To get a sense for the potential value of keywords in a certain niche, we need to do more than just look at the number of searches those keywords get each month. In today's Whiteboard Friday, Rand explains what else we should be looking at, and how we can use other data to prioritize some groups over others.
For reference, here's a still of this week's whiteboard. Click on it to open a high resolution image in a new tab!
Video transcription
Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week I want to chat about how you can estimate the total volume and value of a large set of keywords in a market or a niche.
Look, we're going to try and simplify this and reduce it to something that is actually manageable, because you can go way, way deep down a well. You could spend a year trying to figure out whether Market A or Market B is better to enter or better to chase keywords in, better to create content in. But I want to try and make it a little simple without reducing it to something that is of no value whatsoever, which unfortunately can be how some marketers have looked at this in the past.
Asian noodle keywords
So let's try this thought exercise. Let's say I'm a recipe site or a food site and I'm thinking I want to get into the Asian noodles scene. There's a lot of awesome Asian noodles out there. I, in fact, had Chow fun for lunch from Trove on Capitol Hill. When you come to MozCon, you have to try them. It's awesome.
So maybe I'm looking at Chow fun and sort of all the keyword sets around those, that Chinese noodle world. Maybe I'm looking at pad Thai, a very popular Thai noodle, particularly in the U.S., and maybe Vietnamese rice noodles or bun. I'm trying to figure out which of these is the one that I should target. Should I start creating a lot of pad Thai recipes, a lot of Chow fun recipes? Should I go research one or the other of these? Am I going to chase the mid and long tail keywords?
I'm about to invest a large amount of effort and really build up a brand around this. Which one of these should I do?
Side note, this is getting more and more important as Google is moving to these topic modeling and sight specific, topic authority models. So if Google starts to identify my site as being an authority on Chow fun, I can expect to rank for all sorts of awesome stuff around it, versus if I just kind of dive in and out and have one-offs of Chow fun and 50 different other kinds of noodles. So this gets really important.
The wrong way to look at AdWords data
A massively oversimplified version, that a lot of people have done in the past, is to look broadly at kind of AdWords groups, the ones that AdWords selects for you, or individual keywords and say, "Oh, okay. Well, Chow fun gets 22,000 searches a month, Pad Thai gets 165,000, and rice noodles, which is the most popular version of that query -- it could also be called Vietnamese noodles or bun noodles or something like that -- gets 27,000. So there you go, one, two, three.
This is dead wrong. It's totally oversimplified. It's not taking into account all the things we have to do to really understand the market.
First off, this isn't going to include all the variations, the mid and long tail keywords. So potentially there might be a ton of variations of rice noodles that actually add up to as much or more than pad Thai. Same thing with Chow fun. In fact, when I looked, it looked like there's a ton of Chow fun modifications and different kinds of things that go in there. The Pad Thai list is a little short. It's like chicken, vegetable, shrimp, and beef. Pretty simplistic.
There's also no analysis of the competition going on here. Pad Thai, yeah it's popular, but it also has 50 recipe sites all bidding for it, tons of online grocers bidding for it, tons of recipes books that are bidding on that. I don't know. Then it could be that Chow fun has almost no competition whatsoever. So you're really not considering that when you look in here.
Finally, and this can be important too, these numbers can be off by up to 200% plus or minus this number. So if you were to actually bid on Chow fun, you might see that you get somewhere in the 22,000 impressions per month, assuming your ad consistently shows up on page one, but you could see as little as 11,000. I've seen as much as 44,000, like huge variations and swings in either direction and not always totally consistent between these. You want them to be, but they're not always.
A better process
So because of that, we have to go deeper. These problems mean that we have to expend a little more energy. Not a ton. It doesn't have to be massive, but probably a week or two of work at least to try and figure this out. But it's so important I think it's worth it every time.
