This is Stephan’s podcast appearance about Perfect Keyword Strategy at the brightonSEO Conference.

Hi, my name is Kelvin Newman. Welcome to the Brighton SEO podcast, where we share talks from one of the world's most popular search marketing conferences. The event started out as a few people meeting in an upstairs room with a pub and is now attended by over 3000 people from all over the world. This episode is a recording of one of the speakers at a recent event. 

We've got a session now about strategy from someone who I really rate. He does our training on SEO auditing, and he's a real all-around expert. If we could have a huge round of applause for Stephan, please, everybody.

Good afternoon. How's everybody doing? Oh, come on. Really? This is a great conference. I want to hear some enthusiasm. Who's excited to be here? Yes! All right. So, I'm going to talk to you about the four critical elements of the perfect keyword strategy. By the end of this session, I promise you, you will gain at least one gold nugget out of this session that you will be able to implement next week and make beaucoup cash out of.

Okay, so that's my promise. But first, let me take a selfie, if you don't mind. This is a great opportunity. This is a pretty big stage, so let's do this. If you could maybe wave your hands, smile, and here we go. Ready? One, two, three. All right. Thank you. I know, cheesy, isn't it?

As a little thank you, I've got a few free gifts for you for playing along. I've got my SEO BS Detector, which has trick questions you can use to hire people or not hire them depending on their answers, my SEO Hiring Blueprint, a seven-step process, some SEO myths and chapter seven of this awesome book.

The Art of SEO. Who's familiar with this book? Yeah? Who actually has it? Who wants to have it? Like, who wants it enough that they'll come and get it? You're welcome. The early bird gets the worm. But I also have a couple of other books. Social Ecommerce is all about how to get social networks to do your bidding, anyone? Anyone? Wow. No, no, no, no. She's going to get it. She worked hard for that one. And Google Power Search. OK, you get that one. That's how to find anything in Google, including confidential business plans from competitors, forced to research reports that normally cost thousands of dollars. I've even found credit card numbers files with credit card numbers with expiration dates that are not in the book. It's pretty crazy what you can find on Google.

Who listens to podcasts? Anyone? Great. So, I've got two fantastic podcasts for you to subscribe to: Marketing Speak and Get Yourself Optimized. That's me—I'm the Optimized Geek. And here's what we're going to cover in this session. We're going to go through the right and wrong keywords, the types of searches, how to slice and dice your keyword portfolio, knowing your target market intimately, and finally, the keyword research tools that will do the hard yards for you. That's what we're going to cover.

Let's start with number one in the four keys to the perfect keyword strategy: getting the keywords right—the right ones, not the wrong ones. Let's look at what the right ones are. These are keywords that are relevant, popular, and attainable. They're relevant to your business and to your industry, popular with searchers, and attainable. We actually have a shot at ranking on page one—ideally in the first half of page one, even in the top three positions, because that's where all the action's happening. What are the wrong keywords? These are keywords that are like trophy keywords the CEO is fixated on or synonyms that nobody searches for. Let me give you a couple of quick examples. This is from a past client, and it is a very frustrating situation.

Westpac is a big bank in Australasia, Australia, and New Zealand, and their legal department, aka the business prevention department, said that they could not use the term "mortgage" anywhere on the website. Nope. They offer a home loan, not a mortgage. That's a legal instrument. They do not offer the legal instrument. Therefore, you are banned from using it, marketing department. And look at the comparison here in Google Trends.

Home loans are in blue there, practically flatlined nothing, and then mortgages are so much more popular. That's very frustrating. Here's another example. Kohl's department stores in the US were fixated on the keyword "Kitchen electrics." Who's ever heard of that phrase before? Anyone? Exactly. Yet they were so tied to this keyword that they were on page one for it. And it was a complete and utter waste of time. So kitchen electrics is a small kitchen appliance like a toaster, a food processor, or a blender. It clearly has no volume, nothing whatsoever. I think it's all Kohl's employees who are searching for that keyword, and that's it.

So, number two in the perfect keyword strategy is to slice and dice your keyword portfolio by types of searches. There are different ways of slicing and dicing. One of them is looking at the types of searches, such as informational, navigational, and transactional, as you just heard in the previous presentation. Another way is to look at the funnel and identify where in the funnel the particular searcher is based on likely intent. So awareness, then consideration, then purchase, and finally retention. What if we could map these just basically automagically.

Wouldn't that be cool? I'm gonna show you a tool that does that in just a few minutes. Of course, there's the long tail, which gets a lot of play. It's actually quite valuable. Even though the search volumes aren't there in aggregate, it can add up to a sizable amount of business for you. So the head terms, which are always so focused, and we're just dying to get those rankings for, tend to be a lot of competition.

They are hard to achieve a high ranking for. And the long tail has a lot more buying intent typically. If somebody puts a model number or a bunch of product attributes into that search query, they probably are pretty motivated to buy that thing unless they already own it. Step three is knowing your target market, knowing them intimately, really understanding them at a deep level, and understanding them as people beyond the demographics, psychographics and even sociographics. This is about getting to know them as individuals, even putting names on them, having stories about them, and understanding their morning routines, their hobbies, their interests, and their families.

