SEO is a very powerful marketing strategy that businesses of any size, from the smallest to the biggest, can benefit from. And as it is so effective, it is also complicated in a few aspects. That’s why, we wanted to make this article a free SEO course where we are going to break down SEO for you, starting from the keywords research.
Hi there, and welcome back to Serendipity Marketing. We're a digital marketing agency with a mission to help small businesses grow by applying psychology to their marketing strategies.
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Keyword research is one of the most fundamental steps of SEO and the reason being is that keywords are where it all starts. That's how people find you.
If you do it right, great, you're not only going to get traffic but you're going to get sales.
If you do it wrong, you may still get traffic, assuming you follow all the other materials we going to teach you, but this traffic won’t be qualified, meaning that users will not be interested in what you sell and you won't get any sales as a consequence.
And we want you to avoid making this mistake.
In other words, you need traffic that converts into leads or sales and that's what this free SEO course will teach you.
So, let's dive into keyword research. Are you getting the right traffic?
Keywords Research
Once, the CEO of Google said "Anytime you type in a keyword in Google, we have gone and stored copies of billions of pages in our index. We take the keyword and match it against the pages and rank them based on 200+ signals. Things like relevance, popularity and how other people are using it".
Google is looking at a lot of things, so when you're doing keyword research, don't worry about the 200 factors, I know a lot of SEOs talk about them.
We going to break it down to the simplest possible and you don't have to worry about each and every single algorithm change or factor in the algorithm because it's just too complicated and it's just overwhelming.
As we mentioned, picking the right keywords will make you more money, and picking the wrong ones will hurt you.
Now, most people start off with Google Keyword Planner, right? It's a free tool by Google where you go in, you type in keywords and Google roughly tells you how much traffic a keyword gets or what it costs.
But there's something wrong with the approach. It basically tells you “Hey, here's a keyword which gets traffic or doesn't”.
But it doesn't necessarily tell you the most important part which is what your audience is looking for which is that traffic that will generate leads or revenue.
And that's why we want you to skip using Google Keyword Planner.
To overcome this problem, we use a tool named Ubersuggest.
You can type it on Google and you’ll find different options which are good and will help you find the right keywords to attract qualified traffic to your web pages.
This tool will generate keyword ideas related to what your target audience uses on Google. When you type in a keyword that you're trying to go after, anything related to your space, it'll tell you what's popular, the cost per click, the SEO difficulty, and paid difficulty.
When SEO difficulty is under 40 it's easier to rank for, when it's over 40 it gets harder and harder to rank for.
Typically, when a keyword has a high cost per click, it means that people are spending a lot of money because it's generating sales. It's very rare that companies spend a lot of money to bid for that keyword in paid ads if it's not generating any sales.
You will also have access to keyword ideas report that shows you all the people who are ranked for that keyword, how many visits they are roughly getting from that keyword, how many backlinks they have, and their overall site authority.
The domain authority is a metric from 0 to 100; the higher the number the better. When you see domain scores of less than 40, it means that a lot of sites are ranking for this keyword that doesn't have that much authority and it's a much easier keyword to rank for.
This will give you ideas of if a keyword is good. So, you have the CPC data if it's easy to rank for it or not and you can also see on the right side who's ranking for it.
In many cases where even small competitors that you know are doing well, it tells you that it is a keyword that you should be on the lookout for.
In addition to that, if you don't want to use Ubersuggest there are many other ways you can go and find keywords out there. We recommend using a combination of all of them because the more the merrier.
Things like Wikipedia or other content pages around the web that have really detailed content can give you keyword ideas as well because these articles are filled with lucrative keywords.
So, make sure that when you're reading content around the web, especially on competitor sites, look at what words are mentioned on a frequent basis. At first, you won't notice them, but when you have that thought in your mind that your competition is using keywords, you'll start noticing what they're mentioning over and over and over again.
The concept of keywords is very similar to the Three Musketeers. They have a slogan "all for one and one for all".
And here's what I mean by this, we call it the musketeer intent, but your intent, which is “Hey, I want to rank high on Google for a keyword” needs to be similar to the customer's intent, which is “Hey, I'm looking for keyword because it solves a problem.”
You want to rank because not only do you want traffic, but you need to be able to solve the customer's problem. If you solve their problem, you're much more likely to rank. On top of that, you also want to think about the influencers' intent.
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Influencers Intent
Why should you want people to share your article on the social web or link to it? Because if you get way more people linking to you, your rankings are going to be higher.
So, in essence, when you're doing keyword research. and creating content, you need to make sure the intent aligns with each of these three groups.
When you're going after keywords, it all starts by understanding your goals. Do you want to rank for the keyword because you want more sales? Or do you want your product or service to generate more leads? Or do you want to feed different sections of your sales funnel with more traffic? Do you want to build awareness? Do you just want that brand recognition, so everyone knows you like Nike or Adidas? Or do you want all that organic traffic so you can remarket to those people and get them coming back to your site through ads?
A journey really looks something like this. It's all scattered, not everyone goes through all the steps, but in essence, they may go to a website or see a TV commercial or go back to your site or click on your ads, but in general, they're going through a journey whether it's opening up your emails or reading the news and hear about your company.
