Keywords and Keyword Research – #Pubcon Liveblog
Keywords and Keyword Research – #Pubcon Liveblog was originally published on BruceClay.com, home of expert search engine optimization tips.
Keyword research – it’s the first step in the search engine optimization process, according to Bruce Clay, Inc. In this Pubcon Las Vegas session, Bruce Clay himself along with fellow presenters Craig Paddock (@craigpaddock) and Ash Nallawalla (@ashnallawalla) talk about how to perform the best possible research methods for your keyword processes.
Craig Paddock: Content and Topic Research
Hummingbird is making it so we’re not targeting keywords but topics and multiple synonyms, says Craig Paddock.
70% of queries now involve synonyms and 98% of the time Google properly serves results for synonyms.
The SERPs for “boxing equipment” and “boxing gear” are the same.
We’re losing keyword data from analytics at a rapid rate. There are some workarounds for Not Provided. His agency provides an organic report by URl in GA. We get some partial data from bing/yahoo/google. You can get some data from Search Console. You may want to implement site search if just for the data intelligence. You get data from paid search and AdWords. Here are some keyword data sources:
Search Console Queries: no performance data (goals, $$$), limited to 90 days
Search Console data in GA – again no performance data, limited to 90 days
AdWords Organic report – connected to Search Console account, AdWords account under Dimensions tab, no performance data or landing page, no historical data. It’s great because it shows organic CTR with paid impact
Keyphrase (content) research selection factors:
Popularity
CTR
Quality
Competitiveness
Engagement
Be an authority:
Don’t just target top sales terms
Be an authority and be interesting
Keyphrase ideas:
Best – target with anchor text
“Wholesale” in the retail businesses is not as competitive and has 50+% CTR
Glossary
“Nearby” queries are up 100% YOY
How to queries are up on YouTube 70%
“Your company reviews/complaints” – provide a direct option for complaining before they post to Yelp of consumer affairs
Most important keyword phrases:
Primary site
Paid search listing
YouTube channel/Vimeo
Facebook/Twitter/Google+
Wiki
Flickr/Pinterest/Instagram/Tumblr/Slideshare
Microsite
iTunes app page/Google Play
Amazon
As a case study (we were not prepared for this and Bruce, on the stage, does a double take!) if you search for “Bruce Clay,” you see he controls the content on the first TWO PAGES.
Industry tools:
Google Keyword Planner
Google Trends (new and improved July 2015)
[I couldn’t type fast enough to get them all]
Paid search campaign data
Heads up: GA Matched Search Query is very broad and getting broader. Travel keywords are matching for “time travel,” for example.
The paid impact on organic: Google says paid ads don’t impact organic rankings. However, a $200M paid search campaign later, he found that people link to pages and share pages more as an indirect result of a paid search campaign.
When looking at your rankings, be sure to look at the non-personalized results.
You may also look to take advantage of result clustering, where Google takes a website’s results at multiple positions and groups them in the listings all together so it’s like you have more results ranking higher.
CTR by position segmented by query type (branded, ads by the brand on the page, etc.):
In summary:
Ash Nallawalla: Lateral Keywords for Writers
Ash looks after 8 brands in the Suncorp insurance and banks company based in Melbourne, Australia. He’s speaking to the writers and SEOs working with writers, sharing discoveries and an Excel file (published by Eric Enge) and how he modified it to become something else.
Keywords: everyone’s using the Google Keyword Planner to get a feel for the most searched terms. You probably use it and your competitors do too. We use it as a starting point. Search intent is important. Intent can be navigational, info, commercial, transactional. This is the background, to set the scene.
So, who is winning in your niche? Check out the competition. See the content they sue on their sites. He has a 1-hour presentation (link: http://trainsem.com/pubcon) to show us how to make a ranking spreadsheet. “Visibility” is important, but what is your wat to measure it? Which competitor is more visible? Choose your top 5 competitors.
The content writer’s dilemma:
The spreadsheet shows the winners, not the losers. We can see who is using the most searched phrases. What content are they using that you are not using? Ranking involves many other factors. And this is also about selling!
Looking for that lightbulb moment? It’s time to think about keyphrase frequency. See Eric Enge’s TF-IFD Moz article.
Term Frequency: how frequently the term appears in a document (including stop words). There’s a fancy formula on the screen which you can presumably get from Eric Enge’s article. No need to fear the formula. Once you plug it into Excel you never have to look at it again but can get all the benefit of its analysis.
Look to sell, not to rank. If it helps you rank, great, but don’t have that as your goal.
Get n-grams (one-word, two-word and three-word phrases) from a keyword density tool analysis of your five competitors. Those are the key phrases to include in your worksheet. Get a count of each word or phrase used by the top five pages and your page(s). Then, do the TF number crunching. Use conditional formatting to pick a range of TF values and compare your TF column with the average TF of the competitors. You will now see significant words to consider. When doing this you’ll find that the pages you’re analyzing may not contain some obvious words. This is the beauty of this technique.
Bruce Clay: How We Look at Keyword Research
Bruce agrees that Ash’s description of keyword research is right on how to do it. The SEOToolSet Multi-Page Analyzer does the analysis of what Ash describes minus the statistical analysis. But it does ID competitors and their most-used words.
Talking about subject matter experts and speech recognition and basics of research @bruceclayinc
A photo posted by Bill Slawski (@billslawski) on Oct 6, 2015 at 3:13pm PDT
Use the right keyword when building your site. All keywords should be based on search volume, how people are searching and what people are doing to find you. Understand what you’re trying to get across to your audience, and know that there are different keywords based on regions, and much more. Also, pay attention to keywords based on media (including voice).
Keywords and keyword research: the steps
Generate a seed list (basic 101)
The client keyword list
The site
Search Console Traffic > Search Queries
Google Analytics
Find more keywords – Related searches at the bottom of every SERP
Find more keywords – Google Instant
Understanding keywords (or, using wisdom to evaluate and select keywords)
There is a difference between data and wisdom
Having a keyword list is not enough
Most lists are excessively broad
Each keyword is a new SEO project
Most sites cannot produce expert content for too many keywords
What worked in the past is past
Panda-related quality penalties come down to trying to be too broad and thus not an expert. Choose wisely. Narrow your focus. Know your market. Do this by considering:
Google audience and personas
Transactional or navigational (commercial or informational)
Millennial + gender and region
Voice, mobile and desktop
Expertise focus
Focus on a specific, high-level expertise. Be the subject matter expert for any keyword you’re trying to rank for. How close can you get to being recognized as the expert? A poor selection of poorly matched keywords and mediocre content on too many topics is going to hurt rankings. Two years from now, the only viable keyword is the one you’re an expert on.