1) Keyword research dive
First off, we're going to conduct a broad keyword research dive into each one of these. Not as much as we would do if we knew, hey, Chow fun is the one we're going to target. We're going to go deep. We're going to find every possible keyword. We're going to do kind of what I call a broad dive, not a deep dive into each market. So I might want to go, hey, I'm going to look at the AdWords suggestions and tally those up. I'm going to look at search suggest and related searches for some of the queries that I get from AdWords, some of the top ones anyway, and I'm going to do a brief competitive analysis. Maybe I'll put the domains that I'm seeing most frequently around these specific topics into SEMrush or another tool like that -- SpyFu, Key Compete or whatever your preference might be -- and see what other terms and phrases they might be ranking on.
So now I've got a reasonable set. It probably didn't take me more than a few hours to put that together, if that. If I've got an efficient process for this already, maybe even less.
2) Bid on sample keyword sets
Now comes the tricky part. I want you to take a small sample set, and we've done this a few times. Random might be not the right word. It's a small considered set of keywords and bid on them through AdWords. When I say "considered," what I mean is a few from the long tail, a few from the chunky middle, and a few from the head of the demand curve that are getting lots and lots of searches. Now I want to point each of those to some new, high-quality pages on your site as a test.
So I might make maybe one, two, or three different landing pages for each of these different sets. One of them might be around noodles. One might be around recipes. One might be around history or uses in cuisine or whatever it is.
Then I am going to know from that exercise three critically important things. I'm going to know accuracy of AdWords volume estimates, which is awesome. Now I know whether these numbers mean anything or not, how far off they were or not. I could probably run for between 10 and 15 days and get a really good sense for the accuracy of AdWords. If you're feeling like being very comprehensive, run for a full month, especially if you have the budget, because you can learn even more over time, and you'll rule out any inconsistencies due to a particular spike, like maybe The New York Times recipe section features Chow fun that week and suddenly there's a huge spike or whatever it is.
You can also learn relative price competition in click-through rate. This is awesome. This means that I know it costs a lot more per visitor that I'm trying to get on pad Thai. There are two really good things to know there. When a click costs more money, that also usually means there are more advertisers willing to pay for that traffic.
If you're primarily on the organic side and you believe you can compete with the folks in the organic ranking, a very high bid price and payment price that you have to pay to AdWords is a good thing.
If you're on the other side of that, where you think, "Hey, look, we're not going to compete organically right now. We just don't have the domain authority to do it. It's going to take us a while," then a high price is a bad thing. You want that cheaper traffic so you can start to build up that brand through paid as you're growing the organic side. So it really depends on who you are and what situation you're in.
Then finally you can figure out some things around click-through rate as well, which is great to know. So you can build some true model estimates and then go into your board meeting or your client pitch or whatever it is and say, "Hey, here are the numbers."
Lastly, you're going to learn the difficulty of content creation, like how hard was it for you to create these kinds of things. Like, "Wow, when we write about Chow fun, it's just easy. It just rolls off. Pad Thai we have a really hard time creating unique value because everything has been done in that world. We're just not as passionate about those noodles as we are about Chow fun." Cool. Great, you know that.
Also, assuming your test includes this, which it doesn't always have to, you can guess from sort of engagement rate, browse rate, time on site, all those kinds of things, but you can look at search conversion as well. So let's say you have some action to complete on the page -- subscribe to our email newsletter, sign up to get updates when we send them out about this recipe, or create an account so you can sign in and save this recipe. All that kind of stuff or a direct ecommerce conversion, you can learn that through your bidding test.
3) Analyze groups based on relevant factors
Awesome. That's great. Now we really, really know something. Based on that, we can do a true analysis, an accurate analysis of the different groups based on:
- Relative value
- Difficulty
- Opportunity
- Growth rate
- ROI
Growth rate might be an interpreted thing, but you can look at the Google trends to kind of figure out over time whether a broad group of terms is getting more or less popular. You could use something like Mention.net or Fresh Web Explorer from Moz to look at mentions as well.
Now, you can be happy here. I might have chosen chow fun because I looked and I said, "Hey, you know what, it did not have the most volume overall, but it did have the lightest competition, the highest return on investment. We were great at creating the content. We were able to engage our visitors there, had lots of mid and long tail terms. We think it's poised for big growth with the growth of Chinese noodles overall and the fact that the American food scene hasn't really discovered Chow fun the way they have Vietnamese noodles and pad Thai. So that is where we're placing our bet."