Just to expand on this a little bit, I forget if it's Adidas or Nike, but they have these life-size posters of teenagers that are their target audience, different teenagers, different personas in this huge room with all these different lockers next to each of the posters. You can open the locker up, and you can see how that person has decorated the locker, their sports gear, their lunch, their textbooks, their book bag- it's all in there. It's almost like full immersion. You can see their life-size poster and then their locker. Life-size posters and then their locker. Isn't that amazing?

Once you get inside their heads, you understand their pain points, their challenges, what are their fears, what are their frustrations? And yes, you also want to understand what motivates them, whether the towards sort of motivations, as well as the away from motivations. So fears and frustrations are away from. Wants and aspirations are towards. You can do a four-quadrant kind of four-forces exercise to map out all these: their fears, their frustrations and so forth.

And then you can insert into the copy you're writing these triggers that bring them to that fear, that frustration front and center. Get them to feel that pain, to feel the gap between where they are and where they want to be.

 But it all starts with identifying the right keywords where they're feeling the pain already and they're searching for the solution. And then topic mapping. So instead of just looking at your site architecture and figuring out, well, what are the keywords I wanna map to my homepage and then to my category level pages and then to my subcategory level pages, et cetera, to take it to another level and think of it as a thematic mapping. Let's say that you're selling music online, and you're starting with very broad keywords like, I don't know, music.

Download MP3s, those sorts of keywords. And then you get down to the genre level, electronica, country, R&B, et cetera. The next level down might be subgenre. So instead of an electronica, it might be house or acid. And then, even further, more deep down into this thematic tree, you may have a particular artist or discography and their album name. There are song titles. Finally, there is keyword research, doing the hard yards with the tools to brainstorm and get the data for comparison purposes to build your portfolio. Because you don't want to just go with your gut, let's look at how we do that. 

We're going to look not only at search volume but also use keyword ideas and brainstorming tools. We're going to look at topics and entities instead of just the keywords themselves because there are multiple keywords within an entity or a topic. Looking at trends and seasonality, for example. Looking at geographic variants. So, keywords vary depending on where we are in the world. So you guys say bespoke, and I say custom. And then also looking at your competitors, mining them for competitive intelligence, looking at their keyword portfolio in ways that they didn't even know was possible.

Let's have a look at some of these awesome tools that are part of my tool set. And it's so important that you use a range of tools, not just rely on one or two tools. You're looking for corroboration across multiple tools. One tool might say that the trend is going up. Another tool might say it's going down. We'll start with keyword brainstorming and then move into the more hardcore tools, which will give us numbers. We're just brainstorming. We're perhaps looking to create a site navigation structure or taxonomy. Maybe we're looking to create blog posts and need content ideas. 

So we turn to Google, start typing, and we get auto-complete suggestions. That's Google Suggest. It's a great keyword brainstorming tool that's available all the time for free. And then we can take it to another level and use a tool called Soovle. Who's heard of Soovle? Anyone? Okay, and not very many. Love this tool, and it's free. Let's see how this works. So we start, hold on one second. Start typing, and look at that. It's pulling in auto-suggestions from Google, Bing, Yahoo, YouTube, Answers.com, Wikipedia, and Amazon, all simultaneously, and these are all clickable. Once I click on one of these search suggestions, it'll take me right to the search results of that search engine for that particular keyword.

Another great tool based again on Google Suggest is Ubersuggest. Watch what happens if I select a word here like Brighton. So, type that in, and then it goes through, iterates through zero through nine, all the letters of the alphabet for the next word, and collects all the ten suggestions from Google Suggest for each of those. So, it includes by default. Google Keyword Planner, I unticked that box, and now we're just getting Google Suggest data. So we see things like Brighton and then the 9th of May. Brighton Bands, Brighton Beach, Brighton College, Brighton Council, Brighton Earrings. Pretty cool, and then, of course, we can export that, pull that into Excel or what have you. Another fun tool that's free.

It's quite useful, especially when you're trying to figure out featured snippets that you want to target, and you're looking to create FAQs. That sort of stuff is AnswerThePublic.com. Here's how that works: You see this funny-looking guy who starts picking his teeth or rolling his eyes at you, and you start typing your keyword in there. Let's do SEO. I'm just getting impatient there. It's pulling in data. These are popular question-based keywords: who, what, when, where, and why. It's a very pretty visual here, but it's not terribly usable. So, I like to switch to data view. Scroll back up a bit, and you'll see, click on the data tab. Now, it's a much easier view.

We can download everything with the download CSV button at the very top right. We also get implied questions that are prepositions like in, within, through, near, to, and for, et cetera. That's all downloadable as well. Does anyone know where this data source is? Where is this being pulled from? Anyone? Guler? What? Google Suggest, thank you. If I had an extra book, I'd give it to you. Good job. This is one of my favorite brainstorming tools of all. It's the Topic Explorer from Search Metrics, part of the Content Experience Suite from Search Metrics. Let's see how this works. I put in the keyword avocado, and now I start getting this visualization happening. 

