YouTube has 2 billion active monthly users who watch over 1 billion hours of content on the platform every single day. With content coming in at that volume, it gives a more accurate sense of scale to think of any individual video not as a person shouting amidst a crowd, but as a single grain of sand on a beach. It’s not a perfect analogy, because grains of sand on the beach are not individually identifiable, searchable, or able to be organized and catalogued. YouTube videos are.

That doesn’t mean that it’s in a marketer’s best interest to have an “if we build it, they will come” mentality on YouTube. Content creators and marketers who publish video to YouTube sometimes assume that the most interesting content is naturally selected by the algorithm and pushed to the front page, to be rewarded with millions of views by some combination of timing, luck, and merit. But considering the sheer scale of content available on YouTube, it’s a bit more useful for our purposes to think of YouTube as the largest video library archive ever to have existed. The key to getting more views on YouTube videos isn’t to be special enough or loud enough to get noticed in the throng. Rather, the key is to tag your content with lots of detail-rich identifying information, making it searchable in the catalogue for viewers who are already looking for videos like yours.

YouTube is a search engine

Does this sound really similar to the SEO principles that get websites to rank on Google? That’s because it is. YouTube is a search engine for video, which means that videos can be optimized to perform better by making them easier to search for.

This post is a primer on how YouTube tags, catalogues, and recommends videos to their users, and how you can use those features as tools to help you set your video up for success. This assumes, of course, that generating more views on your videos is a part of your strategy. Many people use YouTube as a convenient hosting platform for their videos to embed to their own websites and social feeds, and attracting viewers on YouTube isn’t a priority for them. That’s a perfectly legitimate way to use the platform. We’re going to focus on how to optimize video content that is intended to attract new viewers and broaden your audience, and the technical steps needed to do it.

Plan for the audience you want, then work backwards

To increase the views on your YouTube videos, you need to start by making it easy to find you for those already interested. You can only do that effectively when you know who those people are, and why they would want to see what you post. Starting there, you can work backwards to tag your video as likely to be relevant to them.

The benefit of posting to mega-networks like YouTube is that the audience is already there without you having to build it. But because of the sheer amount of video content offered, waiting for viewers to find your stuff serendipitously is unlikely to get you more than a handful of views and very little return for your investment. For your video content to be worth the cost and effort of producing it, you need to proactively plan your content and posting around the specific people you want to see it and marketing outcomes you want to achieve.

Check out Moz’s resources on audience targeting and content strategy if you’re just getting started on that. With those basic outcomes in mind, you can start working backwards to determine what metrics you’ll need to watch to gauge your success, and how you’ll structure your content to get there.

A refresher on YouTube analytics

YouTube Studio Video Analytics, Overview, from “Relics from a Lost Future (Full Album 2021) [INSTRUMENTAL POST ROCK]” courtesy of Undercover Rabbis.

Before we take a deeper dive into YouTube keywords, it’s important to define the different KPIs that we use to measure the success of videos. In simplest terms, they’re the stats on your video that tell you whether your plan for video marketing is working or not. They include:

Watch time: This KPI measures the total amount of minutes a viewer spends watching your content. Content and channels that have longer watch times are elevated by YouTube in the recommendations and search results. A low average watch time can indicate that your viewers are getting bored or that your video is too long to hold their interest.

Retention rate: This is the percentage of audience members who stay to watch the video all the way through compared to those who leave before it’s over. The YouTube platform favors videos with high retention rates, judging them to be more likely to be relevant and recommending them to more viewers.

YouTube Video Analytics (under Overview) from “Bosses Hang (Godspeed You! Black Emperor Cover)” courtesy of Undercover Rabbis.

Engagement: This refers to the actions that viewers take beyond just watching the video, like taking the time to comment, like, share, subscribe, or bookmark for later. Engagement is often the most important metric for marketers to track, because it tells you how many people are interested enough in your content to take further action. Comments can paint a clear picture of how your content affected viewers. Shares gauge how much viewers value your video and your brand, and are crucial to growing a following. Likes and dislikes can help you evaluate what content did or did not work, and it further indicates to YouTube what content is likely to be high quality when recommending videos in users’ feeds.

Thumbnails: The thumbnail is the picture of your video that appears with the title on a results page or link. It provides a sneak peek of the content you’re sharing to help the viewer decide whether to watch it or not. A thoughtfully crafted thumbnail is easy to make and can have a big impact on how many viewers will ultimately choose to click and watch your video.

Title keywords: The keywords you use in your video title tells YouTube what’s in it, and helps guide viewers to your content when they search for similar words or phrases.

Re-watches: This metric measures the number of times viewers re-watch particular parts of your video. If there is a high re-watch rate, viewers are likely interested and invested in the topics you’re covering, and might want to know more. This can be useful for strategizing and planning future content.

Demographics: These stats account for the different types of viewers who are watching your content, segmented by gender, age, and geography.

It’s important to understand what these YouTube metrics are meant to measure. They all play an important part in your video rankings on both YouTube and Google, so it’s prudent to implement some basic best practices to keep these stats out of the gutter, as we’ll outline below. However, it’s important to keep your focus on the end goals, and not just chase the stats. Good metrics are to be used as indicators of your progress, not the goal in and of itself.

How Google ranks YouTube videos

YouTube views don’t only come from people already logged on to YouTube. Google is also a huge driver to your YouTube videos. Google needs to understand the content of your video in order to include it in search results. Google ranks YouTube content in the following ways:

• Crawling the video and extracting a preview and thumbnail to show the user

• Extracting meta tags and page texts from your video descriptions to tell the user more about the video’s content

• Analyzing the video sitemap or structured data to determine relevance

• Extracting audio to identify more keywords

Keywords aren’t pulled just from the text attached to your video in the descriptions and tags -- they can also be pulled from the audio itself. This is why including the right keywords in your video script will help boost the video’s rankings on Google.

Choosing keywords is about relevance, not volume

This begs the question: what, then, are the “right” keywords? A better question might be: what makes a keyword the right one? Let’s return to the “YouTube is like an enormous library archive” analogy for a moment. If only making noise and getting noticed mattered, then the right keywords would be the ones that get the most search volume to attract the most viewers. But like we said, YouTube is too saturated a platform to count on viral spread. Search engines don’t really think in terms of “best and worst” videos to make their rankings. (Search engines don’t really think at all, but that’s a topic for another day.) Search engines are designed to identify “what video is best for this particular viewer, in this particular instance?” That’s not a question of volume or popularity. That’s a question of relevance.

It is rarely going to be an effective marketing goal to merely seek out lots and lots of viewers regardless of who they are. Most campaigns are better served by a smaller group of highly engaged fans than by millions of lukewarm passive viewers. If you spend all of your focus optimizing your content for Google’s bots, high volume and low engagement is what you’re likely to get. If you want to build a meaningful fan base, then you must build your content for the people watching it, not just the search engines ranking it.

Defining your audience and their needs

You must have a clear idea of who you are trying to address with your YouTube content if you want to know what to say to them. Defining your target audience first will make the SEO optimization process more goal directed and specific.

Identifying and defining your target audience can start with the motivations behind their video searches. Some common motivations include:

YouTube Studio Channel Dashboard courtesy of Undercover Rabbis.

I want to know: The user wants to learn more about a specific topic they’ve already identified. They’re likely to be interested in tutorials, how-to’s, and explainer videos.

I want to do: The viewer has a specific action already in mind that they want to take, like planning a trip or exploring a new hobby. They might watch videos either aspirationally or proactively, like vlogs for inspiration or travel guides for actionable tips.

I want to buy: The potential viewer is seeking information related to a specific product they want to purchase, including reviews or comparisons. They might look for unboxing videos, reviews from influencers, or product demos.

Understanding your audience, their pain points, and their purchase drivers is key to identifying which keywords can help guide those viewers to your YouTube videos. Keywords are the language viewers use to ask a search engine for specific content, which is why we often start with viewer intent and work from there. Jot down a few words or phrases that a viewer might use to describe what they want to see in your video. Think about both the featured topic (like “dogs” or “makeup” or “golf swing”) and format/genre (like “tutorial” or “vlog” or “Let’s Play” or “reacts”). List the relevant verbs, like “buy”, “play”, “learn”, “explain”, “explore”. By building out a word cloud like this, you’ll have a starting point for your keyword research.

Begin your keyword research with an autocomplete tool or competitor browsing

The simplest way to start the keyword research process is by playing around with a keyword tool (Moz offers a free Keyword Explorer,) or the search function right on YouTube and Google. Trying out some different searches that your audience is likely to make can give you insight into what your target audience is already searching for, what they’re interested in, and the specific words or phrases they use when they’re talking about it online.

Type one of your potential keywords into the search box. As you type, YouTube will suggest related popular searches — this is an autocomplete feature built right in. The Ubersuggest tool is also a good place to try this exercise, which will run through the alphabet for the first letter of the next word in your search phrase.

Gauging YouTube keyword search volume

It’s also good to know which of your keywords people search for most frequently. The free Google Trends application “YouTube search” option lets you compare potential keywords in your list to see which ones rank higher and appear in more searches. Keep in mind that higher search volume usually also means more competition to rank for that particular word or phrase.

You can also keep tabs on the keywords your competitors are using to compare to the ones on your list. Find channels within your niche that have a few thousand subscribers, and sort through the content using the “Most Popular” option. Click on the video with the highest number of views and make note of the keywords used in the title, tags, and description. This can show you which keywords might already be saturated in your market with high competition, or reveal gaps where there are opportunities to provide content.

Attaching keywords to your videos

YouTube Channel, Basic Info Keywords courtesy of SustainablePR.

When you’ve identified a list of high-value keywords, it’s time to put them to work. Here are all the places you can incorporate keywords when first posting your YouTube video:

Video file name: SEO optimization begins before you even upload the video. Include keywords prominently in the video file name.

Video title: The title should be punchy and concise. Think about what you would want to click on. Avoid using video titles longer than 70 characters, because they’ll get cut off on the search engine results page and thumbnails. Try to include the keyword towards the beginning of the title when you can.

