Keyword Research Part 1 – SEO Unlocked – Free SEO Course with Neil Patel
– Hey everyone, is Neil Patel and welcome to another
day of SEO Unlocked. Today is very exciting because
we're going to start the journey into keyword research. This is one of the most
fundamental steps of SEO and the reason being is
keywords is 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're
going to get traffic, assuming you follow
all the other materials I'm going to teach you, but if you do it wrong,
you're going to get traffic but what you'll find is
you won't get any sales and I want to avoid you
making that mistake. In other words, you need
traffic that converts into leads or sales and that's what
this will teach you. SEO Unlocked as a seven-week
course, as you already know, and we're in week one so let's
dive into keyword research. Are you getting the right traffic? And here's one of my favorite quotes it's from the CEO of Google and he says "anytime you type in a keyword
as 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. I'm going to break it down
to as a 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 I mentioned, picking the right keywords will make you more money and picking the wrong ones will hurt you. My last startup, I was getting roughly four times more traffic
than my competition. They're worth $800
million during their peak and we weren't even worth one
tenth of what they were worth.
The reason being, I
picked the wrong keywords that just shows traffic isn't everything. Now, most people start off with Google Keyword Planner, right? It's a free tool by Google. 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. What's wrong with it is, it tells you, hey, here's a keyword it gets traffic or it doesn't get traffic, but it doesn't necessarily tell
you the most important part is that traffic where your
audience is looking for? is that traffic and it
generate leads or revenue? and that's why I want you to skip using Google Keyword Planner.
You can use Ubersuggest,
It's a tool I built, there's a free version of it
that anyone can go and use and you can get tons of keywords ideas and it breaks it down not
just based on popularity, but also what's most
likely going to convert and generate you revenue as well. And there's tons of reports in it and I'll show you how to use it over the period of this course.
When you go to Ubersuggest on
the left-hand navigation side, you'll see a link that says Keyword Ideas. When you type it in and
you type in a keyword that you're trying to go
after anything related to your space such as
like shaving or razors, it'll tell you what's popular, the cost per click, the SEO difficulty, that's the word SD you see the abbreviation there
or PD is 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. And on the right side of
the keyword ideas report, it shows you all the people that are ranked for that keyword. How many visits are roughly
getting from that keyword? How many backlinks they have? Their overall site authority, that's what we call domain score, it's a metric from 0 to 100, the higher the number
like Google or Amazon being like a 90 plus or 100 those sites tend to dominate
and rank for everything, right? When you see domain scores
of less than you know, 40, 50, it means that a lot of sites are ranking for this keyword that don't have that much authority and it's a much easier
keyword to rank for.
And this will give you ideas
of if a keyword is good, right? Because you have the CPC
data if it's easy to rank for because you have the SEO difficulty data and you can also see on the
right side who's ranking for and we're seeing big brands
going after these terms, in many cases where
even smaller 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's many other ways you can go and find keywords out there. I recommend using a
combination of all of them because the more the merrier. I love using Wikipedia, right? On Wikipedia pages, like let's say if I
looked up United States, it'll mention things like other countries that are bordering us,
like Canada or Mexico.
It'll mention things like
the statue of Liberty or the Star Spangled Banner. 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 when you're
reading content around the web, especially on competitor sites, look at what words are
mentioning 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 you
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. Why should people want
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 and we'll go into creating
content upcoming weeks, you need to make sure
the intent aligns with each of these three groups and don't worry about
the details right now we have worksheets and PDF that'll help break that all down for you and teach you how to do it step by step.
When you're going after keywords. It all starts by understanding your goals. Do you want to rank for the
keyword cause 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 American Express? 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 someone's
out there, you know, 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
hearing about your company.
Eventually they all start
at the same position and end up at the same position, right? 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 they become a lead to learn more information. But you need to remember 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 I mentioned, hey, it's not just about
you or the person searching, it's also about authority because authority is what
leads to more social shares and backlinks and we'll
go over backlinking in the up and coming weeks. 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. There's really five
steps to keyword success. The first is you need to
build your keyword list, then need to research
your target musketeer, then you need to understand
the keyword metrics. Next you need to match
the customer journey and of course, last but not least, you need to refine your keyword list.
So first building a keyword list, you go to neilpatel.com/training and you'll be able to
download the PDF there and it breaks down how you can use it and what you need to do step by step. Second, you need to research
your target musketeer right? 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, right? And they're based in Venice, California and their whole model was razors and all these things are really expensive, let's just send them to
people on a monthly basis, make it really simple and
make it really affordable.
