How to Choose the Right Keywords for SEO

How to Choose the Right Keywords for SEO 

 If you're struggling to get your head around keywords,

what are they?

How do I use them?

How do I increase my site's ranking for them?

Then this article is designed to help.

In this article, we're gonna go through a process

that you can use to choose the best

and most profitable keywords for SEO.

I bring order to the chaos of digital marketing.

Actually, that's not true at all.

In Exposure Ninja, I bring chaos to the order,

but that's another story.

Keywords or search queries are basically

the things that people search for,

really, really important for SEO.

In fact, one of the most important elements of SEO.

There's a bit of a myth going around

that keywords don't really matter

in 2019, 2020, 2021, whenever you see this,

but I can assure you that keywords will matter forever.

So let's go through a process that you can use to identify

the most profitable keywords for your business

so that you can help your website's

ranking improves for them.

In this video, we're gonna cover,

understanding your customers or buyer intent,

we're gonna look at your customer journey as well

and you can identify keywords at different stages of that,

we're gonna also take a look

at how to analyze your competitors,

how to use some awesome tools to find the best keywords

and also how to map your target keywords

to the best pages for you.

Let's go.

A keyword is just a search term,

something that people search for.

A keyword can be competitive, it can be uncompetitive,

it can be commercial, it can be informational,

we're gonna look at all of these things.

So keyword can be broad so for example,

the phrase, diamond rings, is actually a fairly broad keyword.

There's lots of possible intent behind that.

That might be someone who's looking to buy a diamond ring,

it might be someone who's looking

for pictures of a diamond ring,

it might be someone who's looking to make diamond rings

and they want instructions, right,

there are loads of possible intent behind it.

So that's what we call a broad keyword.

Now a more exact keyword will be something

like platinum diamond engagement rings.

That is someone, usually,

I mean, they still might be looking for a picture,

but it's a more precise definition of what that keyword is.

Now platinum diamond engagement rings,

two carats, next day delivery UK,

that is someone who's got a holiday in two days,

they want to propose to their girlfriend,

they know exactly what sort of ring she likes,

and they know how much they can afford.

That is a really, really qualified commercial buyer.

This kind of broad and exact thing, obviously,

the broader the keyword, the higher the search volume right.

Hardly anybody is gonna be searching for that specific term

but the people who do are likely

to be very commercial buyers,

so they could be quite profitable.

So we'll look at how to target

all of these different variations as we go on.

But firstly, the question you're probably asking,

"Keywords, really?"

Well, let me tell you in 2019 keywords

are as important as ever.

Now previously, in the olden days of SEO,

(laughter)

Google was really unsophisticated

and just saw keywords as basically blocks of text

which needed to see exact matches for to rank.

So if you wanted to rank for a platinum diamond

engagement rings, two carats, next day delivery, UK,

you would just use that keyword in its entirety,

multiple times on your page.

You might even call your website

platinum diamond engagement rings, two carats,

next day delivery, UK,

and guess what, you would rank for that term very easily.

Google's more sophisticated than that.

Google understands more the intent behind keywords

and how variants of different keywords work

and also the relationships between different keywords.

But I can assure your keywords are as important today

as they always have been.

Even if we take out everything,

remove SEO completely from the equation,

keywords are still important.

If your customer searches for a platinum diamond

engagement rings, two carats, next day delivery, UK,

those are the phrases that you need to use

on your website to trigger that thing in their head,

which says, "Ah, this is what I'm here for."

Let me tell you a little story.

We worked with a client who sold corporate massage.

So they go into people's offices,

and they would massage them

and that was the business, fantastic.

Right, great, send them over.

The trouble was that their industry term for this

is onsite massage.

So everyone in that space, was all targeting the phrase,

onsite massage, because that's what it is.

That's technically what it is.

It's a massage and it's given on-site rather than,

you know, in the massage's office, whatever.

So everyone in the space targeted that term.

But when we did the research,

we found that customers had no idea

what onsite massage was at all.