Great. Now you have a real analysis. You have numbers behind it. You have estimates you can make. This process, although a little heavy, is going to get you so much further than this kind of simplistic thinking.
All right, everyone, I look forward to hearing from you about how you've done analyses like these in the past, and we'll see you again next week for another edition of Whiteboard Friday. Take care.
Great great WBF. And since I scratched my head many times trying to figure out how to conduct this type of research myself, a few more things to add:
1. As far as competition goes, it pays a lot to understand what type of content they are creating. If it is subpar, entering the niche is rather easy to decide. So you can use BuzzSumo, or even Social Bakers.
2. Figuring out the scope of the industry, you can even get a rough estimate of the number of influential people, courtesy of FollowerWonk.
3.Similar Web can paint a more vivid picture of what traffic looks like and how are the big players comparing to one another. You can get information about how the traffic circulates (direct, social, search, referral, and moreover the most used social channels, referral sites etc.
4. Way Back Machine. It can help a lot. I've used it to see Wait But Why homepage a year back, only to discover that their e-mail subscribers were 44k as opposed to 160k now. This can, in some instances, help you gauge the scope of both the industry and your competitors as well.
5. Impersonal.me can help you estimate the SERPs in different locations, and what percentage of SERP real estate are competitors holding abroad.
6. Doing a simple Facebook page search, and looking for suggested similar pages and their fan count as well as engagement can also shed some light as well.
7. One more thing about competitors- it helps to do a search of their brand names, and see how they fare in Google Keyword Tool- an overall increase in brand names speaks volumes about a competitor.
8. Browsing affiliate networks for products within the niche. The more there are, the better. If there is a large number of products, it means that people are buying, and in turn that the market is of decent size.
And you are right about watching an eye on offline factors as well. We created a site a while back, trying to rank for everything connected with a small country in the Balkans. Seeing how the government was already spending a lot of money advertising on CNN, it was a good clue that market was to grow. And it did.
Slavko, Rand,
When doing this research, you're looking for a measure of relevance -- i.e. how relevant are the topics pad thai, chow fun and rice noodles to what your target audience is looking for.
Right now, this research is basically done manually -- you can compare competitors or look at keyword volume and other metrics, but you're still making a determination around relevance in your head.
For more, check out a blog post I wrote about this last year: https://blog.marketmuse.com/2014/06/12/why-topical-...
Disclaimer: I co-founded a company that makes machine learning tools to help marketers measure relevance.
Best,
Aki
Agree that testing with Paid Search always gives great insights!!!
Agree that testing with Paid Search always gives great insights however is not always possible due to time and budget constraints.
I very much liked the tip of expanding on broader terms and personally I spent time evaluating:
After I scored these I then decided the niche to focus on.
People tend to focus on big terms but they often forget how valuable and powerful a niche can be. We managed to launch an eCommerce site starting from a single niche piece of content (literally one page focusing on a niche that presented poor competition in term of content). That helped to generate the initial traffic, build the foundation of the brand and now we are expanding into new product categories. Initially the content was the only page that use to generate organic traffic now eComm product pages that are starting to rank as well.
Totally agree - being focused in a niche is also much easier for branding and for customer targeting in a lot of ways. As long as you've got enough opportunity to grow the business (or the market itself is growing), it's a very smart way to start.
Yet...! again a great whiteboard. I am surprise how the search volume can fluctuate. Surprising for me.
Thanks Rand. This was an excellent article/video. Very, very informative.
But should't we establish first what type of keywords we are going to target.
Normally people divide keywords in 4 types.
1) Informational: good for branding but very hard to monetize. ( I suspect your article is primarily about this type of keywords)
2) Commercial: Those are related to a buyer’s intent to compare, thus helping him to evaluate choices and pick the best solution. If you asked me what is the #1 keyword research mistake my answer would be 'not spending enough time on commercial intent and focusing on search volume'.
