we got Google sells Motorola to Lenovo. Yeah, I saw that, the handheld portion. Yeah. So, first off, they sold it for 25, they sold it for 75% less than they bought it for. So, that's, you know, whatever. It's called stopping the bleeding. Yeah. And so, there was some debate. I actually saw two separate articles. One article said that Apple was going to be the biggest loser out of that, and another article said HTC. So, I thought that was pretty good. The biggest loser? The biggest loser out of this, the fact that Lenovo has taken over the handset Motorola division. Yeah, I don't see how either one of them lose. Well, so, their point, and it makes sense, you know, business analysts are business analysts. It makes sense. HTC is really still kind of up and coming to, it doesn't compare to Samsung. It can't do the volume Samsung. It doesn't have the number of handsets that Samsung does regularly. So, they're kind of up and coming, and the fact that Lenovo has the hardware machine, right? But not for mobile. So, they know the logistics of creating hardware. Yeah, yeah. Right? As a company. So, they're in a much better place to outperform HTC than anybody else. Remember, when Lenovo bought IBM, it's kind of like, you know, the big behemoth on the block who wasn't boxing, he was kickboxing, and he may not have the boxing skills because he was more of a kicker, and now he's entered the boxing ring, and you're like, but I'm puny. You may have a shot for, like,

round one or two. You better hit him with your best shot. I'm like, well, I could see that. I could see that. I just know that from a mobile perspective, you know, kind of like Windows phones, right? I'm like, you make, your computers don't always function right, so I don't know if I want a phone, and I feel the same way about Lenovo. You know what I'm saying? Yeah. I would rarely get HTC. They're stuck with the operating system, right? Which is Android, though. Well, no, I mean, Lenovo's lack of performance is Windows-based. Okay, yeah. Right? Yeah, so the OS, kind of, okay, I can dig it. Yeah, put Linux on Lenovo, and you don't have to reboot it. Yeah, or put iOS or something like that on there. Yeah, if you could make that happen. Mountain Lion or whatever. Rawr! That was not the Google... Pirate? Pirate. Yeah. So I thought that was interesting. Galaxy S5 was introduced. Just, I'm actually, I'm so happy. I don't know about you. I know you... Yeah, but it's three is cool. I don't know what I'm missing. Maybe a little more speed. It never hurts, but, you know. Yeah. Yeah, I'm happy. Apple is going to use an Arizona-based sapphire crystal plant. I thought that was pretty cool. Well, we had a debate a while back. You know, they told us that, I think it was on Jon Stewart, that they talked about how much it would cost if you actually brought the production of the iPhones over here. How much more would it cost? And you think, you know, people are jumping out of the plants and they're working... Like 10 more dollars or something crazy. That's like 5 or 10 bucks. I'm like, you know what? If I had a U.S. option, I'd pay that 5 or 10 bucks. I'd even give you some markup, 30% markup. I'll give you 13 extra dollars just so you make it here in the U.S. So I'm glad that they're using some plants here. Yeah. I mean, you

know, and then according to the state of the year the other day, there should be a huge tax break for them for doing that. And so... Bring them in. Bring them in. I saw this title of the article. It was A Skype Exorcism. And I was kind of drawn to it because I'm like, man, Skype's not that bad. I actually like it. Like, why would you... First off, why would you want to get rid of it? Because in my mind, I'm thinking, computer, you're deleting it. Oh, literally. And it's stuck in your computer. I thought you meant like... Well, that's what it turns out. It turns out that's what it is. It is not the exorcism of Skype from your computer. It's actually a dude doing exorcisms through Skype. Yeah. So, I just thought that was interesting. And all right. Now I have a little bit of... So, does the computer start spinning around myself? Like, how does that happen? And puking... Yeah, technology, maybe. I don't know. White noise, perhaps. I compel you. Reboot. I compel you. All right. So, here's a little riddle. What do you get? What happens if you lose power? In the middle. Like, so, I got rid of half the demon. So, my rights... I walk with a limp because my exorcism Skype session got cut off halfway. So, here's a riddle. What do you get when you have an unholy amalgamation of America's favorite lunchtime treat and live Snidarians? An unholy amalgamation of America's favorite lunchtime treat and live Snidarians. Okay. Let me analyze that. America's favorite lunchtime treat. It has to be either burgers or pizza. Peanut butter. Really? Yeah, we'll go with peanut butter. Okay. Yeah. Unholy... So, a Snidarian is a jellyfish. Okay. So, it's a peanut butter and jellyfish. Some researchers actually fade peanut butter to jellyfish. And they said... They were funny. They were like, I wish we could say this was for, like, really purposeful reasons. We just wanted to make a peanut butter and jellyfish. Apparently, the jellyfish turn a little