Eventually, they all start at the same position and end up at the same position. They all start with having a problem or looking for something, and they all end up at the same place, which is. they find the solution and they tend to do the transaction like they buy a product or become a lead to learn more information.
But you need to remember that when you're going through this, your customer is a person. They're not a robot, they're not a machine, they're real people.
Like if you're selling beard products, would you really target people who are clean-shaven? Of course not, and if you don't understand your customers, you're going to be wasting a lot of time.
In addition to that, you need to also think about authority, right? Remember how we mentioned that isn’t just about you or the person searching, it's also about authority because authority is what leads to more social shares, but if you're not getting that authority and going after the right influencers, you're not going to get the links, which means it's going to be harder to rank.
You need to build your keyword list to then research your target musketeer. Next, you need to match the customer journey and of course, last but not least, you need to refine your keyword list.
Research your target musketeer
It's all about researching that individual. So, let's take an example, Dollar Shave Club. They're a company that offers shaving products and their mission is to help guys take care of their minds and bodies so they can be their best selves.
Their whole model was expensive razors, so to make it easier and affordable they planned to just send them to people on a monthly basis. So, keeping them in mind, there are a few places where you can go to really understand your customer.
You can go to places like Forums. There are forums on everything. Just google your keyword plus the word forums, or it could be you know, board as well some people call them message boards or boards or groups.
It's a great place where you can see what problems people are facing and what solutions they're looking for. It's all about understanding people because understanding them is what will help you lead that visitor into a customer once you get them to your site.
Wikipedia, this is a great place to go as well, depending on what you're looking up. Even things like shaving, they have different sections in there like, shaving in religion or myths or history.
This will tell you what people are really looking at because the way people write Wikipedia articles isn't just Wikipedia articles, it's a community.
Everyone's adjusting it and they're adjusting that article to be the best article out there to really help people looking for information on that subject and are looking to solve their problem.
Reddit's another amazing place. You can see what's uploaded.
Things that are uploaded tend to be more popular and this will give you ideas on what more people are interested in, which is great for you because the last thing you want to do is create content and go after keywords and subjects that people aren't really that interested in.
Another tool that we love is Google Trends because you can type in keywords and it'll tell you what's trending this is great because you want to know where the market's going.
You don't want to just be reactive as a marketer or as an SEO, you want to be proactive and go after areas that people are going to be more interested in in the future. And Google Trends shows you that. It shows you what's trending and what's becoming more and more popular over time.
There's also Quora, which is one of the most popular questions and answers sites.
You can see what's popular, whatever has tons of answers. People are probably interested in that subject and are looking for answers as well.
We like Amazon Reviews as well. This gives us an idea of what people think, what they like, what they dislike, and what we need to really cover when we’re trying to find the right keywords that appeal to my ideal audience.
Now, one thing we really want you to do and this is one of our favourite tactics but a lot of SEOs don't do this, we want you to set up Facebook Audience Insights.
This doesn't mean you're going to be spending money on Facebook or you have to run ads or anything like that, don't worry.
What's cool about Facebook Audience Insights is they'll tell you exactly all the people who are visiting your website, what they like, what their interests are, so that way you can do better targeting.
And the way you figure this out is you can look at Facebook's Pixel Guide and install their pixel.
When you install their Pixel, what will happen is they're going to end up tracking the data on your website and they'll end up giving you the demographic data on the people who are visiting your website so you can see their interests and it'll help you determine what keywords you should go after.
So step one, log into Facebook and click on Pixels and once you end up doing that, the next step is you click Get Started. And then from there, you know after you created your pixel, then you want to name your pixel, whatever you want to call it, you can just name it the name of your site.
Then from there you want to email it to a developer to install it or you can install it yourself, it's kind of like installing Google Analytics, and then step five is View and copy the code into the head of your site and once you end up doing that, you know you're off into the races and then boom, within the time you'll be able to see that Facebook is telling you your Audience Insights.
And if you want to track to see if you did it right, there's also a Chrome extension that you can install and it'll tell you if you did it right or wrong.
All right, now that you're starting to collect data on your ideal customers and the people visiting your website so you can learn more about them, you also want to check for what keywords you already rank for.
Keywords
You may be ranking for something already. We rank for multiple keywords because we've been doing this for a long time.
So, you should be using Google Search Console, it's free, and it shows you that data. The other thing that you can end up doing too is you can go to your competition or your own website and you can type it into Ubersuggest and go to the Traffic Analyzer Overview and when you click on the Keywords Box, it'll take you to a report that breaks down all the keywords that that website ranks for.
And this is really useful because it'll tell you what keyword is good. Look at all the traffic they're getting for, here's their position, here's their search volume
It'll help give you more ideas as well.
Remember how we just break down the musketeer profile, right? "All for one, one for all". It's about people as well. You're not just trying to please a robot or a server or algorithm, you're trying to please people because that's how you convert visitors into customers who download this worksheet and go through it.
This will help you do keyword research the correct way as this free SEO course has broken it down for you.
If you need help with your SEO or digital marketing to grow your business in terms of visibility, engagement, and profit, contact us today and speak with one of our digital marketing experts to see how we can build the bridge between the point you’re standing at right now and your goals.