Description: Many content creators make the mistake of only writing a couple of sentences in their video description. The more words your description has, the better. YouTube allows up to 5,000 characters for video descriptions, so be sure to utilize that real estate. Include strategically placed keywords, information about the video, an enticing hook, and a specific call to action.

Transcript: The video transcript, or caption, is another opportunity to include keywords because it provides additional text used by the platform’s ranking algorithm.

Tags: When tagging your video, include the top relevant keywords, the brand or channel name, and the more specific keyword phrases. Keep all tags under 127 characters. The more the merrier, as long as they are all relevant and concise. No one likes a bait and switch, and too broad a range of topics in your tags will signal to YouTube that your video isn’t strongly relevant to anything in particular at all.

Try audio keywords to get more traction

A unique way to include even more keywords in your video is to speak them in the video itself. Since Google and YouTube no longer need to crawl a transcript to understand what you’re saying, you can utilize audio keywords. Always try to include the keywords in the first two sentences you speak in the video to keep your viewer retention rate up.

Bottom line: prioritize relevance over volume, and start with the viewer and work backwards

If you take nothing else away from this guide, know that a search engine like Google or YouTube has no concept of what “best” means. It cannot judge a video by merit, and it does not rank individual videos as being more or less worthy of views. Only the viewers can make value judgments like that. A search engine can only make determinations of relevance, and only using the keywords we give it, as compared to the keywords provided by the user when they perform a search.

The search engine only knows if it provided the right video for the right search by interpreting the actions the user takes next. If you give YouTube and Google plenty of keywords to parse by completely filling out your description, tags, titles, and transcripts, your video will be returned in more searches. If the viewer then leaves comments or subscribes to your channel after watching, YouTube’s algorithm concludes that your video was highly relevant, and returns you in more searches. It’s a relatively straightforward cause-and-effect relationship, not a mystical process.

Play around with some of the free SEO tools and Learning Center resources that Moz makes available, and see what you turn up. A little bit of effort, forethought, and consistency goes a long, long way when it comes to improving your performance on YouTube.

I bet you have, but this doesn’t mean you have a branded search optimization strategy.

Brand-driven search is so much more than URLs you see ranking for your brand name. It’s an ongoing process that will result in higher conversions and more predictable buying journeys.

Let’s start from the beginning.

What is branded search?

A branded (also referred to as brand-driven) search query is one that contains your brand or product name. Branded search includes search queries that include personal, brand-driven words, like your CEO or writers’ names.

Why should your branded search be your marketing priority?

There seems to be an obvious answer to this question. After all, great SEO starts with your brand, so branded SEO research should be any company’s priority. Yet, it’s quite unbelievable how many brands completely ignore search queries.

Branded search is crucial for several important reasons:

• Brand-driven search is usually high-intent: People who type your brand name in the search box want to either go straight to your site or research you before making a purchase.

• Branded search queries show which issues your current or future customers may be experiencing with your site or product.

• Brand-driven search is important to analyze in order to understand the online sentiment around your (and competing) brand.

• Finally (and obviously), any of those branded SERPs may influence buying decisions, which make them part of your sales funnel.

Like a branded hashtag, your branded SERPs don’t belong to you, and you can’t really control what people see there, unless you spend some time and effort optimizing for your own branded search.

How to research your branded search queries

Start with your immediate branded Google suggestions

What do people see when they just start typing your brand name into the search box?

Brand-driven Google suggestions should be your top priority for two important reasons:

• Google suggestions show what people search most as far as your brand is concerned. They’ve historically relied on the search frequency data, so the more people search for a particular phrase, the higher that phrase shows up in Google suggestions.

• Google suggestions may (and likely will) influence lots of your customers’ buying decisions. Think about someone typing your brand name in their mobile device address bar (in an effort to go directly to your site) and seeing “brand name alternatives” as a suggestion. What’s the chance that person will get curious enough to click that suggestion and discover your competitors? According to the recent study, Google searchers use one of Google’s suggestions 23% of the time. That’s almost a quarter of your customers who already know you enough to search for your name. Suddenly, you’re competing for the attention of someone who had been going directly to your site:

"This isn't even a search box. This is Safari's URL bar. Safari uses Google's top suggestions, which may steer your current or future customers to competitors."

Basically, this means that branded Google suggestions may influence your buyers’ decisions even when they aren’t really searching for anything.

I’m sure you’re wondering: Is there any way to change what Google shows when people are typing your brand name?

Unfortunately, no.

There’s no long-term way to somehow influence Google suggestions. Of course, you could try and hire an army of searchers to type some other combinations with your brand name to convince Google to include in those results. But even if it works, Google will remove that suggestion soon after you stop paying your army.

Another way to influence your branded suggestions is to go viral with some new product, report, or news. A quickly-rising search term is often included in those suggestions.

Yet, as soon as people stop searching for that query, the result will also be replaced with a different one.

That being said, chances are, you’ll need to deal with branded Google suggestion results as they are.

Types of branded Google suggestions

It’s amazing how often brands absolutely neglect their branded search suggestions. In fact, these as-you-type results may tell you a lot about your brand’s perception as well as your buyers’ journeys:

In our example, the brand’s domain ranks #1 only for four queries. All other branded suggestions are controlled by third-party domains:

Use keyword research tools

Your brand name is your most important keyword. You want people to search more for your brand as that helps you evaluate your marketing efforts and measure brand awareness. But you also want to make sure that your branded search results push those searchers further down your sales funnel instead of scaring them away for good.

Moz’s Keyword Explorer is perfect for that:

• It will pull a large variety of your branded search queries.

• It will show you the search volume for each query containing your brand name.

• It offers a few cool filters allowing you to play with your lists. For example, you can filter your search queries to questions or group them by lexical similarity.

Keep an eye on branded questions

Questions often get additional visibility in organic search because they often trigger featured snippets. Additionally, Google has a separate section for questions within search result pages called “People Also Ask”.

I like using questions as subheads of whatever content I’m working on. When phrased as questions, subheadings seem to draw readers in deeper into the page.

The three useful sources of branded keyword inspiration include:

1. Moz Keyword Explorer

Moz Keyword Explorer offers you an easy way to filter keyword lists by questions:

2. Google’s “People Also Ask”

Simply searching Google can give you some question inspiration. Keep an eye on those “People Also Ask” boxes and keep a record of questions that need your attention there. It’s also your goal to rank your answer for each one of those:

For larger brands with hundreds of branded search queries and questions, it would be easier to use tools like IMN’s Content Optimization tool that collects People Also Ask results for your most important queries (Disclaimer: This is the company I work for).

If you feel like playing some more, People Also Ask boxes may also give you some idea as to what Google considers relevant, as Google will show different follow-up questions based on a brand-driven question you click:

3. Text Optimizer

Finally, my go-to tool for just about any SEO task, Text Optimizer offers a separate section for questions that helps you better understand searching patterns of your audience:

Take note of these questions to include into your content marketing plan.

Group your keywords

Like with any keyword lists, yours will have several variants of one and the same idea, worded a little differently. This will be especially true for larger brands in broad niches that are searched a lot.

This is where Moz’s Keyword Explorer will turn helpful again. Take a look at your Google suggestion results and use keyword modifiers from there to group your list by a common word:

[These are essentially keyword phrases to use within a single article.]

You can also use Moz’s keyword grouping feature to discover more groups to focus on:

Finally, for every keyword you choose to work with, you can also run a SERP analysis to see high-ranking results as well as Google’s search elements:

How to optimize for your branded search

Identify where you currently stand

I’m an SEO, and any of my digital marketing strategies starts with ranking analysis. For this, Moz comes with a powerful rank tracking solution.

The tool I’m currently using is called SE Ranking, because I like how they save a cached snapshot of each monitored SERP every day. For branded search monitoring where I try and rank more than my own website for each query (more on that below), this close-up view of each SERP (and all saved records) is exactly what I need:

Group your branded search query groups by intent and further action

Above I mentioned that I group branded keywords by a common modifier or close semantic meaning, so my plan of action involves those groups rather than an individual query.

This makes the work much more doable because I usually have to deal with no more than 20 branded keyword groups instead of hundreds of individual search queries.

When making my plan, I always note:

• Search intent

• Further action, which largely relies on where my site currently ranks for each one

Your possible action item for each of identified branded keyword groups may be:

• Optimizing your existing page

• Creating a new page

• Publishing a blog post

• Adding a separate section to your FAQ page

• Covering it in your Knowledge Base

As you may know, I love using spreadsheets for just about anything because they make data so easy to organize, and can even be turned into a schedule, if need be.

I break [cost] and [price] into different groups because the search volume is so high for both, they each deserve an individual marketing plan.

Go above and beyond

When it comes to branded search, the more of each SERP you control, the better your odds are at winning those brand-aware searchers.

Besides, branded SERPs (just like any other SERP out there) are more than organic links. They often include videos, images, “People Also Ask” results, and more. It’s worth noting all those additional search elements in your spreadsheet as well:

So optimizing your own site for each of these keyword groups may not be enough. To incur your brand’s visibility throughout branded SERPs, you may need to:

• Create and optimize videos (as well as host them in more places, other than Youtube).

• Create and optimize images (as well as host them all over available channels, including Instagram, Pinterest, etc.)

• Create and publicize more diverse assets using content re-packaging

• Maintain more long-form, content-based channels, including Medium and LinkedIn, etc.

• Set up mini sites targeting some of your most popular branded queries (including coupons, reviews, etc.). Namify is a great tool to come up with cool domain names to register:

It’s a good idea to note additional assets to be created in your spreadsheet as well:

On top of that, it’s always a good idea to optimize for Google’s rich snippets to let your brand-owned search snippets stand out in search. Consider adding one of the following schema markup types to your brand-oriented content assets:

• FAQ schema for just about any page that answers more than two questions (this is where your question research will turn useful)

• HowTo for instructions

• Video schema if you have a video embedded

You also do want other departments of your company to be aware of some or many of those branded search queries. For example, navigational search queries may be a signal of some serious usability issues to be fixed, and some product-related queries may help you identify some product flaws to work on:

Interlink and monitor

Obviously, you still need links to rank all of your assets on top of branded SERPs, so it’s important to interlink your assets effectively, especially if you’re using more than your website to optimize for branded search.