3) Navigational: The customer already know your company or products you are offering and just want to find the correct Internet address by typing in your brand name. Will help a lot if I already know Trove on Capitol Hill when visiting Seattle :-)
4) Transactional: Often used at the very end of the buying funnel. Similar to 'commercial' keywords but with a twist - people use the exact name of the product. For example 'Buy Nike Air Max 2015' is a transactional intent compare to just 'Buy running shoes' which can be classified as 'commercial'.
Now armed with all that knowledge I can see us "taking into account all the things we have to do to really understand the market".
I think adding those to your keyword consideration set when prioritizing is a great idea, but they wouldn't necessarily need to come into play for estimating an overall market size. After all, even if terms are branded for your competitors, that's an indication of market/size opportunity - it may be harder to get those visitors through search (or even impossible), but if you can reach them through other means - social, email, word of mouth, ads, etc - you still have growth potential, which is what an exercise like this is trying to target.
I learned Omi's lesson personally a long time ago when I was evaluating niche markets to get into. I looked at the overall market interest and competition through the first two steps you outlined above Rand. But, by not segmenting them into "informational" and "commercial" intent buckets, I lost a lot of time and money building a good starter site that attracted a good amount of visits, but never made any money. People came for the information, not to buy.
Not mentioning keyword difficulty tool in keyword analysis process is unfair. I used to list competitive keywords via SEMRush and then check competition through keyword difficulty tool as this process help me to sort out low competitive keywords with low CPC to test via Adwords.
Yes it is necessary to check the authenticity of Adwords suggested searches by paid campaign as it will clarifies the exact figure of searches and let you know the value of keyword, so that you can make a decision will it worth to optimize the keyword organically or not.
Tip: I always use exact match type to check the keyword value and searches and run the campaign for at-least a week. This will cover up the week trends.
In a nutshell, the process is time-consuming but its worth it. Finally, Thanks Rand for clarifying the steps and making it so simple for us (y)
Thanks! I'm working with the team on a bigger, better version of KW Difficulty, due out late this year :-) Hopefully you'll find it even more useful for this type of stuff.
Welcome Rand, Waiting to use a better version of KW Difficulty tool.
Yes, Always useful.
Are there any updates on when the bigger, better version of the KW Difficulty tool will be released? It's 2016 now!
IMO I find that in today's SEO environment you are better off building the overall authority of the websites VS taking the time to go after long tail terms. In the long run you will be better off. You can definitively prepare for the LT as far as on page SEO but build up your authority and the LT through SEO will come.
If your strictly doing PPC then sure go for the long tail terms because it only takes a second to build a list.
Historically the Adwords tool has been way off even after G, "fixed it". How many times have you ranked 1st in organic only to wonder hey where is all that traffic?!?
Asian Food ... blah gimme steak and potatoes lol
Go Big or Go Home!
Happy Friday
You just need to get out to Seattle and try Trove's Noodle Bar. Never again shall you say "blah" about noodles :-) Actually, there's probably 20 places you could go in Seattle to have that reaction. Phnom Penh Noodle House, Fu Lin, Samurai Noodle, In the Bowl... the list just keeps going. I guess Seattle's just a noodley wonderland.
In terms of putting together content for the long tail vs. building authority - why not do both? If you're doing content right, then you're earning shares and links and brand searches and all sorts of other positive ranking signals that are boosting your site's authority. IMO content shouldn't be produced unless you have a great answer to "who will share this and why?" - and if you've got that, you're growing authority every time you publish.
You can certainly go after both at the same time. I like calling it SEOing front to back or back to front. some times I will try working it both ways at the same time. I decide on which way to go in the SEO Plan. For me It really is a case by case choice depending on first is it a new or seasoned website? what is the competition like? what are the clients goals? ROI obviously plays a role in the method you attack it.
The questions "who will share this and why?"are super important if you can't make a couple of notes on who and why then you need to rethink the content piece. Almost like looking at a landing page when you question each word choice and image on the page and what do they mean. At least with a PPC landing page you can get the results rather quickly and do A/B testing.
Man my diet is really poor. I eat Waaaay to much meat but I really don't like veggies (Its a texture thing) and when I think of Asian food I think of the clever way they hide the veggies.