It was a completely industry-specific term

with no meaning to the general public.

So what they'd done there

are they'd made a mistake with their keywords.

All of the copy on the page

was all talking about onsite massage,

rather than corporate massage or office massage,

which are things that actually mean something to people.

So that just illustrates the importance

of getting these keywords right.

Whatever Google's doing with latent semantic intent

and all these different algorithmic understandings

of what keywords actually are,

just talking your customer's language

is good practice with marketing.

And that's really exactly what we're doing

with keyword research.

So keywords will always be important.

So let's look at some quick keyword misconceptions.

Keyword misconception number one

is that you're looking for the definitive list

with your keyword research.

I'm going to break it to you,

there is no one right answer.

That's good news is bad news.

The good news is, hey, if there's no right answer,

then you can't be wrong.

The bad news is, you're going to be constantly iterating

your keywords based on the data

that you're getting back from Search Console,

and from your conversion tracking.

So this thing that we're doing today,

where we're analysing and identifying

our top performing keywords,

and our top target keywords,

it's going to be a constantly evolving process.

So when we're working on a client campaign,

this is something that we'd revisit typically

every six months to one year,

depending on traffic volumes.

The second misconception is that tools and data

are your biggest assets.

You'll notice in this video

that we spend very little time talking about tools,

and there's a very good reason for that.

Tools can give us data

about the specific keywords that we're looking to target.

But what they don't do is provide a common sense approach

to the phrases that your business should be ranking for.

And actually this common sense,

your brain is the biggest asset with keyword research.

So lots of what we're going to be doing

is kind of brainstorming, having a look at competitors, yes,

but filtering everything through common sense.

If it makes sense in the tools,

but it doesn't make sense in your brain, trust your brain.

Your brain always wins.

Misconception number three is

that if you don't target a particular keyword,

you won't rank for it.

That maybe was the case in the olden days

when Google looked at just oh,

that specific block of words,

is that specific block present?

If yes, great, if no, not relevant.

Now Google is much more sophisticated than that.

So even if you're not targeting a specific keyword,

the fact that you've got content about that topic

or related topics on your site

doesn't mean that you won't rank for it.

So don't panic.

So let's look at the different types of keyword

that you might be targeting in your keyword research

that we're going to be doing.

So we're going to have a look at broad and exact keyword.

So broad, obviously, the really kind of basic

head terms and exact to the very specific,

much narrower focus.

And then we've got this kind of spectrum

between informational and commercial.

So an informational keyword

is something where people are doing some research.

They're not really looking to buy.

Commercial is something

where there's a very clear purchase intent.

So what I'm going to do, we're going to have a look

at some different keywords and then talk about

where they fit on this spectrum.

So first keyword that we're going to look at,

Range Rover, what do we think?

Well, it's a pretty broad term.

And it's also pretty informational.

Lots of potential intent behind that.

Yes, someone might be looking to buy a Range Rover,

but they're probably,

if they're going to be looking to buy a Range Rover,

they're probably going to be having something

a bit more exact, and something a bit more specific.

So that is what we call a broad and informational term.

Range Rover for sale.

Now that moves into the commercial terms, right?

So that's a commercial term, but it's still fairly broad.

There's nothing specific about that

that tells us that this is a really

kind of long tail phrase.

Range Rover SVR fuel consumption, right?

So this person is looking for a specific model

and they're looking for a characteristic

of that model, right?

So that's what we call an exact term.

Now is this person looking to buy?

Maybe, but it's pretty unlikely based on that term.

What they're probably looking for is information, right?

They're just wanting a number from that most likely,

so that's an exact and informational term.

Range Rover Sport Dynamic Black Tan Leather Nottingham.

Well, that's a fairly exact term.

And it's also fairly commercial,

because they've added the area there as well,

which would indicate that they're in the market

to buy that and they're looking for that model

in that specific area.

So that's an exact and commercial term.