• Use your website power to link to your third-party assets. This is the easiest to do. You can use your About page as well as your blog to send links to your other columns and channels to rank those higher.

• Don’t forget to link from video descriptions back to your site.

• Link all your channels together listing all your additional columns and accounts wherever possible..

Having to deal with so many channels and assets can be exhausting, but it is doable if you set up your monitoring routine right:

• Again, use a position monitoring platform to keep an eye on your positions.

• Use tools like LinkChecker to keep an eye on all the links and make sure you haven’t lost any.

• Keep an eye on your branded search traffic. Google Search Console is a free and easy way to do that. All you need is to limit your queries to your brand name and then compare that to the previous period to see if you are on the right track:

If Google is not the only search engine you’re interested in (for example, if you target Russian and Chinese markets), you can use Finteza, which gives aggregate traffic data from all search engines:

Conclusion

Branding comes with many benefits, including higher conversions and revenue. But it also comes with one challenge not many brands are prepared for: a fast-growing branded search. As more and more people are researching your brand online, you need to keep improving your branded search optimization strategy.

As such, optimizing for your branded search is an on-going effort (since we all hope your brand will keep growing), but hopefully the steps above will help clearly define and implement it.

The keywords you target should be relevant to your business and have the ability to increase organic traffic and drive conversions. But how do you determine which keywords are going to be of value?

In these Daily SEO Fix videos, we show you how you can use Moz’s keyword metrics to help you evaluate how much of an impact ranking for certain keywords will have.

If you’d like some more tips on analyzing keyword metrics with Moz Pro, you can book a one-on-one walkthrough with a member of our onboarding team. It’s a free, personalized call which will show you how to get the most out of Moz Pro.

Using keyword metrics to analyze a list of keywords

In this video, Emilie shows you how to find out the average monthly volume, difficulty score, organic CTR, and priority within a keyword list.

You can use this information to examine the overall keyword metrics for a specific topic area and to pinpoint the most common SERP features.

Importing CSV to Keyword Explorer

Keyword research often involves collating data from a variety of sources. For example, you may be using a spreadsheet from a client alongside your own keyword research.

The data you have gathered can be pieced together to give you a clearer understanding of the value and relevance of your keywords.

Maddie shows you how to import a CSV of your own keywords into Moz Pro. You can use them to create a keyword list or you can track them in your campaign.

Keyword Explorer: Advanced Exporting Tips

Exporting a keyword list from Keyword Explorer will allow you to analyze your keyword data in a spreadsheet.

In this Daily SEO Fix, Emilie will explain how you can filter and export a CSV of your keyword list and show you what insights you can take from it.

Advanced Google Sheets Metrics Look Up

In this video, Jo shows you how to merge keyword data from Moz Pro with your existing keyword data.

This can be particularly helpful if you’re using a variety of data sources to research keyword opportunities. Adding all of your keywords to a single spreadsheet makes it easier to organize and analyze them.

What we can agree on is that — due to Google’s advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) — the long tail of search has exploded. However, I will argue that NLP has also imploded the long tail, and understanding how and why may save our collective sanity.

What is the long tail of SEO, exactly?

The long tail of search is the limitless space of low-volume (and often low-competition) keywords. Tactically, long-tail SEO centers on competing for a large number of low-volume keywords instead of focusing on a small set of high-volume keywords.

Long-tail SEO encourages us to let go of vanity, because high-volume, so-called “vanity” keywords are often out of reach or, at best, will empty our bank accounts. Low-volume keywords may be less attractive on the surface, but as you begin to compete on hundreds or thousands of them, they represent more traffic and ultimately more sales than a few vanity keywords.

You’ve probably seen a graph of the long tail like the one above. It’s a perfectly lovely power curve, but it’s purely hypothetical. And while you may smile and nod when you see it, it’s hard to translate this into a world of keywords. It might help to re-imagine the long tail of SEO:

I’m not sure the “reclining snowman of SEO” is ever going to catch on, but I think it helps to illustrate that — while head keywords are high-volume by themselves — the combined volume of the long tail eclipses the head or the middle. Like the familiar curve, this visualization dramatically underestimates the true scope of the long tail.

What are long-tail keywords?

In the words of the ancient SEOs, “It doth depend.” Typically, long-tail keywords are low-volume, multi-word phrases, but the long-tail is relative to your starting point. Historically, any given piece of the long tail was assumed to be low-competition, but that’s changing as people realize the benefits of targeting specific phrases with clear intent (especially commercial intent).

Targeting “widgets” is not only expensive, but searcher intent is ambiguous. Targeting “buy blue widgets” narrows intent, and “where to buy Acme Widget LOL-42” laser-focuses you on a target audience. As searchers and SEOs adapt to natural language search, previously “long-tail” keywords may become higher volume and higher competition.

The long tail has exploded

Google has told us that 15% of the searches they see every day are new. How is this possible? Are we creating that many new words? That’s sus, bruh!

I can explain it to you in a very short story. The other day, my (half-Taiwanese) 10-year-old daughter couldn’t remember what her Chinese zodiac sign was, so she asked Google Home:

Hey, Google, what's the animal for the Chinese new year calendar thingy for 2010?

It’s easy to get hung up on the voice-appliance aspect of this, but whether or not you believe in the future of voice appliances, the reality is that voice search in general has driven the need for natural language search, and as Google becomes better at handling natural language, we’re reverting to using it more often (it’s our default mode). This is especially evident in kids, who never had to learn to dumb down their searches for antiquated algorithms.

How can we hope to target keyword phrases that are literally evolving as we speak? Fortunately, NLP cuts both ways. As Google understands context better, the algorithm recognizes that many variations of the same phrase or question are essentially the same. Which leads us to...

The long tail has imploded

Back in 2019, I did a keyword research case study at SearchLove London on UK mega-retailer, John Lewis. In my research, I was surprised to see how many searches Google was automatically redirecting. There’s the obvious, like Google assuming that people who searched for “Jon Lewis” in the UK probably meant “John Lewis” (sorry, Jon):

It’s interesting to note that Google has gradually, quietly moved from the previously more prevalent “Did you mean?” to the more assertive (some might say aggressive) “Showing results for…” In this case, optimizing for Jon Lewis in the UK is probably pointless.

I expected a rabbit hole, but I landed in a full-on bunny chasm. Consider this search:

Hjohjblewis?! I landed on this misspelling entirely by accident, but I imagine it involved an attention-starved cat and cat-adjacent keyboard. This level of rewriting/redirecting was shocking to me.

Misspellings are just the beginning, however. What about very similar long-tail phrases that don’t surface any kind of rewrite/redirect, but show very similar results?

Note that this same set of terms in the US overwhelmingly returns results about former US Representative and civil rights leader, John Lewis, demonstrating just how much not only intent can shift across localities, but how Google’s re-interpretations can change dynamically.

That same year, I did an experiment for MozCon targeting long-tail questions, such as “Can you reverse a 301-redirect?”, demonstrating that posts written around a specific question could often rank for many forms of that question. At the time, I didn’t have a way to measure this phenomenon, other than showing that the post ranked for variations of the phrase. Recently, I re-analyzed my 2019 keywords (with rankings from April 2021) using a simplified form of Rank-Biased Overlap (RBO) called RBOLite. RBOLite scores the similarity between two rank-ordered lists, yielding a score from 0-1. As the name implies, this score biases toward the higher-ranked items, so a shift at #1 will have more impact than a shift at #10.

Here are the scores for a sampling of the phrases I tracked for the 2019 post, with the title of the post shown at the top (and having a perfect match of 1.0):

You can see visually how the similarity of the results diverges as you change and remove certain keywords, and how this creates a complex interaction. What’s fascinating to me is that changing the question phrase from “Can you” to “How do you” or “How to” made very little difference in this case, while removing either “301” or “redirect” had more impact. Switching “you” vs. “I” by itself was fairly low impact, but was additive with other changes. Even the SERPs with “undo” in place of “reverse” showed fairly high similarity, but this change showed the most impact.

Note that the week-over-week RBOLite score for the initial phrase was 0.95, so even the same SERP will vary over time. All of these scores (>0.75) represent a fair degree of similarity. This post ranked #1 for many of these terms, so these scores often represent shifts farther down the top 10.

Here’s another example, based on the question “How do I improve my domain authority?”. As above, I’ve charted the RBOLite similarity scores between the main phrase and variations. In this case, the week-over-week score was 0.83, suggesting some background flux in the keyword space:

One immediately interesting observation is that the difference between “improve” and “increase” was negligible — Google easily equated the two terms. My time spent debating which keyword to use could’ve been spent on other projects, or on eating sandwiches. As before, switching from “How do I” to “How do you” or even “How to” made relatively little difference. Google even understood that “DA” is frequently substituted for “Domain Authority” in our industry.

Perhaps counterintuitively, adding “Moz” made more of a difference. This is because it shifted the SERP to be more brand-like (Moz.com got more mentions). Is that necessarily a bad thing? No, my post still ranked #1. Looking at the entire first page of the SERPs, though, adding the brand name caused a pretty clear intent shift.

The long tail is dead. Long live the long tail.

In the past decade, the long tail has exploded and then imploded (in many ways, due to the same forces), and yet somehow we’ve landed in a very different keyword universe. So, where does that leave us — the poor souls fated to wander that universe?

The goods news of this post (I hope) is that we don’t have to work ourselves to death to target the long tail of search. It doesn’t take 10,000 pieces of content to rank for 10,000 variants of a phrase, and Google (and our visitors) would much prefer we not spin out that content. The new, post-NLP long tail of SEO requires us to understand how our keywords fit into semantic space, mapping their relationships and covering the core concepts. While our tools will inevitably improve to meet this challenge (and I’m directly involved in such projects at Moz), our human intuition can go a long way for now. Study your SERPs diligently, and you can find the patterns to turn your own long tail of keywords into a chonky thorax of opportunity.

