What is Keyword Research- a video overview (The DeBrief 002)

Overview

Highlights:

0:06- Where do you start with your strategy?

2:00- Understanding your target audience.

3:08- The Keyword Research Process- where do you start?

5:25- The SEO process: identifying keywords, grouping and mapping.

10:03- What is the difference between Long Tail Keywords and Money Keywords?

Sam Sayer 0:00

How are you doing Chris?

Chris Anderson 0:07

Yeah, really good. How are you?

Sam Sayer 0:08

All good, all good. We’re looking forward to do this, this follow-up from our SEO overview. So much so, I’ve invested into the new kit, which hopefully has got better quality. And in the process of setting up today, I’ve managed to call the police by mistake. So watch out using your phone as a camera. But here we are back again.

So just want to sort of loop back on what we were talking about in the last video. So let me just get this back up on screen. So we started talking about what is SEO. What’s the SEO overview? All right. And, you know, it’s just a massive, massive universe, of SEO. Now, I think we gave an overview of all those bits. But what I wanted to dig into now is, where do you start? What’s the first thing to do? So, strategies? The first piece of the puzzle, right? Did you want to sort of tell us, how’d you start with your strategy? How do you approach it?

Chris Anderson 1:21

Well, there’s, two parts to this. There’s the research part of the strategy where you’re finding out about who you’re targeting, and what you’re offering and things like that, doing the research and finding out, then it kind of moves on to kind of keyword research. Once you then know the keywords that you’re the you’re shooting for the types of searches that people make the types of content that they’re interested in, then there’s the kind of active strategy of, or the plan of how do we get found for those kinds of keywords. And then there’s, you know, so this is exactly what we’re going to do.

But the first part of all of this is understanding our target audience, understanding what their needs, what their pains are. So this is more of a more of a broad marketing question. But of course, it leads into SEO search engine optimization is about is a marketing channel, at the end of the day, we have to have a full understanding of who we’re targeting, what their needs are, what their questions are, what their pains are, then we relate that to how they are going to act on the Internet, what they will be searching for potential ins into our business to our offering based on the activities that that target audience is doing.

Then, at that point, when you know, what their needs are, and what their pains are all that all that good stuff, that’s when you start moving towards, okay, what will they be searching?

Sam Sayer 2:56

So how do you find that out? How do you find out analytics? What’s your first port of call? So let’s say you’ve decided your target audience, right? It’s gonna be different for everyone. Could be location based. So what’s the first step then in finding out what keywords people their audience is searching for?

Chris Anderson 3:14

Okay. So if you’re talking about keyword research, it’s a, multi step process, really, there’s lots of different places that you can go and you should go and you need to consider to produce a full mature list of keywords. The other thing that I would say is that this never ends, there’s always different keywords, always different searches that we can add into the mix. And over time, as a campaign matures, we get to understand which keywords really mean the most to us as we go on. But here’s some real basic starting points when it comes to keyword research.

The first thing that you need to do is bearing in mind at this point, we’ve got all the information in front of us in terms of who we’re targeting, what their pains are, all that good stuff that will then effectively trigger certain kind of research steps that you’re going to do. Okay? So you’re always referring back to that avatar, that audience and those needs, okay. And when you read something within there you go, Okay, this where could I find out the answer to that question, and you go, Okay, I know, we go here we read this and we what have you. And when you’re then doing the research, you simply (and maybe I’m a little bit old school) but ultimately, the process I go through is simply writing down ideas of what these people might be searching for. I’ll give you an example of this.

So it might be in terms of let’s say we decide we the first step we’re going to do is look at their look at the let’s say this is a business to business target. Okay. We might then go and let’s say solicitors, we might go to to a solicitors website, probably multiple solicitors websites. But we’re then reading their website and we’re looking at the types of things that they are considering, the types of things that they might have issues with or needs for. And, as we’re going through, and we’re reading the website, we’re just jotting down the types of language that they use and the types of needs that they might have.

Once we then have a broad list of potential keywords, and as, the years go on you’re doing this many times in a day, you get an understanding of how people search, so you automatically know some, some really good keywords.