So what you can do

as you're running through your keyword research today,

you can have this kind of mental model in your head

of is this a broad term?

Is this an exact term?

And then where does it fit

on the informational commercial spectrum as well?

Okay, what does the keyword research process look like?

Well, we've got a few different stages.

First off, we start with some brainstorming.

This is where we get all

of the possible ideas down on paper.

The rule that we tend to use for this

is that we'll just get as many keywords

as we possibly can down,

and then we can start filtering and digging through later.

Once we've brainstormed,

then we'll expand these with tools.

So we'll look for related terms.

We'll look for terms that competitors might be targeting

by using tools.

Once we've done that, we then start adding some numbers.

So looking at how competitive they are,

how much commercial intent there is behind them.

And then from that, that allows us to then begin

prioritising them.

So we've got these four steps.

Then just to help you out,

because we're super lovely here at Exposure Ninja,

we've put together a very simple spreadsheet

that you can use to start doing this stuff yourself.

So if you go to bit.ly keywurdz,

then you can have a look at this spreadsheet.

So just download a copy or whatever

or copy it into your Google Drive.

I don't know how these things work,

but you can use this to go through the process

that we're going to be looking at today.

So first up, we're going to be looking at keywords

and the categorization of them.

So let's start with this first step in the process,

brainstorming possible keywords.

We're going to start in a whole bunch of different areas,

but the first thing that you can do is start

looking at your competitors.

So you're going to go straight to Google

and you're going to start typing some keywords

and you're going to be noticing what brings up the most ads.

Which are the keywords that bring up the most Google ads?

Because these are typically the ones

that have the highest commercial intent

and are likely to be the most competitive.

If people are spending money to advertise for these terms,

then it usually means

that there is some commercial intent behind them

if they're tracking conversions.

So therefore, they're going to be profitable to rank for.

Now have a look at also

when you're running through your competitors

and you're looking at that Google search page,

what are the keywords that your competitors

are using in their page titles?

So those blue links that are showing up in search.

What are the specific phrases they're using,

particularly at the start of those page titles?

Because that can give you a good indication

that they think that keyword

is going to be really important for their business.

You can also have a look at what your competitors

are ranking for.

In a second I'm going to show you SEMrush

and we use SEMrush a lot at Exposure Ninja

to identify what keywords our competitors

or our clients' competitors more accurately,

are ranking for.

So what we'll do is we'll put the competitors site

into SEMrush, and it'll show us

all of the different keywords

that competitor's ranking for.

So we're looking through this list,

and we're taking out keywords,

and then we're putting it in our spreadsheet

that we're going to crunch the numbers on a bit later.

I also want you think about your services and products,

so what are the different names that your customers have

for each of your products or services?

And you can think here

about the different stages in the buyer journey.

So if we go back to the Range Rover example,

and there's a guide that we'll put links somewhere

down below about how all this works.

But you've basically got four stages of awareness.

You've got awareness, you've got interest,

you've got the decision, and then you've got action, AIDA.

Now the awareness phase is when people

don't really know too much about what it is

that you're selling.

So in the SUV or Range Rover example,

this person might be looking at best luxury SUVs, right?

So they're in the awareness, they're thinking "Hmm,

"I might want me one of those Range Rovers,"

but they don't really know what it's called,

they might not know which one is the best one for them.

So they're just kind of really

top of funnel informational terms.

So something like best SUVs or something like Range Rovers,

when they're just kind of beginning to

"Yeah, maybe, yeah, that might be quite interesting."

Then we have the interest stage.

This is where they start

to become a bit more educated,

and they have a bit more knowledge

about what it is that you're offering.

So here they might be thinking,

"Actually, do you know what?

"I'm quite interested in that Range Rover SVR,

"that looks pretty funky, it makes a nice sound.

"I think I might go for one of them."

So at that point they're starting

to kind of qualify themselves.

They're starting to get a bit more of an understanding.

Now they're going to have different keywords

for each of these different stages, aren't they?