darker than normal when they eat only peanut butter. And they're see-through. All right. Back to our reviews. What is it called? Snidarian? Yeah. It's a weird C-N-I-D. Snidarian. Oh. Snidarian. I think I'm going to forget that. Yeah. So, here from Stephanie Hill. This is actually somebody we know here in town. I gave her a lot of big help. And... Oh. Oh. Thank you. Nidarian. Nidarian. Okay. So, the C-K-N-I-Darian. Is that... He actually knows it. So, he actually put K-N and then I and Darian. My question is, is K-N like the K-N in no? Yeah. So, then why put the K? That's just confusing. Yeah. Like, Cat Williams said, it's called a knife. A knife. Yeah. Kniving. All right. This is from Stephanie Hill. She's here in town. I was helping her. I was like, hey, I just helped you out. Why don't you write us a review? She did. E-WebStyle is a great partner to have. They go out of their way to help you out and are friendly in doing so. That's what's up. Appreciate you, Stephanie. Punch in the face to Stephanie. Here's another one from James Bennett. Love the podcast. I like to listen at the gym or mowing the lawn. I'm just getting started with SEO and find the information useful. I have also learned many non-SEO related web stuff that happens on either side of the meat and the potatoes. Cool. That's what's up. Punch in the face to you. Especially if you're just starting out. Hit us back. Podcast at E-WebStyle.com. Let us know what you're working on. We'll have to check it out. Finally, we got Chris Churchill. And it only says Puka Podcast. P-U-K-K-A. Which is some sort of, I think, Russian phrase or something. I tried to look it up and I came up with brilliantly humorous and informative. I'll take it. Punch in the face because we created our own definition. Yeah, we can record that. All right. That is the potatoes of our podcast. Time to get into the, you know what? Before we

get into the meat, remember there's lots of ways that you can follow us and haunt us and stalk us. You just start off with Facebook.com slash. E-WebStyle. Twitter.com slash. E-WebStyle. YouTube.com slash. E-WebStyle. And you can email us, podcast at. E-WebStyle.com. Did I forget one? Yeah. IG. Instagram. It's at E-WebStyle as well. That's right. Instagram. Yeah, we can be heavy on that, man. Yeah, we got, yeah. Nick is killing it on that. I'll tell you what. I was liking photos and sharing them earlier today. All right, guys. Let's get in the meat of our podcast. I'm going to give a big punch in the face to Ken Lyons. Ken Lyons put out an article on Search Engine Watch called Eight Deciding Factors That Influence SEO Keyword Prioritization. And so, it's basically eight factors that you really, that influence your decision making when choosing your keywords for SEO. You know what? I think he needs to read an article that I saw, Three Ways to Shorten Your Title. Yeah. But, you know, when I began reading the article, I thought that some of his factors will actually work for a pay-per-click keyword prioritization as well. And so, we'll kind of go through both of those. So, the first one he says is search demand. And I think search demand is key, right? You know, you need to, you know, assess the level of demand or interest for the keyword, right? Meaning how many people are looking for it. And not just how many people are looking for it, but what are the people who are searching those particular phrases, what are they doing? You know, one of the questions he asks is, is the traffic generated from high-demand keywords, is it qualified? Or, here's a good question, whether this traffic will help you achieve your client's goals. And so, I think those are great questions to ask when you're doing keyword research for an SEO perspective or from a PPC perspective. Both have, you know, different avenues, right? An SEO key phrase would, it's going to take