The meat might taste awesome and then BOOM a Veggie appears... yea I have eaten like a half dozen salads in my life my insides are just a picture of health I am sure.. lol
Amazing article, thanks Rand. This is a great method you have devised, thanks for sharing it with us.
Again very useful! We had this question a few times from some of our clients and it is hard to give them trustworthy advice. This guide can help us in the future.
Rand, your posts are always useful. Can anyone please give me some tips to optimize www.tamrakarfurniture.com ?
Is it good to re-direct a domain to another (for seo)?
As a website developer I totally agree that keywords are important however my advise is that if you totally focus on SEO for your site you will lose focus on writing good content for your website audience. Indirectly, if you concentrate on writing good content for your audience, you will be optimising your site anyway. I will be writing an article on this on my website this week www.creatourwebsite.com
Exceptional post Rand... Im quite fond of using campaigns to establish a baseline medium for a keyword group and filtering the group by perceived intent as to target phrases with the greatest conversion potential...
Hi Rand
Thanks for another great whiteboard Friday.
I really like this approach to estimating the value of keywords. In the beginning we really had time telling some of our clients that some keywords was worth working for even though they monthly search volume wasn't as high.
But since we started to estimating the ROI on a keyword its seemed easier to get customers to take low traffic keywords into consideration.
I like your "Digg deeper" approach and taking the time to really get a clear picture - Just because googles getting better at understanding topics on a site doesn't allow you to get lazy.
I am looking for new ways to "estimating the value of keywords". I know some companies make calculation based on volume, difficulty, opputunity and CPC. But i would really love to see different models that can be put into use.
This is the most helpful post I've read on content creation around relevant keyword research in a long time - thanks for your input, Rand!
My sound disappears at 1,3 and then re-appears at 7,17...
Hi, thanks a lot for this process!
It would be very nice from Moz to get some kind of "keyword planner" tool, this way we would be able to:
This is a mix between keyword difficulty, buzzsumo, adwords keyword planner and sem rush....
But it would be sooooooo much handyyy :)
Best, keep your whiteboard friday, it rocks!
Hi Rand, Guessing total value and volume for keywords can be much easier than you think. If want to estimate value and volume for a specific category, you need to make sure that you go beyond simply assessing the amount of searches the keywords receive on a monthly basis. It's extremely important to evaluate various other key factors. You should first make sure that you're viewing AdWords details in a smart and effective manner. It's also important to locate any and all existing keywords that might relate to your specific market. Assessing groups by considering pertinent components can also help greatly. Doing so can pave the way for an honest analysis that takes ROI (return on investment), rate of growth, opportunity, difficulty and relative value into consideration. Viewing patterns and trends on Google can help you figure out if a category of terms may be on its way out. It can also help you figure out if a category of terms is, on the other hand, becoming even stronger and more powerful.
Good post!! Thanks!!
Rand. Great job making keyword research understandable. Although, now I'm hungry. LOL
Thanks for all your fantastic education over the years. I know you've helped me and many other professionals better understand the world of online marketing. Happy Holidays to you and all followers.
Rand, your points from min 2-4 are items many "SEOs" forget to inform their clients and/or potential clients. You touch on the many aspects of actual keyword research, and not going the over-simplified approach of Google Keyword Planner, entering in some keywords, grabbing the monthly search volume into an XLS file and showing the client as that's what they can expect. So many small businesses want to know what it will take... when you show them a large number they get excited, they make a quick decision, and then are surely let down.
Your points of digging deeper is spot on. We have to show them the search volume, yes, BUT you also have to look at all of the variations and mid-long tail keywords and not to mention what the competition looks like in the SERPs. What are they doing in their site(s)? In their content? In their links? In their keyword selection? etc...
This is a more technical approach to keyword research, but nonetheless, every person wanting to get into SEO or content marketing should watch and take notes. Thanks for the great information! - Patrick
It was true information. If we comes on real ROI so it is all about good for startups.