When they're in the awareness,

they're going to be targeting really broad,

really informational terms.

As they start to move down the funnel though,

those terms are going to become more exact

and more commercial.

So phase three is the desire or the decision.

At that point that they're making the decision.

They're saying, "Do you know what?

"Screw the environment, forget the world.

"Global warming, let's go.

"I'm going to get one of them SVRs," right?

So they've made a decision

that they're going to purchase,

or they've got the desire that they're going to purchase.

The final step is action, where they decide,

"Right, okay, here's where I'm going to buy it,

"this is what I'm going to do,"

and they actually do that thing.

So when you're brainstorming,

and you're putting all your different keywords down,

you want to think about the keywords

that your audience is going to be using

at different stages here.

And remember, focus on what your audience

is going to be saying, not what your industry

or what you might describe your product or service as.

And if that feels like a big step, it is a big step.

There's a lot of work that goes in that.

The next thing to think about is differentiators and USP.

For example, a differentiator might be

that you offer same day delivery, or next day delivery,

or free delivery.

These would all be things

that people might be searching for.

So the platinum diamond engagement rings next day delivery,

that might be a really good keyword for you.

And it's going to be easier to rank for that

than platinum diamond engagement rings.

Next day delivery means that there's commercial intent

and it ties into a USP,

that would be a great keyword for you.

So think about your differentiators and USPS,

and how you could add them to your keywords,

and put all of these in a big, bad, beautiful list.

And then you can also look at

what you're ranking for already.

So stick your site in SEMrush.

If you don't have SEMrush, then go to thankyouninjas.com

and get a free trial, it's on us.

What are the terms that you're ranking?

Like page two, or page three,

that you could maybe push the page one?

That you think would actually be really relevant

and really profitable for your business?

Add them to your list as well.

The next prompt for coming up with brainstormed keywords

is your customers.

So are you a local business?

If you're a local business,

then you're going to want to include your location

and nearby locations.

Or if you go out to people, the locations that you serve.

The best exercise that you can do with keyword research

is to just talk to your customers when they come in,

or when you're talking to them on the phone and say,

"What would you search for if you were looking for us?"

You'll get a whole bunch of really random stuff, right?

And you're typically gonna want to ignore the first answer

and ask them "What else would you search for?

"What else would you search for?"

And get them to kind of dig through

until you get to those really kind of basic,

stupid Google searches that we all make.

I don't know if you're like me

when sometimes you search something on Google,

and you're like "Oh my God,

"I hope that no one's looking at my searches,

"because that's just really stupid."

I wanted to find the name of a song the other day.

So I was like, "What's the name of the song

"fat synth, duh-duh-duh."

I got it eventually, but that sort of useless search term,

you kind of want to dig into your customers' psyches

and just say "Alright, if you had no idea about us,

"what would you be searching for?"

And you'll get a whole bunch of really random stuff.

Another good thing you can do

is listen to sales recordings from inbound leads.

What are the customers actually asking for?

Are they asking for onsite massage?

Or are they saying "Hey, can you come to my office

"and do a massage," right?

Because that's a very, very different term.

So your customers will often tell you

their target keywords in sales recordings.

So, you gotta start brainstorming

and sticking all of your keywords

in the Bitly keywurdz spreadsheet.

So step two is to expand your keywords with tools.

Now, we're going to use SEMrush

because we always do here at Exposure Ninja.

Absolutely love SEMrush as a tool.

Fantastic company as well.

So you can go to thankyouninjas.com

if you want a free trial of SEMrush.

Here we can see an example

keyword research that we're doing

for the broad term disability equipment.

Now disability equipment is a fairly commercial term.

It's a fairly broad term as well.

And what we're doing here is firstly,

we're looking at the volume and the CPCs.

But really what we want to do is find related terms

to this one that we can add in to our brainstorm list.

So for example, down here you can see

the phrase match keyword, so these are other keywords

which include the phrase disability equipment.