a lot of time to eventually get content and get that page ranked for that phrase. And so, you don't want to be optimizing for a phrase that may not necessarily drive people to achieve the goals you want them to have. And from a paid perspective, you just don't want to be paying for the wrong key phrases if they're not converting right. So, think about that. You know, the people who search those phrases, is that type of traffic going to help them achieve your goals? Whatever your goal is. And I think you've got to be really careful because you may have a goal and you need to be aware of the visitor expectation. Exactly. They did this search. They arrived at your website because they clicked through your ad or your SERP result. And now, what are they expecting? You know, you can't, you know, sell kitty litter pictures, not kitty litter, but litter of kitten pictures, and then try and sell them dogs. Yeah, you can't do that. Right? This is not going to work. So, you may have a goal in mind. Make sure that you're thinking about what the actual visitors are going to be expecting when they arrive. Which kind of goes into this next section. The next one is user intent, right? So, what is the user intent behind the search query for a particular keyword? You know, or better yet, where would someone searching for this keyword fit into your marketing funnel? That's a great question. So, like, for example, we were meeting with a client earlier today who sells insurance, right? Life insurance and commercial liability insurance and auto insurance and homeowner's insurance and things like that. Tough market. Great. Tough market. Highly competitive. Yeah. From a PPC perspective, click cost, you know, for auto insurance are 80 bucks, right? Yeah. And then from an SEO perspective is, yeah, 1.8 million results. And so, competitive in both markets. And so, you have to really be specific in your keyword research. For example, would you bid for just life insurance?

Or would you try to optimize for just life insurance? You could. You waste a lot of time. You spend a lot of time doing it. From a paid perspective, you probably spend a lot of money and get people who were just doing some sort of research and things of that nature. And so, instead, maybe you come up with something a little bit longer tail of maybe term life insurance quote, right? What's the intent for somebody searching for something like that? Somebody searching life insurance is clearly just researching, probably gathering information. Somebody searching for term life insurance quote knows the type of life insurance they want and they need a quote. And so, where do they fit in your funnel? If your funnel involves them filling out a quote form first, then that's really a keyword you want to go for. If your funnel involves them feeding them a whole bunch of information first and then maybe going down a path of getting on a newsletter, then submitting something, and then following up, then life insurance could work better for you. It just really depends on what your target is. So, I like the next question in regards to the intent. Will they take the step to sign up for whatever your action is? Like, if your action is to get a quote, will the keywords you chose lead them to do that? I mean, that's, you know, we talked about A&B testing when we first started. That A&B testing helps you determine that. Yeah. The next one is on the keyword competition. How hard will it be to rank for this keyword? This is, you know, if we're talking SEO, right, because we're talking ranking, if you're a new site, probably extremely hard. You know, I think you have to go in and compare it to things like your competitor's domain name, how well they rank, how big their brand is, how long they've been there. And that'll give you a clear indication of how hard it is going to be for you to rank

for that certain key phrase. Yeah. And if indeed it's too difficult or it's just a steep uphill climb, then you may want to really invest in some other things. Well, spend your time and resources in other places, right? Spend out maybe some set of long tail phrases, maybe target some areas that aren't as populated and things like that because, you know, no need to fight the big bad wolf if you don't have to. So, pirate. It's a wolf pirate. A wolf pirate. Maybe the wolf should be. Or blowing the house down. So, the next one, number four, is the budget. And, you know, a lot of times when you hear budget and you're talking keywords, people automatically think PPC, which you should because it's paid. But I like to consider budget for SEO purposes as well. So, what is your budget, right? With the life insurance example or insurance period, for that matter, you're competing against, you know, Geico, Progressive and big budgets out there, State Farm, Allstate. And so, if you don't have a budget to compete, then that should really dictate what your keyword choice is going to be. From an SEO perspective, it may not be budget per se as in a hard fixed cost for a keyword. It could be budget in regards to resources used. How much social activity is going to be necessary? How much content do you have to write? How many internal hands is going to have to come to the plow in order to make this site eventually rank for that? That also requires budget. Those people have to be paid. And so, you have to really determine what your budget is and can you afford to target whatever keywords you're coming up with. Right. The next one is the time frame, right? How fast do you need to rank for these terms? You know, if you have the time to wait, you know, four, five, six, seven months, then great because it'll likely take that long if you're doing SEO. If you're looking for some

immediate satisfaction, some immediate goals, a faster return, return on your investment, and you have the budget, then it's clear that PPC would be the way you go with that, especially for whatever phrases you're choosing. You just have to make sure that you follow the first few steps. Make sure that at the end of the day, you're still bidding on the right phrases that you've chosen the right key phrases to bid on so that way you can get your goals accomplished, which is the next one here. He put client goals. I changed it to your goals. I mean, because most of you guys who watch us or listen to us right now, you are normally doing it your own, right? You necessarily have clients. Some of you guys do. But, you know, you have to figure out what your goals are. Are you focused on just ranking for a certain level of pages just to rank for those words? Are you interested in branding, right? You want to rank for more vague phrases because you just really want your name to be seen? Or are you trying to focus on a specific niche, right, a niche that converts better? Figure out what your goals are first and then make sure that the keywords you choose are in line with those goals. I told a prospective client once, I said, look, if you're really interested in building a specific brand and that's what you're doing and you're going to sell it in five years, I actually know a company that will probably be a better fit for you. If you're interested in generating revenue right now, you should be working with us. So what your actual goal is will govern, you know, the effort where you spend your effort. The strategy you do. Exactly. Profitability is the next one here. You know, Chris asks, you know, we get clients in all the time and clients will come in and they say, man, I want to rank for this term and I need to do this. And Chris