But that’s where I think many SEOs are missing opportunities to bring in targeted — and revenue-generating — traffic.

If you’re in a niche where there are either too many competing products or a small addressable market — like B2B fintech or martech — targeting high search volume keywords from the get-go is an exercise in futility.

For new companies or smaller businesses with low authority sites in competitive niches, it takes months (or maybe even years) to rank for a keyword like “project management” or “online payment”. For niches with small addressable markets, there aren’t even any high search volume keywords to target.

If you’re chasing after high search volume keywords, you’re either creating content that will never be seen by your ideal audience as it stays buried in Google’s page seven, or forcing a content strategy that doesn’t address your buyer persona’s search intent. Either way, it’s SEO’s version of a black hole in space.

And when you look at it like this, you may indeed think, “Why even bother with SEO then? It’s not worth it.”

But from my perspective, SEO is worth it — with the RIGHT approach.

For cases like these — competitive niche, small addressable market, or both — I turn to my proven approach to growing targeted organic traffic and brand awareness: targeting low search volume keywords.

Why are low search volume keywords an SEO goldmine for niche industries like B2B tech?

Low search volume keywords are terms that not many people are searching for. It could be because the keywords are not relevant at all, in which case, it doesn’t make sense to target them. But it could also be because the keyword is specific (i.e. long) or niched.

If your situation falls into these categories, then you have hit an SEO goldmine.

Specific and niched keywords are exactly what accelerate your organic traffic growth and business revenue – even when you don’t have the domain authority, brand awareness, or resources of your more established competitors.

By targeting low search volume keywords, you rank faster for more intent-specific keywords, and can eventually leverage this to go after more competitive keywords. Over time, you become less dependent on Google Ads and social media ads. And as we’ve learned from recent months after having to pivot due to the COVID-19 pandemic, SEO traffic continues to generate revenue even when performance marketing budgets come to a standstill.

But there’s more to your SEO strategy than just going after these keywords. You have to know which keywords are worth going for and how to create content in a manner that you get ROI for your SEO efforts as early on as possible.

Let’s now take a deep dive into this process.

How to use low search volume keywords to improve your SEO

This strategy has proven useful for many niche industries, but it particularly applies to B2B tech.

Here’s how I’d handle this:

1. Research low search volume keywords for your niche. Start by focusing on bottom-of-funnel (BOFU) keywords and further segment your buyer persona to not miss highly specific long-tail keywords with a high purchase or consideration intent.

2. Map your keywords into a content plan. This gives you an overview of your target focus keywords, streamlines your strategy, and gives you a clear action plan.

3. Create skyscraper content for all your BOFU keywords and then extend to middle- of-funnel (MOFU) keywords. Make it very niche and buyer persona-specific so you get as many quick wins as possible from BOFU. Once you have a solid foundation, extend your content to target MOFU keywords.

4. Integrate higher search volume keywords into your content strategy. Once you have a steady flow of organic traffic from your BOFU and MOFU content, start going for higher search volume keywords and update your content plan to cover your buyer persona’s holistic needs as much as possible.

5. Scale like HubSpot. Ultimately, you want your brand to become the thought leader in your niche. Go into detail on complicated concepts, develop and share your company’s industry-related viewpoints, expand your target audience to grow brand awareness further - and most importantly, build your content to scale.

Now let’s go through this whole process in detail, so you know how to put it into action directly.

Step 1: Research and choose the right low search volume keywords that your B2B tech audience is searching for.

Know your audience

The first step in any successful SEO content strategy is to know your audience. Bring your marketing and sales teams together and clarify your ideal buyer persona. Map out their customer journey, list their desired outcomes and pain points, and try to get as many real-world quotes possible.

For a B2B audience, make sure to segment your buyer persona further. Remember that in B2B, you’re not just marketing to one person. You’re marketing to the whole buying committee – the people who buy it, the people who use it, and the executives who decide on it. Each of these teams has their own industry-specific words and jargon – the IT guys won’t be searching the same keywords as the marketers or the CEOs.

For a concrete example from the B2B tech industry, if your product is a business budgeting and forecasting software, you’ll likely need to create content for accounting, IT, sales, and the C-suite.

I’ve found that having this customer-centric approach to content marketing helps us choose the right keywords, including low search volume keywords, that bring in targeted traffic.

Do your keyword research

Once you have your specific buyer personas, do keyword research to see what exactly your target audience is searching for. I’ve outlined below how this works with Moz, but you can follow the process on other SEO tools such as SEMrush.

When searching for “business budgeting and forecasting software” with the Moz Keyword Explorer, this is what comes up filtered by monthly search volume:

We see that the top searches are branded searches – there are clearly companies dominating this niche. But scrolling down the list to the low search volume keywords, we see these:

Compare the two sets of keywords. The keywords with low search volume are terms people closer to the bottom of the sales funnel are searching for. For example, “envelope budgeting software”, “budget management software”, and “budget allocation software” are search terms by people who are already at least in the consideration stage of the buyer’s journey. They already know what envelope budgeting is and are now looking for a specific solution.

Even though there are only an average of 11 searches for these keywords per month, by creating content for these keywords, you give the people searching for them the information they need to purchase your product. That’s already more revenue generated than ranking for a top-of-funnel (TOFU) keyword like “budgeting”. Because your content exactly matches the search intent, you get more conversions.

To clarify the financial impact of this, let’s say for example that 50% of 11 people who land on your page per month end up purchasing your $100-per-month software:

That page alone creates $42,900 in revenue per year.

Here’s why you can’t dismiss low search volume keywords: even if only 11 people land on your page every month but 50% of them purchase your $100-per-month product, by the end of the year you’ll have a revenue of $42,900. From one single page.

Expanding into new markets

Targeting low search volume keywords is also an excellent strategy for expanding your niche products into new markets.

Let’s say you want to capture B2B businesses at the point of market entry. In this case, having a freemium product and targeting small businesses and entrepreneurs would be your best approach. You then should do keyword research for a specific buyer persona: small businesses.

Here’s what that keyword research shows:

Again, we see a lot of branded searches and TOFU keywords. So let’s scroll down the list.

Now we see more BOFU keywords with specific search intent. Targeting keywords such as “free budgeting software” and “budget management software” and creating content that funnels to your freemium budgeting software is definitely more worthwhile than trying to compete with the Mints and the YNABs of your niche.

Step 2: Map your keywords into a content plan

Once you have a list of relevant keywords, map them into a content plan.

I recommend always doing keyword research before drafting your content plan and only creating content based on keywords with at least a search volume of 10 per month. This is also a better strategy for websites with low Domain Authority scores because there is less competition, making it easier to rank.

On another note, I wouldn’t recommend thinking of topic ideas first and then trying to find keywords for them, as often that doesn’t align with the actual target audience’s user intent. With my suggested approach (keywords first, content plan second), you learn the language your audience uses and write your content specifically for them.

After you’ve done holistic keyword research, organize them into BOFU, MOFU, and TOFU topics. The more keywords you add, the further out in time (months or years) this can go. As you plan your content, keep your buyer persona and customer journey in mind and make sure that your keywords don’t overlap and your content doesn’t cannibalize (compete against each other).

To clarify what I mean by the above acronyms:

• TOFU (Top of Funnel): Potential customers who have just become aware of the problem that your company solves, for example, will be searching for TOFU topics - what is it, why does it matter, and what can they do about it?

• MOFU (Middle of Funnel): Once they have a good understanding of the problem and have several ideas on how to solve it, they would then begin searching for MOFU topics, these being educational resources like how-to guides and industry case studies.

• BOFU (Bottom of Funnel): Once they get to BOFU keyword searches, they are already in the consideration or decision stages, such as when they are searching for product comparisons and reviews, customer stories, and demos and trials.

Using our earlier keyword search, here’s how I would map and plan for the topics for the budgeting software company.

If you already have existing articles, write down your entire site map and match them with the focus and related keywords you listed during your keyword research. This is a great way to see where your content gaps are. Choose the focus keywords closest to the search intent that matches the article. For example, if the article most benefits the audience in the awareness stage, use a TOFU keyword. As you assign keywords to topics, also add related keywords and look into keyword clusters (keyword groups) to maximize your chances of ranking your content for multiple variations of your focus keyword.

Step 3: Create the skyscraper content that your B2B audience needs

Now that you have a content strategy in place, it’s time to create your content. This is where the usual SEO and content marketing best practices come into play.

I recommend starting with your BOFU keywords. Create content for all your BOFU keywords and cover all the content your specific buyer personas are searching for. This is the best way to get ROI from your content strategy in the shortest time possible, which allows you to put more resources into your SEO strategy and overall marketing plan.

Use the skyscraper technique

I recommend starting with the skyscraper technique because this is a proven way to outrank your competitors. Longer content ranks better, quality articles naturally attract backlinks, and a comprehensive guide that is better than any of your competitors’ paves the way for your company to be regarded as a thought leader in your industry. Always keep in mind, though, that an easily navigable UI/UX design is crucial here.

Before you begin writing or even setting up your layout, do a thorough competitor analysis and look at the top SERPs. Analyze these and find out how to create better content. If you’re writing content for “budgeting and forecasting software comparison”, for example, aim to have the most comprehensive guide. Give all the essential details – features, benefits, price points – and organize your content for easy skimming.

Don’t forget CTAs

A hugely important element that is often overlooked is to optimize your calls-to-action (CTAs). With BOFU topics, you aim to generate revenue, so your CTAs must be optimized for conversion. For B2B tech, revenue-generating CTAs include links to service pages and product landing pages, as well as buttons to book a demo or download a lead magnet. If you want your content to make money for your business, you need CTAs.