So here we can see disability equipment for the home,

so we'd want to add that to our list.

Second hand disability equipment if we offer that,

then we want to add that to our list.

Disabled equipment shops, right?

So we'd add that to our list.

So you can start to expand your list here.

You also see related keywords as well.

So these are other terms which are maybe similar.

So disability aids.

Disability aids is an alternative way

of saying disability equipment.

So we'd then have a whole bunch

of disability aids phrases as well.

So again, you'd add all of these to your brainstorm list.

You can go even further.

You can then have a look

into all of the organic search results.

And if you click on any of these URLs,

it's going to show you all of the keywords

that this particular website is ranking for.

So you're brainstorming list by now

is going to be like 100 million pages long.

I'm only joking.

Only pick the stuff that's relevant to you.

That'll keep it nice and snappy.

And you can also have a look at

the ads that are running too.

So here we can see the different ads

that people are running

and we can see some of the keywords that they're targeting

or that they think are important in the ad headline.

So for example, disability equipments,

we can see equipment for disabled

so there's another kind of variation,

keyword equipment for disabled,

disabled equipment suppliers.

So these might also be keywords

that you might want to add to your list.

So check out SEMrush, really useful tool.

Let's say that we click on the related keywords

and just have a bit more of a look at that

and go a bit further in depth.

So here we can see a full list

of all the different related keywords.

Again, we're going to add them to our list.

And we're also going to add in

the search volumes and CPCs.

That'll save us a bit of time later on.

You can click the little Export button

in the top right hand corner to export that

so you don't have to do it all manually.

Who does things manually these days, right?

Who knows? Right?

So we've got all of our keywords,

we've brainstormed competitors,

we've brainstormed different stages of the buyer process,

we've brainstormed the keywords

that we're already ranking for.

We've brainstormed related keywords,

phrase match keywords,

the keywords being targeted in ads.

We've got a big old list.

Now it's time to crunch some numbers.

So the numbers that we're specifically looking at

are the keyword search volumes,

and the keyword CPC.

Now CPC is a pay per click metric.

It means the cost per click,

so how much people are willing to spend

to advertise for that particular keyword.

Generally, the higher the CPC,

the more profitable that keyword will be to rank,

although not always the case,

and I'll explain why in just a second.

Now, the trap that people fall into here

is when they start putting in their data,

they look immediately for the keywords

that have the highest search volume.

Because you think, "Well,

"if that keyword's got 100,000 searches a month,

"I could get 100,000 people on my website every month,

"yes, that'd be amazing."

And then they start doing the maths

about what that would mean for sales.

Well the trouble is the highest volume keywords

are often the broadest,

so they don't have as much commercial intent.

Size isn't everything people.

Often, going for a very specific keyword

that has clear commercial intent,

even if it's lower search volume,

will be more profitable for you,

because A, that person is more likely to be a buyer,

but B, because it's going to be easier to rank

for those more specific keywords.

Now the high cost per click

generally means that there's commercial intent,

although it can mean if it's a very broad term,

it can mean that there's just lots of dumb money piling in.

So it's all about the relevance as well as the CPC.

There's no definitive formula that you can use

that says "Yes, this is a great keyword."

Because like I say, you have to pass everything

through the filter of your brain.

Is that a sensible phrase for you to be targeting?

Or is it very broad?

So you're going to fill in the volume and CPC channels

in your keyword sheet.

And you can export it all from the SEMrush if you like

using that super thing.

So what you can do is just download it,

you can use the little export thing.

And then you can just get that in a CSV,

copy and paste it all into your keyword sheet

so you don't have to or manually.

So by now you've got your keywords,

you might have even categorised them.

You've got your search volume, and you've got your CPC.

So next we're going to look at

how to prioritise them

and are they in your very top priority,

your priority 10 list?

Here's how we generally prioritise keywords.

The most commercial and most exact keywords

tend to be the keywords that you'd be targeting

in the short term.