But needless to say, we ended up with a short list of potential keywords. And then that’s when I go to different applications and different systems that allow me to expand on those keywords. There’s lots of different systems there. I personally love to use h refs, that that’s a system that allow you to put those keywords in there. The system will tell you what the search volume is the keyword difficulty, but then it will also tell you similar keywords. So you kind of start off with a sprinkling of a very short list of key words that it takes you off in another direction. So these key words are related to this. Okay? Are they a value to our clients and our our aim and you start to build up a list, you build up a list. That goes on for quite some time, you can spend hours and you probably should have spent hours through this process. Always going back to that avatar and that audience definition that you have to kind of trigger. Okay, here’s a pain. So let’s go and research on that. Here’s a need, let’s go research on that. Here’s a task that they might have. That’s good research on that. You build up lists, builds up lists.

Then you expand upon them, as I explained, and then we get to a point where we start to put some order to that list. So tell me if I’m getting too technical with this.

Sam Sayer 7:04

No, this is the thing, right? And this is kind of the reason I wanted to start this series with SEO and what it is, it’s an enormous, universe. And it is detailed, there is a lot to it. So yeah, keep going.

Chris Anderson 7:18

Well, I won’t get too into it. But I’ve kind of broad stroked, this is basically what we’re doing.

We’re probably halfway through the process now. So we’ve got a kind of starting but expanded starting list. At that point, we then want to start to group these together. We call them clusters in the industry, but use similar keywords, we clustered them together. We go through a process when where we decide whether actually how related are those keywords to each other by basically doing searches and seeing how similar Google or the search engine produces different content. But ultimately, you start then grouping these keywords together. And you’ll have lots of pockets, lots of groups of keywords.

And then you need to decide out of those key words which one is our primary key word. So the way that we do we have a primary, secondary, also tertiary keywords, and then related keywords, but we might not be focusing on these. They’re all grouped together with a prioritised.

Then the next step is where then we decide which key which pages or which content we’re going to map that content to. Okay, sometimes in a website, we’ll have the right content already or the starting point for the right content we get Okay, well, this is related to this service page, or this blog, or whatever it might be. And we go great. Okay, so these are allocated that mapped to that page. Or we decide, well, we don’t have that content. So we need to produce that page, or we need to optimise the page that’s already there. That’s another tasks for us. Yeah, and that’s ultimately the process of finding out what we the types of things that we need to focus on finding those related keywords, grouping them together and mapping them to a page. And then that’s actually when the SEO starts after that, which is making sure that the content is related to those keywords.

Sam Sayer 9:13

Let’s just go back to this time, because I think that, you know, there’s a reason that we spent some quite some time building this, we start with the strategy, right? And then keyword research, and this opens up the gate to everything else, right. I mean, yeah, there’s some on site, you know, bits and bobs to do but it’s all seems to be driven by keyword research, which informs the content and then off you go from there, right?

Chris Anderson 9:14

That’s right.

Sam Sayer 9:14

So you know, it’s a real cornerstone, I think. A lot of conversation. We have people get distracted with Yoast, I’ve got green ticks and Yoast, it’s like cool, but like for what keyword and why those keywords and all the rest of it. And yes, I’m sure you know, some basic things, you know, for us web design, Northampton seems a pretty obvious one. But is it you know, is that how competition, I guess it is.

I think just very quickly before we wrap this up, there’s also longtail keywords, what can you tell us about that?

Chris Anderson 10:10

Yeah, so let me define the difference between Long Tail and what we would call money keywords. So the money keywords are the ones that we actually, that are most important to us. These, these are the ones generally with the highest search volume, and generally the highest keyword difficulty. They’re the ones that everybody is going for. Yeah, but they’re really important to us. Ultimately, that’s our main goal. But then you have longtail keywords, which are, as the name suggests, there’s more words within there, they’re longer tailed, they tend to be more specific, so and lower search volume.

However, because they’re specific, they could be very valuable to us. So they might only get searched 10, 20, 30 times per month. But if we can get found, and we’re right at the top of the Google or whichever search engine it is, and we’re getting the majority of the traffic for those particular keywords that could make quite a difference on on the business that we’re working on.

Sam Sayer 11:22

Absolutely. It’s that old age thing old adage, you know, being niche, right. If you focus on the specific niche, rather than trying to be everything to everyone. That’s yeah, that there’s a good value in that. Awesome. Okay. Yeah. I mean, it’s fascinating, because I learn a little bit each time as well. I’ve got a broad idea of a lot of these topics, but nowhere near the detail that you know, and that your team going to so amazing. Thanks, Chris. Next, I think we’ll move on to content the next. Next recording.

Chris Anderson 11:52

Yeah sounds like a plan.

Sam Sayer 11:53

Really useful. Thanks, Chris.

Chris Anderson 11:54

All right. Take care.

Sam Sayer 11:55

I’ll see you next time. Bye.