Keep things entertaining

The other important element is to entertain your reader (yes, Boring 2 Boring content needs to end!): add interactive content such as quizzes that help your reader decide based on their personal needs or an interactive comparison table. Create infographics, summary tables, and content upgrades if necessary. Use a storytelling framework to keep your audience engaged and direct response copywriting techniques to guide them down the funnel.

Develop your content plan

Once you’ve covered most of your BOFU keywords, start creating content for your MOFU keywords. Revamp your industry pages, add case studies, and create detailed guides for all your products and their use cases.

Depending on your niche and available resources, here’s a rough timeline you can follow:

• Month 1 – Website SEO audit, buyer persona development, keyword research, and content mapping

• Months 2-3 – Writing content with BOFU keywords

• Months 4-6 – Writing content with MOFU keywords

The more resources you’re able to put into your SEO content strategy, the faster you can grow your organic traffic and company revenue. But keep in mind that quality is always better than quantity. Don’t just churn out a bunch of content that users won’t find useful or relevant. Instead, create as much good content as possible and spend more time promoting these through email, social media, and other channels.

Step 4: Integrate higher search volume keywords once you gain SEO momentum

Once you start ranking for many BOFU and MOFU keywords, getting consistent organic traffic, and acquiring a targeted and engaged user base, you can start going after high search volume keywords.

This is where TOFU content comes into play. Our budgeting software company, for example, can now start targeting “sales forecasting” and “financial planning”. You can create articles that don’t necessarily have a purchase intent but are still helpful to your target audience – for example, a comprehensive overview of financial planning and management, a budget plan template for businesses of all sizes, and a step-by-step guide on how to find a financial advisor.

Users who land on these articles are not likely to purchase anything right away. But with lead magnets that appeal to potential customers in the awareness and interest phases, you’re able to bring in more leads into their marketing automation funnel and nurture these relationships. As customers interact more with your brand and get lots of value over time, they are more likely to eventually buy from you and even tell their friends about it.

Step 5: Scale like HubSpot

Ultimately, your SEO content goal is for your website and your brand to become the thought leader in your niche - to be your ideal audience’s go-to platform for everything they need.

For example, our budgeting software company would produce thoughtful and valuable content on everything related to business finance and related topics. You can also develop content on the psychology of wealth and prosperity, successful CEOs’ mindset and habits, and an innovative wealth management framework. You can do deep-dives on complicated concepts, share results from their own research, and even start writing about personal finance.

A prime example is HubSpot: they became a content marketing powerhouse by scaling smartly. By creating SEO content based on thought leadership, they evolved with their audience and even pushed the limits of their industry.

Their revenue of USD 674.9M for 2019 (up 32% compared to 2018) is a clear indicator of the impact good content has on business growth. And let’s not forget, all marketers know their thought leadership strategy has permeated our brains and hearts so strongly that we now ask ourselves, “If HubSpot hasn’t written about it, does it even exist?”

Once you reach that point of trust, authority, and brand awareness, your content platform becomes your most important marketing and business development channel, which in financial terms means a huge revenue driver and a holistic boost to business performance.

Low search volume keywords are not just worth it, they’re essential

When you’re tasked to grow a company website with low domain authority, little organic traffic, and zero backlinks, it’s overwhelming to develop an SEO content strategy that gives ROI early. You look at the high search volume keywords and wonder, how can I ever compete with these content giants?

The secret? Don’t.

Start small and dominate the low search volume keywords. Don’t dismiss these keywords just because only ten people are searching for them. The adage is true: the riches are in the niches.

To find out how, watch this week's episode of Whiteboard Friday! 

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hi and welcome to another Whiteboard Friday. My name is Cody McDaniel, and I'm an SEO manager at Obility. We are a B2B digital marketing agency, and today I want to talk about selecting meaningful B2B SEO keyword targets and the process and steps you can take in your own keyword research.

So B2B is a little bit different than you would see in your normal B2C types of marketing, right? The sales cycle or the length of time it takes to actually make a purchasing decision is usually a lot longer than you would see just buying something off Amazon, right? It's going to take multiple stakeholders. Individuals are going to be involved in that process. It's going to be usually a lot more expensive.

So in order to do that, they're going to want to be informed about their decision. They're going to have to look up content and information across the web to help inform that decision and make sure that they're doing the right thing for their own business. So in order to do that, we have to create content that helps, educates, and informs these users, and the way to do that is finding keywords that matter and building content around them.

1. Gather seed list

So when we're developing keyword research for our own clientele, the first thing that we do is gather a seed list. So usually we'll talk with our client contact and speak to them about what they care about. But it also helps to get a few other stakeholders involved, right, so the product marketing team or the sales team, individuals that will eventually want to use that information for their clients, and talk with them about what they care about, what do they want to show up for, what's important to them.

That will sort of help frame the conversation you want to be having and give you an understanding or an idea of where eventually you want to take this keyword research. It shouldn't be very long. It's a seed list. It should eventually grow, right? 

2. Review your content

So once you've done that and you have a baseline understanding of where you want to go, the next thing you can do is review the content that you have on your own website, and that can start with your homepage.

What's the way that you describe yourselves to the greater masses? What's the flagship page have to say about what you offer? You can go a little bit deeper into some of your other top-level pages and About Us. But try to generate an understanding of how you speak to your product, especially in relation to your clients in the industry that you're in. You can use that, and from there you can go a little bit further.

Go through your blog posts to see how you speak to the industry and to educate and inform individuals. Go to newsletters. Just try to get an understanding of what exists currently on the website, where your efficiencies may be, and of course where your deficiencies are or your lack of content. That will help you generate ideas on where you need to look for more keywords or modifications in the keywords you have.

3. Determine your rankings

Speaking of which, with the keywords that you currently have, it's important to know how you stand. So at this point, I try to look to see how we're ranking in the greater scheme of things, and there are a lot of different tools that you can use for that. Search Console is a great way to see how potential users across the web are going to your website currently. That can help you filter by page or by query.

You can get an understanding of what's getting clicks and generating interest. But you can also use other tools — SEMrush, SpyFu, Ahrefs, and Moz, of course. They'll all give you a keyword list that can help you determine what users are searching for in order to find your website and where they currently rank in the search engine results page. Now usually these lists are pretty extensive.

I mean, they can be anything from a few hundred to a few thousand terms. So it helps to parse it down a little bit. I like to filter it by things like if it has no search volume, nix it. If it's a branded term, I don't like to include it because you should be showing up for your branded terms already. Maybe if it's outside the top 50 in rankings, things like that, I don't want that information here right now.

4. Competitive research

I want to understand how we're showing up, where our competencies are, and how we can leverage that in our keyword research. So that should help the list to be a little bit more condensed. But one of the things you can also look at is not just internal but external, right? So you can look at your competition and see how we're ranking or comparing at least on the web.

What do they use? What sort of content do they have on their website? What are they promoting? How are they framing that conversation? Are they using blog posts? All that information is going to be useful for maybe developing your own strategies or maybe finding a niche where, if you have particularly stiff competition, you can find areas they're not discussing.

But use that competition as a framework for identifying areas and potential opportunities and how the general public or industry speaks to some of the content that you're interested in writing about. So once you have that list, it should be pretty big, good idea of the ecosystem you're working with, it's important to gather metrics.

5. Gather metrics

This is going to contextualize the information that you have, right? You want to make informed decisions on the keywords that you have, so this metric gathering will be important. There are a lot of different ways you can do it. Here at Obility, we might categorize them by different topic types so we can make sure that we're touching on all the different levels of keyword usage for the different topics that we discuss in our content.

You can look at things like search volume. There a lot of different tools that do that, the same ones I mentioned earlier — Moz, SpyFu, SEMrush. There's a great tool we use called Keyword Keg, that kind of sort of aggregates all of them. But that will give you an idea search volume on a monthly basis. But you can also use other metrics, things like difficulty, like how hard it is to rank compared to some of the other people on the web, or organic click-through rate, like what's the level of competition you're going to be going up against in terms of ads or videos or carousels or other sort of Google snippets.

Moz does a great job of that. So use these metrics, and what they should help you do is contextualize the information so that maybe if you're pretty close on two or three keywords, that metric gathering should help you identify which one is maybe the easiest, it has the most potential, so on and so forth. So once you have that, you should be getting a good understanding of where each of those keywords lives and you should be selecting your targets.

6. Select target keywords

Now I've run through a ton of clients who former agencies have sent them a list of 300 to 400 keywords that they're trying to rank for, and I cannot stand it. There's no value to be had, because how can you possibly try and optimize and rank for hundreds and hundreds of different variations of keywords. It would take too long, right? You could spend years in that rabbit hole.

What we try to do is focus on maybe 30 or 40 keywords and really narrow down what sort of content is going to be created for it, what you need to optimize. Does it exist on your website? If not, what do we need to make? Having that list makes a much more compartmentalized marketing strategy, and you can actually look at that and weigh it against how you're currently deploying content internally.

You can look at success metrics and KPIs. It just helps to have something a little bit more tangible to bite down on. Of course, you can grow from there, right? You start ranking well for those 20 or 30 terms, and you can add a few more on at the end of it. But again, I think it's really important to focus on a very select number, categorizing them by the importance of which ones you want to go first, and start there because this process in content creation takes a long time.

7. Consider intent

But once you've selected those, it's also important to consider intent. You can see I've outlined intent here a little bit more in depth. What do I mean by that? Well, the best way that I've seen intent described online is as an equation. So every query is made up of two parts, the implicit and the explicit. What are you saying, and what do you mean when you're saying it?

So when I think of that and trying to relate it to keywords, it's really important to use that framework to develop the strategy that you have. An example that I have here is "email marketing." So what's the implicit and explicit nature of that? Well, "email marketing" is a pretty broad term.

So implicitly they're probably looking to educate themselves on the topic, learn a little bit more about what it's about. You'll see, when you search for that, it's usually a lot more educational related content that helps the user understand it better. They're not ready to buy yet. They just want to know a little bit more. But what happens when I add a modifier on it? What if I add "software"? Well, now that you would have intent, it may mean the same thing as email marketing in some context, but software implies that they're looking for a solution.