I have been observing one of our website grow for 1 year now. We never paid any Google ads for it, but spend more time creating articles around its vertical niche. We are in the international removals industry which has a very expensive keyword CPC from $13 to $50. Nevertheless, we followed the organic and ethical way and was able to rank in mid and long term tails, gotten a few closed leads both ranked pages and social media. I would say focus on the content + engagement - "for who and who will share it". Topic is very helpful. Thanks Rand.
Would most likely utilising exact same suit end up one way to evaluate a lot of these search terms?
Great WBF as usual Rand, just want to add a few more to your amazing idea. We can also use the keywords in the suggestions panels at the bottom of SERPs and can start building things from there. These keywords are usually long tail and they are based on users' intent.
Yes. It's another great post of yours. But you only mentioned about google adwords tools & SEMrush for keyword research. I think you missed keywordspy. It's another great tool for keyword research.
So much to read and understand in this post...thanks Rand!!!
Towards the beginning you mentioned "Google is moving to these topic modeling and sight specific, topic authority models" Im working on an e-commerce site and they want to start a Blog on specific products.
Would this fall under that category and could it give us more "domain authority" ???
Potentially, although it's more authority around a particular set of keywords/concepts than raw domain authority like we think of what Wikipedia or NYTimes having. Check out this Whiteboard Friday for more.
Thank you! That helped a lot. I think the biggest hurdle I will come across is gaining the links themselves. The company is a former mom and pop store that blew up rather quickly.
Interesting article, many people do not work the Long Tails when you are many times we can bring good traffic to our website.
regards
Great keyword information in digging in deeper...like a well you want to make sure you are not taking contaminated water out!
I agree with you Ginny.
Rand,
You come in right time with the perfect topic. :-)
I'm working for one of the UK based client and most of the keywords are in top 10 position having good search volume. Unfortunately, the site isn't driving a desired traffic.
Do you think that having a high search volume keywords drives good traffic?
I'm sure that your post gonna be a fruitful strategy for me.
p.s: The estimated search volume are based on Google keywords planner.
High search volume doesn't necessarily correlate with quality traffic - the best way to test that is, as I mentioned in the video, to buy some AdWords against it and test.
Hey Rand,
Implementing a semantic relation for an entity is only added thing I would like to add. No doubt, for projects which are into both SEO and AdWords, a lot of insight can be gained and implemented, as you mentioned. But now that Google is focused more on topical relevance and semantic relation also come into play, we should be focusing on those too. What do you think?
Sure - I think that could be interesting. Do you have any great sources for how to broaden from a keyword to an entity and then find the associated keywords (beyond mental brainstorming)?
Hi Rand,
I usually do abit analysis from Google auto-suggests and Grep Keyword tools. Filtering those queries and separation each query further into individual words out of those phrases. I would also quote one awesome recent post from John Gritton over searcher intent figuring process: https://adwords.cobnut.net/2015/06/understanding-ev...
I still haven't found any tool to do this but it's all an analysis in Excel. I think this is the ultimate future when it comes to link building.
Rand, first thing that came to my mind was! You are reading my mind when it comes to topics for the WBF. The team is right on it! With that said. I added another step to filter the keywords into informational and purchase intent (some industries or services I think can have better accuracy by doing that). In my case that gave me a good understanding on the topics for content creation that can be posted to inform users rather sell to them. What do you think about adding this step?
Yeah - I think it can add value for prioritization to filter into transactional vs. informational, etc. Omi Sido's comment above was very good on that front. However, as I noted in my response to him, that's probably something you want to save for the keyword prioritization process vs. the broader opportunity analysis I'm talking about here.
Hi Rand,
Great WBF! Doing some research before writing and creating content safes a bunch of time and frustration in the longrun. Another great thing you noticed was; 'picking your battles'; Does the web site have enough DA to focus on the generic keywords or should we focus on niches instead (and increase DA over time).
Clients (and some 'experts') often focus too much on high Monthly search volumes and forget competitions is fierce on these keywords. Result: Nothing to show for after months of work....
I think it's best to order keywords. So proces can be monitored and projects become manageable for Clients. SEO often has to grow inside businesses as well;
1) Quick win; Niche keywordlist -> Focus right now.
