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So, here's a question about keyword research. What's your favorite SEO
keyword research tool? I'm going to, probably, not answer this question in
the way that it was meant to be asked. I think the question you're really
driving at is, "How do I drive this nice list of keywords, using some
automated tools that are out there?" So, for example, one that probably
does answer this question, we use SEMrush a lot. It's a really cool
compendium of all the keywords that your website possibly ranks for.
A lot of these keyword research tools are fairly accurate, mostly accurate,
especially when the data is compared to the same data that you're getting
from the same tool. But once you start trying to cross-referencing or
lining things up with analytics that you might see, things get a little bit
hazy. So I want to kind of think a little bit outside the box here, and see
if maybe I can answer some of this stuff, in a way that maybe some people
haven't thought of before or it just didn't dawn on them.
So the first one is the actual search engine tools. Sounds like a cop out.
It's not, because if you're trying to get the data about an actual search,
the best place to go get it is from the search engines themselves. I mean,
you can argue all you want about how accurate it is relative to itself.
It's extremely accurate, especially when it lines up with analytics and
things like that. You can get cool stuff about seasonality and things like
that. I know a lot of other tools do that too, but most of the stuff that
you really need around relative volumes and stuff like that, the search
engines are still the best at providing that. So just because it's not cool
and flashy and all the hip kids aren't maybe doing it anymore, it's still
really good data.
The second thing that we often use are actual search engine results. So
what I mean by that is, if you're trying rank for a certain phrase or
you're trying to drive traffic through a certain set of long-tail
derivatives; what are the pages that are actually ranking for that stuff?
What are they talking about? There's a reason that they're actually ranked
where you want to be, so go try to figure out what those things are. Maybe
they have a really cool glossary, or maybe there's an FAQ section that
people really enjoy. Try to go find that stuff because that's really neat.
You can start emulating, maybe even improving, some of the content that's
in there, so that's another really good place to look.
The third, good old-fashioned thesaurus. A lot of the way that search
engines understand how things are interrelated is actually, most likely, a
fed list just like, I guess, Microsoft Office has. They get these words
that they know are correlated to each other, that they kind of use synonyms
to pass back and fourth, and that preloaded list probably still exists.
This is really useful, though, to kind of explore word chains. So in a lot
of the, Thesaurus.com, Miriam Webster will let you kind of click in to
words and create these kind of topic models as you go. So you're able to
get a really good idea of maybe how people could be talking about your
product or service that you aren't. The search engine data is another good
place to go for that.
The last one. Social media and in human conversation. So it's a pretty good
guess, I'm just going to say this is not theory, or this is theory, sorry.
This isn't actually data. But search engines likely supplement the fed
data, the dictionary and thesaurus information, with stuff that they're
able to crawl and index around the web. So if you're talking about your
products in a way that nobody else is, it could be a good thing. It could
be that you have a really unique product or a really great USP or something
like that. Most likely, though, you need some content on your site that
people are actually talking about--the way in which people are actually
talking about your product. It's really unfair to expect people to arrive
to your site if you're not willing to put in the effort to try and find out
how people are actually talking about your product.
Maybe you want to go even higher on the funnel than that and say "how are
they talking about the problem my product solves?" That's another really
good place to go for keyword research. So when we approach these things
from a natural organic search standpoint, these are kinds of the things
that we're thinking about. This isn't a very good model for PPC, right,
because you're talking about really exhausting everything that people are
using to find your site; using negative keywords and things like that.
That's a much more in depth keyword research exercise. This is really more
to give you an idea of, "What should I be writing? What should I be talking
about? How should I be engaging my users, to make sure that they're coming
to my site through those queries on Google and Bing?"