Keyword Research Part 2 – SEO Unlocked – Free SEO Course with Neil Patel
– [Lecturer] Hey everyone I'm Neil Patel, and today I'm going to be breaking down how you can do keyword research. I've already broke down some of the basics of keyword research in
the previous lesson, and I've broken down how
to build your keyword list and how to research your target musketeer. If you haven't seen it,
go and check that out. In this training module I'm
going to be breaking down keyword metrics, as well as how to match your keyword to a customer journey, and how you can refine your keyword list. One of the most basic
metrics is search volume. Whenever you do a search on Ubersuggest you'll see the search
volume for any given keyword on a desktop device, as
well as a mobile device. This is important to see
because desktop devices in many cases convert
better than mobile devices. On top of that, you'll be
able to see seasonality. Do certain terms get searched more during certain times of the year? Do they get searched less
during other times of the year? This will give you a good understanding of how to control your traffic.
That way you can get a steady stream, versus the continual ups and downs. Two other metrics that you
really want to look at. The first one is paid difficulty. The higher the paid difficulty, the more competitive it
is when you're bidding for a on-paid search and the other metric is SEO difficulty. The lower that number, the
easier is it to rank for in Google organic search. The higher the number, the harder it is. The other one to look at
if you're doing SEO as well when you're doing your keyword research is CPC, you'll see it on the left.
CPC stands for cost-per-click. Typically, the higher the cost the more likely that
keyword is going to convert a visitor into a customer. The lower the CPC, that usually means that keyword doesn't drive
as qualified traffic, so it doesn't convert as well. Now, when you're going
after a keyword for SEO, yes, you know, you're not bidding for it, but still you want to go after
those most lucrative keywords. So, the terms that have
the lowest SEO difficulty, ideally scores of less than 40 and a high cost-per-click are the ones that are going to tend to
drive the most revenue for you. The next part of keyword research is to match the customer journey. A customer journey
roughly looks like this. They go through roughly six steps, all the way from having a problem to getting success.
And that success is
getting that ah-ha moment once they implement things, or they buy your product and they see that the results are great from it. Not just, "Hey I bought this skin cream to reduce my wrinkles and I'm using it," but more so they got the results and the wrinkles went down. So, let's go over the journey in detail. Now, using Ubersuggest on
the left-hand navigation side you'll see a keyword ideas option. Click on that. That's where I want you
to put in your keywords. There's multiple tabs,
there's a suggestions tab on that report, a related tab, questions, prepositions and comparisons. The questions tab will help
you find a lot of problems, such as, you know, "Hey
can shaving cause acne?" Or, "Will a shaving can explode
when it's on the airplane?" Or, "Is shaving bad for you?" Right? These are all problems that
people may be looking up.
And then when you want
to get into the solutions you can check out the propositions tab and that'll show you results
like, shaving near me. Or, if you look at the comparison results, which also can give you solutions, shaving versus waxing. Anyone who's looking up
shaving versus waxing, they're probably like,
"Hey, which one is better? Which one should I do?" For the buying keywords I want you to look at the suggestions or the related tab. And let's say if you're
interested in shaving you're going to see examples
like shaving supplies or shaving subscription. When you want to work on implementation, or upselling, or customer success, again you can see some of these keywords in the suggestions or related tab.
And they may be phrases like, phone number for dollar shave club, right? This is someone who may have a issue, or they're looking to
place a bigger order, or they're looking to upsell, or sadly maybe even canceling. Or dollar shave club sign in, right? That's another example of a keyword, or even dollar shave club, how to cancel? The last step in keyword research is to refine your keyword list. You see all these keywords, but what do you do with them? You may have too many to go after, some may be the right ones, some may be the wrong ones. So you need to refine your keyword list, and you could do that
through four simple steps. So, let's dive into each of them. The first is the search goal value. What value can you give the
term against your goals? Do you think it's going
to have high profit? Do you think it's going to generate some, not just traffic, but some sales or leads? Typically as I mentioned earlier, if it has a higher CPC,
that's cost-per-click, you're going to get more
value from that keyword.