The length of the line between the bubbles' semantic association and relatedness. These are entities or topics more than just a keyword. I can explode a keyword, see a whole bunch of other topics, and see subtopics underneath it. I can see the color coding is based on the different tabs that I choose, like where it is on the bicycle, awareness and retention, and so forth. I can also look at popularity and color coding as well. Pick guacamole here as the topic I want to explode and get more subtopics from. And then, I can choose different topics to add to my list that I'm gonna build a content piece around. 

So I go ahead and do that, and then I click on go to the content editor, which is this. Let's say I start writing an article from scratch or paste in an article like I'm doing right now. That's a preexisting article I'm gonna edit. And you'll see there are a bunch of keywords over in the right or the left-hand column. Must have keywords, recommended keywords, and additional keywords. Those are all based on the handful of topics that I chose. So remember, inside a topic, you have a whole bunch of keywords. Pretty amazing. Then, it tells you the readability score, the SEO score, and all that is within this tool. Now we get to the hardcore tools that are gonna give us real data and not just suggestions.

Google Trends doesn't really give us numbers, but it does give us percentages, so it is useful for comparison purposes. So, let's see how that works. We just put in a couple of keywords, separated by a comma, which one's more popular, laptop or laptops. Counter-intuitively, it's actually the singular, not the plural, and that holds true month after month, year after year. Another cool little trick with this particular tool is that you can choose up here from a web search. You can choose that pull-down and get to YouTube search. I don't know of any other tool that pulls data from YouTube other than the YouTube suggest tool, which is built into the YouTube search box. Look at this. This is data coming from YouTube searches, and it's free within Google Suggest. I mean Google Trends.

Next, we have Google Keyword Planner, which many people love to hate. For one, if you are not spending money on Google AdWords, they have hobbled the tool and given you these horrible, ridiculous ranges, like 100,000 to a million, or 10,000 to 100,000, practically useless as a tool. But even if you are spending money on AdWords, it's so frustrating because they have traffic buckets and averages, and they group keywords together and do different things. They don't. You don't see any of it. They'll give you a number like 165,000. You think that's a real number, but it's a bucket number, and the next bucket up is $215,000 or something like that. And there's no number in between that they'll return. There's a great article on Moz called Google Keyword Planner's Dirty Secrets. I highly recommend you read that.

Next is speaking of Moz is their Keyword Explorer, which is a relatively new tool. And I love this tool. Let's see how this works. So what we do is we put in a keyword, and we'll get not only it's a relatively small range, and that's because they wanna give it within 95% accuracy. So, I do appreciate that they are within a standard deviation here. So I don't mind the range in this case. They also give a couple of metrics that I love, difficulty and the percentage of CTR, organic CTR. So if there's a lot of stuff happening on the page, a lot of ads, a lot of cert features, it's taken away clicks from the organic listings, then we can see that. 

Priority, which is also taken into account when we build a keyword list, is important scoring. So we can say by default it's a three, but maybe this keyword, we wanna give it a 10, and that increases that priority for that particular keyword when we're building keyword lists. So, let's go to keyword suggestions. One thing that is oftentimes missed is that you can filter down to just question-based keywords, which is great for your featured snippet building.

FAQ building strategies. Then, we have the RankRanger keyword finder. I love RankRanger as a toolset for tracking rankings, and the keyword finder is just another great tool from them. So let's see how that works. In this case, we can choose questions or popular keywords. We can sort by relevance or popularity. And there we go. Good stuff. And then we have SEMrush, which I love this tool set. And let's see how we can identify our competitors' featured snippets so we can steal some of those weaker snippets. So I'm going to put in a competitor here or put in Moz, not that he's a competitor, he's a friend, and well, Rand is no longer there, but anyways, put in moz.com and then you can see here if we go to organic research a huge pile of keywords that they rank for, but I just want to look at the featured snippets that they have.

So, on the right-hand side, you'll see featured snippets as clickable links. Click on that, and it will filter down to just the featured snippets, which is pretty amazing. And I'm gonna identify those featured snippets that are weak because they're not in the right format. It's not the ideal format. Let's say it's a how-to sort of query, and a better format than a paragraph-featured snippet would be a list snippet, ideally a numbered list snippet. 

So, we identify those. Also, you can see in SEMrush that the cached version of this is a very volatile space, the featured snippets. So, if you want a featured snippet and maybe they've already lost it, you can go back in time and look at the cache. Then, we searched for metrics we already saw, but there's also the research suite, which is amazing. And then, finally, stat, stat search analytics, you can do dynamic tagging. So I'll quickly show you a little bit about that. You could say, well, just show me all of the featured snippets, the keywords that are featured snippets that are list type, and show me if I have rankings for any of those. That is my favorite set of tools. Thank you very much. I'm Stephan Spencer, co-author of The Art of SEO. Again, there's my gift. Thank you for your time.

This was originally recorded at a Brighton SEO conference. If you want to listen to more episodes or find out about the conference itself, you can do at BrightonSEO.com.