is great at scaling back and saying what makes you the most money, right? What makes you profitable? Frankly, what's going to help you pay us, right? And so that's a key question because what you don't want to do is rank, spend a lot of time on keywords and PPC campaigns and SEO strategies to rank for words that just have a low revenue generation where they bring in a lot of traffic, but they don't bring in dollars. And at the end of the day, we're all trying to get paid. It's all about revenue. You want to rank for terms that increase your bottom line. Yeah. And the last one was scalability, right? So how quick can you scale this if it works, right? Going back to the life insurance example, right? Let's say you are ranking for, I don't know, term life insurance quote. Okay. Then that's a great word you can scale. You can, because there are different types of term life insurance. There's, you know, different agencies that offer it. They all come in different amounts and different percentages and things like that. And from an SEO perspective, since they're all related to the phrase term life insurance, then you can optimize that page for several of those phrases. And that one page will likely rank for most of those phrases. From a PPC perspective, you can put all of those types of phrases in the same ad group, use the same ad text because they're all related and even land them on the same page because that page is set for that particular word. And so, but that's being scalable. What you can't do is optimize for term life insurance and then on that same page, start talking about whole life insurance. You could, but I wouldn't recommend it. I would recommend a whole separate page. You would need to do it the right way and definitely A and B test that, right? Definitely. If you're trying to switch them from whole to term or whatever, you can accomplish that. You can try

and accomplish that. You just need to be very careful about how you're doing it. Definitely. And from a pay perspective, it's easier. Well, I'm going to say easier because it's easier to put them all in one, but it's better to set up a whole new campaign focused on whole and then do it that way. Land them on a whole different page, create a whole different ad. Use a whole new set of key phrases. So that way the people who land there, like we said on the previous page, have a higher chance of accomplishing the goal that you want them to do, which is fill out a quote or download some e-book or subscribe to your newsletter or request you to call them or whatever your action is. Make sure your keyword dictates that. And so these were, shout out to Ken, Ken Lyons. Good article about. Shout out. Punch in the face. What is that? I know. Kick in the shin. Punch in the face to Ken, man. Great, great factors in regards to doing some keyword research. Cool. Excellent stuff. All right, do you have any blanks there? I want to give a moment of silence. Yeah, that moment of silence goes to link building. All right, link building's out of there, dude. Man, like if you guest blogging right now for the purpose of generating links, Matt Cutts said, no, don't do it. Like if you're submitting articles and all these links to get links, yeah, shame on you. Don't do that. Like, you know, right, if link building is still in your strategy, which it should be, right, I'm not saying don't do it, but you have to be extremely strategic in how you do it. Long gone are those link building days full of keyword rich anchor text. You know, like you better not go out and generate a whole bunch of links using the anchor text life insurance. You will never rank for that. Panda killed that. Penguin killed that. You know, and then if you're doing a lot of

guest blogging and article submissions, hummingbird killed that. And so you really have to be strategic in how you link build. I would suggest all incoming links be company name branded. Right. It's funny how the cycle turns because they started off like that. I would go back to that or even maybe highlighting certain sentences and link that whole entire sentence rather than the key phrase. Right. That sort of deal. And it's really about communication, making sure that the blog post you are putting out, the content you are publishing, is easy to read, that it's user friendly, and that it has high value because then it'll generate natural links that you won't have to go and build. And those have way more value. Yep. Absolutely. Excellent. Well, this has been podcast number 222, the most popular internet marketing and SEO podcast on the known universe. That is because of all y'all. Thank you guys for tuning in. If you could, please do one of the three favors we mentioned at the beginning of the show. Follow us on Facebook. Follow us on Twitter. Follow us on G+. Or add us to a circle on G+. And Instagram. Make sure you check out our Instagram and like those. And we really appreciate you guys listening, checking in with us. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. Charles Lewis. Bye-bye for now.