So keeping the Dollar
Shave example in mind, there's a few places where you can go to really understand your customer. You can go to places like Forums, there's 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 all tell you what
people are really looking at because the way people
write Wikipedia articles isn't just Wikipedia article, 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. The other thing that I like
doing is Ubersuggest, right? It's a tool on neilpatel.com you can go to neil patel.com/ubersuggest or in the navigation just
click on the Tools link and then Ubersuggest type in any keyword on the left-hand navigation once you go to the Keyword Ideas Report, you'll see a list of suggestions.
What most people don't do is they don't click on the Related Tab, which I highlighted on this screen. This will give you the most amount of keyword ideas typically and it sorts them by how popular they are, other related terms, shows you CPC data that's how much people
are paying for them, it even tells you things
like paid difficulty , that's PD how expensive it would be if you're going to to
pay for that keyword. I know this is the SEO course but I thought I'd throw
that in there as well. And SD, which stands for SEO difficulty.
How hard is it to rank, the higher than the number which is from zero to or one through 100. The higher the number, the harder it is to rank
for the lower the number, the easier it is to rank for. You can also use suggestions
through sites like eBay, Amazon, Google. We pull a lot of this into Ubersuggest as well automatically so that way you don't have to do much. You can also look at questions and questions are, what questions are people
asking around this subject? Like can you bring a shaving
razor on the plane, right? That's example of a
question that someone may be searching for that you can answer. Another tool that I love, this
is one of my favorite ones and I use this like once
every three days at least it's Google Trends cause
you ca type in keywords and it'll tell you what's trending and 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 going after areas that people are going to be more
interested in in the future.
And Google Trends shows you that, right? It shows you what's trending
and what's becoming more and more popular over time. You can also correlate
intent through prepositions. So again, on the keyword
ideas report on Ubersuggest there's a Prepositions Tab, like shaving with razor bumps, right? And these are all long-term opportunities that you should be trying to rank for because these long-tail keywords, a lot of people aren't thinking about them and yes they don't drive the
most amount of traffic today but six months from now, a year from now, it adds up and it can drive
quite a bit in conversions. There's also Quora, it's one of the most popular
question and answers site. 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. I like Amazon Reviews as well.
This gives me an idea of what
people think, what they like, what they dislike, what
I need to really cover when I'm trying to find the right keywords that appeal to my ideal audience. Then of course there's Social Shares, so on Ubersuggest whenever
you type in a keyword on the left hand navigation, there's a navigation button
called Content Ideas. This shows you all the popular
blog posts around the web on that subject and it breaks
it down by Social Shares so you can see the ones that
have the most Social Shares at the top, then also looks at backlinks, who's linking to them and estimated visits and the estimated visits is how many visitors is this article getting from Google specifically. So I love looking at this
because it tells me what traction content has and it shows me that hey, these keywords
are better than others. Hey, these keywords do really
well for the social web because there's a lot of shares and these other keywords do
better for Google Search. The results, right? The other thing that you can
do is just google for the term and look at the results in the top 10 this will give you idea of, hey, these are what
people want to read about.
Because Google doesn't just
rank sites at the top based on what keywords they put in or what links are
pointing to their website. As the CEO of Google mentioned,
they look at things like popularity, experience. So if a lot of people
are reading an article and they stick around for 10 minutes versus they read another
article from a competitor and they stick around for two
seconds and they bounce away, what do you think's going to happen? Well, the one where everyone's
sticking around for minutes, that one's going to rank higher but the one where people
bounce away within two seconds, it'll tell Google that, hey, doesn't matter
how many links this has or what their contents about, people don't like this result, so we shouldn't rank it that highly.
Now, one thing I really want you to do and this is one of my favorite tactics but a lot of SEOs don't do this, I want you to set up Facebook
a Audience Insights. Okay? 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. See 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 like 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 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 time
you'll be able to see that, hey, Facebook is telling
me 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, right? You may be ranking for something already. I rank for a ton of keywords because I've been doing
this for a long time. So people are like, Hey
Neil, it's easy for you but hey, when you're a new website and even if you get 10,
20, 50, 100 visitors, hey, it shows up in Google Search Console. So you should be using Google
Search Console, it's free, 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 in to 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, hey, this is a good keyword, 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. The other thing that you can do and this is what I love doing, is I like setting up a
project on Ubersuggest and I put in my own website or you can put in your
competitor's website. I generally recommend that
you put in your own website, it'll show you their estimated
organic monthly traffic, their monthly backlinks if
it's growing or declining, the referring domain names
and what's cool about this is you can track their rankings over time and seeing if they're going up or down and compare it to yours as well.
Now what I want you to do is go back to neilpatel.com/training and download the Customer
and Influencer Personas. 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 and download this worksheet
and go through it. This will help you do keyword
research the correct way and this worksheet breaks
it down step by step. It shouldn't take you more than 15 minutes and once you do that, you'll be then ready for the next lesson. Thank you for attending this week's class. Make sure you go through it, if you have any questions,
feel free to ask us. We're here to help you succeed..