So short term really depends on how much work

you're putting in and how competitive your market is.

But for us at Exposure Ninja,

short term keywords are usually the ones

that we would expect to see

some ranking improvement

over maybe the first three to four months, okay?

So they're going to be the most commercial and most exact.

Obviously it depends on how competitive they are

as to what sort of improvement you're going to see.

But that's a good kind of short term guide.

The ones that are slightly broader

or slightly less commercial may be more informational.

They will typically be your medium term keywords.

And actually, as we go from exact too broad,

the competition tends to go up,

which is a big kind of defining factor

on how long it will take you

to improve ranking for these phrases.

And then the most broad, the most informational,

they are your long term target.

So those are the ones that you're going to be targeting

really over the long term.

So here are some quick kind of prioritisation

things that you can use.

So your short term keywords

are generally going to be the ones

that you want to target immediately.

So you're expecting to see some improvement

over the next three to nine months

if you're not doing much work

or you're in a very competitive market.

They're going to have a healthy CPC.

So there's going to be some commercial intent.

They might not be the highest commercial intent ones,

they might take a little bit longer to rank for.

But there is going to be some commercial intent there.

They're going to have a lower search volume

or competition level,

and they're going to be super relevant.

Now your medium term keywords

are generally gonna have a higher search volume.

So short term ones are going to have a lower search volume,

but they're going to be easier to rank for.

As you start getting into medium and long term,

they're going to have much higher search volume.

Medium term phrases might have a higher cost per clicks,

there might be more competition for them.

They may or may not be more commercial,

but there's always going to be more competition

for your medium term phrases,

which generally means that they're going to have

a higher CPC.

And they might be phrases that you'll be targeting

over the next six to 18 months.

And then your long term phrases

are the most competitive ones of all.

They're generally going to be the broader,

shorter tail phrases.

Things like Range Rover or engagement rings.

These are really, really long term keywords

if you're a brand new business,

or if you're effectively a brand new website, right?

You haven't done much SEO before,

then they're just going to be long term keywords

because you're not going to rank

for Range Rover very quickly.

And they also tend to be a lot of

informational searches as well.

So you can target things like knowledge base content

around those as you start building out the content

on your site.

Now the CPC might be low or it might be high.

Really helpful there, right?

CPC might be low

because they're informational research keywords,

so your competitors might not be valuing

these people as much as they should do.

On the other hand, your CPCs might be high

because if you're targeting a phrase like

divorce lawyer, London, for example,

that's going to have a massive CPC

because there are loads of divorce listers in London

that want to target that phrase.

So it's broad, it's informational and commercial,

and it's very high competition,

which means that it therefore has a high CPC.

And they're going to be the ones

that you're looking for ranking improvement

over the 12 months plus.

Typically at Exposure Ninja

we won't necessarily be targeting long term keywords

on a day to day basis.

We'll be targeting shorter and medium term variants,

and that will bring us a ranking improvement

for the long term phrases over time.

For example, if you're targeting a term

like engagement rings, what you might do

is put together a knowledge base on the site,

which is all about different types of engagement rings

and buyers' guides and stuff like that.

So you're not specifically targeting

engagement rings, because you might be targeting

platinum engagement ring, gold engagement ring,

silver engagement rings,

the perfect guide to choosing an engagement ring,

but you know that by doing all of that work,

you're going to pick up better ranking

for your broader and longer term phrases.

So I hope you found this video useful.

Remember, if you have any questions

about the keyword research, process outlined,

stick them in the comments and we will reply to them.

Don't forget also, if you want some help with your SEO,

if you want to improve the ranking of your website,

then check out the Exposure Ninja free website review.

It is awesome.

Go to exposureninja.com/review, and you'll be able

to fill in a bit of info about your business.

Someone on the team will prepare you a 15 to 20 minute video

which shows you how to increase your website's ranking.

There's no charge, no obligation.

This review is killer,

so I definitely recommend that you do it.

Until the next Article, see you soon.