We've now gone down the funnel and are starting to identify terms in which a user is more interested in purchasing. So that type of content is going to be significantly different, and it's going to be more heavily implied on features and benefits than just the email marketing. So that intent is important to frame your keywords, and it's important to make sure that you have them in every step of your purchasing funnel.

The way that I like to usually look at that, and you see it everywhere, it's an upside down triangle. You have your top, middle, and bottom level pieces of content. Usually the top is going to be things like blogs and other sorts of informational content that you're going to be having to use to inform users of the types of topics and things in the industry you care about.

That's probably where something like "email marketing" would exist. But "email marketing software" is probably going to be sitting right here in the middle, where somebody is going to want to make an informed decision, relate it to other pieces of content on competitor websites, check those features, and determine if it's a useful product for them, right? From there, you can go a little bit further and move them into different types of content, maybe email marketing software for small business.

That's far more nuanced and specific, and maybe you'll have a white paper or a demo that's specifically tailored to businesses that are looking for email marketing in the small business space. So having content in three separate spaces and three different modifications will help you identify where your content gaps are and make sure that users can move throughout your website and throughout the funnel and inform themselves on the decision they're trying to make.

Conclusion

So with that, this should give you some idea of how we develop keyword research here at our own agency, and I hope that you guys can utilize some of these strategies in your own keyword research wherever you are out in the world. So thanks again for listening. Happy New Year. Take care.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

The first time I saw notable results in my work was in the optimizations I put into practice to reach featured snippets. The thrill of jumping to the top of the page was so great that it soon became my passion.

But not everything in SEO is so simple (or stable). Soon, methods that had previously brought results were no longer working. With the competition growing increasingly competent and challenging, great results were becoming less frequent.

If, like me, you’ve reached that point — don't worry! I’ll show you how I overcame this with a method that I lovingly refer to as “Fast & Featured”.

What are SEO entities?

I started with an unpretentious study of entities. I hadn’t read much on the topic, but what caught my attention was the understanding entities can offer into how search algorithms work.

Google’s definition is: “A thing or concept that is singular, unique, well-defined and distinguishable.”But this definition is very broad, leading to even greater confusion. I wanted a clearer understanding of what entities are all about, so I crafted my own definition that I’ll share with you today.

Basically, an entity in SEO is everything definable, unique, and not limited to a specific shape, spelling, or image (e.g. mom, mother, mummy, and a picture of a mother all relate to the same entity).

I really like to make an association with the following image, famous in the study of semiotics, which illustrates entities very well:

Here, we have three chairs: the physical chair, the representation of a chair, and the dictionary definition of what a chair is. All three refer to a single entity: the chair.

What matters here is the essence, the content, and what lies behind it.

In the same way, this is how algorithms understand elements that exist on the web, overcoming restrictions of language, form, or representation — which results in huge improvements in the accuracy of the SERP results.

So, what if I use this concept to understand which entities are most important in searches with featured snippets? With this knowledge, I’d have an in-depth understanding of what the ideal answers are, not just the ones I, totally biased, considered good.

It may seem a simple concept, but it's like telling your SEO to focus on basic practices or understand the user's intention. No matter how much you talk about it or how obvious it seems, people will still be reluctant to do it. The tendency is to look for more complicated or advanced hacks — but that’s not what we want here.

Our goal is to show how to associate a basic concept with a previously understood practice, making each step very clear, logical, and uncomplicated.

Let's get down to the method!

How to use the Fast & Featured method

As mentioned, this method was developed to make achieving featured snippets more intelligent and strategic, so each of these seven steps is essential to increase your probability of success.

1. Understand context and objectives

As with any strategy, whether SEO, marketing, or across other areas, we must first understand the current context — what we have at the moment (and how it serves us) — to then determine our objectives, where we intend to catch up.

As a result, the first step is to compile a list of searches for keywords that you rank in the top ten positions for, and note which already have featured snippets. For even greater chances, filter for just the top three positions as well, since that’s where Google selects the featured snippet 70% of the time.

There are several methods for this, with the main difference being speed. I will share three approaches, to cover the range of demands that different teams may have.

Moz Keyword Explorer

In a very intuitive way, Moz's Keyword Explorer has an easy approach to help you out with this stage of creating your list of opportunities.

To do this, simply access the keywords you rank for and filter positions 1-10.

Then, create your own list and then select the “Featured Snippet” option under “SERP feature”.

Source: Moz

Now you have a complete list of opportunities!

Ahrefs Webmaster Tools

Ahrefs WebMaster Tools (the free version of Ahrefs) can also be used to create your list of opportunities.

The process is largely similar, simply access the “Organic keywords” feature, click on “SERP features” (under “Include”) and select “Featured snippet”.

After doing this, the tool will present a series of results, including snippets that you have already achieved. You can follow up on each result separately or export the complete list.

To clean your data, leaving only the opportunities, exclude all keywords that are in first place — those already considered featured snippets by the tool — after all, you hear less about position zero nowadays.

Google Search Console

This technique was used when free tools were not yet available and a user simply needed a way to generate this list.

If this is not your case — and you’re not curious to find out more — feel free to skip ahead.

To find opportunities where there is less competition and greater focus on long tails, it’s necessary to access the "Performance" report, go to "Search results" and filter by "Queries" using expressions such as "what is", "concept", "definition" , “how to” among others.

As it’s not possible to identify the SERP features this way, it’s not as accurate, but is worth mentioning.

2. Start a SERP analysis

Now that you’ve managed to create a respectable list, select your priorities. Again, keywords with higher positions and more traffic coverage are ideal.

Start by accessing the SERP and identifying the following aspects:

• What type of snippet is it?
• Are there other definitions highlighted on the page? (This could include definitions under a “knowledge panel” or “people also ask”.)

This information will help you understand what Google interprets as the ideal answer, giving you more information than just what the featured snippet contains. This way, you will know if the snippet is a paragraph or shorter, or what the user hopes to find when searching for that term.

For the keyword “interactive ebook”, we find a paragraph snippet. Below, the SERP presents PAAs on how to make interactive ebooks and the difference between digital books and ebooks.

Hang on to this info, as we’ll need it in step 4.

3. Look at competitor content

In addition to the previous questions related to the SERP, the time has come to meet the current winner and understand what sets it apart from the rest. Identify:

• Who has the current snippet?
• Where is it located on the page? (first paragraph, summary, middle of the text)
• How is the concept in question currently defined?
• How objective is it?

Look for answers to these questions and, especially for the last two, try to set aside your current definition or how you would approach it differently, in order to be as impartial as possible in your analysis — however difficult it may be at times.

In the example I presented, the competitor is Visme, the snippet was taken from the beginning of the second title, the definition is very objective, succinct, and logical, and takes advantage of the formats that make up an interactive ebook.

4. Use a comparative analysis

I consider this next step to be the most important. I suggest that you write down the information somewhere. I usually use an online text counter, but feel free to do it on a spreadsheet or another platform.

Whatever tool you use, first record the result of the snippet. Then, add another definition, if found on the SERP (could be a Google dictionary or Wikipedia definition), then finally add your current definition.

Now, the time has come to apply the concept of entities. We will focus on the first two definitions from the beginning of this post.

Below, list the entities you found and how many times they appear in the text — which helps to indicate their relevance in context.

To get the hang of this when starting, you can use Google's own NLP API demo tool or another tool, such as TextRazor, to help you identify it:

5. Identify entities

After you identify the entities and their level of relevance for the definitions you found (the snippet itself and another highlighted definition), see which entities are most repeated on both lists (if the SERP presents more than one definition) and the relationships established between them.

Once you do that, you have the set of entities considered the most important for that Google search and can then avoid relying on “I prefer this” or “I think this word is better”, because it will be based on what the search engine understands to be the best.

Then, just like a puzzle, assemble these entities with your own text in an objective and easy to understand way.

Ideally, your definition should be slightly shorter than the current one, making it as unbiased as possible — very important, especially for voice searches.

Take a look at this example:

In blue are the entities I decided to use on my new definition. You can also note that this paragraph is a lot shorter than the previous one.

Finally, insert your updated paragraph into your text, making sure it fits with the rest of the text, and avoiding any breaks in the flow of the text that could throw off your reader.

6. Re-index your page

After making these changes, the next step is to request that your page be re-indexed through Google Search Console.

This action wasn’t possible until a few weeks ago, but Google announced on December 22, 2020 that “Request Indexing” is back to their tool.

The re-indexing part is not an indispensable step, but it is ideal to streamline the process and verify whether it was possible to achieve the snippet or not more quickly.

To illustrate the results my team and I were able to make, here are some snippets won using this strategy:

And the one that made me proudest (it is in Portuguese, my native language):

Before:

After four minutes:

Besides conquering it incredibly fast, this exact snippet made me realize I had created an effective strategy and I needed to share it with the SEO community.

7. Don’t give up

Something went wrong? Check if your content as a whole relates to what is presented in the snippet text, and make the necessary adjustments or consider re-analyzing the entities to see if something important was left out.

For some tests I’ve carried out, simply shortening the definition by two words was enough for Google to accept my definition and not a competitor's.

In addition, there are cases of reaching the snippet, but then quickly losing it. While this can be very frustrating, it’s a sign that you are on the right track. Several factors can influence this, such as your text not being attractive enough or sounding confusing.

When this happens, keep trying and update your definition from time to time (at two-week intervals), to continue increasing the chance that you show up on the snippet.

Final tips

Here are a few final thoughts. If you have other advice, let me know in the comments!

• Test the use of excerpts in WordPress (that bold section that appears at the beginning of the text).
• Try to work concepts into your text objectively, preferably using the composition “what is + the keyword” in the given intertitle. This doesn’t mean that your copy should lack variety and personality, but look for ways to adapt this formula your own way to attract people with your style, while also being accessible to a wide audience.
• Intertitles of lists should be more obvious as well: "What are the best channels on Youtube" — something simple and without being too distracting.

