- 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.