How to Do Keyword Research and Get Your Content Ranking!.mp3
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Speaker 1 all right, OK. My name’s Rebecca Steckler, and I’m a content marketing specialist here at what effects today for the second video in our Live Guide series, I’m going to be talking to you about keyword research, the keywords that you choose from the basis of your strategy and also determine the kinds of content you’ll create in the future. Beyond that, the keywords that you choose determine whether or not you can attract your target audience and whether your visitors are qualified to become customers or clients in the future.
There are many elements that go into a successful keyword research process, but in this video, I’ll go over three basic steps to help you get started. The first step to keyword research is brainstorming a list of possible keywords. These keywords can be as broad as you want and can be anything that relates to your industry, products or services. So, for example, if you’re a bike shop in Harrisburg, your keywords might be something like a bike shop in Harrisburg, bike rack, bike seats or any other bicycle parts that you sell. You can also use location based keywords. So words and phrases that describe your state, city, region or other terms that searchers might use to describe your area, then you can also check out your competitor site and see the kind of keywords they’re using to describe the similar products and services that they have.
Looking to your competitors can be a great way to come up with ideas that you never would have thought of in the first place and can inform the rest of your keyword research later on once you have your basic list. The next step is to expand this into a longer list of longtail keywords. So the keywords you came up with in step one might be really short and generic keywords like bike shops. But if you think about it, there could be thousands or even tens of thousands of businesses across the country trying to rank for that exact keyword. And as a local business, you’re probably not going to be able to rank in the top 10. So basically what you want to do is find longer, more specific keywords that indicate that a user’s specifically looking for the parts that you offer or a bike shop in your area. There are many ways to find these keywords. So the best way to do this is to use a tool like Google suggest that will expand your keywords based on actual user search trends and data. When you type a keyword into Uber suggests you’ll get an alphabetized list of all of the variations that users commonly search in Google. So, for example, if you type in bike rack, one of the results for this is bike rack for Audi Q five. This means that a lot of users out there have searched for that exact phrase in Google in the past.
And it also means that if you sell a bike rack that is compatible with a specific car. This might be a keyword you want to target. As you scroll down the page. You’ll see a ton of different results for this. And depending on the keyword that you entered, it could be an overwhelming list of keyword. Take note of the ones that are relevant for your business or just export them into a spreadsheet. You can repeat this process for every one of the keywords on your original list. And at this point you may have several thousand possible keyword ideas for your website, but in the next step will go over what to do with all of those keywords and how to narrow them down to get the keywords that are going to generate the best possible results for your SEO strategy. There are many different free tools you can use to narrow down your list, but at what page affects? A lot of us like to use a chrome extension called keywords everywhere. This is a free extension and you can bulk upload all of the keywords that you found in the second step. So if you did export all of your keywords into a spreadsheet, you can just copy and paste those and upload those right into the tool for this example. I’ll stick with the keyword Blakroc. Once you upload your list, you’ll see a few metrics for every keyword. The most important of these are search volume and CPC or cost per click.
The search volume shows how many users are searching for each keyword per month. The higher the search volume, the more users are interested in that particular keyword. The cost per click then is data pulled in from AdWords that represents how many advertisers are trying to place ads for that keyword. The higher the cost per click, the more difficult it will be for your business to rank for the keyword. So in general, the ideal keyword would be one that has a higher monthly search volume but a low cost per click. This means that lots of users are searching for this information, but not a lot of Web sites are trying to rank for it.
Or this example, the keyword bike rack for Subaru Forester has a high monthly search volume, but also a relatively high cost per click. This means that a lot of users are looking for bike racks that are compatible with this car. But unless your site already has a relatively high domain authority, it will probably be hard to rank for this keyword. That doesn’t mean it’s not worth targeting, are not worth having a page on your site for. But there are probably other keywords that will be more effective at driving qualified traffic to your site. If you sort the list by monthly search volume and scroll down a little further, you’ll start to find the keywords that do have a lower search volume but also lower cost per click. So for example, the keyword bike ride for EXI ninety Volvo only has an average monthly search volume of ten. And although this might not sound like a lot, that’s 10 potential customers if your site is able to rinkel for that keyword. Plus, the CPC is only 10 cents. Which means that no matter how small your sight, you do probably have a chance at ranking for that in the early stages of keyword research, don’t focus too hard on monthly search volume. Later, you can start focusing on those keywords that are going to attract a ton of traffic. But right at the start, it’s still worth your time to target long keywords that have a low search volume. As you go through this list of keywords, you may even find ideas that you hadn’t thought of in your original brainstorming process. If this is the case, you can take these keywords and put them into it or suggest or another tool and find even more keyword variations that you can use for your strategy. If you run PPC campaigns with Google AdWords, you can also use their keyword kliner tool to expand your list. Click search for keyword and add your ideas and enter a few of the keywords that you’ve already found in your keyword research process. Then click the ad group Ideas Tab. This will show you the keywords that AdWords advertisers frequently target within the same campaigns. This means that the majority of the keywords in this tab will be relevant to your products and services. And if you decide that any of them are, you can use AdWords average monthly search volume and competition data to determine whether or not they’re good additions to your strategy. Once you have your list of keywords, you can determine where you want to incorporate them on your site. If you found keywords that you already have pages for, you can take these keywords and add them to your title tags, header tags, many descriptions and other important HTML elements, as well as the body copy on each of these pages. That being said, you definitely want to avoid keyword stuffing or adding keywords where they’re not relevant or necessary. All of the content on your site should be written with your users in mind and with the goal of informing your potential customers and helping them find the information that they need throughout the keyword research process, you might have found a few keywords that you don’t yet have content on your site for. But instead of adding these keywords to random pages, hoping that those pages will rank for the keywords, you should see this as an opportunity to create more content for your site and more pages that will help your customers. As you optimize your site. You can continue to do keyword research as much as you need. Over time, this will help you identify even more keywords that are helpful to your customers, as well as keep your keywords relevant to changing search volume and trends. So, for example, even though the keyword bike rack for twenty sixteen Subaru Forester might be really valuable right now, five years from now there will probably be a newer model and other newer keywords that users are searching for. That being said, the three steps that I’ve covered are really only the basics. So if you want to learn more, I recommend that you download our free guide to keyword research. Then you can also enter your email at the end of this video for ongoing SEO updates from what page effects. Make sure that you stay tuned for the third video in our Guide series, where we’ll be going over content creation. Thanks for watching. The more competitive the keyword is.