If it has a lower cost-per-click, you're not going to get as good of a ROY. You also want to check
out the competition. Is that keyword really hard to rank for? Right, and that is SEO difficulty, but you can also look at domain score. In the keyword ideas
report on Ubersuggest, it'll tell you on the right side the average domain score, and how many links the site has that's ranking in the top 10. You can also go to the backlinks report in Ubersuggest, look up
any site that's ranking or any site that's a competitor, and it'll tell you their domain score. That'll give you a good understanding of what your competition's up
to when it comes to ranking. The higher that number,
it's from zero to a 100, or more so one to a 100. The higher that number, the
more power and authority that site has and the more
likely they are to rank.
When you're refining your keywords you also have to keep in
mind commercial intent. So I want you to go to
neilpatel.com/training and there you'll be able to find a 220 profitable buyer
keyword download sheet. So I want you to download it and it'll help you find the right keywords that you should be going after. In essence, it'll help
you refine everything that you're doing. Now that you got your keywords it's all about grouping those keywords and putting them in the right buckets. You're probably like, "Wait,
hey, how do I do that?" I understand that certain keywords are related to some
topics and others aren't. Well, again, you can go to Ubersuggest and type in anyone of
your competitors domains. And you type it out and
then in the navigation I want you to click on top pages, and this will show you
all their top pages.
This is how they're grouping keywords, because a page has many keywords. And under estimated visits you'll see a view all button. When you click on it
you'll see all the keywords that your competition
is using for that page. That'll give you a good
understanding of how to group. You can also go to the keywords report on the left-hand navigation and again, you can see all the keywords that your competition is
ranking for in one simple view. And this as well will help you find the right keywords that your competition is doing well with, and
how you can group them too. As you're doing your keyword research there's some important questions that you need to consider.
Now, here's a interesting
chart from Ahrefs, I'm going to actually
show quite a few charts over the next few slides from Ahrefs. They have one of the biggest databases of SEO data out there. And they were looking at the medium number of keywords that the top 20
ranking pages also rank for. As you can see, it's hundreds. That means, any given page on your website doesn't just have to focus
on one or two keywords, you can focus on hundreds
and hundreds of keywords.
So, don't just focus
on one or two keywords, as I mentioned, you should
be focusing on hundreds. And this right here shows
the overall domain score of a site and how many keywords that they rank for on any given page. So typically, you know, when the URL score or domain score of a site is high they tend to rank for
more keywords on a page. So, as you build up more of your authority you can also rank for
more keywords as well. And if you're looking for quick wins, Ahrefs also did an interesting study and they found that keywords with low volumes of under 1,000 are really easy to rank for within a year. So, if you're trying to go after the most competitive terms, it's going to take you much longer versus going after the ones that aren't as competitive. And typically, the lower volume ones don't get that much traffic. Remember how I said you can rank for a hundreds of keywords on a page, so if you have 400 keywords that each have a 1,000 searches, or
even 500 searches a month for each of those
keywords, that's anywhere from 200,000 to 400,000 potential people that you can attract to your website each and every single month.
And you're probably wondering, "Hey, how long does it take to rank?" And Ahrefs did another interesting study and they found that
with low volume keywords it takes roughly a 121 days, with medium volume
keywords roughly 304 days, how volume terms you're
looking at over a year. The next thing I want you to do is go to neilpatel.com/training and download the working example of doing keyword research. It breaks down how to do it
and how to fill out your sheet so you can do it step-by-step. So that we have a working
example and you're not lost. So again, some action items for you. Make sure you download the
musketeer persona research sheet. Make sure you look at the
musketeer persona worksheet, and of course, the keyword ideas workbook. Next week I'm going to be breaking down how you can add the right keywords to your page, and how to do it correctly. How to write the perfect headline
that attracts more clicks, because they say eight out
of 10 people read a headline, but only two out of 10 will click through and read the rest of your article.
Also teach you how to clean up your site and unlock more traffic. And how to find hired help for less, if you don't have the time and resources to do it yourself. I look forward to helping
you get loved by Google. I'll see you next week..