See how reaching snippets can be simple (and fast) when using a clear method?

It may feel great to achieve a position without much effort or even when we don't know what we did, but it's much better when we know exactly what it takes — without mistakes or crazy tricks.

That is a huge number of opportunities waiting to be identified and worked into strategies, optimization, and content plans. The trouble is, all of the usual keyword research tools are, at best, a month behind with the data they can provide. Even then, the volumes they report need to be taken with a grain of salt – you’re telling me there are only 140 searches per month for “women’s discount designer clothing”? – and if you work in B2B industries, those searches are generally much smaller volumes to begin with.

So, we know there are huge amounts of searches available, with more and more being added every day, but without the data to see volumes, how do we know what we should be working into strategies? And how do we find these opportunities in the first place?

Finding the opportunities

The usual tools we turn to aren’t going to be much use for keywords and topics that haven’t been searched in volume previously. So, we need to get a little creative — both in where we look, and in how we identify the potential of queries in order to start prioritizing and working them into strategies. This means doing things like:

1. Mining People Also Ask
2. Scraping autosuggest
3. Drilling into related keyword themes

Mining People Also Ask

People Also Ask is a great place to start looking for new keywords, and tends to be more up to date than the various tools you would normally use for research. The trap most marketers fall into is looking at this data on a small scale, realizing that (being longer-tail terms) they don’t have much volume, and discounting them from approaches. But when you follow a larger-scale process, you can get much more information about the themes and topics that users are searching for and can start plotting this over time to see emerging topics faster than you would from standard tools.

To mine PAA features, you need to:

1. Start with a seed list of keywords.

2. Use SerpAPI to run your keywords through the API call – you can see their demo interface below and try it yourself:

3. Export the “related questions” features returned in the API call and map them to overall topics using a spreadsheet:

4. Export the “related search boxes” and map these to overall topics as well:

5. Look for consistent themes in the topics being returned across related questions and searches.

6. Add these overall themes to your preferred research tool to identify additional related opportunities. For example, we can see coffee + health is a consistent topic area, so you can add that as an overall theme to explore further through advanced search parameters and modifiers.

7. Add these as seed terms to your preferred research tool to pull out related queries, like using broad match (+coffee health) and phrase match (“coffee health”) modifiers to return more relevant queries:

This then gives you a set of additional “suggested queries” to broaden your search (e.g. coffee benefits) as well as related keyword ideas you can explore further.

This is also a great place to start for identifying differences in search queries by location, like if you want to see different topics people are searching for in the UK vs. the US, then SerpAPI allows you to do that at a larger scale.

If you’re looking to do this on a smaller scale, or without the need to set up an API, you can also use this really handy tool from Candour – Also Asked – which pulls out the related questions for a broad topic and allows you to save the data as a .csv or an image for quick review:

Once you’ve identified all of the topics people are searching for, you can start drilling into new keyword opportunities around them and assess how they change over time. Many of these opportunities don’t have swathes of historical data reported in the usual research tools, but we know that people are searching for them and can use them to inform future content topics as well as immediate keyword opportunities.

You can also track these People Also Ask features to identify when your competitors are appearing in them, and get a better idea of how they’re changing their strategies over time and what kind of content and keywords they might also be targeting. At Found, we use our bespoke SERP Real Estate tool to do just that (and much more) so we can spot these opportunities quickly and work them into our approaches.

Scraping autosuggest

This one doesn’t need an API, but you’ll need to be careful with how frequently you use it, so you don’t start triggering the dreaded captchas.

Similar to People Also Ask, you can scrape the autosuggest queries from Google to quickly identify related searches people are entering. This tends to work better on a small scale, just because of the manual process behind it. You can try setting up a crawl with various parameters entered and a custom extraction, but Google will be pretty quick to pick up on what you’re doing.

To scrape autosuggest, you use a very simple URL query string:

https://suggestqueries.google.com/complete/search?output=toolbar&hl=&gl=uk&q=

Okay, it doesn’t look that simple, but it’s essentially a search query that outputs all of the suggested queries for your seed query.

So, if you were to enter “cyber security” after the “q=”, you would get:

This gives you the most common suggested queries for your seed term. Not only is this a goldmine for identifying additional queries, but it can show some of the newer queries that have started trending, as well as information related to those queries that the usual tools won’t provide data for.

For example, if you want to know what people are searching for related to COVID-19, you can’t get that data in Keyword Planner or most tools that utilize the platform, because of the advertising restrictions around it. But if you add it to the suggest queries string, you can see:

This can give you a starting point for new queries to cover without relying on historical volume. And it doesn’t just give you suggestions for broad topics – you can add whatever query you want and see what related suggestions are returned.

If you want to take this to another level, you can change the location settings in the query string, so instead of “gl=uk” you can add “=us” and see the suggested queries from the US. This then opens up another opportunity to look for differences in search behavior across different locations, and start identifying differences in the type of content you should be focusing on in different regions — particularly if you’re working on international websites or targeting international audiences.

Refining topic research

Although the usual tools won’t give you that much information on brand new queries, they can be a goldmine for identifying additional opportunities around a topic. So, if you have mined the PAA feature, scraped autosuggest, and grouped all of your new opportunities into topics and themes, you can enter these identified “topics” as seed terms to most keyword tools.

Google Ads Keyword Planner

Currently in beta, Google Ads now offers a “Refine keywords” feature as part of their Keyword Ideas tool, which is great for identifying keywords related to an overarching topic.

Below is an example of the types of keywords returned for a “coffee” search:

 Here we can see the keyword ideas have been grouped into:

• Brand or Non-Brand – keywords relating to specific companies
• Drink – types of coffee, e.g. espresso, iced coffee, brewed coffee
• Product – capsules, pods, instant, ground
• Method – e.g. cold brew, French press, drip coffee

These topic groupings are fantastic for finding additional areas to explore. You can either:

1. Start here with an overarching topic to identify related terms and then go through the PAA/autosuggest identification process.
2. Start with the PAA / autosuggest identification process and put your new topics into Keyword Planner

Whichever way you go about it, I’d recommend doing a few runs so you can get as many new ideas as possible. Once you’ve identified the topics, run them through the refine keywords beta to pull out more related topics, then run them through the PAA/autosuggest process to get more topics, and repeat a few times depending how many areas you want to explore or how in-depth you need your research to be.

Google Trends

Trends data is one of the most up-to-date sets you can look at for topics and specific queries. However, it is worth noting that for some topics, it doesn’t hold any data, so you might run into problems with more niche areas.

Using “travel ban” as an example, we can see the trends in searches as well as related topics and specific related queries:

Now, for new opportunities, you aren’t going to find a huge amount of data, but if you’ve grouped your opportunities into overarching topics and themes, you’ll be able to find some additional opportunities from the “Related topics” and “Related queries” sections.

In the example above we see these sections include specific locations and specific mentions of coronavirus – something that Keyword Planner won’t provide data on as you can’t bid on it.

Drilling into the different related topics and queries here will give you a bit more insight into additional areas to explore that you may not have otherwise been able to identify (or validate) through other Google platforms.

Moz Keyword Explorer

The Moz interface is a great starting point for validating keyword opportunities, as well as identifying what’s currently appearing in the SERPs for those terms. For example, a search for “london theatre” returns the following breakdown:

From here, you can drill into the keyword suggestions and start grouping them into themes as well, as well as being able to review the current SERP and see what kind of content is appearing. This is particularly useful when it comes to understanding the intent behind the terms to make sure you’re looking at the opportunities from the right angle – if a lot more ticket sellers are showing than news and guides, for example, then you want to be focusing these opportunities on more commercial pages than informational content.

Other tools

There are a variety of other tools you can use to further refine your keyword topics and identify new related ideas, including the likes of SEMRush, AHREFS, Answer The Public, Ubersuggest, and Sistrix, all offering relatively similar methods of refinement.

The key is identifying the opportunities you want to explore further, looking through the PAA and autosuggest queries, grouping them into themes, and then drilling into those themes.

Keyword research is an ever-evolving process, and the ways in which you can find opportunities are always changing, so how do you then start planning these new opportunities into strategies?

Forming a plan

Once you’ve got all of the data, you need to be able to formalize it into a plan to know when to start creating content, when to optimize pages, and when to put them on the back burner for a later date.

A quick (and consistent) way you can easily plot these new opportunities into your existing plans and strategies is to follow this process:

1. Identify new searches and group into themes
2. Monitor changes in new searches. Run the exercise once a month to see how much they change over time
3. Plot trends in changes alongside industry developments. Was there an event that changed what people were searching for?
4. Group the opportunities into actions: create, update, optimize.
5. Group the opportunities into time-based categories: topical, interest, evergreen, growing, etc.
6. Plot timeframes around the content pieces. Anything topical gets moved to the top of the list, growing themes can be plotted in around them, interest-based can be slotted in throughout the year, and evergreen pieces can be turned into more hero-style content.

Then you end up with a plan that covers:

• All of your planned content.
• All of your existing content and any updates you might want to make to include the new opportunities.
• A revised optimization approach to work in new keywords on existing landing pages.
• A revised FAQ structure to answer queries people are searching for (before your competitors do).
• Developing themes of content for hubs and category page expansion.

Conclusion

Finding new keyword opportunities is imperative to staying ahead of the competition. New keywords mean new ways of searching, new information your audience needs, and new requirements to meet. With the processes outlined above, you’ll be able to keep on top of these emerging topics to plan your strategies and priorities around them. The world of search will always change, but the needs of your audience — and what they are searching for — should always be at the center of your plans.

Now more than ever, we’re depending on the online world for our day-to-day activities. We’re making use of the web for learning and studying, shopping, paying bills, and for the majority of our entertainment and social needs. This means the need for search engines to provide us with what we’re looking for has never been more relevant.

Google's algorithm focuses on how to fulfill search intent, and we want Google to see us doing that. We know the accuracy and relevancy of content is imperative so Google thinks we’re the answer to the searcher's query.