2) Generic keywordlist -> Future focus (strategy & keep track of competition)
Off Topic: Please update the Copyright footer to 2015 :)
Totally agree that when doing keyword prioritization (which was the topic of last week's Whiteboard Friday), adding in difficulty and comparing that against what you can rank for makes a lot of sense. However, when doing the estimation of broad opportunity, difficulty's less important because you're simply trying to figure out what's available.
This analysis seems to favour volume as a determinant of campaign direction? It is a good second step video but the mistake I see pupils making is not properly framing what it is they are promoting to begin with. In fact you do touch on this at the end of the video. A pad thai book at 80 bucks with a 10% commission soon adds up even if search volume is under 1,000.
Great post today, Rand! Your Whiteboard Fridays are equally informative and entertaining. Couldn't agree more with your route map here. We (at the agency) usually go through the same motions more or less. Just yesterday we were looking in awe at the KWD tool suddenly estimating huge keyword traffic, talk about 200% deviation! Much larger than anything we know it to be (we know those keywords). The unsettling factor is that keyword estimates are a fluent concept. Yet, I really believe that search traffic should be much more predictable (aside of breaking news and possibly trends suddenly picking up). In light of Google Trends releasing hourly traffic estimates, would that change the 1 month time frame that you habitually look at?
Great post Rand! Liked the bit about using test PPC ads to verify those Adwords Keyword Planner nutty volume numbers.
Another thing you might mention is that with Google's improved ability to see and understand topics (vs. keywords and synonyms), you might expect a much flatter bell curve in terms of what terms can drive how much traffic to your site. For a particularly effective page on my travel site, my top term is only generating 8% of the overall traffic (out of 14,000 visits/month to that page), and it drops off steeply from there, with only about a dozen or so terms contributing > 1%.
Oh, and clearly you're now "in the pocket" of the Chow Fun lobbyists. :-p
I am your great fan and i always follow your white board for improving my seo knowledge. In this post you explained about choosing right keywords and this is very necessary before starting seo for any website. When i started my website then i found that this website is not performing me on the domain keyword but after doing right keywords research and i used your tips now it is in good ranking. I usually take help from google webmaster for finding right keywords after initial optimization. Is this right practice for promotion.
Would using exact match be the best way to judge these keywords?
As Rand said, you are trying to get the volume of a topic vs another so using broad is the way to go as he mentioned.
Depends on what you're trying to determine. You might want to use broad match if you're aiming to know the full scope of volume around a topic. But, as you dig in and get more detailed keywords, having exact match could be helpful, too, particularly for the keyword prioritization process.
I agree with you and I dont use broad.
Great read, always looking for more to learn when it comes to keyword research, never heard of mention though, it's a pitty they don't have a simple free trial version.
That's an interesting approach, and a wonderful example of how PPC could benefit SEO and vice versa.
When I do keyword research I start with the approach offered by Jon Ball from Page One Power. They use relevancy trees for links and I implemented that approach for keyword research.
So Step 1: I identify the central theme of the website.
Step 2: I use various tools like the ones you mentioned, plus Scrapebox, Ubersuggest, etc to build the mind map of the subtopics, coming from the central theme.
Step 3: I go to Google and paste some of the subtopics into Google and see what articles pop up, like How to articles, long tail questions, etc. These keywords will be used to build articles answering these long tails search queries.
Step 3a: I also cluster some of the keywords into bucket lists to bulld topic pages.
That's it.
Slightly off topic but this came to mind: have you ever done a WBF on PBNs? That's something I'd like to see personally, or even a series.
Thanks for the suggestion. It's not a tactic I'd encourage anyone to use or participate in, but maybe can do a warning about it in a future video.
I'd be interested in hearing why you feel that way. It seems to be "the thing" these days, and while I can see the "dark arts" part of it, if you created sites that had quality content, helped folks and were related to your main site (aka a set of real sites), is that still bad?
Again a great whiteboard Friday post.
Nice blog...thanks for the post...itz really helpful!!!!
I really totally agree with you!
Thanks for sharing this!
nice post rand. i realy enjoyed and get the benefit.