Keyword Research Flashcards
What questions should you be asking before and during your keyword research?
- What type of product or service are people looking for?
Who is searching for these terms?
When are people searching? Are there seasonality trends throughout the year?
How are people searching? - What word do they use?
- What questions do they ask?
- Are more searches performed on mobile devices?
Why are people looking for the product or service? - are people looking for health-conscious products services? What USPs might they be looking for?
- Where are potential customers located? Locally, nationally or internationally?
How can you help provide the best content about the product or service and cultivate a community and fulfil what all those people are searching for?
What is your audience searching for?
You probably have some idea about what keywords represent your products well, so start here. You can use the following tool to find out more: https://moz.com/explorer#index
this tool will help you discover search volumes. The tool should also give you some alternative, highly relevant and searched for keywords.
It might even be a good idea to target keywords that are less competitive.
Important note on keyword ranking
Entire websites don’t rank for keywords, pages do. This is why it’s so important to target multiple keywords with one page. This resource helps with that: https://moz.com/blog/target-multiple-keywords-next-level
What is the Hummingbird algorithm update?
https://moz.com/learn/seo/google-hummingbird
This Google algorithm update cam after Penguin and Panda and affected the knowledge graphs and semantic search features of the SERP. It was put into place to make semantic search more of a reality, so that when users searched certain terms, the real idea of what the user was looking for was predicted by the algorithm to then return results that were most likely to be beneficial for the user.
Should I optimise my page for multiple keywords?
You should definitely do this. If you don’t, you might limit the content writer to a single world that will stop them from writing full content and about the topic in a decent amount of detail
How do you include keywords in your content?
One good practice is to put them in the H2 headings of your content
How can you find niche topics to talk about?
You can use the “people also ask” feature.
Step 1 - Enter a relevant question into your search engine - question format searches are great because they often generate featured snippets. Featured snippets are the little boxes that show up at the top of of search results, usually displaying one or two sentence answers or a list. There can also be another box displayed that says people also ask. This allows you to get an idea of the logic behind the search algorithm - this is what the algorithm thinks are related topics.
Step 2 - select the most relevant “people also ask query”, when you do this, three more of the questions will pop up for you to look into.
Step 3 - find suggestions with low-value featured snippets. Every “people also ask” suggestion is a featured snippet. As you dig deeper into the topic by selecting one “people also ask” after another, keep an eye out for featured snippets that are not particularly helpful. This is the search engine attempting to generate a simple answer to a question and not quite hitting the mark. These present an opportunity. Keep track of the ones you think could be improved.
Step 4 - Compile a list of “people also ask” questions into excel
Step 5 - analyse your list of words using a keyword research tool
Step 6 - apply the keywords to your page title and heading tags (place your keywords in H2 and H3)
Measure niche keywords in your campaign
In your Moz pro campaign, you can baseline a group of niche keywords by putting them in a labelled group together. You can then measure the average rank for them and judge whether they will likely cause your page to increase rank.
Range of Moz resource links that I should look into
can be found here: https://moz.com/blog/target-multiple-keywords-next-level
Tasty SEO Report Recipes to Save Time & Add Value for Clients
Hunting Down SERP Features to Understand Intent & Drive Traffic
I’ve Optimized My Site, But I’m Still Not Ranking—Help!
Diving for Pearls: A Guide to Long Tail Keywords
Be Your Site’s Hero: An Audit Manifesto
How to Defeat Duplicate Content
Conquer Your Competition with These Three Moz Tools
10 Tips to Take the Moz Tools to the Next Level
How often are the search terms searched?
The higher the search volume for a given keyword or keyword phrase, the more work is typically required to achieve higher rankings. The top 10 most popular businesses will usually take up the most SERP real-estate and competing with these guys could take years of effort.
Understanding the long tail
In many cases, the best option is to target highly specific, lower competition search terms. In SEO, we call this the long tail.
The really high yield search volume keywords only make up a small amount of the total searches on a search engine and may even signify ambiguous intent and if you target these, you might be at risk of drawing people to your site whose goals don’t match the content your page provides.
With this, it’s important to understand the different intent of keywords. Just browsing versus practically having your wallet out.
Keywords by Competitor
It could be a good idea to tackle the high-volume keywords that your competitors aren’t ranking for first. On the other hand, you could also take a look at the keywords your competitor is ranking for and tackle those. The former is great when you want to take advantage of your competitors’ missed opportunities, while the latter is an aggressive strategy that sets you up to compete against your competitors for keywords that they are already performing well for
Keywords by seasonality
Knowing about seasonal trends can be advantageous in setting a content strategy. For example, if you know that “christmas box” starts to spike in October through December in the United Kingdom, you can prepare content months in advance and give it a big push around those months.
Keywords by region
You might find out that certain areas or cities use their own slang even on Google searches.
The different types of search queries
Informational Queries - The searcher needs information, such as the name of a brand or the height of the empire state building
Navigational Queries - The searcher wants to go to a particular place on the internet, such as Facebook or the homepage of the NFL
Transactional Queries - The searcher wants to do something, such as buy a plane ticket or listen to a song.
Commercial investigation - The searcher wants to compare products and find the best one for their specific needs
Local Queries - The searcher wants to find something locally, such as a nearby coffee shop, doctor or music venue