I lead Moz’s onboarding team in Ireland, and keywords are our most discussed topic in one-on-one walkthroughs — you all want to know how to find the best keywords, if you are currently using the most relevant keywords, and what keywords your competitors are using. The Moz Pro tool shows us all this and more.

We want our customers to know the most effective ways to use Moz Pro to get keyword data, so we’ve put together these Daily Fix videos to help you do just that! I would love to hear your opinion on fulfilling search intent and what has yielded good results for your website, so speak to you in the comments section!

Keyword suggestions groups

Is there any way to find keywords that have a similar meaning or are broadly related in meaning so I can focus on similar keywords? How can I see the volume of a group of similar keywords?

In this Daily Fix, Emilie guides you through how to use the “Grouped keywords” filter in the Keyword Explorer tool.

The “Grouped keywords” filter gives you an idea of the volume for your area of interest, rather than focusing solely on the volume of one keyword.

Content suggestions

Does Moz have anything to help me create better content relating to my keywords, or to help me start my keyword competitive analysis?

In this Daily Fix, Megan shows us how to use the content suggestions section in the Page Optimization tool to help build better content in relation to your keyword topic.

This can also help you get ideas for keywords to research based on the content suggestions provided.

This section is based on a specific URL and keyword pairing, and shows other keywords commonly found in the highly-ranked search results which contain your initial keyword.

Keyword opportunities

What keywords am I ranking for that I’m not aware of?

What if I start ranking for other keywords after I create my campaign, does Moz track this data?

In this Daily Fix, Emilie explains how to find keywords that may be sending your site traffic, and for which your site is already ranking but you’re not tracking.

Click on the “Track” button to add these opportunities to your campaign, and start collecting data to see where you’re ranking for each keyword.

Finding ranking keywords

How do I know what I’m already ranking for?

How can I see what keywords my competitors are ranking for?

In this Daily Fix, I demonstrate how to find any website’s ranking keywords. You can see your website’s ranking keywords, or find those of competitors. You can also see pages associated with ranking positions, which will help with content ideas.

Having this information allows you to start your competitor analysis. You can use your keyword list feature and have a list for each competitor to get a better understanding of potential keyword opportunities available to you. 

The keyword list overview helps to compare metrics across groups of keywords, which will help you see low hanging fruit.

Filtering keywords

Can Moz give me suggestions of keywords I might not have thought of? How do I know what questions my customers could be asking?

In this Daily Fix, Michael shows you how to use the suggestions filter in Keyword Explorer to find useful keywords. This can be a great source for content suggestions, example ideas for your blog, or potential FAQs on your website.

It can also help you find topics that are related to your keyword so you can provide the content your customers really want to see.

Want to try the Moz Pro tool? First sign up for our 30 day free trial and then book a walkthrough with one of our onboarding specialists.

We would love to hear about your SEO goals and how we can help!

Bonus: Be sure not to miss Cyrus's on-demand webinar, Build a Winning Keyword Strategy: Start-to-Finish:

Save my spot

You'll walk through his keyword research process start-to-finish with real keywords, topics, and websites to create a complete keyword research strategy. It's a great follow-up to this Whiteboard Friday!

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans. Welcome to a very special edition of Whiteboard Friday talking about keyword research today. Now keyword research, you know how important it is, and it forms the basis of all successful SEO. People who are good at keyword research and having a good research strategy, that often makes the difference between winning and having an SEO campaign that just goes nowhere. 

I love keyword research because we all have an idea of what we think we want to rank for, right, but when you use keyword research, you can use data to find opportunities and surprises that you didn't even know existed. So I want to dispel a myth about keyword research. A lot of people think it's about finding the right tool, and you enter the keyword into a tool and you get a list.

Technically, that is keyword research, and that's a fine starting point. But it's not so much about the tool. It's about a process. It's about a process of creating a strategy for your entire website and finding those winning keywords that you can rank for and getting traffic from that are relevant to your business. So it's more than just a tool.

It's a process. There are entire guides and webinars about this. But I think we can simplify it. In the next few minutes, I want to show you the basics of a winning keyword research process that I think you can start to master in just a few minutes and get the fundamentals. In fact, I did write a guide about this. We'll talk about it at the end of the video. It's completely available. 

But I want to go over the basics so you can start to get an understanding of the process that will help you win with keyword research. 

1. Seed keywords

So first of all, a concept that you are probably familiar with is the idea of seed keywords. We call them seeds because they help grow your keyword list and expand it. Seed keywords are more important than people think, and I'll tell you why you in just a second.

So many tools will give you seed keywords. But I want to dismiss the idea of thinking in terms of tools for just a second. When researching seed keywords, I propose that you think of it in terms of questions, questions that you want to ask yourself. 

a. What do I want to rank for?

The first is simply, "What do I want to rank for?" In this hypothetical example, our client sells calligraphy pens.

They're like, "Cyrus, I want to rank for calligraphy pens." That's great. That will be your starting point, your first seed keyword. 

b. What do I already rank for?

So a second question you can ask is, "What do I already rank for?" Well, let's say the client has an existing website. They sell some pens. Maybe they do well, maybe they don't.

So we want to dig into the data of what is already sending them traffic, and we can do this with a lot of keyword research tools — Moz, Ahrefs, SEMrush. I prefer Moz, 500 million keywords, it's a great set. But you can use whatever you want. So you want to search keywords by site or keywords by URL. We can enter our client's site and see that, oh, they rank for "pen starter kit."

Their rank is number one. It only receives 10 visits a month, so maybe that's not such a good seed keyword. But "best calligraphy pen," they rank number 8, 500 visits a month. "Calligraphy supplies," 14th, 750 visits a month. Those are excellent seed keywords. So we're going to make note of those and use them a little later in the process.

You can also get this data from Google Search Console, rank and volume. Wherever you get it from, these are what you want to search for great keywords that you already rank for, but maybe not number one, with good search volume. 

c. What do my competitors rank for?

Finally, let's say you don't have an existing website, or you're starting a new project from scratch.

You don't have a lot of existing data. You want to ask, "What do my competitors rank for or the top ranking sites?" So I might Google "calligraphy pens" and see who ranks number one. Pop it into Keyword Explorer and see all their ranking keywords here and start to find the good seed keywords. So I can see that they rank for "calligraphy kit" -- that sounds pretty relevant — 750 visits a month.

"Pen starter," not so much. I'd probably throw that one out. "Learn calligraphy," that's a great seed keyword. I'm going to make note of that, 1,200 visits a month. You can get seed keywords from literally any keyword tool. Some of our favorites, beyond Keyword Explorer: 

• Google Trends
• Answer the Public
• People Also Ask

Anywhere you want to get your seed keywords, that's where you form the basis of your list. 

2. List building

So next we're going to start building our list. Seed keywords move into list building. So this is where we want to use a robust keyword research tool, such as Moz, Ahrefs, or whatever you want. We're entering our seed keywords "calligraphy pens."

We're going to get a list of keywords, sorted by relevance and volume. Now there are many metrics in keyword research, such as keyword difficulty, click-through rate, importance, things like that. For right now, we only want to be concerned with two metrics — relevance and volume.

You can concern yourself with the other metrics a little later when we're sorting and filtering. But right now, we want to find more seed keywords. That's the key difference here in this process. We're not just finding related keywords. We're finding more seed keywords. We're reiterating. So "calligraphy pen set," highly relevant.

Five means highly relevant. Volume of 100. All right, we're going to mark that. That becomes a new seed. "Calligraphy Amazon," okay, that only has a three relevance score. Unless you're Amazon, that's probably not the most relevant keyword. We're going to cross it off the list.

"Calligraphy fonts." "Calligraphy pens price," well, that's great. "Calligraphy ink," great with high volume. So what we have done now is we have collected more seeds, and we're going to throw those seeds back in and discover even more related keywords, more seeds. In other words, we're going to start building out our list.

That's the process. Not just get a list of related keywords, but you're finding more seeds. When you find more seeds, continually do this, these become new pages of your site or a new entire content section. So we could have a section on calligraphy ink. We could have a page on price. We're going to group these in our spreadsheets together, and every time we find a new seed, it can become a new topic, a new page, a new idea.

The idea is you want to find as many seeds as possible. 

3. Competitor analysis

So when we get these seeds, we're going to reinsert them back, but we're also going to do one final step that a lot of people forget or just don't realize, and that is the competitive analysis. The keyword tool is going to find a lot. Moz Keyword Explorer does a particularly excellent, excellent job of this.

But if you're not using Keyword Explorer, one thing I like to do is I'll take my seed keyword, "calligraphy ink," and I'll put it into Google and I'll see who's ranking in the top 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 positions. I'll look specifically for sites that specialize in this. I might throw out Amazon or things like that.



But Ink Warehouse, Shop Calligraphy Inks, I'll take this page and I'll put it in Keyword Explorer, keywords by site or URL, and I'll get all the other keywords that this page or site ranks for, because they've undoubtedly tried a lot of content. They know what works, what doesn't work.

I'll find new seeds that way. So I can see that Ink Warehouse ranks for "best calligraphy ink," and that's a good one. "Calligraphy ink set," great new seed keyword. "Calligraphy ink bottle," another great seed keyword. So then, we have new seeds, new pages, new topics. We can take these and start the process again, and we do this over and over and over again until we have a complete set of keywords for every page, every conceivable ranking position, and we can start to build a strategy out from that.

After this, we can start to sort and filter by keyword volume and difficulty and things like that. But that's a process for another time. So I've documented this strategy and so much more in a brand-new keyword research guide, "The Master Guide to Keyword Research." We just released it. It's available free. It covers this topic in depth, and we try to make these concepts as easy as possible to help you win SEO. We're going to link to it below. You can download it and let me know what you think. 

Read the new guide

So I hope you learned something today. If you liked this video, please share it with anybody that you can. It would be a great favor to me. Okay. Until next time, thanks, everybody.

Best of luck with your SEO.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com